THE STRUGGLE TO HOLD ONTO THEIR RIGHTS
That blacks valued freedom immensely would prove to be beneficial in their struggle to combat white racial violence, which was designed to take away that freedom. Indeed, they would need all the determination they could muster to withstand the massive onslaught of white violence launched against them. Having lost the war, whites were embittered and in a state of shock. How could this have happened? they asked. How could their way of life have been destroyed? How was it possible that lowly and inferior blacks were now truly free? And how could they tolerate blacks as free individuals? The answer was that under no circumstances could they accept blacks as their equals. The only alternative was to convince blacks that while the U.S. government might recognize them as being free, Southern whites never would, even if it meant the annihilation of freedmen—a mission that roaming gangs of former Confederate soldiers would be happy to carry out.
In some areas, violence against blacks reached staggering proportions in the immediate aftermath of the war. In Louisiana in 1865 a visitor from North Carolina wrote, “they [whites] govern... by the pistol and the rifle.” “I saw white men whipping colored men just the same as they did before the war,” testified freed slave Henry Adams, who claimed that “over two thousand colored people” were murdered in 1865 in the area around Shreveport. The Freedmen’s Bureau was not able to establish order in Texas, and blacks there were especially vulnerable to white violence. Blacks in the state, according to a Bureau official, “are frequently beaten unmercifully, and shot down like wild beasts, without any provocation.” A freedwoman from Rusk County named Susan Merritt remembered seeing black bodies floating down the Sabine River and said of local whites, “There sure are going to be lots of souls crying against them in Judgement.”
It was not unusual for whites to wipe out whole black communities on fabricated allegations. For example, in 1866, after “some kind of dispute with some Freedmen,” a group near Pine Bluff, Arkansas, set fire to a black settlement and rounded up the inhabitants. A man who visited the scene on the following morning described it as “a sight that apald me 24 Negro men woman and children were hanging to trees all round the Cabbins.”109 Moreover, whites sometimes would take advantage of starving freedmen by offering them poisoned food. Annie Day explained: “I wuz told by some older niggers dat after de war and de slaves had dere freedom, de niggers was told to go to Millican. A lot of ‘em went down dere. Dey wuz awful hungry, and de storekeepers dere give ’em barrels of apples to eat and de apples had been poisoned, and dey killed a lot of de Colored people.”110
Regardless of the obstacles they faced, some blacks refused to take the random violence meted out to them by whites without a fight. They employed two strategies: blacks sought to use the judicial system; and, in some cases, they took the law into their own hands. On one occasion, a poor white woman hit a black woman for no apparent reason other than the color of her skin. At first, the black woman did not complain. However, when her white neighbor struck her a second time, she retaliated. In response, the white woman had her arrested, but the black woman had already contemplated filing charges against the white woman for violating her civil rights. The judge ruled in favor of the black woman. As a result, the case was thrown out of court, and the white woman was assessed the court costs. Utilization of the judicial system, however, was often long and taxing and yielded few positive results.
Even if they banded together and took the law into their own hands to suppress crimes committed by whites against them, blacks tried to work within the system. For example, when a group of armed blacks in 1866 in Orangeburg, South Carolina, apprehended three whites who had been terrorizing freedmen, instead of lynching them, the blacks delivered them to the county jail. And when a white man was found guilty of the cold-blooded murder of a freedwoman in Holly Springs, Mississippi, blacks formed a posse to hunt him down, although there is no record of their having caught him. Some whites who assaulted blacks were, however, not so fortunate. In the Newberry district of South Carolina, two former Confederate soldiers attacked a black Union soldier. While he was struggling with them, one of the rebel soldiers stabbed him so severely that the wound was thought to be fatal. News of this confrontation quickly spread, and both rebel soldiers were apprehended by black soldiers of the regiment to which the injured soldier belonged. Within three hours the Confederate who had stabbed the Union soldier was tried, found guilty, shot, and buried.111 Certainly, the second rebel would have undergone a similar fate had he not managed to escape.
