Been in the Storm So Long (84 page)

This freedman fared better than the many blacks who testified that local agents refused even to listen to their complaints but ordered them back to
work and threatened them with deportation. Confronted with an employer unwilling to pay him his share of the crop and with threats to burn down his house (because he conducted classes there), a North Carolina freedman carried his appeal to General Oliver O. Howard, the Bureau’s head commissioner, after the local agent had refused to intercede.
¹¹⁴

Even where a Bureau official tried to act on behalf of a freedman, he might find himself frustrated by military authorities, whose support he needed to enforce his decisions but whose sympathies often lay with the native whites. In some regions, military officers not connected with the Bureau collected fees for approving labor contracts and paid little attention to the provisions. Captain Randolph T. Stoops, the provost marshal in Columbia, Virginia, readily conceded his lack of concern in such matters but thought it perfectly justified. “As to the price of labour I have nothing to do with it. The citizens held a meeting some time since and made a price to suit themselves.… When Farmers bring the negro before me to have written agreements between them whatever price is agreed upon between them I enter on the article and consider them bound to fulfill the agreement whatever it may be.” Often over the protests of sympathetic Bureau agents, military authorities permitted employers to mete out punishments to recalcitrant blacks or imposed their own form of discipline. That was how Captain Stoops dealt with the problem of blacks “swarming the streets” of the town in which he was stationed. “There being no jail or place of confinement I resorted to the wooden horse and making them work on the streets. Such punishment I found beneficial for in a short time I found almost every negro for some distance, had gone to work and was doing well.… Fright has more to do with it than anything else.”
¹¹⁵

To keep the freed slaves on the old plantations and to force them into contracts with an employer doubtless helped a local Bureau official to win a degree of toleration in an otherwise hostile community. But at the same time, he easily persuaded himself that he was acting in the best interests of the freedmen. After all, the Bureau officer in Vicksburg observed, wherever the freedmen were “submissive and perform the labor they contract to do in good faith,” the native whites treated them “with kindness.” If the blacks themselves remained unconvinced of the Bureau’s good intentions, an official could reason that they had only recently been released from bondage and were in no position to know what was best for them. The more the freedmen resisted their advice, the more Bureau officials insisted on it, justifying their positions by the number of ex-slaves they had induced to return to work. Upon assuming his post in Jackson, Mississippi, Captain J. H. Weber found the city “full to overflowing with stragglers from the plantations.” He immediately ordered the troops under his command to round up the “stragglers” and put them to work on the city streets.

With equal satisfaction, a Bureau officer in southern Mississippi boasted that his “presence and authority,” backed by troops when needed, had “kept the negroes at work, and in a good state of discipline.” If it had not been for the Bureau, he added, “I feel confident there would have been an uprising upon the part of the negroes.”
¹¹⁶

Established to ease the ex-slaves’ transition to freedom, the Freedmen’s Bureau ultimately facilitated the restoration of black labor to the control of those who had previously owned them. “They are, in fact, the planter’s guards, and nothing else,” the
New Orleans Tribune
concluded, almost two years after expressing its initial doubts about the Bureau. “Every person acquainted with the regime of our country parishes knows what has become of the Bureau’s agencies and the Agents.” The potential for a different course of action had been present from the outset. Although the President’s liberal pardon policy necessarily frustrated any radical redistribution of land, the Freedmen’s Bureau had been in a position to effect significant changes in labor relations, particularly during the chaotic aftermath of emancipation. “In my opinion,” a Bureau official wrote from Meridian, Mississippi, in June 1866, “you could inflict no more severe punishment on a planter than to take from him the negroes that work the place. They will do anything, rather than this, that is possible or reasonable. They feel their utter helplessness without them to do the work.” But even the best-intentioned of the commissioners and local agents manifested their sympathy for the freedmen in curious and contradictory ways, embracing a paternalism and a contract labor system that could only perpetuate the economic dependency of the great mass of former slaves.
¹¹⁷

“Philanthropists,” a black newspaper observed in 1865, “are sometimes a strange class of people; they love their fellow man, but these to be worthy of their assistance, must be of an inferior kind. We were and still are oppressed; we are not demoralized criminals.” Nor did black people need to be reminded to avoid idleness and vagrancy; the repeated warnings, preached by native whites and Federal authorities alike, were all too reminiscent of the white preacher’s sermons during slavery. After all, the newspaper concluded, “the necessity of working is perfectly understood by men who have worked all their lives.”
¹¹⁸

