Been in the Storm So Long (83 page)

If “instruction” could cure the propensity of the ex-slaves toward “indolence” and “unreliable” labor, the agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau eagerly assumed the role of teachers and disciplinarians. The lessons they imparted seldom varied and rarely departed from what Union officers and planters had been telling the slaves since the first days of liberation. “He would promise them nothing, but their freedom, and freedom means work,” General Oliver O. Howard, the Bureau commissioner, explained to the freedmen of Austin, Texas, and he offered them, too, the classic maxim of nineteenth-century employers: “The man who sits about the streets and smokes, will make nothing.” That very morning, Howard said, he had attended church services in different parts of the city and had heard a black clergyman and a white clergyman preach the gospel of love. “Oh, if you will only practice what you preach,” the commissioner told the freedmen, “it will all be well.” But if they refused to work, a Bureau officer warned the blacks of Mississippi, they should expect neither sympathy, love, nor subsistence. “Your houses and lands belong to the white people, and you cannot expect that they will allow you to live on them in idleness.” Nor should the ex-slave expect the state or Federal government “to let any man lie about idle, without property, doing mischief. A vagrant law is right in principle. I cannot ask the civil officers to leave you idle, to beg or steal. If they find any of you without business and means of living, they will do right if they treat you as bad persons and take away your misused liberty.”
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Upon assuming office, the local Freedmen’s Bureau agent seized every opportunity to preach the gospel of work to the blacks in his district, often visiting the plantations themselves at the invitation of the grateful proprietors. In addressing the assembled laborers, he would familiarize them with their “duties and obligations,” seek to correct their “exaggerated ideas” of freedom, impress upon them the need to be “orderly, respectful, and industrious,” and assure them of protection and compensation “commensurate with their industry and demeanor.” At the same time, Bureau commissioners implored the freedmen, in words that would become all too familiar, to exhibit those traditional virtues of patience and forbearance, no matter what the provocation.

No doubt many Bureau agents took comfort in the impact of their message. “The Negro is often suspicious of his former master and will not believe him,” the subcommissioner in Jackson, Mississippi, observed, “but when assured by the Federal authorities that he must go to work and behave himself, he does so contentedly.” That made it all the more imperative, he thought, “for the good of the Negro and the peace of the Country,” to have Bureau representatives visit every part of their districts.
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The manager of a plantation in Bolivar County, Mississippi, heartily agreed. “If you would send an agent here to look into matters, and give some advice, I would be pleased to have him make his quarters with me for a week or two.” With unconcealed enthusiasm, a planter near Columbia, South Carolina, welcomed the advice a Bureau official gave to his laborers. “You’re their best friend, they all know,” he told him, “and I’m very glad you’ve come down this way.” The planter had good reason to be grateful. Until the official’s visit, the freedmen had thought they owned the plantation.
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Acting in what they deemed to be the best interests of the ex-slaves, the strongest and proven advocates of the freedmen’s cause admonished them to prove their fitness for freedom by laboring as faithfully as they had as slaves—and even more productively. “Plough and plant, dig and hoe, cut and gather in the harvest,” General Rufus Saxton urged them. “Let it be seen that where in slavery there was raised a blade of corn or a pound of cotton, in freedom there will be two.” Along with Saxton, few whites were more committed to the freedmen than Clinton B. Fisk, a Bureau official who subsequently helped to found one of the first black colleges. And he doubtless thought himself to be speaking in their best interests when he advised the freedmen to remain in their old places and work for their former masters.

