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By Root 1486 0

benefits to be bestowed on them by the Government.” Nor would they place any great faith in the employer’s assurance that the contract protected their best interests. The freedmen lacked confidence “in the white man’s integrity,” a Bureau commissioner in Mississippi concluded, and the suspicion, other agents reported, often extended to “papers of any description, in which their former masters are in any way concerned.” On Edisto Island, South Carolina, several freedmen declared at a meeting with Federal officials that they bore no personal enmity toward their old masters but they had no desire to contract with men who had once owned and abused them, or even with those who might have treated them reasonably well but in whom they had no confidence.62

With numbers of ex-slaves refusing to sign contracts, many of them hoping to obtain better terms, the planter class counted heavily on the ultimate weapons of necessity and compulsion. To hasten that moment of decision, Federal authorities complied all too readily with the demands of planters that they apprehend black vagrants and cease issuing food rations to freedmen, thereby forcing them to depend once again upon their old masters for daily subsistence. Ironically, that policy accorded with the growing conviction of the Freedmen’s Bureau and northern freedmen’s aid societies that to distribute food and clothing among the ex-slaves made them less independent, reduced their incentives to work, and demoralized them. “The most dangerous process through which the negro goes when he becomes a freedman is that of receiving the gratuities of benevolence in the shape of food and clothing,” a missionary wrote late in 1865. “If you wish to make them impudent, fault-finding and lazy, give them clothing and food freely.” Once the freedmen had to depend upon his bounty, the planter reasoned, he had only to withhold such support to induce his laborers to agree to terms. That proved to be a sound conclusion, though the results were not always gratifying. When Stephen Doan, a South Carolina proprietor, decided to withhold food rations to force his men to abide by a contract, they killed him.63

To counter the freedman’s principal bargaining strength—the threat to take his labor to the highest bidder—planters often effected combinations or understandings among themselves not to contract with any former slave who failed to produce a “consent paper” or a proper discharge from his previous owner. The white citizens of Nelson County, Virginia, acting “to prevent improper interference with each other’s arrangements,” resolved that “in no case” would they hire a laborer who failed to supply “a certificate of character, and of permission to rehire himself.” More often, as in the Clarendon district of South Carolina, local planters simply reached a verbal understanding “not to hire their neighbour’s negroes.”64 Such an agreement, in one bold stroke, would effectively reduce the freedman’s chances of either improving or changing his position, while it obviously enhanced a planter’s ability to exact for himself the most favorable terms. “The nigger is going to be made a serf, sure as you live,” vowed the owner of a cotton factory and two plantations in Alabama.

It won’t need any law for that. Planters will have an understanding among themselves: “You won’t hire my niggers, and I won’t hire yours”; then what’s left for them? They’re attached to the soil, and we’re as much their masters as ever. I’ll stake my life, this is the way it will work.65

Appreciating the need to coordinate their efforts, planters in numerous regions also met to fix maximum wages, to draw up model contracts, to agree on penalties for violations of contracts, and to pledge themselves not to lease or rent any land to a freedman. Although the Freedmen’s Bureau frowned upon such combinations and in some instances banned them, local agents might choose to look the other way; after all, the ends they wished to achieve were almost identical. In Clarke County, Alabama, a Labor Regulating Association formed by local planters appeared