Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [237]
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ALTHOUGH SOMETIMES MOTIVATED by different considerations, Federal authorities and native whites often worked in close harmony to curb black movement into the cities and to force the freed slaves back onto the plantations. Few northern whites espoused the cause of the ex-slave more forcefully than Clinton B. Fisk, a Freedmen’s Bureau officer who commanded the respect of most blacks. And when he admonished them to remain on the plantations, few doubted that he thought this the best way for them eventually to realize their aspirations. In the congested cities, Fisk warned, “you will wear your lives away in a constant struggle to pay high rent for miserable dwellings and scanty allowances of food. Many of your children, I greatly fear, will be found wandering through the streets as vagrants—plunging into the worst of vices, and filling the workhouses and jails.”51
Invoking almost the same images, black leaders, newspapers, and conventions repeated the same advice and affirmed the agrarian mystique to which most Americans—white and black—still adhered. “He that tilleth the land shall have plenty of bread,” declared the black newspaper in Augusta, Georgia, and others played on that same theme. The freed slaves who came to the cities exposed themselves to “high rents,” “exorbitant prices,” and unemployment, whereas in the country they “can always make a living,” perhaps even save enough to purchase at some future date their own farms. “You have no trade adapted to city life,” one black editor advised the freedmen. That being the case, he warned, they would be compelled to find alternatives to legitimate occupations if they persisted in settling in urban centers.
Many who flock to these large cities are very apt to partake of all the vices prevalent, such as rum drinking, playing cards, picking pockets, and knocking men down with bludgeons for the sake of a little recreation.… What little money you may have will soon be squandered in loathsome rumshops, generally kept by those who are negro-haters, although they profess to be “frinds” while your money lasts.… If you carry on in this way, you will soon become strolling vagabonds, and honest men will shun you.
Few agrarian leaders set forth as cogently the evils that lurked in the city. In addressing the recently freed blacks of Maryland, Frederick Douglass, who had himself drifted toward the city as a fugitive slave, tried to disabuse their minds of the notion that urban living and freedom were somehow inseparable. “I believe $150 in the country is better than $400 in the city,” he insisted. Since fewer temptations existed in the country to lead them astray, they would live more economically, accumulate their savings, and become landowners. “If the colored people of Maryland flock to Baltimore, crowding the alleys and by-streets, woe betide them! Sad, indeed, will be their fate! They must stick to the country, and work.” Whoever they listened to, whites or blacks, the freedmen might have heard those words repeated in various forms.52
To make certain that the ex-slaves heeded this advice, city authorities moved to restrict, harass, and expel them, not always bothering to distinguish between the older black residents and the newcomers or even between the gainfully employed and the “vagrants.” In Richmond, the post-emancipation “jubilee” had hardly ended before black residents complained of treatment “worse than ever we suffered before,” including daily mounted patrols reminiscent of the much-dreaded patrollers and the revival of the old pass system.
We are required to get some white person to give us passes