Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [278]
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FACED WITH troublesome laborers after the war, a Louisiana sugar planter mused over the changed situation and how he would have dealt with such problems in better days. “Eaton [an overseer] must find it very hard to lay aside the old strap—As for myself, I would give a good deal to amuse myself with it, a little while. I have come to the conclusion that the great secret of our success was the great motive power contained in that little instrument.” Few of the former slaveholders would have disputed that observation. To maintain a disciplined and docile labor force, they had long acknowledged their reliance on “the power of fear.” Nor had the emancipation of the slaves lessened the need to exercise their traditional prerogatives. “They can’t be governed except with the whip,” one planter explained. “Now on my plantation there wasn’t much whipping, say once a fortnight; but the negroes knew they would be whipped if they didn’t behave themselves, and the fear of the lash kept them in good order.”81
When Federal officials suspended the newly enacted Black Codes, southern whites greeted the decision with predictable expressions of dismay but few were altogether surprised and some felt the states had acted foolishly. But when Federals in some regions reprimanded employers for using the whip on black laborers or forbade any kind of corporal punishment, that was truly hard to accept—even to comprehend. “I know the nigger,” a Mississippi planter pleaded with a Freedmen’s Bureau official. “The employer must have some sort of punishment. I don’t care what it is. If you’ll let me tie him up by the thumbs, or keep him on bread and water, that will do.… All I want is just to have it so that when I get the niggers on to my place, and the work is begun, they can’t sit down and look me square in the face and do nothing.”82
To manage black laborers, numerous planters agreed, was not unlike handling mules; both could be stubborn, even insolent, and experience suggested that they were most serviceable and contented when they had “plenty of feed, plenty of work, and a little licking.” What these planters now demanded was simply the necessary authority to exact the fear and the deference always considered essential to racial control. Like the Black Codes, corporal punishment would benefit the blacks by restraining their worst passions and forcing them to acknowledge authority. “A nigger has got to know you’re his master,” a Georgia planter still insisted, “and then when he understands that he’s content.” Still another former slaveholder attributed his postwar success in managing thirty-five freedmen to their fear of punishment: “You see I never let myself down to ’em.”83
If the old discipline in any way contradicted the new freedom, few of the former slaveholders cared to admit it. To them, emancipation had only made more urgent the need to exercise traditional authority. Although employers made less use of the whip than before the war, they managed to find equally effective and less controversial alternatives. After serving a fifteen-day jail sentence for lashing a former slave (“was there ever such a damned outrage!”), a South Carolina planter claimed to have “larnt a trick” that exacted the proper respect of his blacks. “I jest strings ’em up by the thumbs for ’bout half an hour, an’ then they are damned glad to go to work.” Since the Union Army used that method to discipline its own men as well as recalcitrant blacks, the South Carolinian obviously expected no interference. Fearful of whipping their freed slaves, lest they lodge a complaint with Federal officials, some planters took out their frustrations in verbal abuse. “Can’t lick free niggers, but I don’t know if there’s any law ag’in cussin’ ’em, and I believe it does ’em a heap o’ good,” a Georgian suggested