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By Root 1194 0

believe it. As if to prepare the assemblage for the ordeal ahead, he thought it might be appropriate for them to begin the meeting with a song. Suddenly an old woman on the edge of the crowd began to sing, “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,” and the entire throng of more than two thousand soon joined in a resounding chorus. Whether it was the song, the look of dismay on their faces, or the shouts of “No! No!” that greeted his announcement, Howard found himself so flustered that he could barely finish his speech. But he had nevertheless articulated the government’s position. They should lay aside any bitter feelings they harbored for their former masters and contract to work for them. By working for wages or shares, he assured them, they would be achieving the same ends as possession of the soil would have given them. If the freedmen found Howard’s advice incomprehensible, that was only because they understood him all too clearly.40

The hope Bureau officials held out for the freedmen was largely a cruel delusion. The same men who had been disabusing the minds of the exslaves of their land expectations now urged them to bind themselves to the white man’s land. That was another way of saying they should give up the struggle altogether. Not all of them were willing to do so, at least not at the outset. What the freedmen on Edisto Island found most offensive in Howard’s speech, apart from having to give up their claims to the land, was the suggestion that they should now work for their former masters. In the petition they addressed to the President, the Edisto blacks argued that no man who had only recently faced his master on the field of battle should now be expected to submit to him for the necessities of life. He was more than willing to forgive his old master, another freedman remarked, but to have to submit to his rule again demanded too much. “He had lived all his life with a basket over his head, and now that it had been taken off and air and sunlight had come to him, he could not consent to have the basket over him again.” Rather than face that eventuality, the blacks on several islands near Edisto rowed themselves to Savannah, leaving behind their household goods and the crops they had made.41 But some of the freedmen had worked too long and too hard on these lands to give them up so easily, and they resolved to remain and fight.

To inform the blacks that their land aspirations were all a delusion was difficult enough. But to remove them from the lands they had come to regard as their own often required more than verbal skills. In Norfolk County, Virginia, the freedmen who had settled on Taylor’s farm refused to leave, ignoring the court orders and ousting the sheriffs and Federal officers who tried to enforce them. After assembling together, the blacks refused offers of compromise, questioned the President’s right to pardon the original owner, and resolved to defend their property. At this meeting, Richard Parker (“better known as ‘Uncle Dick,’ ” said the Norfolk newspaper) explained to his fellow freedmen that the white man had secured this land only by forcibly expelling the Indians and he suggested that they now exercise the same prerogative.

We don’t care for the President nor the Freedmen’s Bureau. We have suffered long enough; let the white man suffer now. The time was when the white man could say, “Come here, John, and black my boots,” and the poor black man had to go; but, my friends, the times have changed, and I hope I will live to see the day when I can say to the white man, “Come here, John, and black my boots,” and he must come. I will never be satisfied until the white man is forced to serve the black man, as the black was formerly compelled to serve the white. Now, my friends, we must drive them away.

After a pitched battle with county agents, the black settlers were finally driven off the land.42

Along the South Carolina coast, blacks barricaded themselves on the plantations, destroyed the bridges leading to them, and shot at owners seeking to repossess them. On several of the Sea Islands,