Many blacks in the South looked to the Cherokee Nation as a haven. Although racism existed among the Cherokees, blacks were treated in the Nation better than they were in the American South. Unlike the Southern whites who often indulged in mob violence, the Cherokees did not. In fact, there is no record of a lynching among them. Freedmen there did not fear for their personal safety, and they were assured of a hearing before a properly constituted tribunal.112 Moreover, the Choctaws and Chickasaws had few difficulties with their freedmen, as cases of violence involving them were relatively few. Ironically, the racial tension that existed in both Nations was the result of confrontations between freedmen from Southern states and their white counterparts who moved to the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations after the war. Of course, the Southern whites who moved into the Chickasaw Nation brought with them their old bigotry. Ardmore and other towns in the Indian Territory became the home of active Confederate veterans’ organizations. As expected, racial prejudice against blacks ran high among the white population of the region that later would become known as “Little Dixie.” Indeed, if crimes were committed, blacks were looked upon with suspicion. Visitors were asked to leave town if they could not convince local whites that they had business in the area. Not surprisingly, fistfights were common on the streets. If the fight was between two blacks, it became a spectacle, as people gathered and began to cheer for one or the other. However, if the fight was between a black and a white, racial tensions ran high and the fight would likely spread to onlookers.113
Despite the many trials that blacks had to endure during the early years of emancipation, they remained undaunted. They were determined to enjoy the fruits of their newfound freedom to the fullest. Whites could continue to employ whatever measures they devised to deny them full autonomy, but it would be to no avail. At long last savoring the sweetness of liberty, the black people could now shout, “Free at last; Free at last; Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”114
CHAPTER FOUR
A “WORKING CLASS OF PEOPLE”
The Struggle to Gain Economic Independence
THE WARTIME PROSPERITY continued into the postwar years in the North, but in the South towns and cities lay in ruins. Plantations were wrecked, and neglected fields were overgrown with grass, weeds, and wildflowers. Bridges and railroads were destroyed. White Southerners had lost much of their personal property in the war, including, because of emancipation, about $2 billion worth of slaves. Furthermore, Confederate bonds and currency were now worthless. These losses were a huge blow to the economic future of Southern whites. Many of them faced the prospect of starvation and homelessness. Even some of those who had earlier been counted among the wealthy would now be able to survive only on government rations.1
While conditions were bad for Southern whites, they were even worse for Southern blacks. Four million black men and women were now emerging from slavery. They and their ancestors had been held in bondage for nearly two and one-half centuries. Once they were emancipated, many left the plantations in search of a new life in freedom, walking to the nearest town or city or roaming the countryside and camping at night on the bare ground. Most of these people had no more possessions than the clothes they wore, and often these were merely old sacks tied together and socks instead of shoes. The new freedmen were overwhelmingly unskilled, illiterate, and poor. Moreover, since responsibility for their well-being had always been assumed by the master, they had little knowledge about how to survive on th
eir own.2 Now that blacks were no longer under the direct supervision of whites, the nation looked in 1865 at its now-large free black population in the South and wondered: Will they work to provide for themselves and their families? Will they rely on government handouts? Will they become parasites or beggars? Will a large number of them become criminals? The answers to these questions proved that the former slaves had definite ideas about how free men and women should conduct themselves.
