Although claiming that the ignorant and backward Negro could not be made to respect the sanctity of a written agreement, employers were not necessarily the innocent victims of black deceit. If the contract stipulated food rations, for example, it guaranteed neither the quality nor the quantity of the food. That was “de fust dif’culty,” a South Carolina freedman contended when asked about contract violations, “we gits no meat.” Investigating a disturbance on a plantation in the Beaufort district, the Freedmen’s Bureau agent reported that the laborers thought their employer to be dishonest, and they complained of overwork and being fed “musty” corn and “rotten” bacon. Although the Freedmen’s Bureau threatened to disallow contracts which empowered employers to use corporal punishment, that did not protect the freedmen from other forms of abuse. After being berated for negligence, a Mississippi freedman replied that he was a free man, he refused to be insulted as though he were still a slave, and he left. His decision could not have been made lightly. Not only did he face arrest and prosecution for violating the contract but he lost his remaining pay.71
The thought occurred to more than one planter that a way to avoid paying his laborers was to provoke them to break the contract near the end of the season. Asked to explain “the real cause” of labor turbulence in his area, a black worker who lived near Florence, South Carolina, singled out that particular grievance.
Well, sah, there’s a many masters as wants to git de colored peoples away, ye see; an’ dey’s got de contrac’s, an’ dey can’t do it, ye see, lawful; so dey ’buses dem, an’ jerks ’em up by de two fums, an’ don’t give ’em de bacon, an’ calls on ’em to do work in de night time an’ Sun’ay, till de colored people dey gits oneasy an’ goes off.
On a Mississippi plantation, the manager expelled some blacks who had expressed dissatisfaction over working conditions, refusing to pay them for the three months they had already labored. (The Bureau agent ordered their reinstatement.) And in South Carolina, Martin Delany heard numerous complaints that near the completion of the crop, the employer brought “some frivolous” charge against freedmen and discharged them, thereby making them forfeit their share of the forthcoming division of the crop. The practice reached such proportions, in fact, that the Freedmen’s Bureau found it necessary to require that employers show “sufficient cause” before discharging contracted laborers and pay them what they had earned. When one Bureau agent tried to explain this policy to local planters, he reported that they found it “quite incomprehensible from the old-fashioned, patriarchal point of view.”72
Although the Freedmen’s Bureau insisted that both planters and laborers comply with contract terms, local agents thought their primary mission was to keep the blacks at work and punish them for violations. “Doing justice,” an observer sympathetic to the blacks reported, “seems to mean … seeing that the blacks don’t break contract and compelling them to submit cheerfully if the whites do.” Nothing seemed to disturb Bureau agents more about the postwar black “migration” than the tendency of freedmen to leave employers with whom they had agreed to complete the current crop. Consistent with their vigorous suppression of black vagrancy and their regular pronouncements on the necessity of labor, Bureau officials impressed upon blacks the sanctity of contracts and moved quickly to apprehend non-signers and violators as vagrants. While employers might be reprimanded or even fined for violating a contract, the freedman usually found himself in far deeper trouble, perhaps incarcerated for a period of time or forced to work on the public roads without pay. After a “contrary” freedman in a Florida community spent a week in jail on a diet of bread and water, he was said by the local Bureau agent to have been “very willing” to return to the fields. If evidence reached the nearest office of the Freedmen’s Bureau that laborers had left a plantation, refused to contract or work, or were creating a disturbance, that was all the agent needed to know to justify his intervention, with troops if he deemed them necessary. Upon hearing that some freedmen near Meridian, Mississippi, had left their jobs for “frivolous and insufficient causes,” the Bureau agent requested the names of the “guilty” parties and ordered their arrest. In many instances, Bureau officials acted in good conscience to exact a fair settlement of the grievances which had required their intervention but seldom would they tolerate any violation of a contract, no matter how relatively trivial the nature of the offense or how unreasonable the contract.73
The Freedmen’s Bureau defended its policies in the name of stabilizing labor relations. But the overly zealous commitment of its agents to the inviolability of contracts and the double standard they often applied in enforcement and in the punishment of offenders proved of immeasurable benefit to the employers. After reviewing the work of the Bureau, a conservative Memphis newspaper could not help but applaud its accomplishments: “The chaotic condition of the labor system is being reduced to order. It gives the employer the means of compelling the fulfillment of engagements on the part of the employee.” Such intervention was particularly welcomed in the initial experiments with contract labor, when violations and plantation disturbances loomed as a critical test of the entire labor system. The need to make examples of “turbulent negroes,” lest they influence others to “go astray,” seemed all the more urgent. When two of his contracted freedmen fled “without any provocation,” Lorenzo James, an Alabama planter, wished to have them arrested, punished severely, and sent back “as an example to those remaining.” He knew precisely in what terms to frame his appeal to the Freedmen’s Bureau for assistance:
There is every reason to believe that these two negroes were induced to leave by the other negroes, to test this question and see if any punishment could be inflicted upon them for a violation of their contract. If they go unpunished, it will have a very bad effect upon, not only my plantation, but upon the surrounding country; and if they are allowed to violate a contract made in good faith whenever they see fit to do so, the agricultural interest throughout the country must necessarily suffer to a very great extent.
