THE MEANING OF FREEDOM

Families in Freedom

With slavery dead, institutions that had existed before the war, like the Black family, free Blacks’ churches and schools, and the secret slave church, were strengthened, expanded, and freed from white supervision. The family was central to the postemancipation Black community. Former slaves made remarkable efforts to locate loved ones from whom they had been separated under slavery. One northern reporter in 1865 encountered a freedman who had walked more than 600 miles from Georgia to North Carolina, searching for the wife and children from whom he had been sold away before the war.

While freedom helped to stabilize family life, it also subtly altered relationships within the family. Immediately after the Civil War, planters complained that freedwomen had “withdrawn” from field labor and work as house servants. Many Black women preferred to devote more time to their families than had been possible under slavery, and men considered it a badge of honor to see their wives remain at home. Eventually, the dire poverty of the Black community would compel a far higher proportion of Black women than white women to go to work for wages.

Church and School

More information

“Five Generations of a Black Family, an 1862 photograph that suggests the power of family ties among emancipated slaves”

At the same time, Blacks abandoned white-controlled religious institutions to create churches of their own. On the eve of the Civil War, 42,000 Black Methodists worshiped in biracial South Carolina churches; by the end of Reconstruction, only 600 remained. As the major institution independent of white control, the church played a central role in the Black community. A place of worship, it also housed schools, social events, and political gatherings. Black ministers came to play a major role in politics.

Another striking example of the freedpeople’s quest for individual and community improvement was their desire for education. The thirst for learning sprang from many sources—a desire to read the Bible, the need to prepare for the marketplace, and the opportunity, which arose in 1867, to take part in politics. Blacks of all ages flocked to the schools established by northern missionary societies, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and groups of ex-slaves.

Before the Civil War, few colleges admitted Black students (an exception was Wilberforce University in Ohio, an institution for Blacks founded by the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1856). During Reconstruction, Black colleges proliferated, including Fisk University in Tennessee, Hampton Institute in Virginia, and Howard University in the nation’s capital.

Political Freedom

More information

“Mother and Daughter Reading, Mt. Meigs, Alabama, an 1890 photograph by Rudolph Eickemeyer. During Reconstruction and for years thereafter, former slaves exhibited a deep desire for education, and learning took place outside of school as well as within.”

In a society that had made political participation a core element of freedom, the right to vote inevitably became central to the former slaves’ desire for empowerment and equality. As Frederick Douglass put it soon after the South’s surrender in 1865, “Slavery is not abolished until the Black man has the ballot.” In a democracy, “where universal suffrage is the rule,” excluding any group meant branding them with “the stigma of inferiority.” Anything less than full citizenship, Black spokesmen insisted, would betray the nation’s democratic promise and the war’s meaning.

Land, Labor, and Freedom

Former slaves’ ideas of freedom were directly related to landownership. On the land they would develop independent communities free of white control. Many former slaves insisted that through their unpaid labor, they had acquired a right to the land. “The property which they hold,” declared an Alabama Black convention, “was nearly all earned by the sweat of our brows.” In some parts of the South, Blacks in 1865 seized property, insisting that it belonged to them.

More information

“The First African Church, Richmond, as depicted in Harper’s Weekly, June 27, 1874. The establishment of independent black churches was an enduring accomplishment of Reconstruction.”

In its individual elements and much of its language, former slaves’ definition of freedom resembled that of white Americans—self-ownership, family stability, religious liberty, political participation, and economic autonomy. But these elements combined to form a vision very much their own. For whites, freedom, no matter how defined, was a given, a birthright to be defended. For African Americans, it was an open-ended process, a transformation of every aspect of their lives and of the society and culture that had sustained slavery in the first place. Although the freedpeople failed to achieve full freedom as they understood it, their definition did much to shape national debate during the turbulent era of Reconstruction.

Masters without Slaves

Most white southerners reacted to military defeat and emancipation with dismay, not only because of the widespread devastation but also because they must now submit to northern demands. The appalling loss of life, a disaster without parallel in the American experience, affected all classes of southerners. Nearly 260,000 men died for the Confederacy—more than one-fifth of the South’s adult male white population. The wholesale destruction of work animals, farm buildings, and machinery ensured that economic revival would be slow and painful. In 1870, the value of property in the South was 30 percent lower than before the war, not counting that represented by slaves.

Planter families faced profound changes in the war’s aftermath. Many lost not only their slaves but also their life savings, which they had patriotically invested in now-worthless Confederate bonds. Some for the first time found themselves compelled to do physical labor.

