Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [336]
After several years of highly precarious planting, the landowner was not necessarily averse to the rental system, preferring to reorganize the plantation rather than continue an increasingly unprofitable arrangement. At best, he hoped to achieve a modicum of economic success without compromising his ownership of the land and without having to suffer the ordeal of supervising black labor. Such a decision, nevertheless, was not always reached easily. Only when he despaired altogether of operating the place successfully along the old lines did the planter usually agree to divide and rent. That was the only way he could procure labor “under any terms,” an Alabama planter conceded, and still realize “a bare support” from his land. Despite the anguish that often accompanied such decisions, however, the plantation system itself remained very much intact. Only apportionment of land and responsibility on the plantation had been altered.133
But to many freedmen, the new arrangement—tenant farming—seemed promising at first glance because of the feelings of independence it imparted, making them in effect mock farmers and freeing them from the cultivation of staple crops and from working in field gangs under supervision. As if to underscore such feelings, the new tenant might move his cabin from the old slave village out onto the plot of land he had rented or else build a new cabin to symbolize his new autonomy. In opting for this arrangement, moreover, he fully expected to make this plot of land his own through hard work and frugality—precisely as his leaders and many of his white friends from the North had advised him. But in most instances, such aspirations remained unfulfilled and the tenant found himself little better off than he had been under the previous arrangement. “We made crops on shares for three years after freedom, and then we commenced to rent,” Richard Crump recalled. “They didn’t pay everything they promised. They taken a lot of it away from us. They said figures didn’t lie. You know how that was. You dassent dispute a man’s word then.”134
No matter how often the black press celebrated the few examples of economic success and landownership, the great mass of laboring freedmen, whether they rented lands or worked for wages or shares, remained laborers—landless agricultural workers. Even the illusion of independence imparted by tenant farming could not obscure for very long the fact that the black “farmer” enjoyed neither ownership of the soil nor the full rewards of his labor. He worked the white man’s land, planted with the white man’s seeds, plowed with the white man’s plow and mules, and harvested a crop he owed largely to the white man for the land, the seeds, the plow, and the mules, as well as the clothes he wore and the food he consumed. And if his own leaders could offer him little more than the mid-nineteenth-century shibboleths of hard work, perseverance, frugality, and honesty, to whom could he turn? How could he be frugal if he had no money to save? Why should he be honest only to have the white man defraud him? Why should he work hard and persevere if the results of that labor left him even further removed from acquiring the land on which he toiled? “The negro’s first want is, not the ballot, but a chance to live,—yes, sir, a chance to live,” a prominent white Georgian declared in late 1865. “Why, he can’t even live without the consent of the white man! He has no land; he can make no crops except the white man gives him a chance. He hasn’t any timber; he can’t get a stick of wood without leave from a white man. We crowd him into the fewest possible employments, and then he can scarcely get work anywhere but in the rice-fields and cotton plantations of a white man who has owned him and given up slavery only at the point of the bayonet.… What sort of freedom is that?”135
If the freedman’s “mania” for renting or owning land came to symbolize his yearning for economic