Been in the Storm So Long (91 page)

No matter how explicitly a contract defined the freedmen’s rights, duties, and compensation, many laborers persisted in following their own notions about how and when they wished to work. Although most freedmen contracted to work a six-day week, many of them refused to labor for the employer on Saturdays, preferring to confine their efforts to their own garden plots and to household chores. More commonly, disputes arose over whether freedmen were obliged to perform tasks not actually stipulated in the contract. On a Georgia farm, for example, the refusal of a freedman to work on Sunday precipitated a confrontation with his employer that required the intervention of the Freedmen’s Bureau. By the terms of the contract, he had agreed to perform “any and every duty that may, at any time, be required,” including “the customary labors on the Sabbath” such as caring for the livestock. Claiming that he had “his own business” to look after, the freedman rejected Sunday work; when the farmer then insisted on reading the contract to him, the laborer refused to listen, left the place, and took his case to the local Bureau agent, who immediately advised him to return to work. But when his employer insisted that he now acknowledge the error and the commitment to work on Sunday, the freedman said he “would promise nothing and agree to nothing.” To have to listen to such “insolence” from a former slave proved to be more than many planters could tolerate. When a freedman in low-country South Carolina insisted that the contract did not oblige him to perform certain kinds of work, his employer beat him over the head and shoulders with a club; on another plantation, an employer shot a freedman who insisted upon consulting the local Bureau agent about the interpretation of a certain clause in the contract. The tenuous peace that existed in the aftermath of emancipation could be easily broken over such matters, but with alarming regularity the violence would not remain one-sided.
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Whatever the constraints of a contract, the eagerness and determination of black people to reunite their families and to regularize family relations took precedence. For the planters, on the other hand, the need to retain their labor force intact could not be compromised. On a plantation
in upper Georgia, William Henry Stiles thus rejected the plea of a former slave (who had fled during the war) that he be permitted to take his wife with him to Savannah; the planter countered that he needed her labor and he intended to hold her to the contract that bound her to his place until the end of the year. Nor would a Louisiana planter assent to the request of an elderly black woman who wished to be paid so she could move to another place and be closer to her husband. “Don’t you know that you contracted with me for a year?” he asked her. “Don’t know nuffin about it. I wants to go ’way,” she replied. But the planter remained unyielding, and the law clearly backed him. “Well, I’m keeping my part of the contract, and you’ve got to keep yours,” he warned the woman. “If you don’t, I’ll send you to jail, that’s all.”
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Although claiming that the ignorant and backward Negro could not be made to respect the sanctity of a written agreement, employers were not necessarily the innocent victims of black deceit. If the contract stipulated food rations, for example, it guaranteed neither the quality nor the quantity of the food. That was “de fust dif’culty,” a South Carolina freedman contended when asked about contract violations, “we gits no meat.” Investigating a disturbance on a plantation in the Beaufort district, the Freedmen’s Bureau agent reported that the laborers thought their employer to be dishonest, and they complained of overwork and being fed “musty” corn and “rotten” bacon. Although the Freedmen’s Bureau threatened to disallow contracts which empowered employers to use corporal punishment, that did not protect the freedmen from other forms of abuse. After being berated for negligence, a Mississippi freedman replied that he was a free man, he refused to be insulted as though he were still a slave, and he left. His decision could not have been made lightly. Not only did he face arrest and prosecution for violating the contract but he lost his remaining pay.
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The thought occurred to more than one planter that a way to avoid paying his laborers was to provoke them to break the contract near the end of the season. Asked to explain “the real cause” of labor turbulence in his area, a black worker who lived near Florence, South Carolina, singled out that particular grievance.

On a Mississippi plantation, the manager expelled some blacks who had expressed dissatisfaction over working conditions, refusing to pay them for the three months they had already labored. (The Bureau agent ordered their reinstatement.) And in South Carolina, Martin Delany heard numerous complaints that near the completion of the crop, the employer brought “some frivolous” charge against freedmen and discharged them, thereby
making them forfeit their share of the forthcoming division of the crop. The practice reached such proportions, in fact, that the Freedmen’s Bureau found it necessary to require that employers show “sufficient cause” before discharging contracted laborers and pay them what they had earned. When one Bureau agent tried to explain this policy to local planters, he reported that they found it “quite incomprehensible from the old-fashioned, patriarchal point of view.”
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Although the Freedmen’s Bureau insisted that both planters and laborers comply with contract terms, local agents thought their primary mission was to keep the blacks at work and punish them for violations. “Doing justice,” an observer sympathetic to the blacks reported, “seems to mean … seeing that the blacks don’t break contract and compelling them to submit cheerfully if the whites do.” Nothing seemed to disturb Bureau agents more about the postwar black “migration” than the tendency of freedmen to leave employers with whom they had agreed to complete the current crop. Consistent with their vigorous suppression of black vagrancy and their regular pronouncements on the necessity of labor, Bureau officials impressed upon blacks the sanctity of contracts and moved quickly to apprehend non-signers and violators as vagrants. While employers might be reprimanded or even fined for violating a contract, the freedman usually found himself in far deeper trouble, perhaps incarcerated for a period of time or forced to work on the public roads without pay. After a “contrary” freedman in a Florida community spent a week in jail on a diet of bread and water, he was said by the local Bureau agent to have been “very willing” to return to the fields. If evidence reached the nearest office of the Freedmen’s Bureau that laborers had left a plantation, refused to contract or work, or were creating a disturbance, that was all the agent needed to know to justify his intervention, with troops if he deemed them necessary. Upon hearing that some freedmen near Meridian, Mississippi, had left their jobs for “frivolous and insufficient causes,” the Bureau agent requested the names of the “guilty” parties and ordered their arrest. In many instances, Bureau officials acted in good conscience to exact a fair settlement of the grievances which had required their intervention but seldom would they tolerate any violation of a contract, no matter how relatively trivial the nature of the offense or how unreasonable the contract.
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The Freedmen’s Bureau defended its policies in the name of stabilizing labor relations. But the overly zealous commitment of its agents to the inviolability of contracts and the double standard they often applied in enforcement and in the punishment of offenders proved of immeasurable benefit to the employers. After reviewing the work of the Bureau, a conservative Memphis newspaper could not help but applaud its accomplishments: “The chaotic condition of the labor system is being reduced to order. It gives the employer the means of compelling the fulfillment of engagements on the part of the employee.” Such intervention was particularly welcomed in the initial experiments with contract labor, when violations and plantation disturbances loomed as a critical test of the entire labor
system. The need to make examples of “turbulent negroes,” lest they influence others to “go astray,” seemed all the more urgent. When two of his contracted freedmen fled “without any provocation,” Lorenzo James, an Alabama planter, wished to have them arrested, punished severely, and sent back “as an example to those remaining.” He knew precisely in what terms to frame his appeal to the Freedmen’s Bureau for assistance:

