Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [149]
But relief from the anxieties of supervising blacks could last only so long as white families managed to perform the house and field labor themselves or find suitable white replacements. That proved to be a painfully brief period of time. Even as planters recognized the need to maintain a work force, however, they were now in a position to make some important decisions, not only about the disposition of the old and the very young but how many and which of the able-bodied ex-slaves they wished to retain. Noting how her neighbor had been “awfully sanguine” over losing his slaves, Mary Chesnut thought she knew why. “His main idea is joy that he has no Negroes to support, and can hire only those that he really wants.” Although she had always had reservations about slavery, Mary Chesnut found no difficulty in sharing her neighbor’s realistic appraisal of emancipation. “The Negroes are a good riddance,” she confided to her diary. “A hired man is far cheaper than a man whose father and mother, his wife and his twelve children have to be fed, clothed, housed, nursed, taxes paid and doctors’ bills.”63
Whatever the former slaveholders thought of emancipation, it afforded them a convenient way out of supporting nonproductive laborers. Hence, a wealthy Richmond resident, who had owned large numbers of slaves, could suggest that the Emancipation Proclamation provided more immediate relief for the masters than for the intended benefactors of freedom. “It will prove a good thing for the slave-owners,” he explained; “for it will be quite as cheap to hire our labor as to own it, and we shall now be rid of supporting the old and decrepit servants, such as were formerly left to die on our hands.” Not all masters rushed to evict their older slaves, and some would have found it repugnant to their moral sensibilities, but many had no qualms about driving them off their plantations or thinking in such terms, even as they regretted the circumstances that made it necessary and claimed to sympathize with the victims. But why as employers should they assume any greater responsibilities than their far wealthier counterparts in the North? “We are to hire them just as free labor is hired in the North,” Elias Horry Deas reasoned, as he tried to resume rice cultivation in South Carolina. “I hope this may be so for if it is, I think we will be better off, & be able to plant more successfully than we have ever yet done, as we will not have a crew of old idle lazy negros with their children to feed & clothe.”64
Now that the blacks were no longer a financial investment, they suddenly became expendable—but only some of them. While freedmen made decisions about whether to remain on the same plantation, their former masters determined whom they wished to keep with them, based largely on previous records of behavior. “Now that they are all free,” Charles C. Jones, Jr., wrote his mother, “there are several of them not worth the hiring.” She agreed, and named one in particular: “Cato has been to me a most insolent, indolent, and dishonest man; I have not a shadow of confidence in him, and will not wish to retain him on the place.” If any planter felt uneasy about evicting the elderly, he might still eagerly avail himself of the opportunity to purge the work force of the proven troublemakers, the least efficient, and the bad influences, as well as those who were too quick to drop the old deference after emancipation. The sudden discovery that one of his former slaves had deceived him was sufficient provocation to discharge him. On an Alabama plantation, the newly freed workers affixed their marks to a labor contract, except for Arch, who signed his full name. That was too much for his former master, who ordered him off the place. “You done stayed