From Slavery to Freedom

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Southern Slave Ownership. During the decade before the Civil War three-quarters of southern whites did not own slaves, and 72 percent of those who did owned fewer than ten. In fact, half of the slave owners in the South had fewer than five. More than half of the nearly four million slaves in the South lived on plantations with more than twenty slaves. Approximately one-fourth lived among fifty or more slaves.

Slaves’ Work. The slaves’ experiences varied greatly according to where they lived, the sort of labor they were expected to perform, and the kind of masters they had. Slaves in South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi often lived on big plantations where blacks vastly outnumbered whites. These slaves were part of large work gangs that tended large-scale cash crops such as

cotton, tobacco, sugar, and rice. In the Upper South and the slave-holding border states such as Kentucky and Missouri, however, many slaves worked side-by-side with their owners, who grew a diverse assortment of smaller crops. These slaves had more-varied routines, including tasks such as digging irrigation ditches, hoeing and harvesting crops, feeding livestock, shoeing horses, repairing farm implements, and carpentry. On these smaller farms the master usually supervised his bondsmen’s work closely, while on a large plantation work gangs were usually under the direct supervision of a black slave driver, who was more likely than the master of a small farm to give slaves some control over the speed with which they worked. By the beginning of the Civil War, about half a million slaves lived in cities and towns, some as domestic servants, others temporarily hired from their masters, by businessmen such as merchants, factory owners, shipyards, sawmills, or lumberyards.

Treatment. Some masters developed an indulgent, patriarchal attitude toward “their people” and rarely resorted to harsh punishments. These planters usually attempted to keep slave families together and seldom sold slaves except in times of economic hardship or perhaps to settle a bequest. Other slaves experienced many hardships, such as long work hours, poor food, inadequate housing, clothing that was inadequate to protect them from winter cold or summer sun, and brutal treatment at the hands of irrational or incompetent overseers. Although it is difficult to generalize about the experience of American slaves before the Civil War, it is safe to say that most agricultural slaves worked fifteen to sixteen hours a day during the peak seasons (about 290 days a year), were sold at least twice, and were rarely able to maintain lifelong family ties.

A Typical Plantation Day. On large plantations slave families lived in slave villages of small cabins. They were awakened an hour before sunrise by a bell or a horn. After a frugal breakfast of corn cakes and perhaps some salt pork, the slave driver led them to the fields. Men worked alongside women, some of them pregnant or nursing. Elderly slaves and those too weak for field work stayed home and tended the gardens, watched babies, spun yarn and wove cloth, or did kitchen work. Small children carried water to the field workers and took them their midday meal, prepared by one of the kitchen slaves. After resting briefly, the field hands worked until dark. Domestic workers, who did all the indoor work, including cooking, cleaning, child care, and personal services for the planter’s family, generally remained on duty longer than field hands and had to be prepared to work at unpredictable hours.

Discipline. On large plantations overseers were usually responsible for managing crops and livestock, keeping records, supervising and disciplining slaves, and meeting crop quotas. They were also in charge of the slave drivers and meted out punishments that could range from fairly mild reproofs to brutal discipline, including whippings and brandings. Before his escape to

freedom, the prominent abolitionist Frederick Douglass experienced severe beatings after he was leased to a master who was determined to break Douglass’s spirit. Even pregnant women were not exempt from beatings; the overseer would force her to lie face down with her belly in a hole in the ground while he beat her. Some slaves were forced to wear shackles or head irons (a kind of cage fastened to the face). Another punishment was hanging a slave by the thumbs for hours. Of course, the worst punishment was to be sold away from one’s family, usually to a harsher owner.

