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By Root 1324 0

I had a violent attack of hysterics afterwards, from fatigue and excitement.” Only once did she lose her composure and that was when a freedman, “after showing decided signs of insolence,” finally declared, “Well, you sign my paper first, and then I’ll sign yours.” She ordered him off the plantation, only to have him return minutes later “with a broad grin on his face” and prepared to sign the contract. After several days of negotiation, she claimed to have broken “the backbone of the opposition,” and all but two of the laborers went back to work under the new contract; one left from “imagined ill-health” and the other she dismissed for “insubordination.”102

The economic necessity which forced planters to bargain with their former slaves did not make the experience any less demeaning or exasperating. A Louisiana planter confided to his diary how he had “purposely” stayed away from the sugar house “to avoid talking to the negroes about a contract before I was ready to make one.” When he finally did so, he found the final terms to be “distasteful” but unavoidable. “Every body else in the neighborhood has agreed to pay the same and mine would listen to nothing else.” The task of having to deal with their former slaves at the bargaining table could be further aggravated by the obvious delight the laborers derived from the proceedings and the breakdown in the traditional forms of deference. When Daniel Hey ward, the South Carolina planter, met with his blacks, the word soon got around that they had been “kind enough but spoke to him sitting, and with their hats on.” Not only did they seem “confounded and incredulous as to his ownership of the land” but they shook their heads when he suggested they work in much the same way as they had before emancipation. “Oh no, neva work as they did,” they replied, “and no overseer and no drivers.” Upon hearing this story, an acquaintance of the Heyward family expressed no surprise: “Now all this strikes me as being exactly what was to be expected. That feeling of security and independence has to be eradicated; and if it should survive after January [1866], I think with proper management it will be effectually extirpated before we wish to put seed in the ground in March or April.”103

Employers evinced the most resistance to precisely those demands—less supervision, more free time, and the opportunity to lease lands—that might ultimately lead to a greater measure of independence and self-reliance for their black workers. To the freedmen, these issues naturally took on added significance with each new contract year, reflecting their discouragement over the most recent settlement, the failure of their land aspirations, and their precarious economic position. If planters grew to fear that crop shares, as a substitute for cash wages, compromised the proper relationship between themselves and the laborers, growing numbers of freedmen turned to that form of compensation as affording them an enhanced feeling of independence. After charging that indebtedness now characterized the monthly wage system, the black newspaper in South Carolina advised agricultural laborers to work the land on shares or leases and thereby “retrieve the mistakes of the past season.” About the same time, late in 1865, on a cotton plantation near Beaufort, the freedmen countered the planter’s wage offer by demanding half the crop instead. Upon being turned down, they appealed to the local Union commander, who advised them to agree to the employer’s fair offer. Still refusing to concede anything, the laborers crowded around the planter when he visited their quarters, shouting their demand for “half the crop.” With the planting season about to begin and the freedmen refusing to sign the contract, Federal troops were dispatched to remove the rebellious blacks from the plantation and make room for more compliant workers. The show of force and the threat to displace them from their jobs broke the resistance effectively, and the laborers reluctantly gave up their fight for a share of the crop.104

The questions of greater independence,