Hunting and Fishing in the New South: Black Labor and White Leisure after the Civil War

• 1 “You Can’t Starve a Negro”: Hunting and Fishing and African Americans’ Subsistence in the Post-Emancipation South
• Chapter
• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. 10-44
• View Citation
• Additional Information

CHAPTER 1

“You Can’t Starve a Negro”
Hunting and Fishing and African Americans’ Subsistence in the Post-Emancipation South

We try to treat them fairly, and to impress them with the
idea that we take an interest in them, which we really do.
Yet with all this, when fish bite, they will go fishing, no
matter how important their labor may be.

— Southern Planter and Farmer editorial on the state of African-American labor, 1872

I ain’t never stole a moufful somepin’ t’eat for [my family]
in all my life. It’s honest vittles dey et, and varmints
I’s killed in de woods, ’ca’se us raised chillum fast, and us
had a heap of ’em, sixteen if I ’members right, and soon’s
I found out dat I could help feed ’em dat way, I done a
heap of hunting. And everybody knows I’s a good hunter.

— Testimony of former slave Josh Horn to Works Progress Administration interviewer

In December 1900, farmer George Washington Trimble of Augusta County, Virginia, received a letter from a fellow landowner voicing a complaint common among landed Southerners in the decades after the Civil War: the difficulty in keeping and managing African-American farm labor. The letter recounted an incident involving a laborer both men knew, William Carter. Mrs. Bell, a neighbor of the letter writer, was looking for farmhands. Having employed Carter in the past, Trimble’s friend recommended him to Mrs. Bell—a gesture he came to regret.

Mrs. Bell hired Carter, gave him clothes, and agreed to a month’s advance on his wages. Carter, on receiving the advance, “like a nigger,… ‘skipped by the light of the moon.’” Carter used the advance to reclaim Jack (a hunting dog) from a Mr. Michael. After recovering the dog, Carter disappeared. “Where he went,” Trimble’s acquaintance wrote, “the lord only knows; but coon-hunting I guess.” For the letter writer, this was the last straw. After years of frustration with the use of freedmen for labor, he vowed never to be taken in again. “[Carter] is one of the very few Negroes I would have recommended, but now there is none. I’ll never, never again, endorse one of them to anybody for anything, under any circumstances.”¹

The story of William Carter, who abandoned a new job as a farmhand after getting enough money in advanced pay to recover his hunting dog (and, in the process, embarrassed the man who had recommended him for the job), echoes several important facts about life in the agricultural South in the decades after Emancipation. First, the “labor question,” as Southern farmers often framed the problem of managing the labor of former slaves, became a central concern of landowners striving to recover from the economic dislocation of the war and the loss of slaves. Second, African Americans’ ability to avoid laboring exclusively for whites became linked, as was well understood by employers such as Trimble and his friend, to their ability to find alternative subsistence options. Third, although farmers and landowners worked to establish an economic system that gave most former slaves little choice but to make their living through farm labor, hunting and fishing gave freed people alternative means for subsistence and income.² In the case of Carter, recovering his hunting dog enabled him to leave his job as hired farmhand, perhaps earn a portion of his living outside agricultural work, and perhaps escape the control and oversight of white employers. For African Americans, the long-cherished customary rights of hunting and fishing provided distance from white employers by cultivating additional economic and dietary options. For Southern landowners, these rights interfered with their economic success by making it more difficult to narrow former slaves’ subsistence options and thus better dominate black labor.

It was clear to white Southerners, almost from the moment of Emancipation, that former slaves had no intention of abandoning their cherished customary rights to hunt and fish. Indeed, the frequency with which freed people of the rural South made fish and game crucial parts of their daily subsistence is confirmed by a virtually limitless number of narrative descriptions from both white and black Southerners. And as demonstrated by the extent to which African Americans used fish and game to enter into a wide array of valuable market activities, former slaves exploited these time-honored survival strategies to the fullest. White Southerners recognized that hunting and fishing provided avenues for liberated African Americans to work toward, and sometimes achieve, a life away from the oversight and control of exclusive agricultural labor. These activities posed a serious and continuing problem for Southern landowners. Both African Americans’ reliance on hunting and fishing and whites’ consternation over such customs deepened as the subsistence and partial independence provided by fish and game became an increasing point of conflict in the decades after Emancipation.

Thus, at the close of the war, Southern planters faced not only humiliating defeat but also the possible loss of control over their entire labor supply. This great fear, although somewhat assuaged by Northern authorities who soon showed their intention to partially side with the landholding elite in matters of labor contracts, stayed with Southerners for decades. African-American labor could be temporarily forced, through “black codes” designed to limit former slaves’ mobility and their ability to refuse laboring for their former masters. Yet most landowners realized by 1867-1868 that, given African Americans’ resistance and the interference of federal authorities, a return to slavery—even quasi-slavery—had become impossible. The freedom that came with Emancipation, albeit not total, gave blacks the power to modify the Southern labor system. By the close of the 1860s, the planter’s dream of a return to a system much like bondage and the former slave’s dream of widespread fee-simple land ownership had melded into a compromise: contract labor, tenancy, and sharecropping. Former slaves, although largely unable to own land, could now migrate, withdraw their families from the field, begin work later in the day and quit earlier, control the pacing of their labor, and hunt and fish.

This serious challenge to Southern employers was a frequent topic in newspapers and agricultural journals. Because elite whites could no longer control the operation of labor, they needed to guarantee its supply. As one contributor noted in Southern Planter and Farmer in 1867, “the first and paramount necessity of the colored race within these States is employment—permanent and remunerative employment.”³ Planters soon became aware of a general drop in prices and production, which seemed to worsen in the years after the war. “The South is sparsely settled,” a planter wrote in 1867, “is scarce of labor, and what [labor] they have, is so much demoralized, by a surfeit of freedom ‘so called,’ that two laborers now perform but little more than one accomplished a few years since, and the loss of a hand or two at a critical time, may lead to most serious loss to the owner of the soil.”⁴ Planters argued that laborers had become too independent and had too much control over their own workday. According to the “Essay on the Subject of Labor” by the Goodwyn Agricultural Club, “the wild ardor of the freedmen in the first years of their emancipation, during which they seemed to regard their broken shackles as introducing them to an independence of work … left no opportunity to try conclusions or make choice of modes or terms of [labor’s] employment.”⁵ Put simply, freed people had become too independent—they had options. Such independence, particularly former slaves’ new capability of providing for themselves, remained the single greatest threat to landowners’ ability to recover their wealth and prosperity.

Between Emancipation and the first decades of the twentieth century, hunting and fishing were important subsistence and market activities for African Americans, aiding in their struggle for greater freedom from white domination and for more personal control over their lives and labor. As long-standing customary activities that benefited slaves and free blacks across the South, hunting and fishing now joined other independent economic activities, such as gardening, self-hire, and marketing of homemade goods, through which African Americans loosened the hold of servitude. After the Civil War, hunting and fishing complemented such institutions as black churches, schools, and mutual aid societies as crucial ways in which freed people could guarantee subsistence and avoid falling into dependency on their former masters. Hunting and fishing thus demonstrate how former slaves turned to long-cherished survival strategies to meet the changing economic and social circumstances of life in the postwar South.

For slaves, hunting and fishing had long been critically important customary activities that strengthened their nutritional and material condition, provided food, money, and material goods, and gave them valuable time for family and community camaraderie. After Emancipation, as hunting and fishing became an important part of the transition from slavery to freedom, the tensions engendered by these activities increased—including controversy over freed people’s use of firearms, ownership of dogs, use of traditionally scorned plebian sporting methods, entry into a variety of hunting- and fishing-related market activities, and, perhaps most important, ability to apply such traditions to supplement or replace agricultural labor.

Hunting and fishing in the South, before and after Emancipation, rested on a complex web of mutuality and interdependence. African Americans had long acquired fish and game far from the prying eyes of whites, but they had also, for centuries, taken to the field alongside, in service to, or with the full knowledge of whites. The Southern sporting field was racially integrated, a tradition that continued after Emancipation. Former masters and former slaves became well acquainted with each other’s sporting aims and methods through decades of sharing common social and productive space. The many conflicts created by hunting and fishing helped define the nineteenth-century rural South, but deep traditions of cooperation often played a countervailing role.

