Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [315]
There is every reason to believe that these two negroes were induced to leave by the other negroes, to test this question and see if any punishment could be inflicted upon them for a violation of their contract. If they go unpunished, it will have a very bad effect upon, not only my plantation, but upon the surrounding country; and if they are allowed to violate a contract made in good faith whenever they see fit to do so, the agricultural interest throughout the country must necessarily suffer to a very great extent.
His friendship with the Bureau’s regional commissioner no doubt helped to ensure prompt compliance with his request.74
The sanctity of contracts proved of little avail to the freedmen on the day they settled their accounts with the employer. With the approach of Christmas each year and the division of the crop and the final wage payment, the dire predictions of “a heap o’ trouble” proved all too prophetic. “They’ll be awfully defrauded,” a Virginia poor white thought, perhaps reflecting his own experiences with the planter class. “I know houses yer whar they keep a nigger till his month’s most out, and then they make a muss with him, and kick him out without any wages. Poor men like me has got to pay for it. Of course, if they don’t pay, the niggers can’t keep themselves, and it’ll come on us. They’ll be cheated all kinds o’ ways. Don’t I know it?”75
6
IF HIS NEWLY FREED SLAVES remained with him until the end of the season, a Tennessee planter promised, they would be awarded a share of the crop. “Most of them left,” Lorenzo Ivy recalled; “they said they knew him too well.” But this sixteen-year-old black youth and his father stayed on and worked “just as if Lee hadn’t surrendered.” By Christmas 1865, they had raised a large crop of corn, wheat, and tobacco, they had shucked the corn and stored it in the barn, and they had stripped all the tobacco. “I never worked harder in my life, for I thought the more we made, the more we would get.” But when the two freedmen stood before their former master to obtain the promised shares, he refused to pay them anything, declared he could no longer support them, and ordered them off his land. Thinking few grievances could be more legitimate or clear-cut, they appealed to the local officer of the Freedmen’s Bureau. He refused to help them. “The officer,” Lorenzo Ivy recalled, “was like Isaac said to Esau: ‘The voice is like Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau.’ So that was the way with the officer—he had on Uncle Sam’s clothes, but he had Uncle Jeff’s heart.”76
Large numbers of freedmen shared the experience of Lorenzo Ivy and his father. With the completion of the crops, some planters defaulted on promised payments or pleaded inability to pay, and still more reduced the payments drastically through arbitrary and inflated deductions. The initial victims were ex-slaves like the Ivys who had agreed to stay on after emancipation in return for a share of the crop. But now they were left with nothing, and even driven from the plantation. When the Freedmen’s Bureau launched its operations, local agents found their offices besieged by blacks testifying to the extent and persistence of this grievance. “The old story has been repeated thousands of times,” one officer reported, “no definite bargain made—no wages promised; but ‘massa said, stay till the crop is made and he would do what was right.’ ” That proved to be the downfall of many a freedman. Popular in verbal understandings though seldom written into contracts, the employer’s