• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Although reports of rampant “polygamy, adultery, and indiscriminate sexual intercourse” among the ex-slaves would reinforce white notions of black moral laxity, some Freedmen’s Bureau officers readily conceded that a disproportionate number of such cases came to their attention. “If I exaggerate in this matter,” a Bureau officer in South Carolina wrote, “it is because, like most officers of justice, I saw chiefly the evil side of my public—all the deserted ones coming to me for the redress of their grievances or for help in their poverty.” Actually, the seriousness with which most blacks assumed and sustained their marital vows, like the intense interest they had shown in locating family members, surprised and elated many Bureau officers and northern missionaries, who had come to the South prepared for the worst. If Horace Greeley, the New York editor, thought “enslaved, degraded, hopeless races or classes are always lewd,” that was far from the conclusion reached by a white teacher in postwar Virginia. “The colored people easily assume the responsibilities, proprieties, and graces of civilized life. As a class, their tastes are comely, though they are acquainted with filth. I fancy they see the moral significance of things quite as readily as white people.” And if white masters and mistresses claimed credit for the “civilizing influences” they had exerted on their slaves, the freedmen and freedwomen took some pride in the moral values they had managed to sustain in the quarters, often in the face of the grossest forms of white savagery.47

The eagerness of blacks to assume the “graces of civilized life” manifested itself in ways that native whites found most disturbing. “The black women do not like to work,” an Alabama planter reported, “it is not ladylike.” The phenomenon he described was real enough, though whites tended to exaggerate its prevalence. With the acknowledgment of emancipation, many black women did withdraw their labor from the fields and the white man’s kitchen in order to spend more time tending to their own husbands and children. If the women themselves did not initiate such moves, the men often insisted upon it, and husbands and wives together effected arrangements that would be more compatible with freedom. Mary Jones, the Georgia proprietress, tersely summed up the changes affecting her own household: “Gilbert will stay on his old terms, but withdraws Fanny and puts Harry and Little Abram in her place and puts his son Gilbert out to a trade. Cook Kate wants to be relieved of the heavy burden of cooking for two and wait on her husband.” No less distraught, an Alabama planter claimed he had lost one fourth of his labor because the men regarded it as “a matter of pride” to exact from their employers a new division of labor that would exempt their women from field work. Where women continued to work, the men often insisted during contract negotiations that wives and mothers be given time off during the regular workweek to tend to their housekeeping chores.48

That the withdrawal of women from the labor force was frequently made at the insistence of the men reflected a determination by many husbands and fathers to reinforce their position as the head of the family in accordance with the accepted norms of the dominant society. The place for the woman was in the home, attending to the business of the home. “When I married my wife,” a Tennessee freedman told his employer, in rejecting his request for her services, “I married her to wait on me and she has got all she can do right here for me and the children.” Like many outside observers, Laura Towne, a northern white teacher in the Sea Islands, explained such developments as a natural reaction to the dominant place she had assumed black women had occupied in the slave household. In wishing to “rule their wives,” the men could thus hardly be blamed for exercising “an inestimable privilege” of freedom. “In slavery the woman was far more important, and was in every way held higher