In September 1863, with war still raging across the South, Edward Philbrick, a New Englander working with freedmen in Port Royal, South Carolina, wrote a letter to his friend William C. Gannett describing the fishing activities of two former slaves named Limus and ’Siah (whom both men knew). Philbrick, a devotee of local fish and game who often employed African Americans as oarsmen and laborers, noted that former slaves drew much of their subsistence from fishing. Uneasy with that fact, he was reluctant to order new seines (large fishing nets) requested by Limus and ’Siah. Thinking such equipment a poor investment, Philbrick had arranged for only one seine to be shipped (to Limus), opting to postpone ’Siah’s in the hope that his fishing activities might diminish. “Moreover, entre nous, I do not believe it will do him [’Siah] any good to spend his time a-fishing,” Philbrick wrote. “After the war the negroes will have to fall back upon field-labor for a living, and it will be better for them if in the meanwhile they do not acquire a distaste for steady labor and get vagrant habits.” Many other Northern and Southern whites, confident that former slaves would abandon such means of survival, believed a quick return to agricultural labor would prevent them from developing such “vagrant habits” as fishing.⁶

Yet a letter from Gannett describing Limus’s activities in more detail belied Philbrick’s hope that freed people might exclusively “fall back upon field labor for a living.” Describing Limus as “a black Yankee,” someone who “has the energy and ’cuteness and big eye for his own advantage of a born New Englander,” Gannett documented just how substantial the freedman’s business interests had become. According to Gannett, Limus owned substantial property, including “poultry-houses, pig-pens, and corn-houses” and “even a stable, for he made out some title to a horse,” all of which he maintained through cotton farming and, more importantly, a fishing enterprise. “With a large boat which he owns,” Gannett reported, “he usually makes weekly trips to Hilton Head, twenty miles distant, carrying passengers, produce, and fish.” Limus had the use of a seine for which “he pays [the] Government by furnishing General Hunter [Major-General David Hunter]⁷ and staff with the finer specimens, and then has ten to twenty bushels for sale.” With the money earned from fishing, combined with his other activities, Limus “is all ready to buy land, and I expect to see him in ten years a tolerably rich man.” Gannett concluded by suggesting that such activities were not confined to just one industrious former slave. “Limus has, it is true, but few equals in the islands, and yet there are many who follow not far behind him.”⁸

Some freed people, like the former slaves at Port Royal, clearly intended to meet the challenges of freedom through customary traditions that had served them so well under slavery. The ambitious fishing enterprise maintained by Limus suggests that despite the wishes of white observers such as Philbrick, African Americans would not give up such cherished practices in favor of the exclusive agricultural labor that whites saw as the sole path to the South’s future prosperity. Former slaves would show tremendous determination and resourcefulness in earning subsistence and income in the decades after Emancipation, and they would work to do so on their own terms.

HUNTING, FISHING, AND SUBSISTENCE AFTER FREEDOM

African Americans intended to maintain old customary rights to meet the new challenges of the postwar South. Although slavery had disappeared, former slaves’ nutritional, material, and cultural needs had not. When Robert Glenn, a former slave from Hillsboro, North Carolina, was asked by a WPA interviewer what he had done in 1865 and 1866, he replied simply, “I went back home [to the plantation] and stayed a year. During the year I hunted a lot at night and thoroughly enjoyed being free.”⁹ Likewise, former Alabama slave George Fortman asserted that after liberation he became a “roustabout,” surviving by hunting, between bouts of employment. “There was much wild game to be had and the hunting season was always open,” his WPA interviewer noted. “He also remembers many wolves, wild turkeys, catamounts [mountain lion], and deer in abundance near the Grand River.”¹⁰ African Americans’ continued reliance on the region’s wildlife even reached into popular literature. In George Washington Cable’s John March, Southerner, Cable tells of a postwar meeting between former slaveholder General Halliday and his former slave Cornelius Leggett. Asked if he and his kin are still on the old plantation, Leggett replies: “they ain’t ezac’ly on no plantation,” admitting that he and his family are “mos’ly strewed round in the woods in pole cabins an’ bresh [brush] arbors.” Halliday asks if that means they survive by hunting and fishing. “Yaas, sah, livin’ on game an’ fish,” the freedman replies.¹¹

Hunting and fishing became natural remedies for the dislocations accompanying Emancipation. Many newly freed African Americans, lacking employment opportunities or sources of income, relied on fish and game to meet their needs. Numerous observers, Southern and Northern, commented on freed slaves’ retention of such time-tested survival mechanisms. Immediately after Emancipation, many former slaves chose to eke out a living on the South’s seemingly limitless supply of abandoned or unoccupied land rather than work for their former masters. One-time Virginia slave Minnie Fulkes noted how freed people “stay in de woods an’ git long best way dey could after freedom done bin ’clared,” an ability that angered many white Southerners.¹² As indicated in 1866 letters between farmer and physician James Philip Jones of North Carolina and his cousin, farmer and physician Ethelred Philips of Marianna, Florida, landowners disapproved of such activity. “The negroes are so fond of living off of public lands to themselves and stealing for a subsistence, I don’t know who will work next year,” the Floridian noted. “The most sanguine among us who early in the spring were hopeful of good crops, have changed their opinions now.”¹³ His Carolina cousin described a similar type of squatting in the Old North State, noting that “the negroes settled on the public lands will soon not have a squirrel or possum left and then there will be trouble … I get a more unfavorable opinion of our future every year.”¹⁴ Alarmed by the prospect of former slaves living by means other than white-controlled labor, farmers such as Jones grew uneasy with freed people’s ability to hunt and fish.

Many white observers noted the omnipresence of hunting and fishing by freedmen. Ruth McEnery Stuart, in her recollection of nineteenth-century Simpkinsville, Arkansas, described former slave Old Proph (shortened from “Jeremy the Prophet”) as someone who “never done nothin’ sence freedom but what he had a mind to,” but was nevertheless renowned as a woodsman. “They was only one thing Proph’ was, to say, good for. Proph’ was a capital A-1 hunter—shorest shot in the State, in my opinion, and when he’d take a notion he could go out where nobody wouldn’t sight a bird or a squir’l all day long, and he’d fill his game-bag.”¹⁵ According to South Carolina’s first poet laureate, Archibald Hamilton Rutledge, such sportsmen ranked among the best, and most often overlooked, in the country. “And here I wish to mention perhaps the least known of all American hunters: I mean the Negro,” Rutledge declared. “Passing through the South in the autumn or the winter, you recall that you noticed as one of the standard features of the landscape a tattered Negro, with a battered gun under his arm, following a more or less physically shattered cur with no social background whatsoever.”¹⁶ It seems white observers could hardly write about the region without commenting on African Americans’ hunting and fishing.

Scribner’s Monthly correspondent Edward King gave perhaps the best account of the ubiquity of blacks’ pursuit of fish and game. Across the South, former slaves expanded their traditional reliance on hunting and fishing. In San Antonio, Texas, King watched “the negro fisherman as he throws his line horizonward, to see it swirl and fall in the retreating surf to come up laden with scaly treasure.” In a freed person’s community near Beaufort, South Carolina, King noted that “most of the men are armed; they manage to secure a pistol or a gun, and are as fond of hunting as their white employers.” Along Alabama’s Mobile Bay, King ran across “a negro woman [who] fished silently in a little pool made by the tide.” And along the banks of the Savannah River in Georgia, he saw that “[former slaves] are fond of the same pleasures which their late masters give themselves so freely—hunting, fishing, and lounging; pastimes which the superb forests, the noble streams, the charming climate minister to very strongly.”¹⁷ For King and other Northerners, a tour of the Reconstruction South left no doubt that hunting and fishing survived the end of slavery and remained important traditions for liberated African Americans.

To slaves, hunting and fishing had been first and foremost sources of food. As slave narratives make clear, masters rarely provided sufficient nourishment. Despite laws requiring minimum food allotments and despite claims by some exslaves about adequate diets under slavery, it is clear that many wanted more and better food. As former Texas slave Mary Reynolds put it, “We prays for the end of Trib’lation and the end of beatin’s and for shoes that fit our feet. We prayed that us niggers could have all we wanted to eat and special for fresh meat.”¹⁸ This deficiency, whether induced by poverty or part of a purposeful strategy by white employers, continued after Emancipation. Life remained hard for former slaves in the rural South; they were often forced to survive on the meanest subsistence, particularly as, beginning in the 1880s, Southern agriculture became notoriously less efficient and more unpredictable.

Freed persons usually had to provide themselves with sufficient food, money, or material goods. Many turned to hunting and fishing. Former North Carolina slave John Evans, for example, “a well-known character for fifty years among the summer residents along the sounds and on Wrightsville Beach,” earned a solid living, according to his WPA interviewer, as a “fisherman and huckster in his palmy days.” Evans took advantage of coastal Carolina tourism after the war, noting that “when I growed up my job was fishin’. I made enough sellin’ fish to the summer folks all along Wrightsville and Greenville sounds to keep me all winter.”¹⁹ Former Florida slave Christine Mitchell described life on Amelia Island, a small coastal barrier island near Jacksonville, Florida, that is still a tourist draw for its resorts and fine fishing. According to Mitchell, former slaves turned the island into a community that was “practically self-sustaining, its residents raising their own food, meats, and other commodities. Fishing was a favorite vocation with them, and some of them established themselves as small merchants of sea foods.”²⁰ Like other aspects of slave culture redeployed after liberation, hunting and fishing became two dependable ways in which former slaves could mend the dislocation of Emancipation.

