Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [299]
Seems lak we’uns do all the wuck and gits a part. Der ain’t goin’ ter be no more Master and Mistress, Miss Emma. All is equal. I done hear it from de cotehouse steps.… All de land belongs to de Yankees now, and dey gwine to divide it out ’mong de colored people. Besides, de kitchen ob de big house is my share. I help built hit.25
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EVEN AS THEY TOILED in the same fields, performed the familiar tasks, and returned at dusk to the same cabins, scores of freedmen refused to resign themselves to the permanent status of a landless agricultural working-class. Like most Americans, they aspired to something better and yearned for economic independence and self-employment. Without that independence, their freedom seemed incomplete, even precarious. “Every colored man will be a slave, & feel himself a slave,” a black soldier insisted, “until he can raise him own bale of cotton & put him own mark upon it & say dis is mine!” Although often expressed vaguely, as if to talk about it openly might be unwise, the expectation many ex-slaves shared in the aftermath of the war was that “something extraordinary” would soon intervene to reshape the course of their lives. In the Jubilee they envisioned, the government provided them with forty-acre lots and thereby emancipated them from dependency on their former masters. “This was no slight error, no trifling idea,” a Freedmen’s Bureau officer reported from Mississippi in 1865, “but a fixed and earnest conviction as strong as any belief a man can ever have.”26 The feeling was sufficiently pervasive, in fact, to prompt thousands of freedmen in late 1865 to hold back on any commitment of their labor until the question of land had been firmly resolved.
The only real question among some blacks was not whether the lands belonging to the former slaveholders would be divided and distributed, but when and how. Freedmen in South Carolina heard that the large plantations along the coast were to be distributed. Equally persistent reports suggested that the lands on which the ex-slaves were working would be divided among them. Few blacks in Mississippi, a Bureau officer reported in November 1865, expressed any interest in hiring themselves out for the next year. “Nearly all of them have heard, that at Christmas, Government is going to take the planters’ lands and other property from them, and give it to the colored people, and that, in this way they are going to begin to farm on their own account.” In a Virginia community, the freedmen had reportedly deposited their savings with “responsible” persons so as to be in the most advantageous position to purchase lots of “de confiscated land, as soon as de Gov’ment ready to sell it.” And in Georgia a black laborer was so certain that he “coolly” offered to sell to his former master the share of the plantation he expected to receive “after the division.”27
Although confident of retaining their lands, planters expressed growing concern over the extent to which the freedmen’s aspirations interfered with the normalization of agricultural operations. It proved difficult to raise crops when laborers went about “stuffed with the idea of proprietorship” and the anticipation of soon becoming their own employers. “You cannot beat into their thick skulls that the land & every thing else does not belong to them,” a South Carolina planter wrote his daughter. Since many whites refused to believe their blacks capable of formulating perceptions of freedom, they blamed the land mania on “fanatical abolitionists,” incendiary preachers, and the Yankee invaders. But those who had overheard the “curious” wartime discussions in which the blacks apportioned the lands among themselves knew better, as did the victims of black expropriation. Where planters had