The Promise of Freedom. News of the Civil War spread by an informal but highly effective underground news network that had long existed throughout the South. Mary Chesnut, who lived on a plantation in South Carolina, commented in her diary that it was impossible to tell how much slaves knew because they remained impassive in the presence of their owners. During the first year of the war slaves who fled to the camps of the invading Union army were considered “contraband property,” and some were actually returned to their owners. In March 1862, however, the U.S. Congress enacted an article of war forbidding the army to return escaped slaves to their masters, and the following July it passed the second Confiscation Act, stating that slaves who crossed into Union-held territory “shall be forever free.” This law not only made escape attractive, it cleared the way for former slaves to join the Union army. Some blacks celebrated emancipation several times, as they gained their freedom after a Union advance, lost it each time Confederate troops retook the territory, and regained it with each fresh Union victory. With most able-bodied white men away from home fighting for the Confederacy, escaping was much less dangerous for a slave than it had been in the days before secession. There was little an overseer or plantation mistress could do to hold slaves when blue-coated soldiers appeared in the district.

Steps toward Emancipation. Freedom came in stages. On 1 January 1863 President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that all slaves in areas held by the Confederacy on that day were “forever free.” The proclamation exempted Confederate territory in Union hands and the slave-holding states that had remained in the Union: Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, and—after it became a state in 1863—West Virginia. Some states had abolished slavery by the end of the war in April 1865, but in others emancipation did not come until the following December, with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which declared: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude . . . shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

Wartime Options. By late 1863 the trickle of runaway slaves, or “contrabands,” had swelled to a flood. Many of these people worked for the Union army as guides, laborers, or spies, and some became soldiers. For most black men, escaping from slavery meant leaving their wives and children behind, but a few women did run away as well, and some cooked and washed clothes for Union soldiers. Many Union officers reported that they had acquired hundreds of fugitive camp followers. If slaves found escape too difficult as the war came closer to home, they often took intermediate steps. Some slaves simply refused to work; others slowed the pace of their labors or destroyed livestock or implements. Still others negotiated with their mistresses to determine how much work they would do and how quickly they would perform it. Fears of insurrection gripped many southern white women whose husbands, sons, and fathers had left them behind to supervise plantations alone.

Black Soldiers. For many male slaves the surest way to ensure their freedom was enlistment in the Union army. After the second Confiscation Act was passed in July 1862, black regiments were formed in occupied New Orleans and on the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina, but full-scale enlistment of blacks did not begin until after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation the following January. By the end of the war nearly 179,000 black men had served in the U.S. Army; more than half came from Confederate states.

Postwar Reunions. After the war ended, the first task for many newly freed slaves was the search for loved ones who had been sold away. Because of the well-established underground communication network, a surprising number of freed slaves were able to locate family members. Others were less fortunate. There are heartbreaking stories of black people who had been forced by circumstance to remarry after losing a spouse through sale and then met the first husband or wife again after the war.

Transition to Free Labor. After gaining their freedom some former slaves attempted to scrape together a meager living by hunting small game, working as day laborers, or practicing a craft. Some plantation owners tried to help their former slaves, but the destruction of southern agriculture during the war, followed by extremely poor harvests in 1866 and 1867 and a severe economic depression in 1873, made life difficult for everyone. Many planters tried to reestablish the old gang-labor system for tending and harvesting their crops. They often created working conditions remarkably similar to those that existed under slavery. Most freedmen were unwilling to work under these dehumanizing conditions and dreamed of owning their own small farms. The era of gang-labor agriculture had come to an end, and planters had to find a new way to produce the South’s largest cash crop, cotton, with a labor force that refused to work under the old system.

The Freedmen’s Bureau. In March 1865, just before the end of the war, Congress established the Freedmen’s Bureau for a term of one year, giving it the responsibility of providing relief, education, and employment for former slaves. The following year its life was extended for another three years. The Freedmen’s Bureau and the occupying federal army helped freed people to work out labor contracts with plantation owners that were at least marginally fair, usually promising a year’s labor in return for a share of the planter’s crop. The bureau and the army also counteracted the so-called Black Codes enacted by southern states immediately after the end of the war. Varying from state to state, these laws mandated racial segregation of public places and a ban on interracial marriages, as well as declaring blacks ineligible to serve on juries or to testify against whites in court. They also instituted strict curfews and vagrancy laws aimed at blacks who had not signed work contracts with white planters. In some cases a black arrested for vagrancy could be compelled to work for anyone who payed his fine. During the existence of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the military occupation of the South enforcement of these laws was suspended, and some were repealed. After federal troops started pulling out of the southern states in 1872, however, laws similar to the old Black Codes were reinstated.