His friendship with the Bureau’s regional commissioner no doubt helped to ensure prompt compliance with his request.74
The sanctity of contracts proved of little avail to the freedmen on the day they settled their accounts with the employer. With the approach of Christmas each year and the division of the crop and the final wage payment, the dire predictions of “a heap o’ trouble” proved all too prophetic. “They’ll be awfully defrauded,” a Virginia poor white thought, perhaps reflecting his own experiences with the planter class. “I know houses yer whar they keep a nigger till his month’s most out, and then they make a muss with him, and kick him out without any wages. Poor men like me has got to pay for it. Of course, if they don’t pay, the niggers can’t keep themselves, and it’ll come on us. They’ll be cheated all kinds o’ ways. Don’t I know it?”75
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IF HIS NEWLY FREED SLAVES remained with him until the end of the season, a Tennessee planter promised, they would be awarded a share of the crop. “Most of them left,” Lorenzo Ivy recalled; “they said they knew him too well.” But this sixteen-year-old black youth and his father stayed on and worked “just as if Lee hadn’t surrendered.” By Christmas 1865, they had raised a large crop of corn, wheat, and tobacco, they had shucked the corn and stored it in the barn, and they had stripped all the tobacco. “I never worked harder in my life, for I thought the more we made, the more we would get.” But when the two freedmen stood before their former master to obtain the promised shares, he refused to pay them anything, declared he could no longer support them, and ordered them off his land. Thinking few grievances could be more legitimate or clear-cut, they appealed to the local officer of the Freedmen’s Bureau. He refused to help them. “The officer,” Lorenzo Ivy recalled, “was like Isaac said to Esau: ‘The voice is like Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau.’ So that was the way with the officer—he had on Uncle Sam’s clothes, but he had Uncle Jeff’s heart.”76
Large numbers of freed
men shared the experience of Lorenzo Ivy and his father. With the completion of the crops, some planters defaulted on promised payments or pleaded inability to pay, and still more reduced the payments drastically through arbitrary and inflated deductions. The initial victims were ex-slaves like the Ivys who had agreed to stay on after emancipation in return for a share of the crop. But now they were left with nothing, and even driven from the plantation. When the Freedmen’s Bureau launched its operations, local agents found their offices besieged by blacks testifying to the extent and persistence of this grievance. “The old story has been repeated thousands of times,” one officer reported, “no definite bargain made—no wages promised; but ‘massa said, stay till the crop is made and he would do what was right.’ ” That proved to be the downfall of many a freedman. Popular in verbal understandings though seldom written into contracts, the employer’s promise to pay his laborers “what was right” left him free to pay them nothing or very little; indeed, he might even persuade himself that to pay his workers any more could only demoralize them and encourage indulgences not befitting inferiors. The Mississippi planter who deprived his ex-slaves of the crop shares he had promised still thought of himself as an honest man; he simply presumed, a neighbor said of him, that northern capitalists always treated free laborers in this way.77