O
N A PLANTATION
in South Carolina, an elderly black woman known as Aunt Phillis told how her master had built his new house only a year before the outbreak of the Civil War. Like those slaves who habitually boasted of the wealth of their “white folks,” she dwelled on the fact that her master had paid a great deal of money for this house, as much as $20,000. “Where did your master get so much money?” a northern journalist asked the old woman. The question obviously agitated her. Although confined to bed because of an illness, she managed to raise herself up and with considerable excitement in her voice she kept repeating the question: “Whar he git he money? Whar he git he money? Is dat what you ask—whar he git he money?
I
show you, massa.” Pushing up her sleeve, she revealed a gaunt, skinny arm. Tapping it vigorously with her forefinger, she exclaimed, “You see dat, massa? Dat’s whar he got he money—out
o’
dat black skin he got he money.”
³

Few ex-slaveholders ever paused to scrutinize their own lives and dependency, and still fewer would have perceived any reason to do so. But their former slaves had been quite observant, and no one knew their “white folks” better than they did. “Oh, massa ain’t old as me,” an elderly black woman explained. “Us been playfellows togedder. But massa ain’t stan’ lika me, ma’am. Hard work an’ beatin’ about make us grow ole too fast. Us been ole w’en him young. Massa lib soft w’en us lib hard.” Wherever the freedmen turned, it seemed, white men who claimed to be their best friends and emancipators were on hand to advise them to work diligently and thereby prove themselves fit for freedom. The former slaves usually listened politely and nodded their heads in acquiescence. But occasionally their anger surfaced, and few charges infuriated them more than that of idleness, particularly when their former masters leveled the accusation. “They take all our labor for their own use and get rich on it and then say we are lazy and can’t take care of ourselves,” was the way a South Carolina freedman expressed his rage. Why should the ex-slave have to prove himself, others asked, when the evidence of his labor was everywhere to be seen? Indeed, if the freedman needed only to work to prove himself fit to enjoy the blessings of liberty, he should have been free for more than two centuries. After observing how “the flippant class that talks so loud of the idleness of the negro” finds itself unable to do anything without him, the
New Orleans Tribune
reminded the planters: “The time has come when
the cash
, and not
the lash
commands labor. The blacks are no longer required to rise at four and work, work, work all day, till it is too dark to see; and then get up frequently during the night to wait upon the caprices of an indolent master or mistress to whom surfeiting forbids sleep.”
⁴

Having been exposed to regular dosages of advice from white men, more than five hundred freedmen on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, listened with particular attentiveness when Major Martin R. Delany, the outspoken black nationalist and abolitionist who returned to his native South as a Freedmen’s Bureau officer, addressed them in the summer of 1865. “I want to tell you one thing,” he began. “Do you know that if it was not for the black man this war never would have been brought to a close with success to the Union, and the liberty of your race? I want you to understand that. Do you know it? Do you know it? Do you know it?” Cries of “yes,” “yes,” “yes,” greeted his question. With the crowd obviously in his grasp, shouting out their encouragement and approval, Delany assailed the southern planters and northern speculators who exploited their labor, and he urged them to be skeptical even of those who claimed to be their best friends—the schoolteachers and ministers, “because they never tell you the truth,” and the cotton agents, “who come honey mouthed unto you, their only intent being to make profit by your inexperience.” With even greater forcefulness, however, Delany reminded his audience of the heritage of bondage, the white man’s indebtedness to their labor, and the power they held in their hands.

The few local whites who were present, according to one witness, listened to Delany “with horror depicted in their faces.” No less alarmed were two Freedmen’s Bureau officers who had been dispatched to the scene to impart their impressions of this most recent addition to their ranks. If Delany’s words disturbed them, the crowd’s reaction seemed even more portentous. “The excitement with the congregation was immense,” one officer noted, “groups were formed talking over what they have heard, and ever and anon cheers were given to some particular sentences of the speech”; he overheard one freedman remark that Delany was “the only man who ever told them the truth,” while others vowed “they would get rid of the Yankee employer.” Little wonder that the officers dutifully reported the contents of Delany’s speech to their superior with a warning that such “discourse” produced
“discontent
among the Freedmen,” generated “feelings of indignation toward the white people,” and could only incite the ex-slaves to insurrection. “My opinion of the whole affair,” one of them concluded, “is, that Major Delany is a thorough hater of the White race, and tries the colored people unnecessarily.”
⁵