Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [284]
Even as Federal authorities sought to keep the freed slaves on the plantations under a contract labor system, they were not able to guarantee to planters the quality of the labor performed. And to the planter class, caught up in depressed prices and the demands of a free market, that consideration remained critical. “Every abolitionist of New England believes that by thus merely changing slave labor to hireling labor … everything will work well,” Edmund Ruffin of Virginia said of the newly instituted labor system in Louisiana. The assumption would be proven false, he maintained, if only because black workers would “presume on their new rights of freedom” and fail to pass through a necessary “intermediate condition—which would be that of hunger & general privation & suffering, next to starving.” After all, he noted, “few white laborers, of the lowest classes, will labor continuously unless under the compulsion of hunger & suffering of themselves & their familys. Still fewer free negroes will labor without this compulsion.” Rather than view the disaster he predicted for plantation labor, Ruffin chose to put a bullet through his head several months after Appomattox. But few of his fellow planters chose that way out of their dilemma, preferring instead to employ every means at their disposal to regain control over both the movements and the labor of their former slaves.100
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WITH THE END OF THE WAR, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands (commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau) undertook to complete the transition to “free labor” initially begun under the direction of the Union Army. “The freedmen in a few instances are doing well,” Thomas Smith reported in November 1865, not long after he had assumed his post as a Bureau subcommissioner in charge of northern Mississippi. He found many of the freedmen to be “indolent,” some of them “disrespectful and totally unreliable,” and almost all of them “greatly in need of instruction.” But like most Bureau agents, he thought his primary concern was not to make literates of the freed slaves but to teach them to be reliable agricultural laborers. “They have very mistaken notions in regard to freedom.… They ask, ‘What is the value of freedom if one has nothing to go on?’ That is to say if property in some shape or other is not to be given us, we might as well be slaves.” He needed to disabuse their minds of such notions while at the same time restoring their faith in the former masters. “The colored people lack confidence in the white man’s integrity; they fear that, were they to hire to him, and work for him, that he would not pay them for their labor.… The more quickly, and the more perfectly, that confidence is restored, the better will it be for all classes.” He could conceive of no more important task he faced in his new position.101
If “instruction” could cure the propensity of the ex-slaves toward “indolence” and “unreliable” labor, the agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau eagerly assumed the role of teachers and disciplinarians. The lessons they imparted seldom varied and rarely departed from what Union officers and planters had been telling the slaves since the first days of liberation. “He would promise them nothing, but their freedom, and freedom means work,” General Oliver O. Howard, the Bureau commissioner, explained to the freedmen of Austin, Texas, and he offered them, too, the classic maxim of nineteenth-century employers: “The man who sits about the streets and smokes, will make nothing.”