Black Immobility and Free Labor: The Freedmen's Bureau and the Relocation of Black Labor, 1865-1868

BLACK IMMOBILITY AND FREE LABOR: THE FREEDMEN'S BUREAU AND THE RELOCATION OF BLACK LABOR, 1865-1868 William Cohen Labor mobility is essential to any modern economic system. Without such mobility, it would be impossible to shift workers from less productive work to more productive work and the system would collapse of its own rigidity. In the antebellum South black labor mobility came largely from the domestic slave trade and from the slave hiring system. Brutal as these institutions were, they played an essential role in the southern economy by making possible the easy transfer of labor to places where it was most needed. ' The Civil War destroyed these mechanisms of long distance mobility and, at the moment of emancipation, no institutions operated to transfer labor from one area to another. Paradoxically, this breakdown occurred just when blacks across the South were beginning to move about freely for the first time. In the months after emancipation they walked the roads to test freedom, to find family, and to get local work.2 The existence of local mobility did not change the fact that the destruction of the slave trade and the hiring system had eliminated the only formal southern institutions that had previously worked to maintain a regionwide equilibrium between labor supply and demand. In concrete terms this meant that if there were major pockets of black unemployment in Virginia and significant labor shortages in Arkansas, no institutional arrangements existed at the moment of emancipation to move labor from one place to the other.3 1 Frederic Bancroft, Skve Trading in the Old South (Baltimore, 1931; reprint ed., New York: Frederick Ungar, 1959); Richard Sutch, "The Breeding of Slaves for Sale and the Westward Expansion of Slavery;" in Stanley L. Engerman and Eugene Genovese, eds., Race and Shvery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 199-210; Michael Tadman, "Slave Trading in the Antebellum South: An Estimate of the Extent of the Inter-Regional Slave Trade," Journal ofAmerican Studies 13 (August 1979): 195-220. For a contrary view see Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 1:47-58. 2 Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), pp. 292-335, esp. 305 and 322. 3 Within a very short time a new occupation would arise to replace that of the slave trader. Labor agents would play the same role in the postbellum economyas had the slave 222CIVIL WAR HISTORY Into this vacuum stepped the Freedmen's Bureau, the northern agency overseeing the transition to a freelabor system. Beset by massive pockets of unemployment and by deep and genuine concerns that giving long-term aid to freedmen who could not find work would foster dependency, the bureau had a strong interest in establishing mechanisms of mobility that would facilitate the transfer of black labor from one part of the South to another. At the same time, the bureau was uniquely positioned to effect such transfers. It knew where labor was scarce and where it was plentiful, and it had the capacity to provide free transportation to those who wanted work but could not afford to go where the jobs were. Between 1865 and 1868 the bureau transported black laborers to jobs in Texas, Mississippi, Massachusetts, Illinois, and points in-between. According to its own count, in these years it gave free transportation to 29,402 freedmen. This figure represents more than one freedman out of every two hundred and is known to understate greatly the actual amount of aid given.4 This paper will explore the efforts of the Freedmen's Bureau to restore traders before the war. Still, at the moment of emancipation there were no slave traders and no labor agents. Thoughthe evidence is scanty, it seems clear thatthe freedmen wanted nothing to do with the old slave traders and that, by and large, the labor agents who emerged in the postwar era were not the same people who had earlier conducted the slave trade. The new occupation evolved quickly and did bear some resemblance to the slave trade of old, but this was...