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only after proving he had been defrauded. That obstacle proved insurmountable, with the plantation ledger winning out easily over the freedman’s recollections, as it would have in any court of law. Even the most sympathetic Bureau officials confessed their helplessness in such cases. Thomas H. Norton, who supervised freedmen’s affairs in Meridian, Mississippi, suspected that many blacks had been “meanly defrauded” of their earnings and he could readily understand their discouragement. But he could offer them little but his sympathy.

Whenever cases of this kind are presented to the Sub Commissioner for investigation he will find himself involved in such a “Milky Way” of figures, admissions and denials, criminations and recriminations, that it will be almost impossible, considering the length of time that has elapsed, and the inability of the freedmen to bring the necessary witnesses to testify to their statements, to arrive at any just conclusion or settlement of the case.83

A Bureau officer in South Carolina, John William De Forest, recalled how exasperated he became after arbitrating “a hundred or two” such cases, spending in some instances “an entire forenoon” trying to convince a laborer that his employer had not cheated him. “I read to him, out of the planter’s admirably kept books, every item of debit and credit: so much meal, bacon, and tobacco furnished, with the dates of each delivery of the same; so many bushels of corn and peas and bunches of ‘fodder’ harvested. He admitted every item, admitted the prices affixed; and then, puzzled, incredulous, stubborn, denied the totals.” Meanwhile, the laborer’s wife stood next to him, “trembling with indignant suspicion,” until she could contain herself no longer. “Don’ you give down to it, Peter,” she exhorted her husband. “It ain’t no how ris’ible that we should ’a’ worked all the year and git nothin’ to go upon.” But it was no use. The Bureau agent finally advised the couple to throw themselves upon “the generosity” of their employer.84

If the experience of payday exhausted planters and exasperated Bureau officials, it left the freedmen disillusioned, frustrated, and outraged—and in many cases penniless if not in debt. But no matter how hard they tried or to whom they appealed, there was simply no way to make the figures come out differently. “The darkey don’t understand it,” a Mississippi planter remarked, “he has kept no accounts; but he knows he has worked hard and got nothing. He won’t hire to that man again.” The thousands of freedmen who left at the expiration of the contract often cited as the principal reason their dissatisfaction over the final settlement. “I’m willin’ to wu’k, sah, and I want to wu’k, ‘cos I’m mighty ill off,” a Virginia freedman declared, but after his employer had reneged on a promised half of the crop he resolved not to work another year “till I knows I’m gwine to get paid at the end of it.” Wherever they chose to contract for the next year, including the places on which they had worked, freedmen evinced a determination to do so only after some hard bargaining. “We all gits fooled on dat first go-out!” Katie Rowe recalled, but the following year “we all got something left over.” Nor would the freedmen necessarily confine themselves in future confrontations to a refinement of their verbal skills. On Edisto Island, for example, the blacks who worked the Rabbit Point plantation found a different way to make certain that the division of the crops reflected the labor they had expended.

The moment the Cotton house was opened the people rushed in and a number of them took forcible possession of their cotton and carried it off without division and all refused to allow any division to take place, threatened to knock my brains out and forcibly resisted me. Not having any force at my command I was obliged to close the house and await the arrival of a guard.85

With the end of each agricultural season, the tenuous peace that had existed on the plantations suddenly seemed more precarious. The wage settlement, the division of the crops, the need