Josh Horn, former slave of Sumter County, Alabama, reportedly won renown as a hunter and guide. “Josh’s granddaughters still marvel at his proficiency with a gun,” the WPA interviewer noted. “The Horn family grew up eating the raccoons, rabbits, opossums, and deer that Josh had shot … The most important meal of the week—Sunday dinner—consisted of possum, deer, or raccoons served with potatoes, collard greens and yeast bread.”²¹ For Horn, this ability to stretch meager means into certain subsistence was a badge of honor. “I ain’t never stole a moufful somepin’ t’eat for [my family] in all my life,” Horn declared. “It’s honest vittles dey et, and varmints I’s killed in de woods … And everybody knows I’s a good hunter.” Even years later, Horn still spoke proudly of that ability. “So I went every Friday night and went in de week too, and dat help a lot to feed de chillum,” he concluded. “I don’t owe nobody, not a nickel.”²²

Freedmen such as Josh Horn plied their skills in a fish and game region that was the equal of any, save perhaps the largely unspoiled American West. “That country was full of varmints— just full,” another former slave recalled in the 1930s. “A man could go out and kill a dozen squirrels, they was that thick. Pigeons were thick too, thicker than hens and chickens. They would come over at night, and they would darken the sun, there were so many. Wild ducks were numerous; wild ducks came in droves.”²³ Such richness made hunting and fishing obvious options for supplementing poor diets. Former South Carolina slaves Toby Jones and his wife, Govie, who emigrated to Texas in 1869, met the poverty of their hardscrabble existence by using hunting to supplement meager corn harvests. “We didn’t plant cotton, ’cause we couldn’t eat that,” Jones recalled. “I made bows and arrows to kill wild game with, and we never went to a store for nothing. We made our clothes out of animal skins.”²⁴

Generations of bondage taught former slaves that while customary rights could not guarantee material comfort, they could mean the difference between a degree of economic freedom and continuing dependence on labor in the service of whites. As late as the 1920s, according to James Henry Rice Jr., secretary of the South Carolina Audubon Society, African Americans on St. Helena Island (a small island north of Hilton Head populated by former slaves in the early years of freedom) guaranteed their living by fishing for mullet, oystering, and digging clams.²⁵ Northerner Julian Ralph, who toured the South when preparing to write his nostalgic Dixie; or Southern Scenes and Sketches, asserted that African Americans dominated fishing in New Orleans along the Mississippi shores. “Somebody has called fishing ‘idle time not idly spent,’ and that must be how the Southern colored people regard it, for they seem to be eternally at it wherever they and any piece of water, no matter how small, are thrown together.” To Ralph, African Americans’ reliance on fishing seemed somehow natural. “After one has seen a few darkies putting their whole souls into fishing it is painful to see a white man with a rod and a line,” he concluded. “The white man always looks like an imitation and a fraud.”²⁶

An African-American fisherman from Saint James Parish, Louisiana, surrounded by his nets, shows off part of his catch in this photograph from the early 1900s. More than just a valuable source of food, this fishing tradition, as many white complainants noted, helped provide money and economic distance from exclusive labor in the service of white employers. (The Louisiana Collection, State Library of Louisiana, Baton Rouge, Louisiana)

These narratives are supported by an 1895 study of the dietary habits of African Americans in Eastern Virginia, presented to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) by Hampton Normal Institute President H. B. Frissell and Lake Erie College chemistry professor Isabel Bevier. The study, “confined to families living in the region bordering the Dismal Swamp, where the style of living was very primitive and the income usually quite limited,” found that hunting and fishing contributed substantially to many families’ nutritional intake.²⁷ “Family #211,” for example, living near Franklin, Virginia, depended heavily on game provided by a son who supplemented his parents’ income from odd jobs and midwifery. “The family used little or no beef, mutton or other lean meats,” the study found. “Muskrat, opossum, raccoon, and other game, fish, frogs, turtle, and even snakes in certain seasons, furnished part of their diet.” Fishing in the freshwater of the Great Dismal Swamp and the saltwater of the Atlantic proved even more important for the typically impoverished families. The study found the average protein in the typical African-American family’s diet was comparable to that of white persons “in moderately comfortable circumstances, such as families of mechanics and families of professional men.” The reason was the proximity of fish for food. Of the nineteen families examined near Hampton, Virginia, only two failed to eat a meal of fish during the study. For one family, fish accounted for more than fifty percent of its total dietary protein.²⁸

This dependence did not go away as the nineteenth century passed into the twentieth. A 1922 North Carolina State Cooperative Extension Service study, “How Farm Tenants Live,” documented the subsistence of Old North State tenants. In the fifty-one tenant households studied, researchers found fifty guns and forty-six dogs.²⁹ Crediting this high number to the long relationship between farm tenants and the natural bounty of North Carolina, the study’s authors declared: “it is impossible to starve or freeze in the country regions of North Carolina. God almighty made the state a paradise for poor folks.”³⁰

Of course, the degree to which African Americans in the rural South could even partially liberate themselves from regular labor in the service of whites depended heavily on geography. African Americans, like all Southerners, hunted and fished for food, market, and sport across the South, but those in the richer fish and game regions found themselves better positioned to do so. Coastal, riverine, and densely forested and thicketed parts of the South, areas with sufficient wilderness and cover for wildlife propagation, provided former slaves with a bounty of game animals and seafood that created greater independence from whites. As J. William Harris argues, for former slaves along the Georgia coast, the area’s rich wildlife, in addition to its cheap, accessible pineland not far from coastal plantations, allowed them to resist wage labor, better pursue independent farming, and become “in effect peasants, centered on their own family farms.”³¹ Certainly the ability to hunt and fish proved a boon to freed African Americans anywhere, but the more readily available the wildlife, the greater the potential for creating economic alternatives.

The natural bounty of the South may have made it a “paradise for poor folks,” especially former slaves, but only because they were innovative in meeting their subsistence requirements. Resourcefulness and opportunism became necessary hallmarks of African Americans’ hunting and fishing in the late nineteenth century. Under slavery, individual masters and local and state governments prohibited slaves’ ownership of potentially harmful weapons, particularly firearms, and often circumscribed their hunting and fishing.³² With Emancipation, former slaves found that the problem of obtaining the time, equipment, and financial resources to hunt and fish effectively did not disappear. Guns, for example, though more widely and legally available to African Americans, remained difficult to obtain. White Southerners created barriers such as the various “black codes” implemented across the South in 1866. Prohibitions against gun ownership were added to laws that regulated contract-breaking, restricted mobility, established apprenticeship systems, cracked down on vagrancy, and required African Americans to show proof of employment—all as attempts to return former slaves to semi-servitude. In some Southern states, African Americans even needed licenses to hunt and fish.³³ Whites’ fear of an armed black population lurked behind such measures, but firearm restrictions also targeted hunting—a troubling source of subsistence and income that did not require African Americans to be employed by whites.

African Americans obtained guns despite these efforts. The federal government, to the chagrin of Southerners, provided many firearms after the war—a subject of frequent, angry editorials in sporting periodicals. The government’s sale of tens of thousands of surplus firearms to anyone who could afford them put many military-grade, albeit often obsolete, firearms into the hands of African Americans. An anonymous 1886 editorial in the New Orleans Times-Democrat, for example, blamed the federal government for Louisiana’s game depletion, noting that “after the war the government sold about a hundred thousands, more or less, condemned muskets here, at prices that placed them within reach of the lowliest Nimrod in the land.”³⁴ Attorney and renowned turkey hunter Henry Edwards Davis recalled a similar development in the South Carolina Lowcountry, which after the war was “flooded with old smooth-bore army muskets” that reached the hands of local merchants. Davis noted that these surplus weapons “were quickly snapped up by local negroes” at a price of, to his recollection, $3.50 each.³⁵ With the demise of black codes, the states loosened the legal restrictions on African Americans’ gun ownership just as the national government provided surplus weapons. According to one angry Mississippian, “the man and brother, liberated from his shackles, soon scraped up $8 and invested in a pot metal blunderbuss, or an old ‘war gun.’”³⁶

Despite this wider availability of guns, African Americans still had to get the money to own and use such weapons. Even cheap guns could be out of reach for the poorest people in the cash-strapped rural South. Former Alabama slave Mingo White overcame this by sharing a gun with other former slaves, in particular his friend Ed Davis.³⁷ It is likely that many financially burdened African Americans acquired the use of a gun in that way.³⁸ Henry Edwards Davis recalled that the mate of his favorite hunting gun, which had “always been known as the John Gordon gun, as it was one of a matched pair owned by the two brothers John Gordon and Captain Ervin Gordon,” made its way into African-American hands in this fashion. “After he bought a good double breech loader, Captain Gordon gave the mate to his son and namesake,” Davis recalled, “and it was subsequently acquired by a negro and thus passed into oblivion.”³⁹ Some African Americans worked for years to acquire such valuable means of earning a living. “I always wanted a home and a gun,” one former slave recalled, “and I got both of them, but my boy took my gun when they had the riot in St. Louis, and I never did buy another one.”⁴⁰

If aggrieved whites can be believed, African Americans made good use of obsolete, damaged, or poor-quality guns. Former slaves loved even these shoddy weapons because they both greatly aided in hunting and, according to a Mississippian writing under the name Coahoma, testified to African Americans’ liberation. Slaves relied on trapping or nighttime hunting because “they were not allowed to own guns,” Coahoma observed, but since Emancipation “nearly every negro owns a pot-metal shotgun or old musket… but eschews possum hunting at night, of which we, who were the sons of slave owners in the old times, cherish fond recollections, as the youthful romances of old plantation life.”⁴¹ For those who long depended on hunting but had difficulty making the most of it, even a poor gun symbolized and guaranteed the potential of freedom.

The constant grumblings of white sportsmen about African Americans’ weaponry suggests the importance of firearms to freed people. And no one, not even white critics, doubted the weapons’ effectiveness. Southern sporting authority Alexander Hunter found an odd nobility in them. “The freedman’s musket, battered and patched though it be,” he asserted, “must look down upon the handsome, resplendent breech-loader, as a great orator upon the garrulous, loquacious youth who talks upon every subject at any time, and at any length, while he only opens his mouth to make knock-down arguments, or to utter words of great import that thrill and convince.”⁴² Archibald Rutledge also noted the gap between the appearance of these weapons and their deadly accuracy. Writing of his boyhood friend and hunting mentor Gabriel Myers, “as fine a hunter as any Masai,” he recalled that “his weapon was a crude, single-barreled affair, but in this woodman’s hands it was deadly.”⁴³ Many former slaves clearly found ways to obtain reliable guns and make the most of them.

