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P.S.—Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant,

Jourdon Anderson90

Few individuals—white or black—have ever articulated the meaning of freedom more clearly or more precisely than Jourdon Anderson. How many such people came out of slavery remains difficult to determine. But as former slaveholders assumed the role of employers and prepared to deal with the freed slaves as workers, they sometimes found their plantations and farms overrun with men and women who evinced the same spirit and the same determination to work under conditions that would in no way compromise their newly won freedom. What happened to that spirit and to that determination would profoundly affect race relations and the nation for more than a century.

Chapter Seven

BACK TO WORK: THE OLD COMPULSIONS

We have been faithful in the field up to the present time, and think that we ought to be considered as men, and allowed a fair chance in the race of life. It has been said that a black man can not make his own living, but give us opportunities and we will show the whites that we will not come to them for any thing, if they do not come to us. We think the colored people have been the making of them, and can make something of ourselves in time. The colored people know how to work, and the whites have been dependent upon them. They can work again, and will work. A white man may talk very well, but put him to work, and what will he say? He will say that hard work is not easy. He will say that it is hard for a man who has owned so many able-bodied negroes to have the Yankees come and take them all away.

—CORPORAL JACKSON CHERRY, COMPANY I, 35TH REGIMENT, UNITED STATES COLORED TROOPS, DECEMBER 16, 18651

“OLD LETITIA is with me still on the old terms and declines to make any change in consequence of her freedom,” William L. DeRosset, a former North Carolina slaveholder, informed his brother. “I can see no difference in her at all, and I notified her when I first saw the order freeing them, that she was at liberty to go, but that if she staid with me it must be as she had before & if she misbehaved I would not hesitate to flog her. She acquiesced fully & I have had no trouble.” With several of the other servants, however, he had been less successful. “Susie became impudent & I drove her off,” while Louisa “wanted to make a change” and left. To replace them, he managed to hire “two of the best servants I ever saw, both young mulatto women, & real niggers.” Having already surrendered the use of his right leg, the still unrepentant DeRosset remained willing to sacrifice his right arm if it would help to ensure the ultimate triumph of the Lost Cause. With blacks in his region abandoning the rice fields for more desirable labor, he recognized that unwelcome changes lay ahead. But DeRosset remained confident of the outcome and he would manage his laborers in that spirit. “The Negroes over the entire South are beginning to awaken to a sense of their still dependant position towards the whites and consequently are much more respectful and steadily improving in this respect. So that in a few years I think every thing will be about as it was except that we can not control their entire time.”2

To listen to the former slaveholder, emancipation had changed only the method of compensation, not the basic arrangement, not the mutual understanding that had underlain the old system. If he continued to meet his obligations to his freed blacks and provide for their daily needs, if he agreed to pay them in some way for their labor (whether by wages or shares), he expected them to maintain the old demeanor and to comply with his expectations, regulations, and demands. “My own servants on the lot have not said a word about wages nor changed at all in their deportment or duty,” a Florida farmer and physician advised his cousin in North Carolina. The one problem he had encountered was a former slave who “was very idle & a little impertinent to my wife,” but he resolved the