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By Root 1065 0

by toleration” and a “mitigated bondage” analogous to Russian serfdom. That was how the New Orleans Tribune, the articulate organ of the free colored community, chose to characterize the new rules. “Strange freedom indeed! Our freedmen, on the plantations, at the present time, could more properly be called, mock freedmen.” If a laborer were truly free, the editor observed, he should be able to choose his place of residence and his trade or occupation, negotiate his own terms with an employer (including wages, conditions, and term of service), and bring court action against anyone who tried to defraud him; moreover, he should be paid the full value of his labor, not a wage stipulated by planters’ meetings or Federal rules. Under the current regulations, the editor contended, blacks would have to work for wages which barely sustained them. But that deplorable fact seemed even less important than the ways in which the new system perpetuated and enforced the dependency of the freedmen on their former masters:

He does not wear his own clothes; but, as the slave, he wears his master’s clothes. He does not eat his own bread, the bread he won by the sweat of his brow; he eats his master’s bread. He is provided for like the mules and cattle on the plantations. And it is said that this is the way some people intend to follow to make men!

Finally, black critics thought it highly ironic but not altogether surprising that such a labor system should have been instituted and defended by white men who never ceased to display their abolitionist credentials as evidence of their good faith. “I despise a man who pretends to be an abolitionist, and who is only a deepskin abolitionist,” a black clergyman told a meeting in New Orleans called to protest the labor regulations. “We have good friends, who will work with us till this country be a free country; but we have unfaithful friends also. A wolf came, one day, among sheep, in sheep’s clothing; but he had a strange foot, and the sheep wondered at that. We, too, are ready to watch this foot.”97

In defending the labor system of Louisiana, a Union officer not only alluded to his “life-time Anti-Slavery” but curtly dismissed the black critics in New Orleans as “a class of colored people who, with all their admirable qualities, have not yet forgotten that they were, themselves, slaveholders.” But if the urban black elitists could be dismissed, Federal authorities would still have to contend with the black laborers themselves, most of whom had never read a newspaper and needed no one to remind them of the oppressive nature of the system under which they were now told to work. The kind of resistance they undertook varied from mass defections to open revolt; most of them, however, took out their grievances in the erratic work habits about which their employers continued to complain. Rather than submit to the new regulations, the blacks on a plantation south of New Orleans threw down their tools, vowed they would never work under such terms, and “left in a body.” In Plaquemines Parish, field hands lodged the familiar complaint that they had not yet received their share of the previous season’s crops; when they then refused to work, a civilian police officer attempted to arrest the ringleaders, only to find himself “beset upon by at least twenty—with hoes, shovels and hatchets” and forced to leave. Whether directed at specific labor regulations or reflecting general conditions, such outbreaks in Louisiana and elsewhere in the South would require the continued intervention of Federal authorities.98

Neither the charges of black critics nor the resistance of black laborers effected any significant changes in a labor system calculated to subordinate black labor to white planters and lessees. The advocates of that system persisted in the assumption that only coercion and rigid controls could assure the triumph and vindication of free labor in the South. When in mid-1863, at General Banks’s request, two abolitionists evaluated the labor system of Louisiana, they reported with praise that on those plantations