In addition to firearms, freedmen also needed powder and shot or cartridges. To deal with this demand, African-American hunters relied on a combination of conservation and cooperation. Ammunition, African Americans had learned under bondage, could not be wasted. Former slave Sylvia King, for example, recalled the extreme care that her fellow slaves used in hunting: “dey didn’t shoot if dey could catch it some other way, ’cause powder and lead am scarce.”⁴⁴ Out of necessity, this frugality continued after Emancipation. Alexander Hunter reported a conversation with a “weather-beaten old darkey” who always took the most careful aim for fear of wasting his ammunition. “It dun cos’ me nearly five cents to load that air musket, countin’ powder, caps, shot, and everythin’,” the pragmatic freedman recalled, “an’ I ain’t gwine to let er off ’less I knows I’se sartin to make by de shot.”⁴⁵

Before conserving their ammunition in such a fashion, African-American sportsmen first had to secure it. And if they could not raise the money, they made other arrangements. A former slave named Uncle Ned used borrowed ammunition to celebrate his wedding, after nearly eighty years on the same plantation. Determined to use his own skill to help feed his wedding guests, Uncle Ned visited a local white “on a borrowing expedition,” according to a contributor to Forest and Stream. Thus armed with powder and shot, Ned secured five rabbits for the feast.⁴⁶ Likewise a Forest and Stream contributor calling himself Will Scribbler traded ammunition for information from an African-American sportsman while on a plantation hunt. “Further on we met a native hunting rabbits with a hound and musket who volunteered to show a covey if we would repay his pains with a ‘load er two,’” Scribbler recalled. “The terms were easy and we quickly emptied shells enough to satisfy his avarice, demanding that he lead us to the slaughter.”⁴⁷ Information and experience were something black sportsmen had in abundance, but they often lacked the financial means to obtain proper equipment and so depended on such exchanges to improve their hunting.

Because of the difficulty in acquiring, equipping, and maintaining firearms, African Americans used many sporting methods that did not involve guns. To the necessities of conservation and cooperation in methods for pursuing fish and game we can add a third characteristic—creativity. Some African Americans could not afford firearms. For them, the essence of hunting and fishing became the necessity of doing so whenever and however they could.

Whether armed or unarmed, freed people made dogs an important part of their hunting practice. One of the most cherished traditions carried over from bondage, as demonstrated by Jake Williams and his dog Belle (as recounted in the Introduction), was slaves’ reliance on dogs.⁴⁸ Because they both helped to provide meat and represented a part of life not dominated by the master, hunting dogs were ubiquitous in slave quarters. J. Vance Lewis, born a slave in Louisiana, noted this dual importance. “The slave loves his dog,” he wrote. “They are constant companions. He talks with him by day and hunts with him by night… His dog is the only thing under the sun that he can call his own; for the master claims the woman that is called his wife, his offspring, his hut, his pig, his own body—his very soul.”⁴⁹

Renowned southern writer Charles H. Smith, writing under the pen name Bill Arp, reached a similar conclusion about the role of dogs in the lives of former slaves. “Dominion is the pride of man—dominion over something,” Smith asserted. “A negro is proud if he owns a ‘possum’ dog.”⁵⁰ Harry Worcester Smith, while on a Southern excursion, was awoken each morning by an African-American servant who regaled him with proud stories of his father’s dogs and hunting prowess. “He told me the names of all the spaniels and how three of them would ‘fetch’ but he ‘spected’ the two younger ones would soon learn, that his papa could make a dog do anything,” Smith recalled. “He told me the names of the Negroes and how one of them was death on coons and how his papa had killed a great big bear ever so big last fall and there was skin on the floor by my bedside.”⁵¹ Northerner Sarah Carter, traveling to Yorktown, Virginia, to teach at a freedman’s school, encountered many dogs in a black community near Hampton. “From every house we passed there came out, at least, two, often three dogs. The houses were mostly back from the road, and the dogs ran along the lanes to meet us.”⁵² Such numbers could be found in black settlements across the South. Travel writer Clifton Johnson noted bluntly that “a nigger always has a dog, a poor nigger has two, and a desperately poor nigger has half a dozen.”⁵³

Such descriptions matched the reality of African-American life in the rural South that white observers knew all too well. Charles Hallock, describing his hunting of wild cattle on the Georgia coast, recalled a former slave named Sambo who, along with his loyal dog Sanch, led the hunts. According to Hallock, “the twain are officially recognized as law and gospel on all occasions, especially in matters appertaining to the hunting of beasts, the catching of fish, or the entrapping of birds.”⁵⁴ Archibald Rutledge recounted another such relationship cultivated by his hunting mentor Gabriel Myers. According to Rutledge, Myers’s bonds with his animals made him a great huntsman. “A more complete companionship between dog and man could not exist, for to it Gabe brought that strange, wise intimacy that he had with all animals, a peculiar fellowship and understanding that he shared with the creatures of the wild. This comprehension, turned to his account, was what made him the best trapper, hunter and general poaching rounder-up of game in all that country.”⁵⁵

Even without dogs and guns, black hunters and fishermen possessed the necessary skill and flexibility to meet their needs. Like slaves before them, freed people learned to catch fish and game through a variety of methods, from the commonplace to the extremely creative. Without guns or dogs, they often turned to trapping skills learned under bondage when, given the obvious time constraints, they depended on devices requiring little attention.⁵⁶ After Emancipation, a trap, snare, or other such device that, once set, required only daily or weekly checking and occasional repair was sure to have a permanent place in African Americans’ hunting and fishing.

The trapping of game animals and fish not only provided subsistence but also struck at elite white ideals of sportsmanship. A Forest and Stream contributor noted the effectiveness of these methods, especially for small game. “I have never seen a trap of any kind set for one which … wouldn’t catch a coon,” the contributor recalled. “In my boyhood days I have seen them caught in boxes set for rabbits at holes in the fence; I have seen them [raccoons] caught by the score in log traps set across fallen trees in the swamp, and by the way that is the darky’s favorite way of trapping them.”⁵⁷ Sussex County, Virginia, resident “Chasseur,” writing to Forest and Stream in 1875, provides some idea of the magnitude of former slaves’ reliance on trapping. Out hunting one day, he came upon a trapping ground popular with African Americans, and “in this cornfield bordering the swamp … I counted sixty-eight log traps balled and set. They were placed at regular intervals of about ten yards distant; and this is just an instance—a thousand could be given.”⁵⁸

Freedmen also continued to rely on fire hunting, a universal tool of plebian and primitive hunters that was despised by elite sportsmen, who looked on it as dangerous and unsporting. Through the use of torches, hot coals, and even bonfires to illuminate the animals’ eyes and make easy targets of potential prey, hunters greatly increased their productivity.⁵⁹ Slaves had fire-hunted for decades and, unsurprisingly, freed people carried the practice into the postwar period. Former Virginia slave Sarah Woods Burke recalled her father using fire to provide for the family. “The men folks would build a big fire, and I can remember my Pappy a settin’ on top of the house at night with a old flint lock across his legs awaiting for one of these critters to come close enough so he could shoot it.”⁶⁰ Likewise, John Fox Jr., in his Blue-Grass and Rhododendron: Out-Doors in Old Kentucky, described old Ash, “a darky coon-hunter who is known throughout the State,” who typically hunted with fire. “In his pockets were matches to build a fire, that the fight could be seen; at his side hung a lantern with which ‘to shine his eye’ when the coon was treed; and under him was a meal-sack for Br’er Possum.”⁶¹ Henry William Ravenel noted that farm tenants “would go, two or three together with a blazing torch, and a good supply of lightwood, into the swamps and thickets within a mile or two of the plantation. I have often, when a boy, gone out on these hunts.”⁶² Well-heeled sportsmen despised such methods, declaring them both destructive to Southern forests and emblematic of blacks’ inferiority. Former slaves, however, prevented by necessity from giving primacy to sportsmanship, embraced any method that worked.

African Americans across the South employed hunting and fishing methods as simple as crude wooden clubs and as complicated as intricate weirs. North Carolinian James Lee Love recalled fishing as a child with an older, former-slave companion using only “little hooks, baited with what we called ‘fish worms’ —now called ‘red-worms’ or earth worms, or angle worms—the universal earth worm.”⁶³ Clifton Johnson witnessed small-game hunting that was decidedly not elaborate. “If de ’possum git in a small tree, we knock him out, an’ if de tree is large, we sometimes cut it down an’ sometimes climb up it,” one of his black companions noted, making clear that catching fish or game often required no more than determination and a blunt instrument. “We mos’ gener’ly ketch de ’possum alive. He’ll bite yo’ if he can, an’ we tote him home bu puttin’ his tail in a split stick dat pinch it tight an’ keep him remind dat he is ketched.”⁶⁴

But not all hunting and fishing was so simple. Henry Edwards Davis, for example, recalled that while some “old gun-carrying negroes” focused on shooting game on the ground because it was easier, “there were many negroes who were real shots and hunters who specialized on squirrels and ducks by day, and on treed raccoons and opossums by night. Most of the squirrels were taken at feed trees, especially oaks and hickories, and the ducks were shot on the water by hunters concealed either in the canes or in the shrubbery bordering it, or in a camouflaged boat.”⁶⁵ The Reverend Peter Randolph, who hunted and fished as both slave and freedman, noted in his From Slave Cabin to the Pulpit that fishing was also sometimes quite elaborate, as in the case of a fish trap “made by cutting oak wood into very small strips, which are tied together with a great deal of ingenuity.”⁶⁶ This range of methods and devices confirms that function, not form, guided those who lacked the luxury of conforming to white sporting ideals.

