by H. W. Brands
Yet for emancipation to be real, it had to be followed by measures to make the former slaves independent of their erstwhile masters. To this end Sherman issued an order in January 1865 that had enormous symbolic impact and made him the improbable embodiment of Radical Reconstruction. “The islands from Charleston south,” Special Field Order 15 stated, “the abandoned rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. John’s River, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States.” The order continued: “On the islands, and in the settlements hereafter to be established, no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside; and the sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves, subject only to the United States military authority, and the acts of Congress.” On the lands reserved to the freedmen, heads of families might claim parcels as their own. “Each family shall have a plot of not more than forty acres.”5
Sherman later directed that confiscated mules be made available to the black settlers. Special Order 15, together with this decision, became the basis for the slogan “Forty acres and a mule” that served as a beacon to black hopes and the battle cry of the Radical Reconstructionists. In the process it confirmed Sherman’s reputation among Southern whites as the devil incarnate.
GERTRUDE THOMAS WAS among those who uttered a prophylactic prayer when they heard Sherman’s name. The daughter of one Georgia planter and the wife of another, Gertrude Thomas was living in Augusta when Sherman’s army swept through and wreaked havoc on her family’s property. She seethed with indignation at Sherman’s violation of the accepted rules of warfare, and in her anger she imagined herself writing a letter to Ellen Sherman, the general’s wife. A message from Mrs. Sherman to her husband had found its way into Southern papers recently, and it provided the literary stimulus to Gertrude Thomas’s response.
Mrs. General Sherman.… I, a rebel lady, will give you some information with regard to General Sherman’s movements. Last week your husband’s army found me in the possession of wealth. Tonight our plantations are a scene of ruin and desolation. You bade him “God speed” on his fiendish errand, did you not? You thought it a gallant deed to come amongst us where by his own confession he expected to find “only the shadow of an army.” A brave act to frighten women and children! desolate homes, violate the sanctity of firesides and cause the “widow and orphan to curse Sherman for the cause.” And this you did for what? To elevate the Negro race.
Mrs. Sherman must know what the elevation of the Negro entailed.
Enquire of General Sherman when next you see him who has been elevated to fill your place. You doubtless read with a smile of approbation of the delightfully fragrant ball at which he made his debut in Atlanta? Did he tell you of the Mulatto girl for whose safety he was so much concerned that she was returned to Nashville when he commenced his vandal march? This girl was spoken of by the Negroes whom you are willing to trust so implicitly as “Sherman’s wife.”
Rest satisfied, Mrs. Sherman, and quiet the apprehension of your Northern sisters with regard to the elevation of the Negroes. Your husbands are amongst a coloured race whose reputation for morality has never been of the highest order. And these gallant cavaliers are most of them provided with “a companion du voyage.”
Perhaps Mrs. Sherman felt sorry for those whose homes and lives her husband wrecked. She shouldn’t bother.
As your brave husband considers a southern lady a fair object to wage war against, and as I do not yet feel fully satisfied that there is no danger of a clutch from his heavy hand upon my shoulders, I will only add that, intensely Southern woman that I am, I pity you.6
Gertrude Thomas did not mail this letter. Even if postal operations hadn’t been disrupted by the war, she was too much the gentlewoman to intrude on another gentlewoman’s private life. She prided herself on the manners she had learned at the Wesleyan Female College of Macon, Georgia, and she took pains to display them as the mistress of one of Augusta’s most distinguished households.
Until Sherman brought the war to Georgia, the Thomas household had comprised Gertrude; her husband, Jefferson; their four children; and several slaves. The family property included the house in Augusta and various farms outside the town, with the many slaves that worked the farms. Sherman’s soldiers ravaged the farms and encouraged the field hands to flee. Gertrude’s situation would have been discouraging under any circumstances, but that she was pregnant again rendered her predicament even more dismaying. “I make no plans for the future,” she wrote in her journal, despite the fact that she dearly wished to know where and under what circumstances her baby would be born. “During the first months of pregnancy I am always sadly depressed, and, the body acting upon the mind, my whole nature is affected. This time I was congratulating myself that I was going through the terrible ordeal in better style, but thanks to General Sherman … my nervous system received a shock which was terrible. I was made really sick by the combined prospect of Sherman’s visit and the burning cotton.” Like most prospective mothers she looked to the time of her delivery with some trepidation. The recent events doubled her distress. “I have been so sad, unusually low spirited.… I have thought of my dying when the hour of trial comes.… If I do die, I hope that my baby will die with me.”7
The following weeks brought word of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. “The war is over, and I am glad of it,” Gertrude wrote. For many months she and her neighbors had known the South would lose; the only question was how badly. “What terms of agreement may be decided upon, I cannot say, but if anything is left us—if we can count with certainty upon enough to raise and educate our children—I shall be grateful.”
