Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [280]
If open resistance invited severe reprisals, the freedmen could exercise the power to withhold their labor or leave the premises and never return. The ties that kept former slaves on the plantation were often so tenuous that an employer’s threat or attempt to inflict punishment might end the relationship altogether. Faced with the imminent loss of their laborers, many a former master and mistress suddenly became “very con’scending” after the war, learned to address their blacks in terms of respect, and banished both the whip and the overseer. “I told my overseer the old style wouldn’t do,—the niggers wouldn’t stand it,—and he promised better fashions,” an Alabama planter remarked; “but it wasn’t two days before he fell from grace, and went to whipping again. That just raised the Old Scratch with them; and I don’t blame ’em.” In explaining the changed attitudes of their old masters, some former slaves suggested that fear itself could have been a motivating factor. “He never was mean to us after freedom,” a former Tennessee slave recalled, along with the many beatings she had once endured. “He was ’fraid the niggers might kill him.” Rather than trust their former master to exercise proper judgment, many blacks extracted from him, as a condition of employment, assurances that he would refrain from corporal punishment and discharge the overseer.88
By these and other demands, the freedmen suggested the need not only to abolish the relics of bondage but to give substance to their position as free workers, with the same rights and prerogatives they had observed white laborers exercising. Nowhere would they manifest this determination more vividly than in the new economic arrangements they worked out with their employers. Unfortunately, the former slaveholding class seemed in many respects less equipped to make the transition to freedom than their former slaves. No matter how hard some tried, few of them were capable of learning new ways and shaking off the old attitudes. Even if they could, they found themselves increasingly trapped into an untenable position. Desperately needing to exact enough labor from their former slaves to meet a brutally depressed market, employers now encountered free workers who looked first to their own subsistence and refused to work up to an exploitative level they deemed incompatible with their new status. When these conflicting needs created an impasse, as they often did, the employer class was forced to look elsewhere for the kind of compulsion and guidance that might once again produce a stable and tractable labor force. How ironic that none other than the much-hated Yankee conquerors should have ultimately shown them the way.
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NOT LONG AFTER Federal authorities set aside the Black Code of South Carolina, Armisted Burt, who had helped to frame the new laws, noted with obvious satisfaction that the Union commander had ordered freedmen to contract with an employer or be sentenced to hard labor on public projects. “I have no doubt the Yankees will manage them,” he concluded. The confidence he expressed was not misplaced. No matter how much whites chafed under military rule and occupation, the planter class—native whites and northern lessees alike—often acknowledged its indebtedness to the Union Army for controlling the otherwise restless and rebellious dispositions of the freed slaves. After conversing with the local commander on steps that had been taken to suppress a feared black uprising, the manager of a plantation in low-country South Carolina breathed much easier: “Our people object to the troops being sent here. I thank God they are here.” No sooner were cases of “insubordination” reported to Federal authorities, a Georgia clergyman