WORKING TO PROVIDE FOR THEMSELVES AND THEIR FAMILIES
Contrary to the belief held by most Southern whites that blacks would not work without being forced to, most freed slaves were willing under emancipation to provide for themselves and their families. The editor of a black newspaper declared in 1865 that black people need not be reminded to avoid idleness and vagrancy. After all, he concluded, “the necessity of working is perfectly understood by men who have worked all their lives.” For example, at Augusta, Georgia, a convention of freedmen discountenanced vagrancy and encouraged every one of their group to obtain employment and labor honestly.3 Blacks had established a remarkable work record under slavery, and as free men and women they were determined not to blemish that record. A resolution was passed at a convention of freedmen in Hampton, Virginia, asserting that they were capable of maintaining themselves in their new situation. They argued that any one advancing a different viewpoint was either purposely misrepresenting them or was ignorant of their capabilities.4 Furthermore, if any class could be considered lazy, they stated, it would be the planters who had lived in idleness and on forced labor all their lives. One scholar posits that “blacks brought out of slavery a conception of themselves as a ‘Working Class of People’ who had been unjustly deprived of the fruits of their labor.”5
The efforts of blacks throughout the South to secure employment during Reconstruction lends credence to their claim of being a working class of people. Of course, many toiled on farms and plantations. Some found jobs in factories and on railroads, and as janitors, porters, stevedores, tailors, longshoremen, painters, carpenters, blacksmiths, tanners, firemen, and even law enforcement officers. Others went into service, performing such tasks as washing clothes, cleaning, cooking, and sewing. Still others worked as nannies and midwives. In addition, due in large part to poverty, prostitution flourished in many of the South’s towns and cities, and black as well as white women supported themselves in that way. Since prostitutes generally made more money than farm workers or domestics, they were willing to risk violence, arrest, disease, and early death. Prostitution was generally segregated but not always. For example, it was rumored that Celia Miller in Galveston, Texas, in 1867 kept a nondiscriminatory “disorderly house” where both white and black women lived and worked.6 In general, not only were blacks working, but it also was a universal observation among Southern whites that they worked well when paid. One hotelkeeper, for instance, informed Sidney Andrews, a Northern white traveler, that he was doing well with his black labor. He asserted, “I treat ‘em just as I would white men; pay them fair wages every Saturday night, give ’em good beds and a good table, and make ‘em toe the mark. They know me, and I don’t have the least trouble with ’em.”7
FORMER SLAVES UNDERTAKING FARM WORK IN THE SOUTH.
Courtesy of the North Carolina Division of Archives and History
The Federal government gave some help to blacks in their struggle to survive as free men and women. In March 1865, Congress created the Freedmen’s Bureau to help oversee what it hoped would be the peaceful transition of blacks from slavery to freedom. The Bureau was intended to function like a primitive welfare agency, providing food and clothing to freedmen and to white refugees. It was also authorized to distribute up to forty acres of abandoned or confiscated land to black settlers and loyal white refugees and to draft and enforce labor contracts between freedmen and planters. The Bureau cooperated with the Northern voluntary associations that sent missionaries and teachers to the South to establish schools for former slaves, and it achieved a measure of success in the area of black education. Its record in other areas was mixed, however. It distributed virtually no land to former slaves. Indeed, Bureau officials would often collaborate with planters in expelling blacks from towns and cities and forcing them into signing contracts to work for their former masters.8
Although Southern whites accused freedmen of relying on government assistance, in some places more whites than blacks benefited from this aid. In fact, it was far more easy for whites to accept government help than it was for blacks. Many freed people, embarrassed by their needs, disdained such handouts in favor of providing for themselves if at all possible. After emancipation, needing the assistance of whites may well have been too reminiscent of the time under slavery when they had to take whatever food and clothing was allotted to them by their masters. As free men and women, they felt obliged to provide for their families and themselves to the best of their abilities. It is no wonder that Sarah Chase, a Northern white schoolteacher, wrote from Richmond in May 1865 in reference to freedmen that “most of these people will not beg.” In order to bring her point home, Chase told a story about a black woman with several small children who asked her for a job: “for something, missus—anything to be earning a little something.”9 Given the fact that the Freedmen’s Bureau usually would not supply rations to freedmen unless they were old or decrepit, it proved beneficial to blacks to display independence and self-reliance.
