Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [297]
But now all that is changed. Being free men, you assume the responsibilities of free men. You sell me your labor, I pay you money, and with that money you provide for yourselves. You must look out for your own clothes and food, and the wants of your children. If I advance these things for you, I shall charge them to you, for I cannot give them like I once did, now I pay you wages. Once if you were ugly or lazy, I had you whipped, and that was the end of it. Now if you are ugly and lazy, your wages will be paid to others, and you will be turned off, to go about the country with bundles on your backs, like the miserable low-down niggers you see that nobody will hire. But if you are well-behaved and industrious, you will be prosperous and respected and happy.
If only every planter adopted this approach, he assured a northern visitor, there would be a harmonious transition to free labor. “They all understood this talk,” he added, “and liked it, and went to work like men on the strength of it.… There’s everything in knowing how to manage them.”19
The transition to free labor would seldom be as smooth as this Alabama planter envisioned. Not only was the situation without any clear precedent but the sharp divisions of race and class, exacerbated by the heritage of slavery and wartime memories, were bound to complicate the new relationship of white employer and black laborer. “I do not like the negro as well free as I did as a slave,” a Virginian conceded, “for the reason that there is now between us an antagonism of interest to some extent, while, before, his interest and mine were identical. Then, I was always thinking of how I could fix him comfortably. Now, I find myself driving a hard bargain with him for wages; and I find that sort of feeling suggested directly by motives of interest coming in between the employer and the employed.” When the former master came around to compensated labor, he would have to calculate precisely how much his ex-slaves were worth to him as free workers. That created some obvious conflicts, with employers and laborers entertaining different notions of value and both determined to stand by their estimates. “They have what seem to me to be extravagant ideas as to what they ought to receive,” a North Carolinian observed, and scores of planters would register the same complaint. But surely, some freedmen suggested, they should not be worth any less now than the price for which their masters had occasionally hired them out as slaves. If the planter pleaded financial difficulties, as so many did, the freedmen had only to look out into the fields and calculate the value of the expected crops. “Massa fust said he find all de famly food and house for our work,” a Virginia black remarked; “den I think that, as him grow 4,000 bushels corn, near 10,000 lbs. clover, and odder tings ’sides, he can ’ford to pay me better dan dat, so I no go with him. Me tell him me worth more, and p’raps he give me some of crop.”20
Accustomed to holding the upper hand in all dealings with blacks, the former slaveholder preferred to make his own decision about compensation rather than suffer the audaciousness of freedmen who confronted him with demands or ultimatums. In his region, a Florida farmer and physician revealed, the planters usually refused to pay “any who demand it” but several had promised to supply their freedmen with provisions at the end of the year if they worked faithfully. Even relationships of long standing, which had survived the war and the first years of emancipation, could fall apart when the ex-slave raised the question of additional pay. Within that tightly knit Jones clan of Georgia, for example, Kate had remained “faithful” to Mary Jones’s daughter while many others defected. Not until late in 1867 did she assert herself on the wage question: “I wish to tell you if you will give me twelve dollars per month [an increase