One thing was clear: the Thomas family would not be left their slaves. Gertrude and the other whites had learned of the Emancipation Proclamation at the time of its publication, but only after Union forces occupied Augusta did emancipation become real for them and their slaves—and even then not entirely so. “This morning a large force of Yankees came marching into Augusta, the drums beating and colours flying, surrounded by a large crowd of Negroes,” Gertrude wrote on May 7. She deliberately slept late in a silent attempt to snub the invaders. “I felt no particular emotion as I looked at them through the closed blinds.” She picked up the morning paper and read an order regarding labor relations under the occupation. “The impression is general that slavery is abolished, that the negroes are free.” But, surprisingly, it was only an impression.
The next day she learned a bit more of the new reality. “Mr. Thomas and I were out riding in the buggy. Pinck and Cora”—a neighbor and his wife—“in his buggy overtook us and enquired if we had seen the order from General Smith with regard to free labor, viz: that the Negroes were to be subsisted, paid six months wages in advance and half the crop made to be divided among them. Contracts to be made between negro and Planter—there, I have followed the Yankee fashion of naming the Negro first and the Master last. A failure to plant will cause the land to be confiscated.”
Gertrude Thomas felt that her world had been turned upside down. “We can count with certainty upon nothing. Our Negroes will be freed, our lands confiscated, and imagination cannot tell what is in store for us.” Yet though her husband was “utterly spirit-broken” by the recent events, Gertrude felt an odd ambivalence. “I cannot say ‘Why art thou cast down, oh my soul?’ for indeed I am not cast down. On the contrary, I am not the person to permit pecuniary loss to afflict me as long as I have health and energy. As to the emancipation of the Negroes, while there is of course a natural dislike to the loss of so much property, in my inmost soul I cannot regret it. I always felt that there was a great responsibility. It is in some degree a great relief to have this feeling removed.”
All the same, she felt no gratitude toward those who were the occasion of her relief. “For the Negroes
I know that I have the kindest possible feeling,” she wrote. “For the Yankees who deprive us of them I have no use whatever.”8
AS GERTRUDE AND Jefferson Thomas learned from their neighbors, the emancipation of the slaves was wrapped closely in concern for their future subsistence and employment. Sherman’s policy of forty acres and a mule—which was applied, with modifications, in certain other parts of the South on other properties confiscated from the rebels—provided one model for the future of the former slaves. Sherman’s approach had the advantage of being self-sustaining, or at least promising to be. The former slaves possessed farming skills, honed in years of bondage but now employed on their own behalf. As property owners they would respond to, and benefit from, the same incentives that had motivated farmers in the North for generations.
But Sherman’s plan had serious drawbacks. The first was political. The Republicans were the party of free labor, but they were also a party of respect for private property, and to confiscate and redistribute large amounts of property cut against their political grain. The second drawback was constitutional. Sherman’s order could be justified as a wartime measure, but once the war ended, peacetime interpretations of the Constitution would again apply, and these didn’t appear to countenance the wholesale redistribution of land by the federal government.
The third drawback was economic. Emancipation by itself disrupted the Southern economy; if emancipation was followed by the confiscation and redistribution of land, the disruption would be many times as severe. Disruption, of course, was precisely the point of Union policies while the war lasted, but once the war ended the emphasis shifted diametrically, to reconstruction and revitalization. The most vindictive of the Radicals might be happy for the South to starve, but more responsible types recognized an obligation to rebuild the Southern economy, if only because a languishing South would burden the country as a whole. Besides, any economic policy that punished the South would almost certainly punish the freedmen the most, which hardly seemed fair.
For these reasons, the redistribution of land died aborning. The forty-acre settlers found it nearly impossible to acquire title to their plots, and as the original owners returned after the war they thrust the freedmen aside, with the help of friendly sheriffs and courts and the acquiescence of the federal government. The process took more time in some places, less in others, but within a few years of the war’s end the dream of black ownership on any but the most limited scale had vanished.9
MANY OF THE freedmen predictably felt betrayed. “We were promised homesteads by the government,” declared a delegation from Edisto Island, South Carolina, to Oliver O. Howard, a decorated Union officer who headed the Freedmen’s Bureau.
If it does not carry out the promises its agents made to us … we are left in a more unpleasant condition than our former. We are at the mercy of those who are combined to prevent us from getting land enough to lay our fathers’ bones upon. We have property in homes, cattle, carriages, and articles of furniture, but we are landless and homeless.… This is not the condition of really free men. You ask us to forgive the landowners of our island. You only lost your right arm in the war, and might forgive them. The man who tied me to a tree and gave me 39 lashes, who stripped and flogged my mother and sister and who will not let me stay in his empty hut except I will do his planting and be satisfied with this price, and who combines with others to keep away land from me, well knowing I would not have anything to do with him if I had land of my own—that man, I cannot well forgive.
The government in Washington must know what its decisions entailed.
This is our home. We have made these lands what they are. We were the only true and loyal people that were found in possession of lands. We have been always ready to strike for liberty and humanity, yea to fight if need be to preserve this glorious Union. Shall not we who are freedmen and have always been true to this Union have the same rights as are enjoyed by others? Have we broken any laws of these United States? Have we forfeited our rights of property in land? If not, then are not our rights as a free people and good citizens of the United States to be considered before the rights of those who were found in rebellion against this good and just government?
