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By Root 1127 0

to be on good terms with the Bureau agent and hoped to obtain his approval for apprenticing the orphan children of ex-slaves. But even where the Bureau broke up such combinations, planters kept themselves informed of what their neighbors were paying and paid no more. Still other pressures were brought to bear on recalcitrant blacks. In a South Carolina community, physicians agreed not to treat freedmen unless the planters authorized their visits. “They adopt this course,” a local resident explained, “to bring to the notice of the negroes, their dependent condition & to check the feeling of irresponsibility now prevalent.” And if other measures proved unavailing, some employers, particularly in areas remote from a Freedmen’s Bureau office, had no hesitation in employing violent methods to force their laborers to agree to terms. In Surrey County, Virginia, a black farmer testified, “they are taking the colored people and tying them up by the thumbs if they do not agree to work for six dollars a month; they tie them up until they agree to work for that price, and then they make them put their mark to a contract.… A man cannot endure it long.” In some regions, patrols of white men meted out summary justice to blacks who were not under contract to an employer or who were found to be in violation of a contract.66

Although the vast majority of freedmen eventually agreed to terms, that hardly ended the difficulties. During the first postwar agricultural season, with both sides testing the effects of emancipation, the reports mounted of freedmen unable to appreciate the binding character of a contract and leaving the plantations “on the most trifling pretext” before their terms of service had expired. (One planter still referred to such workers as “runaways.”) “They are constantly striking for higher wages,” a Georgian observed of the black laborers in his state.

The great difficulty is that they will not stick to a contract; they are fickle; they are constantly expecting to do better; they will make a contract with me to-day for twelve or fifteen dollars a month, and in a few days somebody will come along and offer a dollar or two more, and they will quit me—never saying anything to me, but leave in the night and be gone.

The most persistent complaints revolved around those laborers who remained on the plantations, worked “only when they please, and as little as they please,” feigned sickness to avoid labor, and had a habit of carrying pistols with them to the fields (allegedly to shoot stray rabbits or squirrels). Unaccustomed to black labor, a northern lessee and former abolitionist who operated a plantation in Georgia found himself annoyed by the sight of laborers dropping their shovels and hoes in the fields to sing “a religious song.” Still other employers fretted over the propensity of their workers to do as little as possible in the expectation of “a better time coming”—the anticipated division of the land among the freedmen.67 “Every contract made in 1865 has been broken by the freedmen,” a Freedmen’s Bureau agent reported from the Georgetown district of South Carolina, and one local proprietor, Jane Pringle, derived little satisfaction from the willingness of Federal authorities to arrest and jail black violators: “Of what earthly benefit is it to us that men who should be laboring are thrown into prison, they can’t till the land there and I assure you that a prison life is rather a pleasure to a negro than a punishment, since they are fed without working.” As an alternative to the “tedious law process,” she proposed the establishment of military posts “at small distances for instant relief” and “double labor on the land” as proper punishment.68

No matter how explicitly a contract defined the freedmen’s rights, duties, and compensation, many laborers persisted in following their own notions about how and when they wished to work. Although most freedmen contracted to work a six-day week, many of them refused to labor for the employer on Saturdays, preferring to confine their efforts to their own garden plots and