After Slavery: Race, Labor, and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South

2. “Erroneous and Incongruous Notions of Liberty”: Urban Unrest and the Origins of Radical Reconstruction in New Orleans, 1865–1868

2  “Erroneous and Incongruous Notions of Liberty” Urban Unrest and the Origins of Radical Reconstruction in New Orleans, 1865–1868 James Illingworth In January 1866, Freedmen’s Bureau agent William Dougherty reported on the radicalization and unrest among black workers in Algiers, a suburb of New Orleans, Louisiana. Contrary to Dougherty’s advice, agricultural workers in the vicinity of Algiers were “delaying to make a permanent contract” with the planters, causing a serious labor shortage. Dougherty noted several reasons for the behavior of the freedpeople under his jurisdiction. In the first instance, he believed that the plantation workers were holding out for wages “at the rate of fifty cents per hour” because black longshoremen in New Orleans had recently been on strike for such a raise. Second, Dougherty attributed the recalcitrance of black workers to the presence of “freedmen recently discharged from the army” who he felt were possessed of “erroneous and incongruous notions of liberty.” And third, the Bureau agent noted that plantation hands in the vicinity of New Orleans enjoyed the option of going “to the city to work on the levee and the steamboats,” where wages were higher and “paid more frequently.”1 Dougherty’s report reveals important themes in the early history of Reconstruction in New Orleans. First and foremost, it shows that labor in the urban economy gave freedpeople the confidence and economic muscle to forcefully advance their own vision of the postslavery South. The clash between these expectations and the aspirations of returning Confederates would play a major role in the coming of Radical Reconstruction in New Orleans. Dougherty’s report also demonstrates the leadership that black veterans were to play in the popular politics of early Reconstruction in New Orleans. Just six months after Dougherty wrote his report, it was the determi- 36 James Illingworth nation of black veterans in particular to reopen the Louisiana constitutional convention and win the right to vote that provoked the racial violence of the New Orleans Massacre, paving the way for congressional intervention in the South and the onset of Radical Reconstruction. Finally, Dougherty’s report suggests the ways in which black urban working people were able to exert an influence over their rural counterparts, pioneering forms of protest such as the strike that would contribute to the radicalization of black workers in the countryside. While historians have devoted relatively little attention to the particular experiences and contributions of the urban popular classes during the Civil War and Reconstruction, some rich scholarship does exist. Scholars of the antebellum South have frequently noted that cities such as New Orleans created major problems of control for the owners and employers of slave labor.2 Although Steven Hahn’s pathbreaking A Nation under Our Feet focuses primarily on the experiences and activism of rural African Americans, it also demonstrates the crucial role urban black men played in the politics of Reconstruction , particularly in the years immediately following the Civil War.3 The most important study of post–Civil War urban radicalism remains Peter Rachleff’s study of black labor organizing in Richmond, Virginia.4 Recent works by David Cecelski and Thomas Buchanan show that black workers in the commercial South built organizing traditions that persisted through the antebellum period and extended into the 1860s and 1870s.5 Michael Fitzgerald has shown how class divisions within the African American community produceda steadyradicalizationof the Reconstructionprocess.6 Tera Hunter has revealed how black working women in Atlanta used the relative freedom of the postwar urban South to build a cohesive—and sometimes militant— working-class community.7 In this essay I build on the work of these scholars to show how the popular classes of one Southern city contributed to the coming of Radical Reconstruction . I identify two distinct phases in this process. First, popular mobilization in New Orleans contributed to the crisis of presidential Reconstruction in the summer of 1866. In the year immediately following the end of the war, the radicalization and mobilization of working people clashed with the reactionary expectations of many returning Confederates, resulting in social turmoil and an explosion of racial violence in 1866. The events in New Orleans , along with similar scenes in other Southern locales, helped convince many Northerners that President Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction policy had been far too lenient and was allowing the return to power of the former rebels. In this context, congressional Republicans seized control of federal Urban Unrest and...