Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [252]
Even as Henry W. Ravenel argued that both whites and blacks now needed to unlearn the old relationship, he had nothing drastic in mind. He insisted that the freed blacks were to show “deference, respect & attachment,” while their former masters, in return, would exercise “kindliness, care, & attention.” But there was little question as to where the ultimate authority lay. Like most planters, William Henry Stiles of Georgia prepared to manage his working force much as he had in the past. If the blacks were no longer legally bound to him, as he finally and only grudgingly conceded, neither did he feel obligated to employ them if they proved troublesome. After reprimanding his newly freed slaves for their independent work habits, such as taking more time off for meals than he permitted, Stiles advised them that they were perfectly free to leave. But if they chose to stay, he made clear, “they should work as they had obligated themselves to do—that is to work in the same manner as they always had done.” This kind of advice became commonplace, and the phrase “to work in the same manner as they always had done” was often written into newly devised labor contracts. To many planters, in fact, the principle was sufficiently important to risk their entire labor force. “Our freedmen will leave us,” J. B. Moore, an Alabama planter, confided to his diary. “They will not agree to work and be controlled by me, hence, I told them I would not hire them.”4
Whatever the legal status of the freedmen, then, the planter class made every effort to retain the essential features of the old work discipline. To tolerate the slightest deviation, no matter how trivial, was to unhinge the entire network of controls and restraints and thereby undermine the very basis of the social order as well as the labor system. What most whites found difficult to accept was not so much the freedom of the slaves as the determination of the ex-slaves to act as though they were free. “Our Negroes remain in status quo,” Donald MacRae, a North Carolina commission merchant, observed in September 1865, “except that I imagine they feel a little disposition to show their freedom.” He determined to impress upon every one of his former slaves that there were restraints on that freedom. “Yesterday,” he related to his wife, “Zielu—without asking—told me she was going to church at Cool Spring. She did what work she had to do ahead, left at daylight, and did not return till after supper. I told her this morning that though I acknowledge her freedom, I do not acknowledge her right to do as she wishes without my consent, and that if she tried it again she should not come back.” He could hardly have been clearer, and few whites accustomed to the ownership of slaves would have dissented from his position. Even the most “humane” among them, “conscious of none but the friendliest and best intentions” toward their blacks, a traveler in Virginia observed in 1865, insisted on “nothing less than complete deference” and resisted “anything resembling independence and self-reliance in them.… In short, he wishes still to be master, is willing to be a kind master, but will not be a just employer.”5
If the former master preferred to view the new relationship within the old work discipline, the newly