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When “a very large assemblage” of blacks convened in a South Carolina community in late 1866, the speakers dwelled on the inadequacy of one third of the crop as compensation for the labor they had performed the previous year. The only conditions under which they should now contract, they agreed, would be for an equal division of the crops among those who labored and those who owned the land. To a local white who observed the proceedings, the meeting assumed “the character of a strike for higher wages” but he found no cause for alarm and applauded the speakers for their advice to act calmly, prudently, and in conformity with the law. Whether or not such meetings were specifically intended to counter similar “combinations” among white employers, black laborers in various parts of the South thought they could strengthen their bargaining position by agreeing on a common set of demands, including the minimum amount of compensation for which they were willing to work. Significantly, they understood the need to involve all the plantations in the region and even to agree on penalties that would be meted out to those blacks who broke their solid front. In Cherokee County, Alabama, the blacks pledged themselves not to work for less than $2.00 a day during the harvest and assessed a penalty of fifty lashes for any among them who agreed to work for less. (White laborers subsequently gathered the harvest at $1.50 a day.) In Rowan County, North Carolina, the freedmen simply resolved that anyone who worked for less than a certain sum would “have to abide the consequences.”113 Although such examples (unique even for white workers) might well have been exceptional, they suggested a potential that could have had a profound impact on labor and race relations. At least, the prospects were sufficiently alarming to prompt many whites to concoct new notions of conspiracy and revolution.

Aside from the freedmen’s work habits, nothing concerned planters and Federal authorities more in 1866 and 1867 than the widely reported proliferation of organizations among plantation laborers. Since most of them were not easily identifiable, they seemed all the more menacing. Near the end of 1866, alarming reports reached the Charleston office of the Freedmen’s Bureau that freedmen in the Kingstree region were organized into six armed military companies which drilled and marched “under Red flags,” threatened white families, and intimidated blacks who refused to join them. Upon investigating these sensational rumors, the Bureau officer found that the freedmen in this region did, indeed, meet regularly to agree on minimal demands for the next year of labor; the sole threat they had issued was to migrate to Florida if they could not obtain “reasonable and just” terms. If any of them possessed arms, the agent reported, they did so with no violent intent but from “the foolish habit into which they have fallen of carrying guns wherever they travel.” Still, the Bureau agent thought it advisable to station a detachment of Union troops in the area for “the moral effect” it might have on both white and black residents.114

Any kind of organization among plantation hands, whether intended for protective, benevolent, or economic purposes, was bound to create consternation in the white populace and revive old specters. The conclusion of Bureau officers that most of the organizations rumored to be military in nature were actually designed to exact economic concessions hardly allayed white fears. The ostensible purpose of meetings of black laborers may be “a strike for higher wages,” a white resident of Halifax County, North Carolina, warned the governor, “but I believe the real design is to organize for a General massacre of the White population. Nearly every negro is armed not only with a Gun, but a revolver.… I am not one to get up an alarm for a trifle, or to raise a noise because some one else does, but the meeting of a thousand or two of negroes every other Sunday, with Officers and Drilling, I think a serious matter.… I hope you will not use my name