• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The fears provoked by organized action among black laborers proved to be more than illusory. Since the early days of emancipation, whites and Federal authorities alike had considerable difficulty distinguishing between black work stoppages and insurrections. The confusion was at times perfectly understandable. When a South Carolina planter heard that blacks on a nearby plantation were “organized after military fashion” and had posted guards on the roads leading to the place, he could hardly be blamed for thinking in terms of an insurrection rather than a strike. The events that transpired on a plantation near Georgetown could also easily evoke the old fears. On March 31, 1866, a freedman named Abram left the field on which he had been working and called the other laborers out with him; after arming themselves with axes, hatchets, hoes, and poles, they drove the black agent of the proprietor off the premises. Finally, two Union soldiers were called in to help quell the uprising, and the planter and his agent prepared to restore order. “As soon as we entered the street the people collected with axes, hoes, sticks and bricks and pelted us with bricks and stones and poles, and took the gun away from one of the soldiers.” The reports of blacks taking possession of plantations were not uncommon in the postwar years, but the purpose of their action was not always clear. In a number of instances, at least, the blacks did not actually lay claim to the land but challenged the proprietor’s right to dictate to them and to dispose of the crops they had raised.116

The plantation “strike,” not always easy to define, could be a complex affair, testing the ability of the workers to maintain a solid front against the planter’s threat to evict them and the probability of Federal intervention. On a Louisiana plantation, when the hands struck for the immediate payment of their wages and the right of each of them to have an acre of land for his exclusive cultivation, the proprietor retaliated by refusing to meet with them, calling in the Freedmen’s Bureau, and locking up the mules—that is, turning a “strike” into a “lockout” and preventing the workers from returning to their tasks without his permission. The Bureau agent resolved the crisis, largely by rebuking the strike leader for his insolent language and threatening to arrest him for breach of contract; at the same time, he sought to exploit differences among the blacks about the advisability of their action. “Dey didn’t want to quit,” several of them indicated, “but dere was no use in deir wuckin’ by demselves, cause de rest ’d say dey was a turnin’ gin deir own color an’ a sidin’ wid de wite folks.” To a northern visitor, who had witnessed the strike, the Freedmen’s Bureau had once again proven its worth. “I knew that but for this very agent not less than a dozen heavy planters would have been compelled to suspend operations. All availed themselves of his services.”117

Along with evidence of collective action, the plantations would also yield leaders capable of mobilizing black laborers. Although some drivers and preachers retained the influence they had exercised before the war, the continuity in leadership is difficult to determine. On the Sea Islands, a Bureau officer investigating labor troubles placed the blame on “oracles” among the freedmen, “and as they go, so go the whole without stopping to consider.” Not uncommonly, a Bureau officer would determine that a particular individual on the plantation had provoked the others to action and he would dismiss him from the place. On the “old Combahee” plantation, near Beaufort, South Carolina, a planter complained of “insolent” laborers who appeared to follow in the steps of Bob Jenkins, a black “firebrand” he had previously ordered off his place. Two Bureau agents investigated the dispute, one of them J. J. Wright, a black man who would subsequently play an important role in the Radical state government. In his report, Wright cited the testimony of the foreman, who claimed