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his slave quarters, changed his name, probably deserted his family, joined a new church and attended many revivals, bought a gun and acquired a dog, and went hunting and fishing to his heart's content.11 The house servants and the artisans, who were the best and most intelligent of the negroes, began to go to the towns. Many were attracted by the reports of confiscation and division of property, and stopped working. Negro women, desiring to be as white ladies, refused to work in the fields, to cook, wash, or to perform other menial duties. It was years before this "freedom" prejudice of the negro women against domestic service died out. The precarious support offered by the bureau attracted many negroes to town and made agricultural labor unreliable. The negro would work one or two days in the week, go to town two days, and wander about the rest of the time. Under such conditions there was no hope of continuing the old patriarchal system, and new plans, modeled on what they had heard of free labor, were tried by the planters. In the white counties the ex-soldiers went to work as before the war, but they had come home from the army too late to plant full crops, and few had supplies enough to last until the crops should be gathered. In the white counties the negroes were so few as to escape the serious attention of the bureau, and consequently they worked fairly well at what they could get to do.12

THE FREEDMEN'S BUREAU SYSTEM

The first work of the bureau was to break up the labor system that had been partially constructed, and to endeavor to establish a new system based on the northern free-labor system and the old slave-hiring system, with the addition of a good deal of pure theory. The bureau was to act as a labor clearing-house; it was to have entire control of labor; contracts must be written in

"The crop of cotton in 1865 was 75,305 bales; in 1866, 429,102 bales; in 1867, 239,516 (showing influence of political agitation); in 1868, 366,193 bales; and in 1869, 429,482 bales. (See Hodgson's Manual, 1869 and 1871, and the Census of 1870.) In 1849 the crop was 564,429 bales, and in 1859, 989,955 bales. 12 New York Herald, July 17, 1865; Reid, After the War, pp. 211, 218, 219; Tillet in Century, Vol. XI; reports of General Swayne, 1865, 1866; Van de Graaf in Forum, Vol. XXI, pp. 330, 339; DeBow's Review, February, 1866, p. 220; oral accounts.

accordance with the regulations of the bureau, and must be registered by the agent, who charged large fees. Unskilled labor was classified into three grades, and men and women were to be paid $10, $8, and $6 per month, according to the grade, and halfgrown children $6.18 In addition, they were to have food, full quarters, clothing, medical attendance, and schooling for their children. The working-day was ten hours from April to October, and nine hours from November to March. The task system, as well as the overseer, was forbidden, and the "share" system was discouraged. Wages were secured by a lien on crops or land, and this was prior to any other lien. Breach of contract was tried by bureau agent, bureau court, provost-marshal, or military commission. No contract for a longer time than six months was approved. The chain-gang hard labor system of punishment of convicts was abolished. Where the laborer received no supplies his pay was fixed at the rate of wages paid for able-bodied slaves before the war. If a negro was found working under a verbal contract, his employer was arrested or warned to conform to regulations. Planters were continually in trouble with the bureau agent, who summoned them before him on the slightest pretexts. The lien on the crop prevented the moving or sale of the crop, unless the negro consented; yet the planter had to sell before he could pay wages."

14

The result of these regulations was to destroy industry where an alien bureau agent was stationed, unless the agent was purchasable; for the planters could not afford to have their land worked on such terms. In some of the counties, where the native magistrates served as bureau agents, no attention was paid to the rules of the bureau, and the people floundered 18 Skilled labor should receive $2.50, $2, or $1.50 per day.

14 Montgomery Mail, May 12, 1865; Howard's Circular, May 30, 1865; Circular No. 11, War Department, July 12, 1865; Huntsville Advocate, July 26, 1865; Swayne's reports, 1865, 1866; General Order No. 12, Department of Alabama, August 30, 1865; General Order No. 13, September, 1865; Selma Times, December 4, 1865. While General Howard was in Mobile, some of the planters asked him to bind to them for a term of years their former slaves, in case the latter were willing. Howard was, of course, horrified at such a proposal. The so-called "black laws" passed by the legislature in 1865-66 were scarcely heard of by the people who hired negroes, and were never in force.

along trying to develop a workable basis of existence. In the districts infested by the bureau agents the negroes had fantastic notions of what freedom meant. On one plantation they demanded that the plantation bell be no longer rung to summon the hands to and from work, because it was too much like slavery.15 In various places they refused to work, and congregated about the bureau offices, awaiting the expected division of property, when they would get the "forty acres and one old gray mule." When wages were paid, they believed that each should receive the same amount, whether his labor had been good or bad, and whether the laborer was present or absent, sick or well. In one instance a planter was paying his men in corn according to the time each had worked. The negroes objected and got an order from the bureau agent that the division should be made equally. The planter read the order (which the negro could not read), and at once ordered the division as before. The negroes, thinking the bureau had ordered it, were satisfied. In the canebrake region the agents were afraid of the great planters, and did not interfere with the negroes except to organize them into Union Leagues; but elsewhere in the Black Belt the planter could not afford to hire negroes on the terms fixed by the bureau.18