THE BARROW PLANTATION

More information

“THE BARROW PLANTATION Two maps of the Barrow plantation illustrate the effects of emancipation on rural life in the South. In 1860, slaves lived in communal quarters near the owner’s house. Twenty years later, former slaves working as sharecroppers lived scattered across the plantation and had their own church and school. The map of 1860 shows a large plot of land with a road going through the center. Along the road is a square labeled “Master’s House” and several rows of smaller rectangles labeled “Slave Quarters.” The master’s house, slave quarters, and large outbuildings are in close proximity. A rectangle labeled “Gin House” is on the other slide of the road. The rest of the plot shows lines where creeks and rivers are but no other dwellings or outbuildings. The map of 1881 shows the same plot of land and road dividing it. The square formerly labeled “Master’s House” is now labeled “Landlord’s House.” All of the former slave quarters and outbuildings are no longer shown. Thirteen rectangles on one side of the road show the residences of individuals, each labeled with a name. On the other side of the road there are thirteen more rectangles, also with name labels. None of these residences are in any particular proximity to the landlord’s house. The gin house has moved slightly and there are an additional two buildings labeled “School” and “Church.””

Southern planters sought to implement an understanding of freedom quite different from that of the former slaves. As they struggled to accept the reality of emancipation, most planters defined Black freedom in the narrowest manner. As journalist Sidney Andrews discovered late in 1865, “The whites seem wholly unable to comprehend that freedom for the negro means the same thing as freedom for them.”

The Free Labor Vision

Along with former slaves and former owners, the victorious Republican North tried to implement its own vision of freedom. Central to its definition was the antebellum principle of free labor, now further strengthened as a definition of the good society by the Union’s triumph. In the free labor vision of a reconstructed South, emancipated Blacks, enjoying the same opportunities for advancement as northern workers, would labor more productively than they had as slaves. At the same time, northern capital and migrants would energize the economy. The South would eventually come to resemble the “free society” of the North, complete with public schools, small towns, and independent farmers.

More information

“Winslow Homer’s 1876 painting, A Visit from the Old Mistress, depicts an imaginary meeting between a southern white woman and her former slaves. Their stance and gaze suggest the tensions arising from the birth of a new social order. Homer places his subjects on an equal footing, yet maintains a space of separation between them. He exhibited the painting to acclaim at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1878.”

With planters seeking to establish a labor system as close to slavery as possible, and former slaves demanding economic autonomy and access to land, a long period of conflict over the organization and control of labor followed on plantations throughout the South. It fell to the Freedmen’s Bureau, an agency established by Congress in March 1865, to attempt to establish a working free labor system.

The Freedmen’s Bureau

Under the direction of General O. O. Howard, a veteran of the Civil War, the bureau took on responsibilities that can only be described as daunting. The bureau was an experiment in government social policy that seems to belong more comfortably to the New Deal of the 1930s or the Great Society of the 1960s (see Chapters 21 and 25, respectively) than to nineteenth-century America. Bureau agents were supposed to establish schools, provide aid to the poor and aged, settle disputes between whites and Blacks and among the freed-people, and secure for former slaves and white Unionists equal treatment before the courts. “It is not . . . in your power to fulfill one-tenth of the expectations of those who framed the Bureau,” General William T. Sherman wrote to Howard. “I fear you have Hercules’ task.”

The bureau lasted from 1865 to 1870. Even at its peak, it had fewer than 1,000 agents in the entire South. Nonetheless, the bureau’s achievements in some areas, notably education and health care, were striking. By 1869, nearly 3,000 schools, serving more than 150,000 pupils in the South, reported to the bureau. Bureau agents also assumed control of hospitals established during the war and provided medical care to both Black and white southerners.

More information

“The Freedmen’s Bureau, an engraving from Harper’s Weekly, July 25, 1868, depicts the Bureau agent as a promoter of racial peace in the violent postwar South.”

More information

“A nursemaid and her charge, from a daguerreotype around 1865.”

The Failure of Land Reform

One provision of the law establishing the bureau gave it the authority to divide abandoned and confiscated land into forty-acre plots for rental and eventual sale to the former slaves. In the summer of 1865, however, President Andrew Johnson, who had succeeded Lincoln, ordered nearly all land in federal hands returned to its former owners. A series of confrontations followed, notably in South Carolina and Georgia, where the army forcibly evicted Blacks who had settled on “Sherman land.” When O. O. Howard, head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, traveled to the Sea Islands to inform Blacks of the new policy, he was greeted with disbelief and protest. Land, the freedmen insisted, was essential to the meaning of freedom. Without it, they declared, “we have not bettered our condition” from the days of slavery—“you will see, this is not the condition of really free men.”

Because no land distribution took place, the vast majority of rural freedpeople remained poor and without property during Reconstruction. They had no alternative but to work on white-owned plantations, often for their former owners. Far from being able to rise in the social scale through hard work, Black men were largely confined to farm work, unskilled labor, and service jobs, and Black women to positions in private homes as cooks and maids. The failure of land reform produced a deep sense of betrayal that survived among the former slaves and their descendants long after the end of Reconstruction. “No sir,” Mary Gaffney, an elderly ex-slave, recalled in the 1930s, “we were not given a thing but freedom.”

