The South’s grave economic problems complicated the rebuilding of its political system. The section had never been as prosperous as the North, and wartime destruction left it desperately poor by any standard. In the long run the abolition of slavery released immeasurable quantities of human energy previously stifled, but the immediate effect was to create confusion. Freedom to move without a pass, to “see the world,” was one of the former slaves’ most cherished benefits of emancipation. Understandably, many at first equated legal freedom with freedom from having to earn a living, a tendency reinforced for a time by the willingness of the Freedmen’s Bureau to provide rations and other forms of relief in war-devastated areas. Most, however, soon accepted the fact that they must earn a living; a small plot of land of their own (“40 acres and a mule”) would complete their independence.
This objective was forcefully supported by the relentless Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, whose hatred of the planter class was pathological. “The property of the chief rebels should be seized,” he stated. If the lands of the richest “70,000 proud, bloated and defiant rebels” were confiscated, the federal government would obtain 394 million acres. Every adult male ex-slave could easily be supplied with 40 acres. The beauty of his scheme, Stevens insisted, was that “nine-tenths of the [southern] people would remain untouched.” Dispossessing the great planters would make the South “a safe republic,” its lands cultivated by “the free labor of intelligent citizens.” If the plan drove the planters into exile, “all the better.”
Although Stevens’s figures were faulty, many Radicals agreed with him. “We must see that the freedmen are established on the soil,” Senator Sumner declared. “The great plantations, which have been so many nurseries of the rebellion, must be broken up, and the freedmen must have the pieces.” Stevens, Sumner, and others who wanted to give land to the freedmen weakened their case by associating it with the idea of punishing the former rebels; the average American had too much respect for property rights to support a policy of confiscation.
Aside from its vindictiveness, the extremists’ view was simplistic. Land without tools, seed, and other necessities would have done the freedmen little good. Congress did throw open 46 million acres of poor-quality federal land in the South to blacks under the
Southern Homestead Act, but few settled on it. (Of the 3,000 former slaves who filed claims under its provisions in Florida, Whoopi Goldberg’s great-great-grandparents were among the 300 who succeeded in fulfilling its terms.) Establishing former slaves on small farms with adequate financial aid would have been of incalculable benefit to them. This would have been practicable, but extremely expensive. It was not done.
The former slaves therefore had either to agree to work for their former owners or strike out on their own. White planters, influenced by the precipitous decline of sugar production in Jamaica and other Caribbean islands that had followed the abolition of slavery there, expected freed blacks to be incapable of self-directed effort. If allowed to become independent farmers, they would either starve to death or descend into barbarism. Of course the blacks did neither. True, the output of cotton and other southern staples declined precipitously after slavery was abolished. Observers soon came to the conclusion that a free black produced much less than a slave had produced. “You can’t get only about two-thirds as much out of ’em now as you could when they were slaves,” an Arkansas planter complained.
However, the decline in productivity was not caused by the inability of free blacks to work independently. They simply chose no longer to work like slaves. They let their children play instead of forcing them into the fields. Mothers devoted more time to childcare and housework, less to farm labor. Elderly blacks worked less.
Noting these changes, white critics spoke scornfully of black laziness and shiftlessness. “You cannot make the negro work without physical compulsion,” was the common view. Even General Oliver O. Howard, head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, used the phrase “wholesome compulsion” in describing the policy of forcing blacks to sign exploitive labor contracts. A leading southern magazine complained in 1866 that black women now expected their husbands “to support them in idleness.” It would never have made such a comment about white housewives. Moreover, studies show that emancipated blacks earned almost 30 percent more than the value of the subsistence provided by their former masters.
The family life of ex-slaves was changed in other ways. Male authority increased when husbands became true heads of families. (Under slavery the ultimate responsibility for providing for women and children was the master’s.) When blacks became citizens, the men acquired rights and powers denied to all women, such as the right to hold public office and
Serve on juries. Similarly, black women became more like white women, devoting themselves to separate “spheres” where their lives revolved around housekeeping and child rearing.
Many slaves understood that illiteracy was an implement of bondage: Here a young African American woman in Mt. Meigs, Alabama, teaches her mother to read.
Sharecroppers pick cotton in the late 1800s.
World History
