• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The work progresses very slowly and they seem perfectly indifferent. Oh! no one away from “the scene of operations” can have any conception of the difficulties we have to encounter.… I allude especially to our Rice field negro, a real gang worker, a perfect machine or part of a machine rather. He never thinks, never did, perhaps never will. The women appear most lazy, merely because they are allowed the opportunity. They wish to stay in the house or in the garden all the time.… The men are scarcely much better. They go out, because they are obliged to. They feel bound as a slave and work under constraint, are impudent, careless and altogether very provoking.

What most planters suspected and many freedmen readily conceded was a general and deliberate slowdown—the development of a work pace consistent with and reflective of their new status as free men and women. “Their idea of freedom,” a Federal official reported from Bolivar County, Mississippi, in July 1865, “is that they are under no control; can work when they please, and go where they wish.”12

With careful training, and with force if necessary, the planter class thought it could instill a discipline and attitude in their slaves that would overcome the blacks’ traditional notions about work and time. But to listen to the former masters in the aftermath of the war, that discipline came unhinged the moment their blacks began to act on their freedom. “Negroes know nothing of the value of time,” a Texas planter proclaimed, and on countless farms and plantations that seemed to translate into less work and lost days, with laborers reporting to the fields late, remaining out longer at mealtime, and refusing to labor on Saturday afternoons.13 Pierce Butler, the large Georgia rice planter, wondered how he could possibly make a crop when most of his hands left the fields in the early afternoon, even at the busiest time of the season. When his daughter returned to the plantation after the war to assist him, she shared his exasperation, particularly in view of the loyalty the blacks had shown him as slaves.

The negroes talked a great deal about their desire and intention to work for us, but their idea of work, unaided by the stern law of necessity, is very vague, some of them working only half a day and some even less. I don’t think one does a really honest full day’s work, and so of course not half the necessary amount is done and I am afraid never will be again.… I generally found that if I wanted a thing done I first had to tell the negroes to do it, then show them how, and finally do it myself. Their way of managing not to do it was very ingenious, for they always were perfectly good-tempered, and received my orders with, “Dat’s so, missus; just as missus says,” and then always somehow or other left the thing undone.14

Few planters appeared to comprehend fully why this was happening, only that their experiences confirmed what they had long suspected—that black slaves were productive laborers while free blacks were not. After thirty-seven years devoted to raising sugarcane and cotton, a Louisiana planter found himself unable to induce his seventy-five blacks, almost all of them his former slaves, to produce even a fraction of the prewar crops. Not only did they work slowly but they took no interest in maintaining the plantation fences (“all rotting down”) or buildings (“decaying and going to ruin”). It was as though they no longer cared. “Wherever you look the eye rests on nothing but the relics of former things fast passing to destruction.” Neither “moral suasion” nor wage incentives had induced them to work harder. “The nature of the negro cannot be changed by the offer of more or less money,” he concluded, repeating the familiar excuse of employers everywhere, “all he [the Negro] desires is to eat, drink and sleep, and perform the least possible amount of labor.” But even if the ultimate responsibility lay with racial characteristics, that made the experience no less wrenching, the