Out of the conflict on the plantations, new systems of labor emerged in the different regions of the South. Sharecropping came to dominate the Cotton Kingdom and much of the Tobacco Belt of Virginia and North Carolina. Sharecropping initially arose as a compromise between Blacks’ desire for land and planters’ demand for labor discipline. The system allowed each Black family to rent a part of a plantation, with the crop divided between worker and owner at the end of the year. Sharecropping guaranteed the planters a stable resident labor force. Former slaves preferred it to gang labor because it offered them the prospect of working without day-to-day white supervision. But as the years went on, sharecropping became more and more oppressive. Sharecroppers’ economic opportunities were severely limited by a world market in which the price of farm products suffered a prolonged decline.

SHARECROPPING IN THE SOUTH, 1880

More information

“SHARECROPPING IN THE SOUTH, 1880 By 1880, sharecropping had become the dominant form of agricultural labor in large parts of the South. The system involved both white and black farmers. Shown are the states of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. Each state is shown divided into counties. A key shows a gradient from dark to light of the percentages of farms sharecropped. The darkest color shows thirty-five to eighty percent, the next darkest color shows twenty-six to thirty-four percent. The middle color shows twenty to twenty-five percent. The next lightest color shows thirteen to nineteen percent, and the lightest color shows zero to twelve percent. The greatest percentage of sharecropped farms is shown in the states of North Carolina, western South Carolina, northern Georgia, Tennessee, and eastern Texas. Lighter percentages of sharecropping are shown in Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi. The states with the lightest percentage of sharecropped farms are Florida, eastern South Carolina, southern Georgia, southern Mississippi, and Louisiana.”

The White Farmer

Wartime devastation set in motion a train of events that permanently altered the independent way of life of white yeomen, leading to what they considered a loss of freedom. To obtain supplies from merchants, farmers were forced to take up the growing of cotton and pledge a part of the crop as collateral (property the creditor can seize if a debt is not paid). This system became known as the crop lien. Since interest rates were extremely high and the price of cotton fell steadily, many farmers found themselves still in debt after marketing their portion of the crop at year’s end. They had no choice but to continue to plant cotton to obtain new loans. By the mid-1870s, white farmers, who cultivated only 10 percent of the South’s cotton crop in 1860, were growing 40 percent, and many who had owned their land had fallen into dependency as sharecroppers who now rented land owned by others.

Both Black and white farmers found themselves caught in the sharecropping and crop-lien systems. The workings of sharecropping and the crop-lien system are illustrated by the case of Matt Brown, a Mississippi farmer who borrowed money each year from a local merchant. He began 1892 with a debt of $226 held over from the previous year. By 1893, although he produced cotton worth $171, Brown’s debt had increased to $402, because he had borrowed $33 for food, $29 for clothing, $173 for supplies, and $112 for other items. Brown never succeeded in getting out of debt. He died in 1905; the last entry under his name in the merchant’s account book is a coffin.

Even as the rural South stagnated economically, southern cities experienced remarkable growth after the Civil War. As railroads penetrated the interior, they enabled merchants in market centers like Atlanta to trade directly with the North, bypassing coastal cities that had traditionally monopolized southern commerce. A new urban middle class of merchants, railroad promoters, and bankers reaped the benefits of the spread of cotton production in the postwar South.

Aftermath of Slavery

The United States, of course, was not the only society to confront the transition from slavery to freedom. Planters elsewhere held the same stereotypical views of Black laborers as were voiced by their counterparts in the United States—former slaves were supposedly lazy and lacking in ambition, and thought that freedom meant an absence of labor.

More information

“Chinese laborers at work on a Louisiana plantation during Reconstruction.”

For their part, former slaves throughout the hemisphere tried to carve out as much independence as possible in their daily lives. In many places, the plantations either fell to pieces, as in Haiti, or continued operating with a new labor force composed of indentured servants from India and China, as in Jamaica, Trinidad, and British Guiana. Southern planters in the United States brought in a few Chinese laborers in an attempt to replace freedmen, but the Chinese remained only a tiny proportion of the southern workforce.

But if struggles over land and labor united its postemancipation experience with that of other societies, in one respect the United States was unique. Only in the United States were former slaves, within two years of the end of slavery, granted the right to vote and, thus, given a major share of political power. Few anticipated this development when the Civil War ended. It came about as the result of one of the greatest political crises of American history—the battle between President Andrew Johnson and Congress over Reconstruction. The struggle resulted in profound changes in the nature of citizenship, the structure of constitutional authority, and the meaning of American freedom.