Been in the Storm So Long (70 page)

If enforcement of vagrancy and curfew laws proved insufficient to deal with the problem, or if Federal officials were unwilling to approve such laws, urban whites relied on more ingenious and imaginative solutions to check the number of black residents in their midst. Imposing heavy license fees and taxes on the occupations which freedmen were most likely to enter might produce the desired results and also suggested that whites were less concerned about “vagrancy” than about ex-slaves working in non-agricultural pursuits. Without the need for any special laws, community pressure was often sufficient to deny jobs and housing to incoming blacks; any whites who defied those pressures were apt to find themselves homeless—the victims of organized arsonists. In New Orleans, insurance companies considered withdrawing coverage from all dwellings in which blacks resided, on the pretext that colored people were “inflammable matter.” In reporting this threat, the local black newspaper urged black citizens to form their own insurance companies.
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To break up the urban black settlements, like the shanty villages appearing on the edges of numerous towns, local authorities might simply order their demolition. To justify such arbitrary actions, they would cite the outbreak of disease among malnourished and ill-clad freedmen and the need to protect the health of the community. That was the only excuse officials in Meridian, Mississippi, needed before they broke up the freedmen’s camps, burned down the makeshift dwellings, and drove the inhabitants from the town. To protect the townspeople of Selma, Alabama, allegedly from a smallpox epidemic, city officials barred any freedmen who did not have the written approval of an employer. Why an employer’s consent would have made the community less susceptible to disease was not explained.
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No doubt some communities simply took their cue from the Union Army’s wartime experiment in preventive medicine in Natchez. To protect both the Union troops and the city’s residents, A. W. Kelly, an army
surgeon and the chief health officer, thought it essential to remove any possible sources of “pestilential diseases,” and there was no question in his mind about where to look—in precisely the same places nearby planters were looking for needed laborers.

No “contraband” would be permitted to remain in Natchez unless employed by a
“responsible white person
in some legitimate business” and unless he or she lived with the employer. Clearly, then, household servants and virtually no one else would be exempt, even if that meant arbitrarily separating families. The first roundup, in fact, took place appropriately enough at the freedmen’s school, with the children herded off to a nearby contraband camp. Although they were subsequently returned, the potential of the order had been clearly revealed. Not only did the action alarm the black residents of Natchez but it infuriated the black soldiers stationed nearby, many of whom had wives and children in the city. “I heard colored soldiers yesterday in their madness swear desperately that they would have revenge,” a white missionary reported.
“And they will
. I tremble as do so many of the officers in the colored regiments, when I witness such expressions & conduct of the soldiers.” Perhaps only the threatened mutiny of these black troops prompted a modification of the order and the dismissal of both the health officer and the Union commander who had supported him. More than a year later, however, in June 1865, a black correspondent in Natchez described a deplorable state of affairs which suggested how much local authorities had learned from their Yankee conquerors.

And this time, no black soldiers were in the vicinity to check such activities.
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Although some of the older black residents liked to think of themselves as different from the new arrivals from the countryside, they quickly discovered
that the restrictions, harassment, and violence were directed against the entire black community. Enforcement of the vagrancy laws revealed an all too familiar double standard. If a white man was out of work, as many were in 1865, that was simply unemployment, but if a black man had no job, that was vagrancy. If a planter refused to till the fields himself, that was understandable, but if a former slave declined to work for him, that was idleness if not insolence. Having perceived the rationale that guided the actions of white authorities, a black editor angrily denounced the arrest of black “vagrants” in Mobile. The laziest class in society, he charged, had to be the planters themselves. “They are lazy enough not to work themselves; but they want to live as parasites on the proceeds of other people’s labor. This time is past;
inde irae
. Laziness, gentlemen, is on your side. We want to work, but not for you; we want to work freely and voluntarily—for ourselves.” Nevertheless, the arrest of “vagrants” persisted, cheered on by groups of unemployed whites loitering nearby.
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Under circumstances that were difficult and often perilous, urban blacks tried to develop some community strength and response. In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, black residents met to protest illegal house searches and legislation that would deny them the right to rent either land or houses within the town limits. In petitioning the Freedmen’s Bureau for help, they simply noted that “this is not the pursuit of happiness, therefore We hope you will help us out.” After enduring a series of “abuses,” including the arrest of blacks coming into town to make some purchases, Vicksburg freedmen held a public meeting in which they protested police harassment and “disgraceful proceedings” in the civil courts. In the smaller towns, often removed from any Federal “protection,” the complaints sounded far more desperate. From Tuscumbia, Alabama, Jim Leigh and forty-seven other black residents voiced their disappointment over the limited amount of freedom they were permitted to enjoy. Local stores would sell them nothing (“We get a White man to get it for us”), and although some of them paid taxes like the white residents, they were still unable to get a school for their children. Nor could they purchase liquor without an order from a white man, or establish an independent business, such as a grocery. They could not even act in their own self-defense. “If a White Man Strik you With a Rock you are not Lowed to Look mad at him.” What was left but for them to appeal to the Freedmen’s Bureau, the agency which had been established, they had heard, to look after their interests. “Send us Sum help. We want Justice. We Want Justice. Gennel you can Send us one Company if you please. We are treted here like dogs.”
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Whatever their expectations in coming to the cities, many of the migrants discovered that their new freedom counted for far less than they had imagined. Former field hands were forced to eke out an existence in the most menial jobs, at least those they could wrest from the former residents who had been practicing them. To a black woman in Atlanta, for example, a mother of six children, whose husband had died “fighting for de Yankees,”
survival depended essentially on how much wash she could take in each day. “Sometimes I gits along tolerable,” she sighed; “sometimes right slim; but dat’s de way wid everybody;—times is powerful hard right now.” Even the plantation artisans and mechanics who had come to the cities with higher expectations found, along with the older residents, declining opportunities to practice those skills. With emancipation, whites began to challenge the virtual monopoly which blacks had enjoyed in various urban occupations, not only in the skilled trades but in the menial jobs once considered beneath the dignity of whites. Of course, if those jobs could be reserved for whites, that would lend them sufficient dignity. In Petersburg, Virginia, the local newspaper perceived significant changes in urban labor as early as August 1865:

The black families which migrated to the cities and decided to remain were apt to discover that the struggle for survival deprived them of some of the advantages that had initially attracted them there. After the war, Jennylin Dunn recalled, her parents moved into the nearest city—Raleigh, North Carolina. Although they managed fairly well in their new environment, Jennylin Dunn never realized her ambition to attend any of the schools the Yankees had established for the freed slaves. The reason she cited told the story of countless others. “Most o’ us wuz so busy scramblin’ roun’ makin’ a livin’ dat we ain’t got no time fer no schools.”
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D
ESPITE THE ALARM
over inundation of the towns and cities, the ex-slaves who moved immediately after emancipation generally confined themselves to the countryside and traveled only a short distance.
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No matter how close they stayed to the old place, however, the farmers and planters who had lost them as laborers were as distressed as if they had moved to the nearest town. To check such interplantation movement, some former slaveholders, as in Lowndes County, Alabama, agreed among themselves not to
hire any freedman within ten miles of his former home. But to implement that decision, the labor supply would have to be plentiful and the planters would have to remain unified, and such situations were uncommon, especially in the immediate aftermath of the war.
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Within several months after the end of the war, the first wave of post-emancipation migration subsided, most of the migrants having resettled in areas with which they were familiar. H. R. Brinkerhoff, a Union officer stationed near Clinton, Mississippi, initially accepted the prevailing view that freed slaves from all parts of the countryside were converging on the towns and cities. After further observation, however, he realized that he had exaggerated both the numbers of blacks involved and the extent of their movements. The migrants who came to the cities, he concluded in July 1865, comprised “a very small part of the whole,” and almost all of these had previously worked on plantations nearby. By the end of 1865, the chief of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Alabama claimed to have “no further fear of the wandering propensities of the negro”; the end of slavery, he reported, had been “naturally followed by a jubilee; but that is over now.” Actually, his optimism proved to be unjustified. Once the 1865 crops were completed and new contracts had to be negotiated, many freedmen who had stayed on the plantations after emancipation chose this moment to move elsewhere, not so much to seek their fortunes in the cities as to improve their prospects on another place. But movement in itself, as many of them discovered, only assured them of different faces directing their labor rather than significant changes in the labor itself or in the rewards they reaped from it. “It wus like dis,” a former North Carolina slave explained, “a crowd of tenants would get dissatisfied on a certain plantation, dey would move, an’ another gang of niggers move in. Dat wus all any of us could do. We wus free but we had nothin’ ’cept what de marsters give us.”
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If any “new” migrants headed for the cities in late 1865, they most likely encountered many of their people on the roads going in the other direction—back to the old places. Mounting pressure from Federal authorities to contract with an employer or be arrested as vagrants, the hostile reception they had received in the urban centers, and the declining hope for any kind of land distribution had forced many ex-slaves to reassess their lives, recognize the limitations of their freedom, and face up to the urgent need to survive. Near Mobile, Alabama, 900 freedmen held a mass meeting to voice their disappointment over the government’s failure to provide for them and voted 700 to 200 to return to their former masters. The stories of disillusioned migrants soon assumed a familiar pattern. After spending one year in a nearby town, Jacob and Lucy Utley decided they had had enough. Cramped conditions in a rat-infested dwelling and a steady diet of hardtack and pickled meat finally persuaded them to return to the old plantation. With equal dismay, John Petty, a former slave in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, was forced to reexamine the decision he had made. The one slave who chose to leave the plantation immediately after the war
had returned with a glowing picture of opportunities for young blacks in the cities. “Up in Winston,” he had reported, “all the niggers make five dollars a day; how come you don’t go up there and git rich like I is.” The other blacks had laughed at his story, refusing to believe any portion of it. But young Petty—eighteen years old at the time of emancipation—waited for the crop to be completed and then informed his old master that he intended to leave for the “north” to make his fortune. He promised the others that he would return and bring them “something.” But Winston proved to be less of a Promised Land than he had expected.