HUNTING AND FISHING AND MARKET RELATIONS

The ability to acquire fish and game through methods both commonplace and creative ultimately had value for both former slaves and their employers. Like antebellum planters who reduced costs by allowing slaves to hunt and fish, postwar agricultural employers, in many cases still responsible for feeding tenants and laborers, often provided fish and game to African-American farmhands. Simeon H. Duffer, overseer for Isaac Coles Carrington’s Sylvan Hill plantation in Charlotte County, Virginia, relied on wild hogs to feed his laborers. Throughout November 1866, Duffer assigned between one and four farmhands the task of hunting hogs for the Southside plantation.⁶⁷ To provision farmhands on his Pampatike plantation in King William County, Virginia, Thomas Henry Carter relied on locally caught fish. His 1875 ledger shows that he bought substantial amounts of shad from employees. Between April 5 and May 13, Carter received 34 shad from Polk Gary, for which he paid a total of $2.80 plus credit on an order to Hay & Co., presumably a general goods company. Between April 6 and May 4, Carter received 41 shad from Jim Nelson, for which he paid a total of $4.30.⁶⁸ So cheaply could fish and game be obtained in some parts of the South that many employers enthusiastically adopted this practice.

Even as late as the first decade of the twentieth century, some planters made wildlife a substantial part of laborers’ diets. B. F. Fly, for example, lauded his own ability to feed laborers on his Ogden, Arkansas, farm in this fashion. “In the fishing season … niggers are fed black bass in preference to ‘sow belly’ because I find it much cheaper,” Fly wrote in a letter to the National Sportsman. During the winter, Fly fed his farmhands on a variety of fish and game, including “canvas backs, mallards, sprig tails, swan bills, butter balls, teals, wood ducks and the like for the same reason, now and then giving them venison, turkey, quail, squirrel, coon, possum and the like for appetizers.” This generosity, according to Fly, gave him a strong reputation among area laborers. “The niggers all say that ‘Mars Frank sho do feed his niggers good,’” he declared.⁶⁹

It is likely, however, that employees’ approval was not the central motivation for these additions to their diet. Much like antebellum masters who boasted about their benevolent treatment of well-fed, contented slaves, postwar landowners covered their drive to save money in a veneer of concern for laborers’ well being. Although not legally bound, as were their antebellum counterparts, to feed laborers, many thought it good business. South Carolinian John Edwin Fripp, before selling his plantation to become overseer for the Chelsea Plantation Club (a Beaufort County sportsmen’s association), fed his laborers on fish provided by local African Americans, many of whom were his own farmhands. Fripp’s account books from 1872 to 1877 show that he regularly rented boats to laborers (including Glasgow, Greaves, Peter, and Tom) for between $1.00 and $1.50, and purchased the fish they caught.⁷⁰

The plantation huntsman or fisherman, usually a trusted farmhand who provided meat and fish for storehouse or table, remained another holdover from the antebellum period.⁷¹ Ambrose Gonzales, cofounder of the South Carolina daily The State, recalled the prowess of former slave Boatswain Smashum, or Bo’sun, who “became an expert horseman” and “as he was quick and intelligent” eventually became a loyal and trusted huntsman and deer-driver to a Major King.⁷² South Carolinian Anne Simon Deas, in her Comingtee plantation memoir, described “old ‘Josh Lovely,’” huntsman for Alwyn Ball as slave and freedman. According to Deas, Lovely was “as fond of hunting as his master, to whom he was much attached. He was a daring rider, and would risk anything when well mounted.”⁷³

The descriptions of Bo’sun and Lovely demonstrate how former slaves often spent as much time hunting alongside whites as hunting independently. One of the chief concerns of Texas slave J. Vance Lewis on liberation was dissolving his long-standing hunting relationship with his master’s son, Cage Duncan. Lewis recalled that “there was also a very difficult problem for us to solve—we had three coon dogs which we jointly owned, and I did not see how to divide the dogs without hurting his feelings, my feelings or the dogs’ feelings, without relinquishing my claims, which I was loathe to do.”⁷⁴ After liberation, such sporting ties often continued. Louisianan B. H. Wilkins, whose family emigrated to Charles City County, Virginia, at the end of the war, recalled getting food secured by “a former slave named Robert,” hired to both labor and procure meat.⁷⁵ “He was a good trapper, hunter, and woodcraftsman,” Wilkins recalled, “and could guide us hunting or fishing through the woods and swamps, when the crops were laid by.”⁷⁶ Likewise, Patti Jane Watkins Scott, diarist of the Charlotte County, Virginia, Bartees plantation, noted that her son often hunted or fished with hired hands. Entries such as “Embry has been out nearly the whole day putting up the geese & hunting with Mose,” dated February 9, 1883, typify the way that whites used African-American sporting skill for their own benefit.⁷⁷

Aside from hiring former slaves to hunt and fish for and with them, employers and landowners relied on freed people to protect their property from pests or predators. Some animals proved expensive nuisances; to counter such threats, most state or county governments offered cash bounties on certain birds and other animals, including, depending on the region, wolves, crows, hawks, and rattlesnakes.⁷⁸ Such bounties primarily served agricultural interests, but also helped sporting clubs protect wildlife supplies from predators.⁷⁹ While overseer and gamekeeper for the Chelsea Plantation Club, John Edwin Fripp offered bounties for hawks.⁸⁰ He recorded the bounties, paid when the claimant produced the head of each animal killed, in his daybook. At 15 cents per head, the bounties apparently became popular with area hunters. In 1904, the year Fripp most consistently kept track of such payouts, Charles Scott offered 58 hawks for a total of $8.70. At a time when unskilled laborers might receive between $6.00 and $15.00 per month, depending on the region, crop, and prices, such income was extremely valuable. Other local laborers also collected Chelsea bounties, including Rufus Brown ($1.80), “John Brown’s Children” ($2.10), and brothers Charlie and Frank Palmer ($3.15). This extra money, which farmhands typically earned during free time, on days off, and over the winter months, provided a valuable source of income that white interests would most likely not begrudge.⁸¹

African-American hunters, aside from earning bounties for nuisance animals, also found employment protecting crops at harvest time. Marauding birds could devastate ripe rice, corn, and other crops. To meet this threat, planters sometimes employed bird-minders. According to Archibald Rutledge, “the only way to keep birds from ruining a crop is to send Negro bird-hunters into the rice after them.”⁸² Fletcher Coyne, writing for New York’s Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, asserted that “the ‘bird-minders’ formed a very important and happy throng during the season when birds made their onslaught on the rice crop.” Squads of laborers took to the field each season when “it became necessary to keep the May-birds off at the early dawn, by the shooting of guns, the cracking of whips and the loud shouts of the merry ‘bird-minders.’”⁸³ Former Arkansas slave Scott Bond also commented on this necessity, noting that “it was next to impossible to make a corn crop unless there was some one to hunt at night and guard the fields of ripening grain. If this was not done, the farms would be stripped of their corn.”⁸⁴ The need to protect crops from birds proved a boon for the hired bird-minders. African Americans, if permitted, ate or marketed the birds, making bird-minding both popular and remunerative. James Henry Rice Jr. recalled that to drive bobolink (a small New World blackbird) from fields, “little negroes were given muskets and plenty of cheap black powder. In bird season there was a continuous rattle, sounding like a battle was in progress.” Rice was careful to note, however, that real ammunition “was never given the negroes, because they would shoot down the birds and stop to pick them up, allowing others to devour rice,” demonstrating that, if given the opportunity, African Americans would first meet their own needs.⁸⁵ Bounties and the income from bird-minding were just two more ways that former slaves reaped the financial benefits of fish and game.⁸⁶

Hunting and fishing also proved invaluable ways for freedmen to enter into crucial market activities. This was a middle ground between cooperation and conflict that characterized Southern hunting and fishing, with the ability to market fish and game making those activities so valuable to African Americans and so irksome to whites. Marketing fish and game provided economic options for former slaves that white landowners sometimes could not control and often did not condone. Yet whites frequently employed African-American hunters and fishermen and often bought their fish and game. Without whites’ involvement these market activities would not have been possible. It is ironic, then, that while white Southerners’ role in and dependence on former slaves’ hunting and fishing guaranteed that such activities would remain potentially lucrative for black Southerners, African Americans’ marketing of fish and game guaranteed that these activities would remain a permanent source of conflict.