NORTHERN AND FOREIGN IMMIGRATION

With the breakup of the slave system the planter found himself with much more land than he knew what to do with. He could get no reliable labor, he had no cash capital, and in many cases he offered his best lands for sale for low prices. The planters wanted to attract northern and foreign immigration and capital into the country; the cotton-planter sought for a northern partner who could furnish the capital. Owing to the almost religious regard of the negro for his northern deliverers, many white landholders thought that northern men, especially discharged soldiers, might be able to control negro labor better than southern General Swayne, the head of the bureau in the state, said

men.

15 Somers, Southern States, p. 130.

10 Southern Magazine, January, 1874; Selma Messenger, November 15, 1865; Harper's Monthly Magazine, January, 1874; Selma Times, December 4, 1865; oral accounts; DeBow's Review, February, 1866.

that the negroes had more confidence in a "blue coat" than in a native, and that among the larger planters northern men, as partners or overseers, were in great demand.1

17

For a short time after the close of the war northern men in considerable numbers planned to go into the business of cottonraising. DeBow 18 gives a description of the would-be cottonplanters who came from the North to show the southern people how to raise cotton with free negro labor. They had notebooks and guidebooks full of close and exact tables of costs and profits, and from them figured out vast returns. They acknowledged that the negro might not work for the southern man, but they were sure that he would work for them. They were self-confident, and would listen to no advice from experienced planters, whom they laughed at as old fogies, but from their notebooks and tables they gave one another much information about the new machinery useful in cotton culture, about rules for cultivation, how to control labor, etc. They estimated that each laborer's family would make $1,000 clear gain each year. DeBow would not say that they were wrong, but he said he thought they should hasten a little more slowly. Northern energy and capital flowed in; plantations were bought and the various industries of plantation life started; and mills and factories were established. Because of the paralyzed condition of industry, the southern people welcomed these signs of prosperity, but they were very skeptical of their final success. The northern settler had confidence in the negro, and gave him unlimited credit or supplies; consequently, in a few years, he was financially ruined and had to turn his attention to politics and to exploiting the negro in that field in order to make a living.19 Both as employer and as manager the northern man failed to control negro labor. He expected the negro to be the equal of the Yankee white. The negroes themselves were dis

17 Swayne to A. F. Perry, New York Herald, August 28, 1865; New York Herald, July 17, 1865; Reid, After the War, pp. 211-19; DeBow's Review, February, 1866, pp. 213, 220; Somers, Southern States, p. 131.

18 DeBow's Review, February, 1866.

19 Many of the carpet-bag statesmen were northern men who had failed at cotton-planting or as overseers.

gusted with northern employers. Truman reported, after an experience of one season, that "it is the almost universal testimony of the negroes themselves, who have been under the supervision of both classes-and I have talked with many with a view to this point-that they prefer to labor for a southern employer." 20

Northern capital came in after the war, but northern labor did not, though the planters offered every inducement. Land was offered to white purchasers at ridiculously low rates, but the northern white laborer did not come. He was afraid of the South with its planters and negroes. The poorer classes of native whites, however, profited by the low prices and secured a foothold on the better lands. So general was the unbelief in the value of the free negro as a laborer, especially in the bureau districts, and so signally had all inducements failed to bring native white laborers from the North, that determined efforts were made to obtain white labor from abroad. Immigration societies were formed, with officers in the state and headquarters in the northern cities. These societies undertook to send south laboring people in families-especially German-at so much per head. The planter turned with hope to white labor, of the superiority of which he had so long been hearing, and he wished very much to give it a trial. The advertisements in the newspapers read much like the old slave advertisements: so many head of healthy, industrious Germans of good character delivered f. o. b., New York, at so much per head. One of the white labor agencies in Alabama undertook to furnish "immigrants of any nativity and in any quantity" to take the place of negroes. Children were priced at the rate of $50 a year; women, $100; men, $150; they themselves providing board and clothes. One of every six Germans was warranted to speak English.21 Most of these agencies were 20 Report to the President, April 9, 1866; also Harper's Monthly Magazine, January, 1874; Mrs. Leigh, Ten Years in a Georgia Plantation; oral accounts. On account of the general failure of the northern men who invested capital in the South in 1865 and 1866, there grew up in the business world an unfavorable feeling against the South, which for the remainder of reconstruction days had to struggle against adverse business opinion. (Harper's Magazine, January, 1874.)

21 Selma Times, December 4, 1865. Nearly all the newspapers printed advertisements of the immigration societies.

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