Been in the Storm So Long (79 page)

Historical analogies came quickly to mind. The freed slaves now faced a doom not unlike that of the other inferior and degraded species in their midst—the Indian. If anything, the African race might diminish at an even more rapid rate. “They’re a-goin’ faster’n the Injins,” a Georgia planter
insisted. “The negro is the most inferior of the human races,” Grace Elmore argued from her home in South Carolina several months before the first of her servants defected, “far beneath the Indian or Hindu, and how can it be expected that they will be the white mans equal. It will be with them as with the Indian.” But like most, she held out a modicum of hope: “The negro will disappear except where he is kept in subjection, and consequently where it will be [in] the interest of the master to promote the welfare of body and soul.”
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The logic of the argument seemed irresistible. If a master did not look out for the welfare of the ex-slave, no one else would, including the ex-slave himself. Nor could the unfortunate Negro be blamed for the innate vices and defects he shared with most tropical peoples—what a Mississippi planter called the “indisposition to provide for the future by sustained industry and persevering efforts.” The typical Negro, as the whites viewed him, worked only to satisfy immediate wants; he was careless or thoughtless of anything beyond the present. Unlike most whites, he was not motivated by a desire for gain; hence, he was apt to do nothing after earning a little money until starvation forced him back to work.
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If the arguments about improvidence and the absence of initiative had a familiar ring about them, they had traditionally characterized upper-class and employer attitudes toward laboring peoples, white and black. A Georgia planter reflected this view when he advised some fellow planters that the problems they now faced were class rather than racial in nature. “I’ll tell you how ’t is: a free nigger’s jest like any low-down white fellow,—pull off your coat and work with him, and he does well enough; put it on and go off to town, and he shirks.”
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In forecasting the doom of the Afro-American race, many whites hastened to add their regrets that this should be the outcome of emancipation. The paternal spirit manifested itself in expressions of sympathy and remorse and in outbursts of nostalgia. “If you had seen them in slave days,” one planter told an English visitor, “what a merry, rollicking, laughing set they were! Now they are care-worn and sad. You hardly hear them laugh now as they used to do.” When the first postwar governor of Mississippi declared that the Negro was “destined to extinction, beyond all doubt,” he thought it “alarming” and “appalling” and hoped he might be mistaken; a South Carolina magistrate “pitied” the freedmen for their inability to understand the freedom thrust upon them; and the Virginia planter who expected the race to “first become pauper and then disappear” still wished the freedmen well and “sincerely” hoped they would disappoint his expectations. But there was good reason to suspect that professions of this kind were not altogether sincere. That is, the former ruling class had a peculiar stake in black failure.
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While traveling by rail through the countryside of western Tennessee, J. T. Trowbridge, the northern journalist and author, caught occasional glimpses of homeless ex-slaves huddled around the campfires in their makeshift settlements, warming their hands and watching with curiosity
as the train rolled by them. The conversation he overheard of his fellow passengers might have been repeated almost anywhere in the South when native whites came across such scenes:

What dismayed Trowbridge were not the remarks themselves (he had heard them so often) but the expressions of “grim exultation” and the “ ‘I-told-you-so!’ air of triumph” that accompanied them, as though their prophecies were their desires. “The slave-owners, having foretold that freedom would prove fatal to the bondman, experienced a satisfaction in seeing their predictions come true. The usual words of sympathy his condition suggested had all the hardness and hollowness of cant.”
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To think that the freedmen could possibly succeed defied logic and nature and contradicted the very reasons they had been held as slaves. How much more reassuring to argue that emancipation—unless properly controlled—sealed the race’s doom and that the abolitionists had succeeded only in expediting racial suicide. This belief rested, of course, on the popular assumption that the character and capacity of the Negro remained immutable; emancipation only filled his head with dreams and aspirations which could never be fulfilled. But that in itself raised a potentially dangerous situation requiring the utmost vigilance and understanding. If blacks should aspire to rise above their appointed station in life, the results were predictable. “Of course, they’ll fail,” an Alabama planter assured a northern visitor; “we have no uneasiness on that score; but we are the friends of these people, and we are sorry to see them expose themselves to so much misery in making attempts that we know from the outset must be abortive. Isn’t it better to have the laws in some way take the matter out of their hands and make them work?”
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If the African race was to survive, then, the old slaveholding class deemed it essential that they determine the conditions of survival—preferably a forced dependency allowing the freedman little or no opportunity to prove his own individual worth. Before emancipation, the planters had argued that they kept the Negro in bondage for his own benefit. Now they could contend that the freedman’s welfare demanded a condition of tutelage and a system of constructive compulsion. After all, to expect that self-interest alone would motivate ex-slaves, as it did whites, to be productive laborers was to betray ignorance of the race itself. “You don’t know the niggers,” a young Virginian told a northern reporter. “No nigger, free or slave, in these Southern States, nor in any part of the known world, ever would work or ever will work unless he’s made to.”
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A
LTHOUGH THE FORMER SLAVEHOLDERS
constituted a small minority of the white population of the South, nearly everyone still looked to them for leadership and supported the urgent need to impose controls on the newly freed blacks. To play on white fears of the Negro, moreover, as most planters recognized, served an important function in maintaining their own supremacy and in muting class antagonisms. Despite the abolition of slavery, the attitudes, fears, and assumptions which had helped to shape and reinforce that institution for over two centuries remained virtually unaffected. When the Freedmen’s Bureau commissioner in Mississippi and Louisiana commented on the state of white opinion in the post-emancipation South, he invited attack as a northern partisan but the evidence was altogether too compelling to discount his conclusions:

No doubt some southern whites might have thought this a crude characterization of their thinking, but nearly every white man and woman readily agreed to the wisdom of restraining and controlling black men and women in ways that were not thought to be necessary for themselves. “The whites seem wholly unable to comprehend that freedom for the negro means the same thing as freedom for them,” a northern reporter concluded after his travels in the postwar South. “I did not anywhere find a man who could see that laws should be applicable to all persons alike; and hence even the best men hold that each State must have a negro code.”
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Despite a white rhetoric that doomed the freedmen to self-extinction, most planters needed and demanded their labor. And despite all the talk about a childlike race, most whites expected blacks to work and behave like
mature adults. Although the war and emancipation had, in the view of whites, filled the heads of their former slaves with unrealistic expectations and rendered their labor erratic, they refused to give up on them altogether, at least not until time-honored remedies proved ineffectual. Whether he had ever owned slaves or not, almost every white man remained convinced that only rigid controls and compulsion would curtail the natural propensity of blacks toward idleness and vagrancy, induce them to labor for others, and correct their mistaken notions about freedom and working for themselves. Claiming an intimate and exclusive knowledge of the Negro’s character (“We are the only ones that understand the nigger”), the former slaveholder demanded the necessary force to back up the traditional rights of authority over “his people,” including the punishment of deviant behavior. Without compulsion of some kind, the experiment in free labor could not succeed. It was as simple as that.
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The self-evident truth which the planter class now imparted to the freed slaves was that they must either work for white folks or starve. That advice differed in no significant way from what Federal officials had been telling blacks since the moment of liberation. “When that lesson has been thoroughly learned and inwardly digested,” a Macon newspaper declared, “the negro may perhaps be of some value.” Whatever sympathies Northerners pretended for the Negro, southern whites assumed they could not object to a principle so universally accepted. “All we want,” a South Carolina planter told a northern visitor, “is that our Yankee rulers should give us the same privileges with regard to the control of labor which they themselves have.” When pressed for his understanding of northern labor controls, he indicated that laborers were bound by law to make an annual contract and could be punished for any violations. Told that no such laws existed in the North, the planter seemed incredulous. “How do you manage without such laws? How can you get work out of a man unless you compel him in some way?” The visitor replied that “Natural laws” sufficed, with the best laborers commanding the best wages. “You can’t do that way with niggers,” the planter immediately retorted. When comparing the two labor systems, some southern whites insisted, in fact, that this distinction be understood—the presence of the African race made the southern situation unique and demanded a unique response. “Northern laborers are like other men,” one planter explained, but “southern laborers are nothing but niggers, and you can’t make anything else out of them. They’re not controlled by the same motives as white men, and unless you have power to compel them, they’ll only work when they can’t beg or steal enough to keep from starving.”
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The urgency of the situation seemed obvious enough. To plant a crop without knowing how many laborers might be around to harvest it made postwar agricultural operations a highly risky venture. Henry W. Ravenel, for example, thought no planter would want to engage in such operations “without some guarantee that his labour is to be controlled & continued under penalties & forfeitures.” To make the free labor system work, some
planters suggested that the ex-slaves be apprenticed to their former masters or to an employer of their choice. The apprenticeship laws enacted by a number of states imposed such controls on blacks under eighteen years of age who were orphans or whose parents could not or refused to support them. Such laws provided some planters with a cheap supply of involuntary labor (if he were deemed a “suitable” person, the former owner of the minor was given preference); at the same time, the arbitrary power these laws usually gave to the courts to bind out such children without the consent of their parents revived the specter of families forcibly separated.
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The idea of apprenticing nearly four million ex-slaves to their former masters never received serious consideration. Nor did the proposals to distribute the freed blacks equally around the country or to colonize them elsewhere make any sense to planters who desperately needed laborers.
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Anxious to regain control over their blacks, but not entirely indifferent to northern reactions, the planter class preferred to establish a docile black labor force in the guise of fulfilling their Christian duties and obligations to those who had once served them so well. Claiming sympathy for their former slaves, they demanded the controls necessary to make them once again “happy and prosperous.” To control and regulate the freedmen was to advance and protect the best interests of this unfortunate race, to help them restrain their “worst passions,” to redeem them from certain relapse into semi-barbarism, to save them from “inevitable failure,” to disabuse their minds of false illusions, and to assist them in finding their proper place in postwar southern society. “If they cannot (as they never can) occupy the places of legislators, judges, teachers, &c,” a North Carolina planter explained, “they may be useful as tillers of the soil, as handicraftsmen, as servants in various situations, and be happy in their domestic and family relations.… It is our Christian duty to encourage them to these ends.”
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That was putting the best possible face on the legislation adopted by most of the ex-Confederate states to regulate the freedmen—laws that came to be known collectively as the Black Codes.