If the planter pleaded financial poverty and indebtedness, he might place the blame on falling cotton prices, a bad crop, or the slovenly work habits of his laborers. Not uncommonly, an employer would charge that the work of his blacks had not even paid for the food he gave them. The problem with confessing an inability to pay, even when justified, was that few of his laborers chose to believe him. And if they did believe him, why should they work for him another year on the vague assurance that conditions would improve? That made no sense at all. The “impoverished” planter might discover soon enough that he had become an undesirable risk among all the freedmen in the vicinity, even more so if they suspected him of deceit or fraud. The much-heralded contract, moreover, seemed less than sacrosanct when it denied them the very fruits of their labor. Such initial experiences, a black man wrote from Helena, Arkansas, in early 1866, would not be soon forgotten. “They may cheat the poor negro out of a year’s work, but in spite of them he has gained a year’s experience, and had the advantage of being thoroughly acquainted with that system of morals, that teaches the negro to observe and fulfill the moral obligations of a contract, but has no meaning or significance when applied to the white man.”78
Although most employers agreed to compensate their laborers on the basis of the contract, the annual settlement of accounts, in itself an unprecedented event, produced new disappointments, angry confrontations, and near rebellion on some places. Even as the freedmen eagerly looked forward to this day, the employer found it unnerving if not downright humiliating. “Staid on New Hope Plantation all day preparing to settle with the Negroes,” a Louisiana planter confided to his diary. “I had almost as lief be shot as to do it, but it must be done.” Equally depressed, Wilmer Shields, who had managed several plantations through a turbulent wartime experience, anticipated nothing but trouble as the dreaded payday approached. “I do not expect to satisfy any of them,” he informed the owner, “for each one seems to think his share will be a fortune.” Whatever the planter’s financial position, he came to look upon this day as an unavoidable ordeal. Unaccustomed to dealing with blacks over such matters, his demeanor was all too likely to crack under the torrent of complaints and challenges—what a South Carolina planter described as “the most gross abuse.”79
But to the ex-slave, “countin’ day” set off his new status from the old, and his expectations were high—almost always too high. Outside the main house the freedmen would assemble and face the table where the planter or his agent sat, holding in his hands the payroll and store book. As each laborer heard his name called, he would step forward to be informed of the number of days he had worked, the debts he had accumulated, the fines assessed against him, and the precise amount he had earned after deductions. That was when the trouble began. If he barely comprehended the often complicated balancing of debts and earnings, he understood the final sum soon enough, his face suddenly assuming an expression of utter dismay and incredulity. “Ain’t got nary a hundud dollars! Ain’t got nary a hundud dollars! Done wucked all de year an’ ain’t got nary a hundud dollars!” a Florida freedwoman kept shouting, waving the dollar bills wildly above her head. On a Louisiana plantation, one of the laborers thought there had to be a mistake: “I done wuck mighty hard fo’ you, chop briars and roll logs, and you haint paid me nuffin at all.” On a Georgia plantation, the laborers failed to discern any relationship between what they had been paid and the labor they had performed.
Ole mass’r had ’greed to give we one tird de craps, an’ we dun got ’em all up,—got de corn shucked, an’ de tatees digged, and de rice trashed; an’ ole mass’r he dun gone sold all de craps, an’ he bringed we all up yere yes’erday, an’ gif we seven dollar fur de man an’ he wife to buy de cloth wid to make we clofes, an’ he say may be he gif we some shoes; an’ he dun gif we’n none o’ de craps, none o’ de rice, none o’ de corn, none o’ de tatees.
