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160 | 10 “Free Ourselves, but Deprived of Our Children” Freedchildren and Their Labor after the Civil War Mary Niall Mitchell “I am the mother of a woman Dina who is now dead. My Daughter Dina had a child by the name of Porter.” This is how Cyntha Nickols began her appeal, in 1867, to the assistant commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Louisiana, hoping that he might help her retrieve her grandson from the man who had once owned her. “I am a Colored woman former slave of a Mr Sandy Spears of the parish of East Feliciana La.,” she explained. Porter, “now about Eleven years of age,” had been bound to Spears under an apprenticeship, a labor contract that would leave the boy under Spears’s control until he became an adult, without her consent. Apparently unable to convince the local Bureau agent to help her, she directed her plea to his superiors, choosing her words carefully. “I do not wish to wrongfully interfere with the arrangement of those who are endeavoring to properly control us black people,” Nickols explained with pointed deference to the Bureau’s authority. “I feel confident that they are doing the best they can for us and our present condition—but I am the Grandmother of Porter—his father Andrew is now and has been for sometime a soldier in the army of the U.S. he is I am told some where in California I do not know only that he is not here to see to the interest of his child I am not by any means satisfied with the present arrangement made for my Grand Child Porter.” She had known Mr. Spears “for many years” and would write “nothing of his faults but I have the means of educating my Grand Child of doing good part by him.” Porter’s uncle, “lately discharged from the army of the U.S.,” would be able to help care for Porter. “We want him we do not think Mr. Spears a suitable person to control this boy.” Nickols placed before the Bureau every available qualification for her guardianship of Porter: her blood kinship, her ability to provide for his “Free Ourselves, but Deprived of Our Children” | 161 education, and the military service of his father and uncle. She also argued that Spears was unfit: Spears was “very old and infirm” and “for many years addicted to the use of ardent spirits. This fact I do not like to mention but truth requires me to speak now is there no chance to get my little boy the agent of this place will not listen to me,” she explained, “and I am required to call [on] you or I must let my Grand-Child go, which greatly grieves me.” Nickols closed with another plea, signing her letter: “Truly yours a poor old black woman.”1 In addition to facing down her former owner over the right to raise her grandchild, however, Cyntha Nickols also had to appeal to the federal government , in the form of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was charged with promoting the successful transition to free labor in the South. The Bureau of Refugees , Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, or “Freedmen’s Bureau,” founded in early 1865, was charged with the management of abandoned lands, the facilitation of labor contracts, the distribution of food and clothing, and the establishment of schools for freedpeople, among other duties.2 Often the Bureau’s most contentious role, as James DeGrey’s position between Cyntha Nickols and Mr. Spears illustrates, was as an intermediary between former slaveholders and freedpeople. The Bureau’s overarching concern in governing these disputes was to keep agricultural production in the South from faltering by encouraging the signing of labor contracts. But as many a Bureau agent discovered, the signing of a labor contract in the postbellum South was not a purely economic transaction. The most pressing problem in the South after emancipation, as many historians have noted, was what kind of labor system would replace chattel slavery. The process of slave emancipation throughout the Americas in the nineteenth century was fueled by arguments, both ideological and material, about who would define the “free” in free labor and how that would translate into profit and loss, wages and shares, sustenance and want. The problem of freedom, in the largest sense, was how to reconcile the conflicting visions of the future that slave emancipation engendered. Struggles over the labor of black children such as...

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