Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [335]
Even as the freedman returned to work for wages or shares, disillusionment with the meager rewards of his labor kept alive that persistent “mania for owning a small piece of land” and farming for himself. That is, he retained an aspiration he had seen many whites and even a few blacks realize. With the end of each agricultural season, the aspiration seemed to take on a new life. While trying to explain the unwillingness of blacks to contract in early 1866, a Freedmen’s Bureau officer in South Carolina made a revealing observation, perhaps without fully appreciating its implications: “They appear to be willing to work, but are decisive in their expressions, to work for no one but themselves.” Only a week earlier, another Bureau officer noted the unanimity with which the laborers refused to contract unless they could control the crops they made. After considering the options open to them, the freedmen on Edisto Island, who were about to lose the lands they had been cultivating, declared that nothing could induce them to work again for their former masters under the old system. But if they could rent the lands they now worked, they were willing to remain. It was the only way to retain at least a semblance of the independence they were now being asked to surrender.130
The experiences of planters in various sections of the South testified to the determination of the freedman to “set up for himself.” After paying wages for three years and treating his hands “with the utmost kindness,” a planter in Maury County, Tennessee, seemed perplexed by their “growing dislike to being controlled by or working for white men. They prefer to get a little patch where they can do as they choose.” Before his laborers would agree to contract, a Louisiana planter reported, they insisted on having tracts of land set off for their exclusive use. No sooner had she paid off her hands, Frances Leigh noted, than a number of them took their money and purchased small, inadequate lots out in the pine woods, “where the land was so poor they could not raise a peck of corn to the acre.” Although she thought they had been defrauded, she was still impressed by the obvious enthusiasm with which her former laborers cleared the lots, built their log cabins on it, and prepared to live “like gentlemen.” With similar amazement, she had previously witnessed the remarkable transformation that came over former slaves she thought “far too old and infirm to work for me” when they came into possession of any land. “Once let them get a bit of ground of their own given to them, and they became quite young and strong again.”131
The drift of these experiences, reflecting both old aspirations and recent disappointments, was unmistakable. Unable to acquire ownership of land, whether because he lacked the funds or local custom barred him, the black laborer increasingly resolved on an alternative that would provide him with the feeling if not the actual status of a family farmer. He became a sharecropper. In the usual arrangement, the planter divided his land into small units or “farms” and rented them to individual black families; he also furnished the necessary implements, work animals, and seed. In return, the tenant or “farmer” paid the planter one half of the crops he raised; if he supplied his own tools and animals, he generally paid one fourth to one third of his crops. In either case, he might have to pledge another