The same incomprehension gripped the laborers on the Butler plantation in Georgia, each one convinced he had been cheated, invariably greeting his payment with some variation of the remark: “Well, well, work for massa two whole years, and only get dis much.”80
Puzzled, bitter, angry over the settlement, the freedmen might insist that their employer had erred in his calculations. If he deigned to respond to such charges, he would hold up the ledger and explain to his laborers how the advances of food, clothing, seed, tools, and fuel, in addition to other deductions, had consumed the greater part of their wages or shares. He would remind them of the items they had purchased and the number of days they had lost because of illness. He might even scold them for their thriftlessness and indulgences. “Now, auntie, you have a right to spend your earnings any way you please; you’re free. It’s none of my business what you do with your money. But if you would let me give you a little advice, I’d tell you all not to waste your money on fish, and candy, and rings, and breastpins, and fine hats. If you will have them, we’ll sell them to you, but you had better not buy so freely.” Denying any intent to deceive his laborers, the employer would contend in this instance and others that he had simply enforced the contract, which stipulated the amount of compensation and enumerated the deductions.81
Unfortunately, the contract said nothing about the cost of the provisions the employer agreed to furnish his laborers. Although the culprit may have been the supply merchant rather than the planter, the fact remained that provisions were sold at highly inflated prices and the laborer had no recourse but to trade where he could obtain credit. “I have neighbors,” a Mississippi planter conceded, “who keep stores of plain goods and fancy articles for their people; and, let a nigger work ever so hard, and earn ever so high wages, he is sure to come out in debt at the end of the year.” Even if the laborer could understand the deductions for actual purchases, he found far less comprehensible if not fraudulent the fines for negligence, the number of days or hours allegedly absent from work, and even in some cases charges for items like bagging and ropes; in Mississippi, planters reportedly gave “presents” to certain laborers during the season to accelerate the pace of work and then charged the cost of these gifts to their accounts. After the various deductions and charges had been assessed, the most brutal truth that greeted the laborer on the long-awaited “countin’ day” was that he stood in debt to the planter! That revelation created such a reaction on a Virginia plantation that the employer, fearing trouble, agreed to pay a token amount ($2 to $5) to each worker.82
No matter how carefully his employer explained the situation, the laborer still found it difficult to understand why his months of hard work should have left him with so little or actually in debt. After what seemed like endless disputations over each settlement
, Frances Butler thought it useless to argue any further; henceforth, she would pay her father’s laborers and refuse to discuss the matter. Besides, she had concluded that the freedmen indulged in these discussions not because they thought they had been cheated but only “with an idea of asserting their independence and dignity.” If an aggrieved laborer appealed his case to the Freedmen’s Bureau, and many did, he might obtain a measure of relief—but only after proving he had been defrauded. That obstacle proved insurmountable, with the plantation ledger winning out easily over the freedman’s recollections, as it would have in any court of law. Even the most sympathetic Bureau officials confessed their helplessness in such cases. Thomas H. Norton, who supervised freedmen’s affairs in Meridian, Mississippi, suspected that many blacks had been “meanly defrauded” of their earnings and he could readily understand their discouragement. But he could offer them little but his sympathy.
Whenever cases of this kind are presented to the Sub Commissioner for investigation he will find himself involved in such a “Milky Way” of figures, admissions and denials, criminations and recriminations, that it will be almost impossible, considering the length of time that has elapsed, and the inability of the freedmen to bring the necessary witnesses to testify to their statements, to arrive at any just conclusion or settlement of the case.83
A Bureau officer in South Carolina, John William De Forest, recalled how exasperated he became after arbitrating “a hundred or two” such cases, spending in some instances “an entire forenoon” trying to convince a laborer that his employer had not cheated him. “I read to him, out of the planter’s admirably kept books, every item of debit and credit: so much meal, bacon, and tobacco furnished, with the dates of each delivery of the same; so many bushels of corn and peas and bunches of ‘fodder’ harvested. He admitted every item, admitted the prices affixed; and then, puzzled, incredulous, stubborn, denied the totals.” Meanwhile, the laborer’s wife stood next to him, “trembling with indignant suspicion,” until she could contain herself no longer. “Don’ you give down to it, Peter,” she exhorted her husband. “It ain’t no how ris’ible that we should ’a’ worked all the year and git nothin’ to go upon.” But it was no use. The Bureau agent finally advised the couple to throw themselves upon “the generosity” of their employer.84
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