Freedmen tried to take some control of the conditions under which they labored. As free men and women, they refused to continue working in gangs under the direction of whites as they had done during slavery. They also demanded that their employers give them time off to devote to their own chores. Convinced that working at one’s own pace was part of freedom, they simply would not labor as long or as hard as they had in slavery.
THE STRUGGLE TO ACQUIRE LAND
“The ex-slaves seemed to see in land ownership, the symbolic and actual fulfillment of freedom’s promise,” according to one contemporary historian. The slogan “forty acres and a mule” epitomized the longing of former slaves to acquire land and, through it, economic independence and the certainty that they could provide for their families. 10 Without land, most freedmen believed that they would always be slaves. One elderly freed black posed a heart-felt question to journalist Whitelaw Reid in 1865: “What’s de use of being free if you don’t own land enough to be buried in?” The old man then answered his question: “Might juss as well stay [a] slave all yo’ days.”11 “Gib us our own land and we can take care ourselves, but widout land, de ole massas can hire us or starve us, as dey please,” said one South Carolina black.12 And a Mississippi black remarked, “All I wants is to git to own fo’ or five acres ob land, dat I can build me a little house on and call my home.”13 That blacks would have a passion for the land should come as no surprise. They had worked the soil—plant—ing, cultivating, harvesting, tending gardens—and raised livestock for generations. Like most rural people, blacks respected the land and its bounty. Although their owners legally owned the property on which slaves had their garden plots, some blacks had felt a certain proprietorship over these plots.14 Moreover, the passion for owning a small piece of land shown by North American blacks is not unusual when compared to the experience of other postemancipation societies. In the aftermath of slavery, freedmen throughout the Western Hemisphere in Haiti, the British and Spanish Carribean, and Portuguese Brazil all saw ownership of land as crucial to ensuring their economic independence.15
FORMER SLAVES TOILING ON THE LAND, LOCATION NOT KNOWN.
Courtesy of the North Carolina Division of Archives and History
In early 1865 many former slaves believed that, having set them free, the Federal government would now give them forty-acre plots taken from the plantations on which they had previously been confined. Lizzie Norfleet remembered that “the report came out after the war that every family was going to get forty acres and a mule to start them out.” However, the government did not make g
ood its promise because “I ain’t never seed nobody what received nothing.”16 Charlie Holman stated that “dey said they was gonna give us so much land an’ a mule but we never did get that.”17 Sally Dixon maintained that “we was told when we got freed we was going to get forty acres of land and a mule. Stead of that we didn’t get nothing.”18 Echoing similar sentiments, Berry Smith asserted, “Dere was a heap of talkin’ after de war, about every nigger was goin’ to git forty acres an’ a mule, an’ had us all fooled up, but I ain’t seen my mule yit. I never did see nobody git nothin!”19
Why did so many former slaves expect the government to give them forty acres of land and a mule? General Oliver O. Howard, the commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, argued that the myth of land redistribution in the South probably arose from the wording of the law establishing the Bureau. This might have been the case, but, if so, it appears that the government purposely misled the freedmen. As noted, the Bureau was authorized to distribute up to forty acres of abandoned or confiscated land to black settlers. In General Howard’s opinion, land speculators should have been blamed for spreading the rumor. The intention of the speculators, he argued, was to lower the value of the land.20 Elizabeth Hyde Botume, a Northern white teacher among Sea Islands blacks, maintained that white and black Union soldiers convinced many freedmen that they would be given the land of their former owners.21 Indeed, Andrew Boone recalled that “shortly after the Union troops arrived in his community ... a story went round an’ round dat de marster would have to give de slaves a mule an’ a years’ provisions an’ some lan’, about forty acres.”22 Moreover, some Southern white civilians and Confederate soldiers believed that land would be given to former slaves and thus helped spread the rumor. For example, a prominent white Georgian, James T. Ayers, wrote in his diary in early February 1865: “I really think this whole South, or that part called South Carolina with a large portion of Georgia and Florida will be gave to the niggers for a possession.”23
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