Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [254]
Whether in the fields or in the house, the most disturbing manifestations of black freedom were the breakdown of the old discipline, the refusal to obey orders promptly if at all, and the disinclination to regard “massa” and “missus” with the same degree of fear, awe, and respect previously expected of black subordinates. “My niggers used to do as I told them, but that time is passed,” a Louisiana planter lamented. The number of black laborers dismissed for “bad work & insolent language” may have been limited only by the difficulty in replacing them. Neither the formerly free Negroes nor the freed slaves, a northern observer wrote, “seem to recognize any obligations they may be under to employers.” Not only had they “appropriated” chickens, eggs, milk, and vegetables “to an amount fully equal to their wages” but any attempt to discipline them proved futile as long as some neighboring planter was anxious to hire them. Where slaves had behaved “outrageously” during the war, as on the Louisiana plantation of Governor Thomas O. Moore, the efforts of local whites to restore the old discipline met with only partial success. The conduct of black workers on the Moore place had become so “disobedient, defiant, [and] disrespectful” that the manager preferred to deal with them through an agent. “I go but seldom where they are at work,” he confessed.9
Comparisons of productivity under slave and free labor, a favorite pastime of postwar commentators of all persuasions, clearly favored the old system. With near unanimity, the planters themselves testified in the aftermath of the war that their former slaves did “half their former work”; the estimates ran both higher and lower but that average tended to prevail.10 A Mississippi planter told of a slave who had once picked thirty bales of cotton in one season but freedom reduced that figure to three bales; on the other hand, he praised three black families (also his former slaves) “who from nothing, are worth from $1,000 to $1,500 in money, stock, etc., to-day. They yielded to my advice. This number, out of 225 (which I was relieved of without any effort on my part); the balance are all trash, paupers, consumers, worse than army worms, and strange to say, they are quite as intelligent as the prosperous ones; but generally good slaves made poor freedmen.”11
To place any considerable weight on these initial assessments of the productivity of freedmen would be to minimize the ways in which a destructive war might have disrupted any kind of labor system. The statistics of output, moreover, could tell different stories, depending on who collected them and for what purpose. Abolitionists and Union officials eager to prove the advantages of free labor were not necessarily more accurate in their computations than those who looked back with nostalgia to the old days and the Lost Cause. No doubt productivity declined under freedom, but to many of the ex-slaves comparative labor efficiency seemed less important in 1865 than the conditions under which they would work as free men and women and the rewards they would reap from their labor.
With the scarcity of laborers in many sections of the postwar South, the former slaves appeared to be in an excellent bargaining position. “The cry on all sides, is for laborers,” a much-perplexed Mississippi planter observed, and yet the freedman, “finding himself master of the situation,” preferred to use his new power to reduce his labor rather than increase his compensation. The problem, most observers agreed, lay not so much in the number of working hours (the ten-hour day, six-day week still prevailed) as in the inclination of the freedmen to labor less arduously. Even as patient and systematic a planter as Edward B. Heyward, who prided himself on his unique understanding