His friendship with the Bureau’s regional commissioner no doubt helped to ensure prompt compliance with his request.
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The sanctity of contracts proved of little avail to the freedmen on the day they settled their accounts with the employer. With the approach of Christmas each year and the division of the crop and the final wage payment, the dire predictions of “a heap o’ trouble” proved all too prophetic. “They’ll be awfully defrauded,” a Virginia poor white thought, perhaps reflecting his own experiences with the planter class. “I know houses yer whar they keep a nigger till his month’s most out, and then they make a muss with him, and kick him out without any wages. Poor men like me has got to pay for it. Of course, if they don’t pay, the niggers can’t keep themselves, and it’ll come on us. They’ll be cheated all kinds o’ ways. Don’t I know it?”
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I
F HIS NEWLY FREED SLAVES
remained with him until the end of the season, a Tennessee planter promised, they would be awarded a share of the crop. “Most of them left,” Lorenzo Ivy recalled; “they said they knew him too well.” But this sixteen-year-old black youth and his father stayed on and worked “just as if Lee hadn’t surrendered.” By Christmas 1865, they had raised a large crop of corn, wheat, and tobacco, they had shucked the corn and stored it in the barn, and they had stripped all the tobacco. “I never worked harder in my life, for I thought the more we made, the more we would get.” But when the two freedmen stood before their former master to obtain the promised shares, he refused to pay them anything, declared he could no longer support them, and ordered them off his land. Thinking few grievances could be more legitimate or clear-cut, they appealed to the
local officer of the Freedmen’s Bureau. He refused to help them. “The officer,” Lorenzo Ivy recalled, “was like Isaac said to Esau: ‘The voice is like Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau.’ So that was the way with the officer—he had on Uncle Sam’s clothes, but he had Uncle Jeff’s heart.”
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Large numbers of freedmen shared the experience of Lorenzo Ivy and his father. With the completion of the crops, some planters defaulted on promised payments or pleaded inability to pay, and still more reduced the payments drastically through arbitrary and inflated deductions. The initial victims were ex-slaves like the Ivys who had agreed to stay on after emancipation in return for a share of the crop. But now they were left with nothing, and even driven from the plantation. When the Freedmen’s Bureau launched its operations, local agents found their offices besieged by blacks testifying to the extent and persistence of this grievance. “The old story has been repeated thousands of times,” one officer reported, “no definite bargain made—no wages promised; but ‘massa said, stay till the crop is made and he would do what was right.’ ” That proved to be the downfall of many a freedman. Popular in verbal understandings though seldom written into contracts, the employer’s promise to pay his laborers “what was right” left him free to pay them nothing or very little; indeed, he might even persuade himself that to pay his workers any more could only demoralize them and encourage indulgences not befitting inferiors. The Mississippi planter who deprived his ex-slaves of the crop shares he had promised still thought of himself as an honest man; he simply presumed, a neighbor said of him, that northern capitalists always treated free laborers in this way.
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If the planter pleaded financial poverty and indebtedness, he might place the blame on falling cotton prices, a bad crop, or the slovenly work habits of his laborers. Not uncommonly, an employer would charge that the work of his blacks had not even paid for the food he gave them. The problem with confessing an inability to pay, even when justified, was that few of his laborers chose to believe him. And if they did believe him, why should they work for him another year on the vague assurance that conditions would improve? That made no sense at all. The “impoverished” planter might discover soon enough that he had become an undesirable risk among all the freedmen in the vicinity, even more so if they suspected him of deceit or fraud. The much-heralded contract, moreover, seemed less than sacrosanct when it denied them the very fruits of their labor. Such initial experiences, a black man wrote from Helena, Arkansas, in early 1866, would not be soon forgotten. “They may cheat the poor negro out of a year’s work, but in spite of them he has gained a year’s experience, and had the advantage of being thoroughly acquainted with that system of morals, that teaches the negro to observe and fulfill the moral obligations of a contract, but has no meaning or significance when applied to the white man.”
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