Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [296]
Community pressures—both white and black—often inhibited any early agreement on paid labor. While the status of slavery and the possibility of compensation remained unclear, many planters held back, preferring to dismiss recalcitrant slaves rather than bargain with them. When blacks in Fredericksburg, Virginia, defected in large numbers and demanded wages, white residents responded by agreeing among themselves not to hire their own or other people’s slaves. After one resident broke that pact and agreed to hire his servants, “the gentlemen of the town” warned him that he was establishing a dangerous precedent and violating the laws of Virginia, and that his action would mark him as a traitor to the state. “So the old man refused to hire them,” a neighbor wrote, “and they all left him.” Such understandings among whites were a forerunner of postwar agreements not to tamper with each other’s former slaves and to set maximum wage and share rates. But the pressures could work both ways. That is, blacks who continued to work when others refused to do so were apt to encounter the hostility of their own people. Thus did a South Carolina proprietress observe “the faithful few” among her slaves to be “uneasy,” fearing repercussions from those who had left. “Rius gave his wife (Ellen) a fearful beating because she came to wait on Aunt Nenna. Those who are faithful suffer so much from the rebellious ones, and we can do nothing to protect them.”17
Confronted with the departure of their laborers, growing numbers of planters would have to face up ultimately to the necessity of reaching some kind of agreement with them. Late in the war, Henry W. Ravenel, the introspective South Carolina slaveholder, acknowledged the need to effect “a radical change” in the labor system. The reason for his decision was clear enough: “Since Thursday the negroes have not been at work.… The negroes are on a ‘strike’ for terms & until an agreement can be made, matters will be no better.” His blacks objected to “gang work,” they wanted no overseer or driver, and they demanded a plot of land “to work for their own use.” Although anxious to retain their labor, Ravenel, for all his brave talk about “a radical change,” feared any concessions which would be “incompatible with discipline & good management.” While the impasse continued, he detected a “sullenness” in his laborers “which I dislike to see,” and he heard that many blacks in the neighborhood, including presumably some of his own, were now armed. The house servants belonging to a Georgia woman determined to test their freedom by suing her for wages. “A most unwarrantable procedure,” her son-in-law wrote afterwards, but he agreed that henceforth “we must pay for services rendered.”18
With the acknowledgment of emancipation, most planters gradually resigned themselves to some form of compensated labor. When the master assembled his newly freed slaves to inform them of his offer, he might also use the occasion to remind them of their new responsibilities and to introduce them to some of the harsher realities of free labor. Thus did a planter in Lowndes County, Alabama, explain to his blacks the new situation in which they now found themselves:
Formerly, you were my slaves; you worked for me, and I provided for you. You had no thought of the morrow, for I thought of that for you. If you were sick, I had