Most fish and game marketed by African Americans provided only supplementary income. Because hunting and fishing were seasonal and because most rural blacks farmed for a living, fish and game had to be caught and marketed wherever and however the opportunities arose. Clifton Johnson met an unnamed African-American tar burner who always took his gun and hounds with him on the way to and from his daily work.⁸⁷ Former Texas slave Virginia Bell recalled that “pappy used to catch rabbits and take them to town and sell them or trade them for somethin’ to eat, and you know that wasn’t much, ’cause you can’t get much for a little ol’ rabbit.”⁸⁸ Recreation contributor Frank Farner described former slaves Gabe and his wife, Clare, who turned hunting into economic opportunities to which they both contributed. Gabe was known to hunt in the bayous near their Mississippi River basin home, catching small game such as opossum for his wife to prepare for hungry white travelers. In the case of Farner and his friend George, who had traveled South for a bear hunt, Clare sold them a full opossum dinner for what she decided was “’mos too much faw sich a poo meal,” while Gabe informed the men of the best nearby places to hunt in exchange for “a generous quantity of flat sweet store terbacker.” Such income was important, particularly to a pair of ostensibly poor bayou denizens such as Gabe and Clare.⁸⁹

Narrative evidence indicates that African Americans marketed most fish and game locally, particularly to nearby whites with available hard cash. Describing South Carolina rice birds, or bobolinks (abundant in the Lowcountry during autumn), a writer calling himself Lawtonvillian noted that former slaves killed these birds in great quantity, taking them to town to sell for whatever they could get. Consumers and wholesalers at the South Carolina markets that absorbed such game paid, in 1876, 5 cents per pound for turkey, 20 cents per pair for quail, and individually negotiated prices for the scarcer, more coveted woodcock.⁹⁰ Frances Butler Leigh indicated that at war’s end, in Georgia, it became difficult to find much meat other than that obtained locally, often through former slaves. “Yesterday one of the negroes shot and gave me a magnificent wild turkey, which we roasted on one stick set up between two others before the fire, and capital it was,” Leigh recalled. “Our food consists of corn and rice bread, rice, and fish caught fresh every morning out of the river, oysters, turtle soup, and occasionally a wild turkey or duck. Other meat, as yet, it is impossible to get.”⁹¹

A 1912 postcard, created by photographer F. Marchant of Hamlet, North Carolina, depicts an elderly African-American man proudly displaying his captured opossum. Images of this type illustrate the connection between people of color and hunting, and such scenes played a key role in white audiences’ common assumptions about Southern black life. (Courtesy of Florida Photographic Collection, State Library and Archives of Florida)

Touring the Norfolk, Virginia, waterfront in 1874, Edward King witnessed the work of “barelegged negro boys sculling in the skiffs which they had half-filled with oysters, and passed through streets entirely devoted to the establishments where the bivalve, torn from his shell, was packed in cans and stored to await his journey to the far West.”⁹² James Henry Rice Jr. claimed that African-American children dominated the trade at the Georgetown, South Carolina, rail terminus where fish and game were shipped north and west. Near harvest season, local children descended on rice fields in the early morning, when birds that had gorged themselves overnight were sluggish to the point of immobility, collected large quantities of the birds, and took them to town for sale. “They received two cents a dozen for this and made money at it,” Rice noted. “To give an idea of the enormous number shipped, one firm in Georgetown shipped sixty thousand dozen or better in a single season.”⁹³

African Americans also marketed other animal products acquired through hunting and fishing, besides meat. Elizabeth Allston Pringle of South Carolina (writing under the pen name Patience Pennington) recalled that two tenants, Mr. and Mrs. Z, obtained food and money by catching and selling fish, often to Pringle herself. Mrs. Z also made “flowers” out of the fish scales, and strung them and sold them as necklaces to local whites, charging 50 cents per necklace.⁹⁴ Descriptions of such practices even pervaded sporting poetry. M. L. Murdock contributed a poem to Recreation in which he recalled the fine hunting dogs sold by African-American Pop Peters:

Pop Peters kep’ a beagle hound,
Bow-legged as a Turk,
Fer runnin’ rabbits, I’ll be bound,
She done jes fancy work.
Pop held her pups fer 5 apiece,
And fast as they wud wean,
He sold ’em off as slick as grease,
Though they looked mighty mean.⁹⁵

With experience drawn from centuries of servitude, no one knew better than former slaves how to exploit hunting and fishing. African Americans sold meat and hunting dogs (by reputation, the best in the South if raised by former slaves) and also marketed animals’ skins, teeth, bones, hooves, and products manufactured from them, such as Mrs. Z’s necklaces. Alexander Hunter had employed an aged African American named Zeb West to lead him and a cousin on an eastern North Carolina raccoon hunt. Judging by what he saw in West’s cabin, Hunter noted, “there certainly must be plenty of coons, for scores of their skins were nailed over wall and roof to dry.” West later told him he sold skins for 25 cents each. In that hunt alone, they caught nine raccoons. If Hunter allowed West to keep them, a customary practice among elite white sportsmen (who typically thought the raccoon beneath them), that night’s work could have yielded $2.25 for West.⁹⁶ Forest and Stream contributor Chasseur, writing in 1875, asserted that with the growing popularity of keeping fawns (baby deer) as pets, African Americans in the Nottoway region of Virginia “catch many of them to sell in the Petersburg markets.”⁹⁷ Hunting and fishing under bondage had imparted the crucial lesson that no animal, or part of an animal, that could be sold or consumed should be squandered.

Freed people exploited fish and game to the fullest, and the cash from marketing became a larger part of their survival than during slavery. Alongside many extant references to African Americans supplementing their income through hunting or fishing, there are occasional examples of former slaves making all or nearly all of their living from these activities. Growing up on his South Carolina plantation, Hickory Grove, Henry Edwards Davis knew that African Americans would work there only when necessary, preferring to survive through more agreeable means. There was “old George, who spent practically all of his time when awake hunting and fishing and who had as much aversion to work as a goat had to rain,” and who derived most of his living in that fashion. Of a “musket toter” named Old John, Davis recalled: “I saw him frequently for years and I never saw him without his musket and I never knew him to do any work, as that was reserved for his wife and children.” Finally there was Stephen Brown, “the best hunter and fisherman among the plantation negroes of Hickory Grove,” who “had considerable aversion to work but who made a good living for himself and his family out of Santee Swamp with his musket, fishing cane and a few cur coon dogs … He specialized in ducks, turkeys, fish and coon hides.”⁹⁸ African Americans such as old George, Old John, and Stephen Brown struggled to avoid being forced to labor exclusively for whites. Hunting and fishing made a relatively independent subsistence, if rarely lucrative, at least much more likely. Each animal killed or captured, each carcass or hide marketed, each pup trained and sold, represented another step in the quest to cultivate that independence. Edward King noted that “if [the former slave] settles on a small tract of land on his own, as so many thousands do now-a-days, he becomes almost a cumberer of the ground, caring for nothing save to get a living, and raising only a bale of cotton or so wherewith to get ‘supplies.’” This independent subsistence away from regular farm labor posed a problem for white employers. “For the rest he can fish and hunt,” King concluded. “He doesn’t care to become a scientific farmer.”⁹⁹

Few African Americans completely escaped laboring for whites, but it did happen. If lucky and hard working, some might transform hunting and fishing into lucrative economic enterprises that became the envy, and sometimes the bane, of white observers. Baltimore sportsman “Delmo,” for example, writing to Rod and Gun and American Sportsman in 1875, noted that African Americans dominated local terrapin hunting, a dominance that led to moneymaking opportunities. “These men make very good wages during the early part of the season,” Delmo noted, “as two men will sometimes capture as high as twenty terrapins in a day.”¹⁰⁰ African Americans had reportedly dominated large-scale terrapin hunting, particularly in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, for well over a century. After Emancipation, their hold on the market continued. Baltimore resident Edward A. Robinson, writing to Forest and Stream in 1899, described African Americans’ terrapin hunting on Harris’ Neck, a small strip of land near Barbour Island River, McIntosh County, Georgia. Noting that Harris’ Neck is “owned and operated entirely by negroes” and that “many of the negroes follow catching [terrapin] for a living,” Robinson went on to describe the market work of two African Americans, Grant, who ran the terrapin market, and his associate Pat. “Each terrapin as it is brought out is held against a notched measure, and Grant would call out the size to Pat, who would put it down in his book,” Robinson noted. “These fellows in the height of the season make from $15 to $20 per week.”¹⁰¹ The traditional association between hunting or fishing and African-American labor, combined with the long-term material and financial products of such associations, provided rare openings for more formal business opportunities.

By the late nineteenth century, rice planter Elizabeth Allston Pringle, against the advice of family and friends, had managed to purchase her late husband’s White House plantation near Georgetown, South Carolina, her own family’s Cherokee plantation, also in Georgetown, and even a summer home in North Carolina’s renowned “Sapphire Country,” the popular resort area in the state’s mountain west. At both Georgetown and her North Carolina “castle in the air,” Pringle’s farmhands did substantial fishing, including netting and seining in area waterways and establishing marketing networks to sell their shad. Problems began when a North Carolina employee named King, or King Stork, started an efficient fishing business in the rich area rivers and streams. Pringle, at the time planning to sell the mountain getaway, discovered that such constant fishing was lowering the value of her property.¹⁰² Once she even agreed to an offer, “but the purchaser withdrew; it is so with everything—no one wants to buy anything. If our valiant, voracious, and vivacious King Stork would only desist from his activities while a few small creatures were left it would be a mercy; but I fear when he gets through, there will be none but sharks, devil-fish, and swordfish left.” Some time later, King asked to be given a house on the South Carolina White House property, where he might expand his business. “He is absolutely worthless and unreliable,” Pringle declared, “but he spoke of his large family and how necessary it was for him to get where he could pursue his business of shadding, and Casa Bianca [White House] was the very best pitch of tide for the shad fishing.” Pringle saw in King’s request a way to keep him happy and protect the resale value of the North Carolina getaway. “He gave me an idea, and I told him he could have the house if he would give me two shad a week during the shad season, two and a half months. This he most willingly agreed to do.” Pringle hoped that through this accommodation she could sell her North Carolina property, obtain free fish, and draw more efficient labor from a contented King.

