Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [263]
Within the first year of emancipation, and periodically thereafter, the introduction of whites, especially immigrants, into the fields and households of former slaveholders came to be viewed as a panacea that would surely strengthen the labor system, force the ex-slave to make a realistic accommodation to freedom, and provide white planters with an alternative to the increasingly humiliating and degrading dependency on black labor. That is, the employment of whites, or perhaps only the threat to do so, was a way to control the labor of the freedmen. “If white labor is generally introduced into the upper District,” a South Carolina rice planter vowed, “it will drive the Negro down, and then the competition for labor will oblige them to work for very little.” White labor, moreover, would provide the permanent and stable working force the South so desperately required for the successful cultivation of its crops. Compared to the freedmen, who “love change, and a month’s work at a place,” white people “love home, take interest in making it pleasant, comfortable—as the spot from which issue all their money and comforts.”34
For those who accepted these assumptions, the proposition made good sense, both racially and economically, and white Southerners certainly enjoyed talking about it. In northern Florida, planters eager for white laborers prepared to apply to New York City for help; a group of Tennessee planters welcomed immigrants from the “industrious Germanic race” to replace “the now indolent negro”; and the Virginia legislature resolved in March 1866 that “the recent radical change in the labor system of the South has rendered the introduction of a new class of laborers necessary.” Principal attention focused for a time on the bold efforts of Mississippi and Alabama planters to import Chinese laborers to work their fields. If racial peculiarities had made black slaves ideal workers, similar characteristics would enable the Chinese to answer the southern need for a docile, tractable, adaptable labor force, with superior enduring powers and less propensity than blacks to fraternize with or intermarry with whites. “We’ve got to change our whole system of labor,” an Alabama planter declared. “Why, I was talking, down to Selma, the other day, with Jim Branson, up from Haynesville. We figured up, I don’t know how many millions of coolies there are in China, that you can bring over for a song. It will take three of’em to do the work of two niggers; but they’ll live on next to nothing and clothe themselves, and you’ve only got to pay ’em four dollars a month. That’s our game now. And if it comes to voting, I reckon we can manage that pretty well!”35
This was bold talk, indeed, and it proved to be mostly talk. How to rid themselves of the presence of the Negro was always a favorite topic of conversation, permitting planters to share their frustrations, anger, and fantasies with others, but few took it seriously. To talk about it perhaps served a therapeutic need, if nothing else. “To get the privilege of governing him [the Negro] as they pleased,” a Freedmen’s Bureau official in Mississippi observed of the local planters, “they will express their anxiety to get rid of him and many other foolish things; but come to the point—they want and must have the negro to work the plantation.” Actually, some Chinese laborers were imported, and small numbers of Swedes, Germans, Dutchmen, and Irishmen were also induced to come to the South. But the results of these experiments were less than gratifying and more often than not failed to meet the expectations or needs of the planters. The new immigrants were no more tractable than many of the freedmen, and replacing troublesome blacks with troublesome immigrants not only made little sense but the cost was apt to be higher. “They cost me $35 each to bring