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By Root 1025 0

therefore can give away none. Freedmen can obtain farms with the money which they have earned by their labor. Every one, therefore, shall work diligently, and carefully save his wages, till he may be able to buy land and possess his own home.” The blacks he encountered held so tenaciously to their illusions, a Bureau officer in Alabama observed, that “unless they see me and hear me refute the story, they persist in the belief.” Still other officers reported that the freedmen refused to believe them, too, or thought the question of land might be negotiable. After being told of the government’s policy, a Virginia freedman offered to lower his expectations to a single acre of land—“ef you make it de acre dat Marsa’s house sets on.”33

As an alternative to confiscation, Freedmen’s Bureau officers and northern white missionaries and teachers advanced the classic midnineteenth-century self-help ideology and implored the newly freed slaves to heed its lessons. Rather than entertain notions of government bounties, they should cultivate habits of frugality, temperance, honesty, and hard work; if they did so, they might not only accumulate the savings to purchase land but would derive greater personal satisfaction from having earned it in this manner. Almost identical advice permeated the editorials of black newspapers, the speeches of black leaders, and the resolutions adopted by black meetings. “Let us go to work faithfully for whoever pays fairly, until we ourselves shall become employers and planters,” the Black Republican, a New Orleans newspaper, editorialized in its first issue. With an even finer grasp of American values, a black Charlestonian thought economic success capable of overriding the remaining vestiges of racial slavery. “This is the panacea which will heal all the maladies of a Negrophobia type. Let colored men simply do as anybody else in business does, be self-reliant, industrious, producers of the staples for market and merchandise, and he will have no more trouble on account of his complexion, than the white men have about the color of their hair or beards.”34

To provide proper models for their people, black newspapers featured examples of self-made freedmen who had managed to accumulate land and were forming the nucleus of a propertied and entrepreneurial class in the South. Actually, a number of blacks had done precisely that, some of them fortunate enough to have purchased tax lands and still others who had taken advantage of the Homestead Act or who had made enough money to purchase a plot in their old neighborhoods.35 But the number of propertied blacks remained small, and some of these found they had been defrauded by whites who had an equal appreciation of the self-help philosophy and made the most of it.36 Even the blacks who obtained legitimate title to lands soon discovered the elusive quality of economic success. The land often turned out to be of an inferior quality, the freedman usually lacked the capital and credit to develop it properly, and he might consequently find himself enmeshed in the very web of indebtedness and dependency he had sought to escape. By the acquisition of land, he hardly avoided the same problems plaguing so many white farmers.37

No matter what the freedmen were told or what precepts they were admonished to follow, the belief in some form of land redistribution demonstrated a remarkable vitality. The wartime precedents and promises were apt to speak louder in some regions than the insistent postwar denials. Thousands of ex-slaves had been placed on forty-acre tracts under Sherman’s program, the earlier experiments at Davis Bend and on the Sea Islands persisted into 1865, and the stories of individual and collective success by the black settlers who worked these lands would seem to have assured the continuation and expansion of such projects. But even if few blacks elsewhere in the South knew of them, even if still fewer were aware of the congressional debate on Thaddeus Stevens’ ambitious land confiscation program or of the immense generosity of the Federal government in