The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [182]
After numerous complaints of mistreatment of the freedpeople by unscrupulous lessees, the War and Treasury departments sent emissaries to investigate conditions in the Mississippi Valley. General James Wadsworth, dispatched by Stanton in October 1863, advocated settling blacks on plantations and arming them to help develop a “manly self-dependence.” He approved of the leasing system but insisted that wages should be high enough to enable blacks eventually to purchase their own farms. The “great danger,” he concluded, was “the tendency to establish a system of serfdom” in the name of supervised free labor. The reformer James Yeatman, sent by Secretary Chase, reported that blacks on leased plantations remained in “a state of involuntary servitude.” He urged the Treasury Department, which supervised abandoned lands, to establish a more humane program that would include some land distribution.81
In December 1863 Chase briefly took control of the labor system. New rules raised wages significantly and contemplated leasing the plantations directly to groups of blacks. But after an appeal from the army, Lincoln at the end of February restored military authority, giving General Thomas command of “the contraband and leasing business.” The Treasury plan, Lincoln wrote, “doubtless is well intended,” but he viewed it as unworkable. Because of constant disputes between employers and employees and Confederate raids that disrupted production, Thomas’s system did not work very well either. Indeed, the most successful freedmen in the Mississippi Valley were the small number of “independent Negro cultivators,” especially those at Davis Bend, the site of plantations owned by Jefferson Davis and his brother Joseph, where the land was leased to freedmen to work as they saw fit.82
The administration, in Stanton’s words, lacked a “well defined system” for dealing with the transition to free labor. But Lincoln, despite remaining far more concerned with the military situation and securing emancipation, expressed increasing interest in how the experiments fared. In February 1862, when he met with Edward L. Pierce, who had traveled to the Sea Islands and written articles about conditions there for the northern press, Lincoln listened for a few moments and then said he “did not think he ought to be bothered with such details.” A year and a half later, however, when he met with John Eaton, whom Grant had sent to Washington to describe his policies for dealing with the former slaves, Lincoln’s attitude had changed. He questioned Eaton closely “in regard to those who were coming into our lines: What was their object; how far did they understand the changes that were coming to them, and what were they able to do for themselves?”83
Occasionally, Lincoln took steps toward assisting former slaves in acquiring land. Preparations were under way at Port Royal, South Carolina, to auction land seized by the army for nonpayment of a direct tax Congress had imposed in 1862. In September 1863, and again in December, Lincoln directed that plots of land be set aside for preemption by black families at a price of $1.25 per acre, to give them “an interest in the soil.” The plantation system would be destroyed, declared the Washington Morning Chronicle, and the “heir of the lash” would become a landowner, thus “assimilat[ing] our institutions to the noble doctrine of Freedom.” The commissioners in charge of the sales, however, refused to carry out Lincoln’s orders. One described the idea of allocating land to blacks as “a wild scheme, that out-radicals all the radicalism I ever heard of.” “Sharp sighted speculators” from the North also objected. They persuaded Secretary of the Treasury Chase, who oversaw the land sales, to amend the instructions.