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By Root 1334 0

every freedman realized that he was no longer an article of merchandise, subject to sale at the whim, bankruptcy, or death of his owner. He understood, too, that freedom secured his family from involuntary disruption. If the freedman could not immediately support his wife and children, he at least had the satisfaction of knowing that any income or property he henceforth accumulated from his labor would be his to retain. That realization was in itself immensely gratifying. After earning his first dollar, working on the railroad after the war, a former Arkansas slave recalled that he “felt like the richest man in the world!” Even ex-slaves who had been treated well readily appreciated this crucial difference between bondage and freedom. “I was brought up with the white folks, just like one of them,” declared a slave refugee who had fled to the Union lines; “these hands never had any hard work to do. I had a kind master; but I didn’t know but any time I might be sold away off, and when I found I could get my freedom, I was very glad; and I wouldn’t go back again, because now I am for myself.” That same point was made by a South Carolina freedman when a reporter asked him why he did not want to return to a mistress who, by his own admission, had treated him well. “Why, sar,” he explained, “all I made before was Miss Pinckney’s, but all I make now is my own.”11

Other than instructing them to “labor faithfully for reasonable wages” and “to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence,” the Emancipation Proclamation provided newly freed slaves with no real guidelines. Nor did subsequent Federal policies provide any underpinning for their new status. Clearly, black people were now free. But how free? Few knew for certain, though many whites had ideas about both the quality and the durability of black freedom. “These niggers will all be slaves again in twelve months,” a Mississippi planter told a Union officer. “You have nothing but Lincoln’s proclamation to make them free.” He had, in fact, made a telling point. No official document by itself could turn a slave into a free man, nor could the Yankees, the white missionary teachers, or the most sympathetic southern whites perform that feat. To know “de feel of bein’ free” demanded that the ex-slave begin to act like a free man, that he test his freedom, that he make some kind of exploratory move, that he prove to himself (as well as to others) by some concrete act that he was truly free. The nature or the boldness of that act was far less important than the feeling he derived from it. The action undertaken by Exter Durham of North Carolina, for example, could hardly be described as a startling break with the past. Upon being informed of his new status, he gathered his few belongings together and left the Snipes Durham plantation in Orange County for the George Herndon plantation in adjoining Chatham County. But to Exter Durham and his wife, Tempie Herndon, who had belonged to different masters, this move meant everything—“kaze den me an’ Exter could be together all de time ’stead of Saturday an’ Sunday.”12

By enlarging the freedman’s sense of what was attainable, desirable, and tolerable, emancipation encouraged a degree of independence and assertiveness which bondage had sharply contained. To leave the plantation without a pass, to slow the pace of work, to haggle over wages and conditions, to refuse punishment, or to violate racial etiquette were all ways of testing the limits of freedom. No doubt a Mississippi freedman derived considerable satisfaction from refusing to remove his hat when ordered to do so in the presence of a white man, as did a Richmond black who turned down the request of a white man to help him lift a barrel, telling him at the same time, “No, you white people think you can order black people around as you please.” To those long accustomed to absolute control, even the smallest exercise of personal freedom by a former slave, no matter how innocently intended, could have an unsettling effect.13

Acting as individuals and families, usually without