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By Root 1157 0

That very morning, Howard said, he had attended church services in different parts of the city and had heard a black clergyman and a white clergyman preach the gospel of love. “Oh, if you will only practice what you preach,” the commissioner told the freedmen, “it will all be well.” But if they refused to work, a Bureau officer warned the blacks of Mississippi, they should expect neither sympathy, love, nor subsistence. “Your houses and lands belong to the white people, and you cannot expect that they will allow you to live on them in idleness.” Nor should the ex-slave expect the state or Federal government “to let any man lie about idle, without property, doing mischief. A vagrant law is right in principle. I cannot ask the civil officers to leave you idle, to beg or steal. If they find any of you without business and means of living, they will do right if they treat you as bad persons and take away your misused liberty.”102

Upon assuming office, the local Freedmen’s Bureau agent seized every opportunity to preach the gospel of work to the blacks in his district, often visiting the plantations themselves at the invitation of the grateful proprietors. In addressing the assembled laborers, he would familiarize them with their “duties and obligations,” seek to correct their “exaggerated ideas” of freedom, impress upon them the need to be “orderly, respectful, and industrious,” and assure them of protection and compensation “commensurate with their industry and demeanor.” At the same time, Bureau commissioners implored the freedmen, in words that would become all too familiar, to exhibit those traditional virtues of patience and forbearance, no matter what the provocation.

Your freedom will expose you to some new troubles. Bad men will take advantage of your ignorance and impose upon you. Some will try to defraud you of your wages, and a few may be wicked and cowardly enough to revenge their losses upon you by violence. But let none of these things provoke you to evil deeds. It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.

No doubt many Bureau agents took comfort in the impact of their message. “The Negro is often suspicious of his former master and will not believe him,” the subcommissioner in Jackson, Mississippi, observed, “but when assured by the Federal authorities that he must go to work and behave himself, he does so contentedly.” That made it all the more imperative, he thought, “for the good of the Negro and the peace of the Country,” to have Bureau representatives visit every part of their districts.103 The manager of a plantation in Bolivar County, Mississippi, heartily agreed. “If you would send an agent here to look into matters, and give some advice, I would be pleased to have him make his quarters with me for a week or two.” With unconcealed enthusiasm, a planter near Columbia, South Carolina, welcomed the advice a Bureau official gave to his laborers. “You’re their best friend, they all know,” he told him, “and I’m very glad you’ve come down this way.” The planter had good reason to be grateful. Until the official’s visit, the freedmen had thought they owned the plantation.104

Acting in what they deemed to be the best interests of the ex-slaves, the strongest and proven advocates of the freedmen’s cause admonished them to prove their fitness for freedom by laboring as faithfully as they had as slaves—and even more productively. “Plough and plant, dig and hoe, cut and gather in the harvest,” General Rufus Saxton urged them. “Let it be seen that where in slavery there was raised a blade of corn or a pound of cotton, in freedom there will be two.” Along with Saxton, few whites were more committed to the freedmen than Clinton B. Fisk, a Bureau official who subsequently helped to found one of the first black colleges. And he doubtless thought himself to be speaking in their best interests when he advised the freedmen to remain in their old places and work for their former masters.

You have been associated with them for many years; you are bound to the old home by many ties, and most of you I trust will be