The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [181]
In March 1863, the War Department, at the behest of Charles Sumner, created the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission (AFIC) to suggest policies for dealing with the emancipated slaves. Its members—Samuel Gridley Howe, James McKaye, and Robert Dale Owen—were prominent reformers. Howe was an abolitionist and advocate of education for the blind; McKaye, part of Charles Sumner’s antislavery circle in Boston; and Owen, an advocate of women’s rights and the rights of labor. The commission took testimony from both races in the North and occupied South, sent questionnaires to the commanders of black troops, and pored over histories of abolition in the West Indies. It issued a preliminary report in June 1863 and a final one eleven months later. The commission’s recommendations, transmitted to Congress by Secretary of War Stanton and widely publicized in the North, illustrated the tension between the laissez-faire and interventionist approaches to the aftermath of slavery. The reports called for the creation of a Bureau of Emancipation to exercise benevolent guardianship over the freedpeople, but warned that it must not be a “permanent institution,” lest blacks fail to become self-reliant. They emphatically rejected the idea of apprenticeship, pointing to the disastrous results of that experiment in the West Indies, and concluded that the best way of protecting blacks’ rights was to grant them civil and political equality and the opportunity to purchase farms. McKaye went further, advocating the confiscation of the planters’ land and its redistribution to poor whites and former slaves, bringing about a thorough “social reconstruction of the Southern states.”77
Lincoln made no public comment on the AFIC reports. He had long insisted that blacks deserved the right to the fruits of their labor. In the Emancipation Proclamation he had urged the former slaves to go to work for reasonable wages. But, as Sumner pointed out, he did not “undertake to say how this opportunity shall be obtained” or how the freedpeople’s rights as free laborers would be protected.78 As the Union army occupied significant plantation regions and conflicts over control of black labor arose involving former slaves, former slaveholders, military commanders, and northern entrepreneurs, Lincoln was forced to begin confronting these crucial problems.
The Civil War witnessed a variety of experiments in free labor in the occupied South. The most highly publicized of these “rehearsals for Reconstruction” took place on the South Carolina Sea Islands, where reformers from the North established schools for blacks and tried to aid them in acquiring land, while northern investors put blacks to work as free laborers on abandoned plantations. Far more former slaves, however, were affected by labor policies implemented in the Mississippi Valley. Benjamin F. Butler had inaugurated this program in 1862, requiring blacks to labor on the estates of loyal planters, where they would receive wages according to a fixed schedule as well as food and medical care. In 1863, General Banks extended this system throughout occupied Louisiana. Banks saw it as “the first step in the transition from slave to free labor.” He banned corporal punishment and required that education be provided for black children, while also promising that the army would enforce “perfect subordination” on the part of the laborers. Many freedmen resented the year-long contracts they were required to sign, the low wages, and the rules forbidding laborers to leave plantations without the permission of their employers. They viewed the system as a disguised form of slavery.79
In 1863 Banks’s experiment was extended to the entire Mississippi Valley. Hoping to relieve the army of the expense and burden of supervising contraband camps and to secure Union control of the Mississippi Valley by settling a loyal population there, General Lorenzo Thomas decided to lease plantations to northerners and local planters