Forty Acres and a Mule. Rumors that the federal government had promised each freedman “forty acres and a mule” circulated throughout the South after the Civil War, fueling blacks’ dreams of owning their own small farms. There were a few small-scale attempts at land redistribution, but all were largely unsuccessful. The first occurred in January 1865 when Gen. William T. Sherman set aside some of the confiscated land on the Sea Islands of South Carolina to be divided into forty-acre farms for former slaves. In August of the same year, however, President Andrew Johnson ordered the land returned to its original owners, following a policy he had established in a 29 May 1865 proclamation promising restoration of property rights to any former Confederate who pledged his loyalty to the Union and promised to support emancipation. This proclamation also hampered the carrying out of a provision in the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of March 1865, which specified that each freedman or white southerner who had been loyal to the Union could lease forty acres of confiscated land with the option of buying it after three years. The Southern Homestead Act, which Congress passed in 1866, designated some 44 million acres of public land in five southern states to be divided into farms for freedmen and loyal whites. Much of this land had poor soil. Even freedmen who got land under these two laws fared poorly. Many lacked the finances to provide for their families until the first harvest and to pay for necessary livestock and farm equipment. By 1869 only four thousand black families had received land under the Southern Homestead Act, and many later lost their farms.

A BLACK SOLDIER’S LETTER HOME

John Boston, who escaped slavery in Maryland and joined a New York regiment of the Union army, wrote the following words to his wife from Virginia on 12 January 1862:

My Dear Wife

it is with grate joy I take this time to let you know Whare I am i am now in Safety in the 14th Regiment of Brooklyn this Day i can Adress you thank god as a free man I had a little truble in giting away But as the lord led the Children of Isrel to the land of Canon So he led me to a land Whare fredom Will rain in spite Of earth and hell Dear you must make your Self content i am free from al the Slavers lash and as you have chose the Wise plan Of Serving the lord i hope you Will pray Much and i Will I try by the help of god to Serv him With all my hart… i trust the time Will Come When We Shall meet again and if we dont met on earth We Will Meet in heven Whare Jesas raines … Write my Dear Soon as you ? Your Affectionate Husban Kiss Daniel For me

John Boston

Sharecropping. After their hopes of land ownership faded, many blacks entered into farm tenancy agreements with white plantation owners. Once they realized

that black people were no longer willing to work on plantations under the gang-labor system, many landowners divided their property into smaller plots, which they leased to tenant farmers in exchange for a share of the crop grown on that land, usually half. This system allowed plantation owners to continue producing important cash crops such as cotton while satisfying, in a limited way, the freedmen’s desire for independence. The practical realities of the sharecropping system, however, all favored the planter. Sharecroppers were forced to buy tools, seed, and other farmer supplies on credit from local merchants who were often the planters themselves and charged inflated prices. By the time they harvested their crops, sharecroppers were usually deeply in debt, and crop failures could drive them into bankruptcy. If a dispute arose between a planter and his tenant, the laws generally favored the landowner.

The Ku Klux Klan. During the Reconstruction period the Ku Klux Klan sparked terror among freed blacks throughout the South. Founded by six young Confederate veterans in Tennessee in December 1865, the Klan had spread to all former Confederate states by 1868 and had become a terrorist organization dedicated to reasserting white supremacy and preventing newly enfranchised blacks from voting. One freedman in Alabama reported that in 1869 his home was invaded by Klansmen, who beat him, raped a young girl who was visiting his wife, and wounded a neighbor “because we voted the radical [Republican] ticket.” The Klan used its vigilantetactics to support the Democratic Party in its efforts to turn out Republican-dominated state governments throughout the South. Anyone connected with the hated Republican Party or who attempted to help former slaves could be targeted for beatings or even murder. Most of the victims of violence, however, were black people, especially those who had become active in the Republican Party or had become local political leaders.

Sources

Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992);

Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: Norton, 1989);

Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1865-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988);

Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1974);

Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South (New York: Knopf, 1956).