At the time King was still fishing in North Carolina, Pringle dealt with similar problems at the South Carolina White House and Cherokee plantations, where farmhands were taking shad and other fish without giving her anything in return. “I never have been able to get any tribute at all from the shad nets, which are set in front of my doors all winter,” she declared. “Five or six men shad there regularly, but they elude all demands, and I rarely eat a shad, as they are too great a luxury for me to buy unless I have company; they are like the wild ducks which swarm in the rice fields at night in the winter, ‘so near and yet so far.’” Worse still, her South Carolina farmhands had more interest in fishing than in working in the rice fields. “They planted five acres of rice-land apiece,” she noted, “but did not work it at all, so they did not pay their rent, and I know they would do worse this year. It has proved a splendid crop year, and they could get $1.15 a bushel for their rice, but they have none, because they were too lazy to work at it.” Feeling desperate, Pringle promoted one of the farmhands, Nat, to overseer and charged him with stamping out the intractability. When that failed, Pringle discharged the most uncooperative of the crew. “I told Nat to do the best he could with the few left,” she recalled, “and to extract a shad a week from the fishermen who are now spreading their nets in the river just in front of the house.”¹⁰³

Probably few former slaves turned hunting or fishing into such lucrative, semipermanent enterprises, but examples can be found—demonstrating that African Americans tried to expand customary activities to their limit. The Reverend Irving E. Lowery, once a slave in Sumter County, South Carolina, recalled that former slaves in Charleston seized every opportunity: “in Charleston, the butcher’s business is largely controlled by colored men. This is true both in the down-town market and also in the green grocery business, as it is called, throughout the city.” He recalled that one person in particular, “C. C. Leslie, the colored fish merchant, did a fine business for nearly thirty years. He did a heavy business in supplying the local market, and shipped large quantities of fish to all parts of the State to both white and colored customers.”¹⁰⁴ Cities such as Charleston, blessed with plentiful nearby wildlife, accessible rivers, and a thriving port, became key markets for African Americans’ fish and game. Leslie was not alone in his success there.

In a lawsuit in the 1890s, Charles Pringle Alston, a planter of Georgetown, South Carolina, tried to make an example of African Americans who worked to secure their livings in such a fashion. He was trying to stop trespassing on his lands between the Waccamaw River and the Atlantic Ocean by people who “have undertaken to trespass and invade upon plaintiff’s said marsh land and creeks, and to take and remove the clams and other shell fish from the beds of the creeks and also fish and seine and remove the fish from the said creeks and in addition to habitually trespass upon, shoot, frighten and scare off the game upon the said described property.” Alston initially accused two area residents, Edmund Cain and Isam Miller, both white, of the trespassing. Cain and Miller informed him that African Americans were responsible. Alston eventually sued a white man named J. F. Limehouse, whom the court found to have “a large number of flat bottom boats to lend to negroes to depredate all the surrounding creeks, & he continues to send up to the cannery every week oysters & clams by the flat load.” In addition to Limehouse, Alston sued other men, both black and white, “fishermen who fish and gather oysters, clams and other shell fish for a living,” eventually securing an injunction to stop the defendants’ hunting, fishing, and oystering on his lands. For Alston and other landowners, trespassing by hunters and fishermen, prompted by marketing opportunities, created both an annoyance and a serious financial burden.¹⁰⁵

Other white observers also noted the ubiquity of these hunting, fishing, and marketing activities by African Americans. According to Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, naturalist, U.S. Fisheries Commission founder, and uncle of Theodore Roosevelt, “all around Charleston the Negroes seem to be in possession of the country … It is they who supply the Charleston market, it is they who do the fishing and the work.” He also commented on similar activities across the South, indicating that wherever there was money to be made through hunting or fishing, former slaves waited to take advantage. Traveling through Fernandino, Florida, R. B. Roosevelt noted, “we found the colored population, which takes to fishing as naturally as the bee is nautically supposed to take to a tar bucket, everywhere, pursuing the finny tribes through the numerous creeks and arms of the sea.” He also claimed that by the 1880s, African Americans’ market activities also threatened the once plentiful supply of rail (a wetland game bird found in many parts of the South). “It is only of late years that many of the rail were killed at the South,” Roosevelt opined. “The old-time battue [beating of vegetation to flush game] of the Negroes at night time, with paddles and torches, did not amount to much, but now hundreds [of rail] are killed daily through the season in the rivers below Washington, although the weather is usually so hot that half of them spoil.”¹⁰⁶ For Roosevelt and other white observers, it was obvious that African Americans had stepped up their sporting activities since liberation. For many, particularly landowners and sportsmen, that fact would become a source of consternation.

In a 1903 photograph, an African-American fish vendor sells his wares in the street, probably in Augusta, Georgia. This was a common sight in Southern cities and towns in coastal and riparian parts of the region. Selling fish and game provided African Americans not only with food but also with an entry into valuable market activities, which they expanded as best they could. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Black Southerners, then, hunted and fished all across the region and, when able, used those activities in the richer fish and game areas—particularly in the coastal and riparian South—to create market opportunities that sometimes allowed them to break free from dependence on white employers. Independence became the greatest benefit of such marketing opportunities. African Americans cultivated independence from the poor nutrition that plagued so many lower-class Southerners, particularly former slaves; independence from white-imposed definitions of acceptable means of earning a living; and, perhaps most valuable, independence from whites’ efforts to restrict their subsistence options. That independence gave many African Americans greater opportunity to improve their financial and material condition and greater experience with a more unrestricted, autonomous subsistence than they had ever known. Both outcomes carried the potential for increasing the distance between former slaves and their former masters.

HUNTING AND FISHING AND THE “LABOR QUESTION”

In her reminiscence of nineteenth-century Fayetteville, North Carolina, Sally Hawthorne wrote of the role of the swamps as safe havens for plebian populations. She noted that the tradition began with Native Americans, who “were at home in the swamps, hunting and fishing,” eventually making the swamps a retreat for “a motley crew of free negroes who were no credit to their race, some runaway slaves, as well as … a few white men, who for one reason or another, were in hiding,” all of whom used the wildlife of the swamp to eke out a living.¹⁰⁷

The existence of such a refuge annoyed planters but, according to Hawthorne, none felt compelled to act. That changed after Emancipation, when planters began having trouble finding “workers from among those who had always lived on the plantation.” Apparently, too many former slaves had taken to area swamps, drawing on customary practices such as hunting and fishing to guarantee subsistence. “One and all, when they had no money to buy what the islands did not produce,” Hawthorne noted, “just paddled along the stream to the most likely place and helped themselves to anything that came in sight.” This led to an even greater nuisance when the swamps became a base for depredations against local plantations, through the theft of livestock, food, and goods from stores and smokehouses. According to Hawthorne, the military eventually stepped in to deal with the crime originating from this swamp community. Over time, as development intruded on the swamps, civilization and capitalization spoiled them as a potential escape from plantation labor. Within a few decades of the Civil War, according to Hawthorne, the African-American population that had made the swamps its home had been all but driven out.¹⁰⁸

Buried in Hawthorne’s dubious yet highly intriguing account are significant truths about African-American economic life and subsistence in the rural South before and after Emancipation. First, the use of hunting and fishing to resist attempts to force former slaves into employment that limited their freedom was deeply rooted in black culture. As the similarities between hunting and fishing before and after liberation suggest, the desire to exploit fish and game to its fullest reflected African Americans’ willingness to employ cherished survival mechanisms carried over from bondage. Second, the nutritional and financial rewards of hunting and fishing, if utilized to their fullest, could greatly improve former slaves’ material circumstances. Those such as King Stork, who turned shad fishing into lucrative businesses in North and South Carolina, and C. C. Leslie, who became one of the best-known fish merchants in the Deep South, seized the opportunity to take control of their own livelihoods.

Many white Southerners, as evidenced by the reaction of Fayetteville residents to the swamp community, did not respond favorably to blacks’ long-term exploitation of Southern environs. Planters and employers often thought of African Americans’ hunting and fishing as strictly sources of money and provisions. But as independent actions that pulled former slaves away from regular labor, or as market endeavors that gave African Americans a chance to live apart from whites’ control, hunting and fishing threatened the South’s labor discipline and its racial hierarchy. Employers and landlords had always been anxious about labor tractability and would, as the postwar period wore on, become increasingly alarmed by this perceived erosion of white supremacy.

The natural bounty of the South was frequently heralded by white elites as one of the greatest attractions of the region, but they described its enabling former slaves to survive apart from agricultural labor in decidedly negative terms. As noted in an 1868 editorial in the Charlotte, North Carolina, monthly The Land We Love, “we might attribute the negro’s indolence to nature’s bounty which … often gave food in return for the mere stretching forth the hand.”¹⁰⁹ R. L. Dabney noted that in a region as naturally blessed as the South, “the last freedman multiplies, unstinted by his poverty,” allowing former slaves to survive without an obligation to hard work. Living in a region with a mild climate, short winter, and bountiful fish, game, and forage, former slaves could work less diligently and, “between these various resources, country Negroes [could] manage to sustain those low conditions of existence, which enable so low a race to multiply; and they multiply on, as yet, very much as in old times.”¹¹⁰ As Southern whites had long been aware, customary practices such as hunting and fishing were common ways in which former slaves exploited such bounty.

Frances Butler Leigh described that connection between the natural bounty and former slaves’ unwillingness to labor for whites. Like other planters, her father had tried a variety of means to get his laborers to work, but “as for starving them into this, that is impossible too, for it is a well-known fact that you can’t starve a negro.” There were “about a dozen” African-American laborers on the Leigh family’s Butler’s Island, Georgia, plantation “who do no work, consequently get no wages and no food, and I see no difference whatever in their condition and those who get twelve dollars a month and full rations.” The situation was explained by blacks’ ability to feed themselves by means other than exclusive labor in the service of whites. “They all raise a little corn and sweet potatoes,” Leigh noted, “and with their facilities for catching fish and oysters, and shooting wild game, they have as much to eat as they want … not yet having learned to want things that money alone can give.”¹¹¹ The quest for “things that money alone can give” was, in the opinion of Southern landowners, incompatible with the freedom from controlled labor that customary rights could provide.

