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By Root 1466 0

himself? To whom could he turn? Although the Freedmen’s Bureau recognized his right to contract elsewhere, it insisted that he contract with some employer; if not, he could be arrested for vagrancy, incarcerated for a brief time, forced to work on the public streets, and finally hired out to an employer under a contract arbitrarily prepared by the Bureau officer. If he chose to work elsewhere, he also faced in some regions the possibility of being blacklisted by other planters, particularly if he had a previous record as a malcontent or rebel. Dissatisfied with conditions, a laborer in Guilford County, North Carolina, left his place of employment and settled a few miles down the road. “I gathered up some o’ our boys,” his former employer declared, “and we went down to this place whar I thought he was at, and told him he’d make tracks before night, and if he was found in this neighborhood arter next day we’d shoot him wharever we found him.… We a’n’t agoin’ to let niggers walk over us.” Finally, if laborers combined among themselves to resist a contract they considered unacceptable, they faced the likelihood of intervention by local militia units or Federal troops.125

Having found no alternative that could sustain them, the vast majority of blacks returned each year to their familiar labors under a contractual arrangement. But it often proved to be a precarious truce rather than a planters’ jubilee. Although blacks found their bargaining power sharply circumscribed, that did not guarantee the quality of their subsequent labor or an orderly plantation. The opprobrium heaped upon black labor in 1865 would be repeated with even greater regularity and the usual expressions of dismay in subsequent years—disregard for contracts, erratic work, arrogant behavior, insolent language, and a contempt for any kind of authority. Few planters considered themselves more exemplary in their behavior and attitudes than Everard Green Baker of Panola, Mississippi. As a slaveholder, he claimed to have made every effort to keep his blacks “joyous and happy,” and the wartime experience no doubt solidified his self-image. While the slaves of neighboring planters fled, his blacks showed “their good sense & stood true to mine & their interests.” After emancipation, they remained with him, and in January 1866 he noted how “cheerfully” they went to work—“perhaps better than any others in the neighborhood.” Six months later, however, for reasons Baker found inexplicable, his freedmen worked only “tolerably,” failing to report early in the morning and remaining in their cabins for two or three hours at noon. “I do not think I will be bothered any more with freedmen,” the discouraged planter confided to his diary. One year later, he added a footnote to that entry: “I had better have adhered to the above resolution. I did not & much regret it.”126

Even if they successfully contracted with their work force, some planters found little relief in the day-to-day ordeal of supervising free black laborers, many of whom refused to surrender their newly acquired prerogatives or accommodate themselves to a contract they had been compelled to sign. On the plantations in South Carolina she had managed since the death of her husband in 1864, Adele Allston had endured work stoppages and near rebellions. With each new crisis her confidence ebbed still further until finally her patience ran out. “Negroes will soon be placed upon an exact equality with ourselves,” she wrote in late 1866, “and it is in vain for us to strive against it.” In 1869, after most of her properties had been sold at auction, she retired to Chicora Wood, her sole possession, and planted a few acres of rice. With similar resignation, Ethelred Philips, the Florida physician and farmer, replaced his “worthless” black servants with “a poor ignorant white girl” and contemplated removing himself and his family to California, where they might be free of “the everlasting negro” rather than have to wait out his inevitable extinction. “They have the China man in place of the African and do what they please