• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1330 0

they organized along military lines to hold their lands and treated any claimants as trespassers. “They use threatening language, when the former residents of the Islands are spoken of in any manner,” a Bureau officer reported, “and say openly, that none of them, will be permitted to live upon the Islands. They are not willing to be reasoned with on this subject.” On Johns Island, the blacks in early 1866 persisted in refusing to contract, insisted they would work only for themselves, and refused to surrender ownership of the land—in theory or in fact. When “a party of Northern Gentlemen” proposed to look over real estate prospects on the island, they were made “prisoners” the moment they landed, disarmed, and advised never to return. With similar vigilance, the blacks on James Island repelled the first landing party of planters who had come to recover their lands. The battle over restoration of the lands soon resembled a series of mopping-up operations, with the Freedmen’s Bureau and Federal troops always ready to guarantee the safety and property of the returning owners, and the blacks able to hold out only for so long against the dictates of the law and the force of an army.43

If blacks could not acquire land by government action, neither would they find it easy to obtain it by any other means, even if they adopted the self-help precepts and accumulated the necessary funds. Appreciating the threat black proprietorship posed to a dependent, stable, and contented work force, and the feelings of “impudence and independence” it might generate, many planters refused to sell or to rent any land to blacks. Such a policy was in accordance with “the general good,” a South Carolina rice planter insisted, for once lands were leased to freedmen, “it will be hard ever to recover the privileges that have been yielded.” When whites tried to restrict landownership in the Black Codes or in combinations among themselves, the Federal government revoked their actions. But community pressures often achieved the same results. “I understand Dr. Harris and Mr. Varnedoe will rent their lands to the Negroes!” a much-scandalized Mary Jones wrote her daughter. “The conduct of some of the citizens has been very injurious to the best interest of the community.” If whites persisted in such behavior, they faced social ostracism or violence to their property. Any white man found selling land in his parish, a Louisiana plantation manager observed, would “soon be dangling from some trees.” Of course, restrictions on the sale and rental of land to blacks could not always be applied with the rigidity some whites desired, particularly when landowners found that leasing might be the only way to keep their land in productive use.44

Within a year of the war’s end, the planter class had virtually completed the recovery of its property. But repossession would be of limited value without a productive and regulated black laboring force to work the lands. Few stated the problem more candidly than Allen S. Izard, a Georgia planter. Now that the “game of confiscation” had been settled, his fellow planters needed most urgently to consolidate their triumph.

Our place is to work; take hold & persevere; get labour of some kind; get possession of the places; stick to it; oust the negroes; and their ideas of proprietorship; secure armed protection close at hand on our exposed River, present a united and determined front; and make as much rice as we can.… Our plantations will have to be assimilated to the industrial establishment of other parts of the world, where the owner is protected by labour tallies, time tables, checks of all kinds, & constant watchfulness. Every operator will steal time and anything else.45

The terms he chose to describe the challenge facing planters in the postwar South suggested the need to adopt modern industrial techniques to ensure their continued mastery over a class of workers who had only recently broken the chains of bondage. That the ideal binding force should have been introduced by Northerners would seem, therefore, to have been