The almost constant complaints about African Americans’ hunting and fishing made by frustrated Southern landowners, sportsmen, and lawmakers, from Emancipation through the 1920s, demonstrate the vital link between the “labor question” and African Americans’ customary rights. Almost as soon as the Civil War ended, planters began to lodge complaints about labor irregularity that cited hunting and fishing as a contributing cause. Susan Dabney Smedes, daughter of Virginia and Mississippi planter Thomas S. Dabney, wrote that her father “had small patience for the shiftless, lazy ways of the negro race after they were set free … Tenants were brought in from other plantations, but they were more fond of barbecues and big meetings and hunting and fishing than of keeping the grass out of the fields.”¹¹² Indeed, almost as soon as slaves became freed people, complaints linking hunting and fishing with labor evasion became commonplace. “The most of the former laborers are here, but won’t labor,” one South Carolinian complained. “The negroes … can do with very little bread—live on fish and oysters, coons, &c, &c., There being therefore but little necessity for labor, very little work is done by the negroes … I am fully satisfied the negro now … is not able to do more than one fourth of the hard work he could easily have done when a slave.”¹¹³ The editor of Southern Planter and Farmer put the matter even more bluntly in July 1877: “There are portions of the state where it is almost next to impossible to procure any reliable labor. In the ability on the part of the idle Negroes there to hunt and fish at will is to be found the cause; and the sooner that is corrected the better.”¹¹⁴

In some cases, African Americans could use hunting and fishing to avoid working for white planters entirely, as in the case of William Carter, who disappeared with his hunting dog Jack. In other cases they might work for whites only when absolutely necessary. For decades after Emancipation, agricultural employers were burdened with the knowledge that laborers could subsist on hunting and fishing. “In Tidewater Virginia there is frequently difficulty in getting sufficient supply of labor during the fishing season,” wrote Thomas Pollard, former Virginia Commissioner of Agriculture, in 1883.¹¹⁵ Another observer noted that “we try to treat [black laborers] fairly, and to impress them with the idea that we take an interest in them, which we really do. Yet with all this, when fish bite, they will go fishing, no matter how important their labor may be.”¹¹⁶ Likewise, Mississippian Andrews Wilkinson described former slave Ebenezer—whose name he shortened to “Ebony for the convenience of brevity, and for cause” —as a devoted hunter and fisherman. “He was born with a passion for hunting and fishing which far exceeded even his fondness for shirking his alleged work most of the day or loitering with idle companions of his own race half the night on the back streets of the little Mississippi town.”¹¹⁷

White commentators believed these occurrences to be symptomatic of African Americans’ idleness and used such examples as the basis of many of the late nineteenth century’s most enduring negative characterizations of people of color. But these accounts reflected much more than racial stereotypes. They also reflected rural African Americans’ ability for using hunting and fishing to minimize whites’ control of their labor, to avoid work relationships that smacked of quasi-slavery, and to reject elite-espoused values of a “free” labor system, if that meant reduced freedom and the loss of cherished customary rights. “In the mind of the negro a great deal of idle time is the sine qua non of happiness,” wrote Jas. H. Oliphant of Stellaville, Georgia, in 1875. “Since he has been set free, he has taxed his limited intellect to the utmost to discover some plan by which he can give a large portion of his time to fishing, hunting, meetings, visiting, politics, and general idleness; but how to make money, accumulate property, and secure the solid foundations of life, are questions with him of minor importance.”¹¹⁸ Such comments are often dismissed as simply landowners’ racist frustrations. I would suggest, however, that for former slaves, such ways of accumulating the “solid foundations of life,” if that meant abandoning traditions that served them so well under bondage, might very well have been “questions of minor importance.”

More important to African Americans was the role of hunting and fishing in helping them make the most of their freedom. Frances Butler Leigh noted that freed people in Georgia “were encouraged in the idea that freedom meant no work, twenty acres of land, a mule, a gun, a watch, and an umbrella,” things largely denied them as slaves and symbolic of both material improvement and independence.¹¹⁹ Philip A. Bruce hinted that this desire to avoid whites’ control and achieve independent subsistence had strong links to both the acts and products of hunting and fishing. He described the living conditions of freed people in Southside Virginia who managed to live, away from whites’ oversight, “on a few acres that lie on the backbone of a vast ridge, far removed from every stream and apparently from all trace of civilization.” In these harsh conditions, with their few crops, vegetables from their small gardens, and “the animals that they trap or shoot in the neighboring woods, they keep their families alive, but the struggle to do so is continuous, and barely successful.” Yet to Bruce’s surprise, “they prefer to live as they do … where they are at liberty to act as they choose, to working on the most extensive and prosperous of the adjacent plantations.”¹²⁰

For employers, blacks’ subsistence activities became sources of idleness and inefficiency; but for African Americans, they brought a measure of economic and physical independence. Over time, their ability to obtain fish and game, which for landlords might otherwise be merely an annoyance, could evolve into activities that presented an overt threat to whites’ economic world. Robert Henderson Allen, a planter of Lunenburg County, Virginia, outlined the harmful effects of such activities. “No work done today,” he wrote in his diary on December 13, 1867. “All our Freedman laborers went hair [sic] hunting. Indeed they are perfectly worthless. Have not made expenses generally since the war, and there is no remedy … and the labor system grows worse and less effective every day.”¹²¹

Constant complaints about hunting and fishing as the cause of lost work time on farms and plantations mounted in the postwar South. Elizabeth Allston Pringle, whose problems with laborer and fishing entrepreneur King Stork left her in no doubt as to former slaves’ attachment to such customary activities, frequently lamented blacks’ penchant for abandoning work for field, forest, and stream. A farmhand named Gibbie had to be scolded several times for bad work habits. “Yesterday I gave Gibbie a severe talk because of his total neglect of work,” she wrote, “the stables not cleaned, no pine straw hauled for bedding, the calves starved, yet the cows only half milked.” She suggested that he failed to complete certain tasks “because he is in such haste to go out hunting.” Gibbie was working less and hunting more, which alarmed Pringle both for its impact on her labor supply and its apparent influence on Gibbie’s interactions with his employers. Describing the chiding she gave him, she noted that “he is intoxicated with the rice bird and coot fever and spends every night out hunting, and of course in the day he is too sleepy to do anything. He answered almost insolently for the first time, for usually he has the grace of civility.” Gibbie’s excursions did not cease after the scolding. Later in the memoir Pringle recounted a daily inspection in which she “got down to the plantation early, expecting to send Gibbie out with the ox wagon to move the heavy things.” There she “found he had sent a message to say he was sick … I went to see Gibbie to see if he were really sick or only resting after his month’s night hunting.” Much to Pringle’s surprise, Gibbie was sick with pneumonia—no doubt a result, she believed, of his frequent hunting at night when he should have been resting for work.¹²²

Although agricultural employers such as Pringle were often the most vocal about unregulated African-American customary rights, others also joined the chorus. Throughout the post-Emancipation period, other groups, especially sportsmen, came to realize that coping with threats to the Southern labor system dovetailed with their own interests. In 1881, a contributor to Forest and Stream hinted at a link between the unsettled state of affairs since Emancipation, Southern economic inefficiency, and sporting interests. “There is hardly a place in North Carolina where a true sportsman may not enjoy himself… Altogether we offer both a field of sport and interest,” he wrote. But there was still work to be done, particularly in relation to the unsettled nature of Southern hunting and fishing since liberation. “We are a peculiar people with our ‘peculiar institution’ gone, and although we have gotten used to the loss, we have not all learned the most profitable ways of the ‘new departure,’” the writer warned. “The saying that it is hard to teach an old dog new tricks is as applicable to men as dogs, and I am inclined to think it especially so of men who live under a southern sun.”¹²³

There is little doubt that Southern sportsmen, many of them also agricultural employers or landowners, believed former slaves’ hunting and fishing activities were threats on several fronts, and they merged their grievances over labor with calls for proper sporting behavior. A contributor writing under the name N.A.T., of Palestine, Texas, mixed former slaves’ independence from labor with concern over their sporting excesses. “When they were ‘turned loose’… they became at once a race of sportsmen,” he wrote. “Every man and boy was eager to be the owner of a gun, and as old muskets and Enfield rifles were very cheap in those days, they had not much difficulty in supplying their wants”—an ease of subsistence that threatened employers’ control. “It may also be so, that they looked upon possession of firearms and gunning as the highest privileges of freedom.” This feeling of freedom might indeed have unintended consequences. “Those were the halcyon days of the negro race in America,” N.A.T. wrote. “I must say that if the freedman ever put on provoking airs toward the white people, it was when he was met by the latter in those hunting expeditions of his early freedom.”¹²⁴

Thus, although originating with Southern farmers and landlords, complaints about African Americans’ unrestrained pursuit of fish and game would not end there. Elite sportsmen, who increasingly turned their gaze southward in the decades following Emancipation, also took up the cause of linking former slaves’ exploitation of the Southern natural environment with a general lack of control over people of color. Over time, the cacophony of angry white voices raised against blacks’ customary rights would lead to the adoption of widespread and comprehensive legislative measures that left African Americans increasingly restricted in their use of such cultural traditions as a way of subsisting, or even prospering, apart from agricultural labor in the service of whites.