Consistent with such advice, Freedmen’s Bureau officials made every effort to rid the urban centers of black refugees and to force them back onto the plantations. (Ironically, the very presence of the Bureau in the towns and villages had induced many ex-slaves to settle there, thinking they might be more secure with Federal protection nearby.) A successful Bureau officer in Culpeper, Virginia, was able to report that “this village was overrun with freedmen when I took charge here, but I have succeeded in getting the
most of them out into the country on farms. The freedmen are, almost without an exception, going to work, most of them by the year.”
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Having been established to facilitate the transition from slavery to freedom, the Bureau faced an admittedly immense task. With limited personnel and funds, it was forced to operate on a number of levels, providing the newly freed slaves with food rations and medical care, assisting them in their education, helping to reunite families, relocating thousands of ex-slaves on abandoned lands, and transporting still more to areas where the scarcity of labor commanded higher wages. In its most critical role as a labor mediator, the Bureau set out to correct abuses in contracts, establish “fair” wage rates, force employers to pay what they had promised, and break up planter conspiracies to depress wages. “What we wish to do is plain enough,” a Bureau officer in North Carolina announced. “We desire to instruct the colored people of the South, to lift them up from subserviency and helplessness into a dignified independence and citizenship.”
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The attempts to implement these policies and lofty objectives revealed varying ranges of competence and dedication within the Bureau’s personnel. In theory, a northern reporter wrote, the Bureau unquestionably “stands as the next friend of the blacks,” but “practically, and in the custom of the country,” he concluded after several months of observation, “it appears to stand too often as their next enemy.” The agent he met in a South Carolina community typified for him the Bureau mentality. Empowered to examine labor contracts and determine the validity of planter and freedmen grievances, he demonstrated little or no sympathy for the very people he had been dispatched to protect. “He doesn’t really intend to outrage the rights of the negroes, but he has very little idea that they have any rights except such as the planters choose to give them.” Henry M. Turner, the prominent black clergyman, shared this dim view of the Bureau in operation. Based upon his travels in Georgia and his conversations with numerous freedmen, Turner concluded that although Bureau agents professed “to do much good,” many of them appeared to be “great tyrants” who were utterly incapable of understanding the problems of his people.
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Whatever directives flowed out of the national office, the crucial power of the Freedmen’s Bureau rested with the state and local officials, many of whom were former soldiers and officers who looked upon their positions as sinecures rather than opportunities to protect the ex-slaves in their newly acquired rights. The competence of individual agents varied enormously, as did the quality of the commitment they brought to their jobs. Under difficult, even hazardous circumstances, some Bureau agents braved the opposition of native whites as well as Federal authorities to protect the freedmen from fraud, harassment, and violence; among these agents were whites imbued with the old abolitionist commitment and a small group of blacks, including Martin R. Delany, B. F. Randolph, and J. J. Wright, all of them holding posts in South Carolina.
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But many of the field agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau coveted acceptance by the communities in which
they served and became malleable instruments in the hands of the planter class, eager to service their labor needs and sharing similar views about the racial character and capacity of black people and the urgent need to control them. The
New Orleans Tribune
tried to be as sympathetic toward the Freedmen’s Bureau as its observations would permit: in the midst of a hostile population, the agents had little choice but to act cautiously; their acquaintances were almost always whites and each day they were subjected to “false impressions and misrepresentations.” Under such conditions, the editor charged, the legitimate grievances of black laborers were understandably “treated with contempt”—that is, if they were considered at all. In a recent visit to Amite City, in St. Helena Parish, he found that most of the blacks were unaware of the presence of the Bureau. “The representatives of the federal power are lost in the crowd,” the editor observed; “and feeling themselves powerless, they are wasting time the best they can, and do not hurt the feelings of any body.” To “make Abolition a truth,” he suggested that black troops be stationed there. “Up to this time, Emancipation has only been a lie—in most of our parishes.”
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No matter how a Bureau agent interpreted his mission, the tasks he faced were formidable. At the very outset, the extent of territory for which he was responsible reduced his effectiveness. “My satrapy,” a South Carolina agent recalled, “contained two state districts or counties, and eventually three, with a population of about eighty thousand souls and an area at least two thirds as large as the state of Connecticut. Consider the absurdity of expecting one man to patrol three thousand miles and make personal visitations to thirty thousand Negroes.” The questions an agent needed to answer and act upon were equally demanding. If a slaveholder had removed his blacks during the war to a “safe” area, who bore the responsibility for returning them to their original homes? If blacks had planted crops in the master’s absence, who should reap the profits? Could a former master confiscate the personal possessions a black had accumulated as his slave? If a black woman had borne the children of a master, who assumed responsibility for them in freedom? Could the ex-slaveholders expel from their plantations the sick and elderly blacks no longer able to support themselves? Compared to the numerous disputes involving the interpretation of contracts, the division of crops, and acts of violence, these were almost trivial questions, but even the best-intentioned agents had few guidelines to help them reach a decision. The Bureau officer, a South Carolina agent recalled, needed to be “a man of quick common sense, with a special faculty for deciding what not to do. His duties and powers were to a great extent vague, and in general he might be said to do best when he did least.”
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No sooner had he taken office than the typical Bureau agent found himself besieged by planters wanting to know what terms and punishments they could impose on their blacks. That would constitute the bulk of his work, along with the many complaints of freedmen who had suffered fraud, abuse, and violence at the hands of their employers. Unfortunately,
few Bureau agents possessed the ability, the patience, or the sympathy to deal with the grievances of the freedmen, even to recognize their legitimacy, and the ex-slave had no way of knowing what to expect if he should file a complaint. To do so, he might have to travel anywhere from ten to fifty miles to the nearest Bureau office, where he was apt to find an agent “who rides, dines, and drinks champagne with his employer” and viewed any complainant as some kind of troublemaker. Even the more sympathetic agents were not always able to consider the freedman’s grievances with the seriousness they deserved.

The ways in which a local Bureau agent or provost marshal considered the grievance of a freedman often differed markedly from the deference paid to a prominent planter. In Liberty, Virginia, for example, the local superintendent of freedmen’s affairs—a sergeant in the Union Army—listened to a black laborer’s account of a severe beating he had suffered at the hands of his employer.