Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [293]
That constant advice to work or starve, which their white “friends” so freely imparted, never seemed to anticipate the plight of people who did little more than work and yet stood on the brink of starvation. “I keeps on washin for em,” remarked a laundress in Richmond, who spent most of her day stooped over a washtub, “for if I leave em they’ll never pay me what they owe me.”9
On the plantations and farms, where the bulk of black laborers still resided, the issue was not whether the freedmen would work but rather for whom, at what rates, and under what conditions, and those were different questions altogether, requiring answers from a class of Southerners who had little experience in dealing with such matters. “Can a planter be expected to treat the laborers under his control in any other way to-day than he has treated them for the last twenty years?” the New Orleans Tribune asked. “He and they are the same men, in the same place, bearing to each other, in all respects, the same apparent relations. No visible change has passed off between them. The Proclamation of Emancipation did not invest the slave with a physical sign of freedom. It was a metaphysical endowment.”10 But if the relationship between “master” and laborer remained essentially unaltered by emancipation, so did the mutual dependency upon which it had always rested, and that raised the most crucial question of all. Could the former slave transform the white man’s dependence on him into a formidable weapon with which to expand his personal autonomy, improve his day-to-day life and his prospects for the future, and thereby redefine if not sever altogether the old relationship? Whatever the degree of success attained toward these ends, the effort itself marked a significant break with the past.
2
WHEN WILLIAM ELLIOTT tried to persuade Jacob to work for him, he ran into unexpected difficulties. As his slave, Jacob had served him faithfully over many years, and Elliott, a South Carolina planter, wished not only to retain a valuable laborer but to have him use his influence to convince the other blacks to return to work. Before he would agree to terms, however, Jacob demanded certain concessions—like the right to keep the provisions he made for himself—that would have lessened his dependency on the old master. He asked for them, moreover, in consideration of his previous record of service to the family. To Elliott, that might have suggested a demand for retroactive compensation, and he viewed the question quite differently than his former slave. “I told him I thought the obligation lay the other way. He is eaten up with self-esteem & selfishness.”11
If the incident be judged by the content of the postwar debate, William Elliott clearly had the advantage. Although dispossessed slaveholders thought themselves entitled to compensation for their losses (President Lincoln had once proposed it as a way to encourage voluntary emancipation), the question of remunerating the slaves for past labor never reached the level of serious consideration. But if the freedmen were not to be paid for their work as slaves, and few of them ever pressed the matter, they could be quite adamant about being paid for any future labor. As slaves, each of them had borne a price tag; as free men and women, they now felt entitled to wages or crop shares commensurate with the labor they performed. To settle for anything less was to compromise their freedom.
During the Civil War, often at the first sighting of Yankee troops, slaves refused to work without some form of compensation. What a Louisiana overseer described in 1863 as “a state of mutiny” on a neighboring