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By Root 1161 0

of black middle-class leadership toward trade unions and strikes. “Poor negroes,” it said of blacks beaten for continuing to work, “abused when suspected of being unwilling to work, and mauled when ready to labor!” When stevedores took to the streets to mobilize support for their strike, the newspaper lamented the number of blacks among them, noting how “their white fellow-workers despise them under ordinary circumstances.” After the laborers returned to their jobs at the old wages, the newspaper could only conclude, “Such is generally the folly of strikes.”122

Whether on the plantations or in the cities, black workers confronted obstacles not unfamiliar to white laborers in the North. Since any work stoppage during the agricultural season necessarily required a breach of contract, field hands found themselves in an even more precarious position. The decision to cease work could not be made easily, involving as it did the possibility of eviction with a loss of accrued wages and the probability of Federal intervention. Not long after a Union commander announced his intention to remove all laborers who failed to conclude agreements with their employers, a group of freedmen near Savannah refused to renew a contract they thought to be unfair. But neither were they willing to move, even when a Bureau agent and five soldiers ordered them to do so. The agent returned with fifty soldiers, the blacks “crowded together in solid phalanx and swore more furiously than before that they would die where they stood,” each side leveled guns at the other, and the soldiers withdrew. But the point had been made, and blacks knew full well they could not stand for long against an entire army.123

If judged by certain isolated examples, the possibilities might have seemed truly promising, perhaps even momentous. The planters owned the land, while the freedmen commanded the labor, and each side reserved the right to use that power to exact concessions from the other, with the differences finally resolved through negotiations. That state of affairs encouraged the black newspaper in South Carolina to think that a new day had dawned. “It takes two to make a bargain now-a-days,” the editor exulted after noting that the former slaves no longer had to contract with their former owner simply because he desired it. But the new era envisioned by this newspaper died in infancy. Appreciating where the power still resided, the employer could hold out against the “extravagant” demands of his laborers, thinking that by January they would be forced to work at whatever terms he dictated. More often than not, that turned out to be a correct assumption. “They thought, by standing out, they could force me to terms about their mules and cotton,” the agent of a Louisiana planter remarked. “But I soon undeceived them. I rigged up the carts, packed their traps into them, and sent them bag and baggage off the place.… Now they’re sneaking back every day and asking leave to enter into contract.”124

Despite the triumphs scored by the field hand on some plantations, particularly in regions where a scarcity of labor prevailed, the bargaining power he wielded with his right to reject a contract proved far less formidable in practice than in theory. “What kin we do, sah?” an underpaid laborer in Virginia asked; “dey kin give us jes what dey choose. Man couldn’t starve, nohow; got no place to go; we ’bleege to take what dey give us.” In the North, white workers came to learn comparable lessons about that much-cherished right to bargain with an employer—that is, they could work at whatever wages and under whatever conditions their hungriest competitors were willing to accept or not work at all. In the postwar South, the options seemed even more limited. If the laborer chose to hold out for better terms, he could be evicted, with the planter free to call on Federal authorities for assistance. If the laborer voluntarily left the plantation, dissatisfied with the previous year’s meager earnings and disinclined to contract for still another year of the same, how would he support