Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [310]
Although designed to protect the interests of planters and freedmen alike, the contract in practice gave employers what they had wanted all along—the crucial element of control by which they could bind the ex-slaves for at least a year and compel them to work and maintain proper behavior. Nor did the presence of a Freedmen’s Bureau officer necessarily make the contracts any less oppressive; after all, one agent conceded, the objective of the contract was to prevent black laborers from deserting their employers “at a critical time” in the making of the crop. Whatever the initial intent, the contract system embodied that universally accepted dictum that only compulsion and discipline could induce free blacks to work. Unlike the northern worker who entered into a verbal contract with an employer, the black laborer in the postwar South was bound by a legal instrument which not only stipulated objective terms of service (compensation, hours, and duties) but imposed conditions of demeanor and attitude on the laborer and not on the employer. That feature in itself made the question of compliance or noncompliance necessarily arbitrary and revealed the contract as something less than a bilateral agreement between equals. In so many ways, in fact, the new arrangements simply institutionalized the old discipline under the guise of easing the ex-slave’s transition to freedom. After comparing the regulations under slavery with those which now controlled free labor, the New Orleans Tribune found but few differences: “All the important prohibitions imposed upon the slave, are also enforced against the freedman.… It is true that the law calls him a freeman; but any white man, subjected to such restrictive and humiliating prohibitions, will certainly call himself a slave.”59
By hedging the freedman’s newly acquired rights, by narrowing his room for maneuverability, by robbing him of his principal bargaining strengths, by seeking to control both his social behavior and his labor, the contract between a former master and his former slaves reminded one observer of a “patent rat-trap.” No one, he noted, could have devised a surer instrument to compel black labor. “Rats couldn’t possibly get out of it. The only difficulty was that they declined to go in.”60
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ONCE THE CONTRACT had been prepared, the employer assembled the laborers on his place (most of them his former slaves), explained the terms, and urged them to sign. The response was likely to be mixed, with some freedmen walking back to their quarters only to pack their belongings and take to the road, unwilling to commit their labor and lives to an agreement they could not even read. The very formality, obscure legalisms, and binding nature of the contract provoked skepticism and dismay, even in exslaves who fully intended to remain with their former master. In Burke County, Georgia, Willis Bennefield would have nothing to do with a contract. “What you want me to sign for? I is free,” he told the man who had owned him as a slave. Nor did the master’s explanation that the contract held both of them to their word satisfy him. “If I is already free, I don’t need to sign no paper,” he insisted. “If I was workin’ for you and doin’ for you befo’ I got free, I kin do it still, if you wants me to stay wid you.” If he refused to sign a contract, his mother warned him, he might forfeit his pay. “Den I kin go somewheh else,” the ex-slave replied.61
Rather than objecting to a specific clause, large numbers of freedmen feared that the contract, as a binding legal agreement, compromised their newly won liberties, and perhaps even forfeited their rights to the expected distribution of land among them. In his section of Virginia, a Union officer reported, the blacks refrained from contracting for any length of time “in the expectation of some indefinable but great