• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Few gave up the struggle with greater reluctance and internal torment than Mary Jones, the deeply religious owner of three plantations in Liberty County, Georgia. After the death of her husband in 1863, she had resolved to carry on the family tradition of paternal affection and beneficent regard for the black children of God. If only they had not also been her laborers, acting all too often as adult men and women, the rewards might have been greater. The plantations languished, the freedmen manifested their discontent with the conditions of labor, and an incident early in 1866 proved to be a turning point. Shortly after two blacks—July and Jesse—asked to see a copy of the contract, the black foreman reported to his employer that the laborers “one and all” refused to work; they were dissatisfied with the contract and thought she intended to deceive them. Along with July and Jesse (whom she suspected as the “ringleaders”), Mary Jones proceeded to the nearest office of the Freedmen’s Bureau, where the local agent advised them that the contract was perfectly legal, even if other planters in the area had offered a greater share of the crop to their laborers. That ended the affair and the freedmen returned to work, but for Mary Jones it had obviously been a demeaning experience.

I have told the people that in doubting my word they offered me the greatest insult I ever received in my life; that I had considered them friends and treated them as such, giving them gallons of clabber every day and syrup once a week, with rice and extra dinners; but that now they were only laborers under contract, and only the law would rule between us, and I would require every one of them to come up to the mark in their duty on the plantation. The effect has been decided, and I am not sorry for the position we hold mutually. They have relieved me of the constant desire and effort to do something to promote their comfort.

The relief this may have afforded Mary Jones failed to instill in her workers any greater appreciation for the conditions under which they labored. Several months after the incident, Charles C. Jones, Jr., advised his mother to avoid still another skirmish with the “ingrates” and sell the plantations. Problems would persist everywhere in the South, he warned, as long as whites allowed themselves to be “led by the Negroes” rather than direct and control their labor.

But Mary Jones held on, sustained by her faith in “His infinite wisdom and special guidance,” even as she lost all faith in the ability of her former slaves to become intelligent and reliable free workers.

The whole constitution of the race is adverse to responsibility, to truth, to industry. He can neglect duty and violate contracts without the least compunction of conscience or loss of honor; and he can sink to the lowest depths of want and misery without any sense of shame or feeling of privation which would afflict a sensitive Caucasian.

After still more outbreaks of disaffection (“they dispute even the carrying out and spreading the manure”), new fears (“they all bear arms of some sort”), new losses (“Gilbert is very faithful, and so is Charles. They are the exceptions”), she acceded to her son’s warning that they would all face troublesome times “before the white race regains its suspended supremacy.” Early in 1868, Mary Jones gave up the plantations, which had now become for her “the grave of my buried hopes and affections.”128

10

ONLY A FEW YEARS after the war, the sight of an old master gathering around him his former slaves, all of whom still maintained that same deference in his presence, filled a white observer in South Carolina with nostalgic memories. He had seen more than enough, he conceded, to know that such exhibitions of the old affections stood out “like an oasis in the desert.” On the eve of Radical Reconstruction, most planters and freedmen appeared to be dissatisfied in various degrees with the workings of the new labor system. While planters fretted