Was money an issue? The freedmen could deal with that. “We are ready to pay for this land.” But they had to be given the opportunity to do so. “Will the good and just government take from us this right and make us subject to the will of those who cheated and oppressed us for many years? God forbid!”10
IF THE FREEDMEN couldn’t be landowners, then, in an agrarian economy, they had to be employees of the people who were. Historically, markets take time to develop, but the South after the Civil War was allowed almost no time to develop a market for labor. The war ended amid the spring planting season, as the need for labor was peaking. But at that very moment the slaves discovered that they no longer had to work for their old masters. Theoretically the masters might have hired their former slaves, yet in practice most lacked the money. Cash flows had typically been modest under slavery, as slave labor was a capital investment rather than an operating expense. The planters might have borrowed money to pay the former slaves, but the four years of the war had used up all the available capital, and in any event emancipation destroyed their principal form of collateral, the market value of their slaves. Nor would land, the basis for borrowing by Northern farmers, be worth anything to speak of until the labor question was answered.
During that first season the labor system evolved haphazardly. Where freedmen retained their forty acres they worked for themselves. In the rare cases where the former masters had sufficient reserves to pay their former slaves, they often tried to do so. Many of Gertrude and Jefferson Thomas’s field hands had fled for freedom upon Sherman’s approach, but the house slaves remained, and the Thomases hoped to keep them on. “This morning Mr. Thomas assembled the servants together, told them that numerous reports were about town, that it was extremely probable that the Yankees would free them,” Gertrude wrote on May 8. Jefferson Thomas said he wished to hire them. “He would have to hire someone, and had as soon pay them wages as anyone else, and advised them to wait quietly and see what could be done.” The offer appeared to elicit general acceptance. “I have seen no evidence of insubordination,” Gertrude remarked. “On the contrary, they all worked very cheerfully.… Since his explanation there has appeared a more cheerful spirit than ever.”
Yet attitudes changed as the new reality sank in. One of the former house slaves, a man named Daniel, abruptly departed. “Took off all of his clothes during the night and left without saying anything to anyone,” Gertrude wrote. She felt betrayed. “He is here in town, but I have not seen him nor do I wish to do so. If he returns to the yard, he shall not enter it.” The next day another slave left. “Betsey, a little servant, went for the Chronicle as she was in the habit of doing every day, and did not return.… I was really annoyed about it.” Gertrude discovered that Betsey had rejoined her mother, whom Jefferson Thomas had sold earlier on suspicion of stealing food from the storeroom. Gertrude thought the departure was Betsey’s loss. “She was a bright, quick child, and raised in our family would have become a good servant. As it is, she will be under her mother’s influence and run wild in the street.” Within two weeks more, nearly the entire staff of the house had melted away. “Out of all our old house servants, not one remains except Patsey and a little boy, Frank.”11
J. T. TROWBRIDGE was a journalist and author who traveled through the South during the year after Appomattox. His first impression of what he called “the desolated states” was that they were indeed in a desolated state. The countryside bore deep scars of the fighting, but the cities showed the damage most starkly. “Everywhere were ruins and rubbish, mud and mortar and misery,” he wrote of Atlanta. “Hundreds of the inhabitants, white and black, rendered homeless by the destruction of the city, were living in wretched hovels, which made the suburbs look like a fantastic encampment of gypsies or Indians. Some of the negro huts were
covered entirely with ragged fragments of tin-roofing from the burnt government and railroad buildings. Others were constructed partly of these irregular blackened patches, and partly of old boards, with roofs of huge, warped, slouching shreds of tin, kept from blowing away by stones placed on the top.” Sherman had wanted to cripple Southern commerce and industry, and by the evidence of Atlanta he had succeeded. “Every business block in Atlanta was burned, except one. The railroad machine-shops, the foundries, the immense rolling-mill, the tent, pistol, gun-carriage, shot-and-shell factories, and storehouses, of the late Confederacy, disappeared in flames and explosions. Half a mile of the principal street was destroyed.”12
But life went on, haltingly. Shop owners sifted through the rubble; planters returned to their farms. Shortages of all sorts—building materials, capital, transportation—plagued the reconstruction efforts. Yet one question hung over everything. Trowbridge heard it from a dozen mouths; it took unspoken shape in the very air: “Will the freedmen work?”
The answers depended on who was speaking. Colonel Samuel Thomas of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Mississippi was hopeful. Thomas had charge of efforts to place black farmers on lands abandoned by their owners. “I am confident there is no more industrious class of people anywhere than the freedmen who have little homesteads of their own,” he said. “The colonies under my charge, working lands assigned them by the government, have raised this year ten thousand bales of cotton, besides corn and vegetables for their subsistence until another harvest.”
Other officers of the Freedmen’s Bureau concurred, as did many—but, interestingly, not all—of the freedmen themselves. Trowbridge toured Vicksburg with the Union commander of the Department of Mississippi, Major General Thomas J. Wood. They visited the freedmen’s quarter below the center of town and together inquired what portion of the former slaves would work, and what portion would try to live without working. “We got very candid replies: the common opinion being that about five out of twenty still had a notion of living without work.” Trowbridge added, perhaps with a smile, “Not one would admit that he was one of the five—every man and woman acknowledged that labor was a universal duty and necessity.”13