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Chapter 10. Lessons Learned
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10 Lessons Learned 910 lessons leArneD The first season of postwar laborconcluded amid preparations fora newagricultural year. Wage settlements for 1865 and the negotiation of contracts for 1866 became occasions to look back on the tumultuous months since the Confederate surrender, to plan for the future, and to reflect on lessons learned. The labor arrangements of 1865 had arisen from hasty improvisation. They reflected not only the conflicting interests of former slaves and former slaveholders, but also wartime devastation, general economic derangement, and contradictory imperatives on the part of federal authorities. As a result, the months since the cessation of armed conflict had produced disappointment for almost everyone involved—none more so than the freedpeople, whose jubilation at the demise of slavery was eroded by the grinding necessity of earning a living in circumstances of hardship and oppression. As the year drew to a close, most former slaves could be found on the same plantations and farms where they had resided at war’s end. More often than not, they were working for the same people for whom they had toiled as slaves. At the same time, many ex-slaves found themselves far from their antebellum homes, having fled from or been relocated by their owners during the war. In terms of material welfare, freedpeople were little if any better off than they had been when they exited slavery. Late planting, the collapse of the credit system by which agricultural operations had previously been financed, and the war’s toll in destruction and neglect had yielded small harvests in most of the region. The returns to planters and farmers were meager; to the laborers they employed, more meager still. Such disappointments notwithstanding, much had changed since the spring. A state of war had given way to an uneasy peace.The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December, abolished slavery throughout the United States, thwarting possible legal challenges to emancipation and establishing freedom as the birthright of all Americans. In struggles with their employers, sometimes assisted by federal military authorities and the Freedmen’s Bureau, former slaves had acquired, at least in theory, certain fundamental attributes of free laborers, including the right to be paid for their work, to negotiate terms of employment, and to change employers. As the new year approached, they stood ready to exercise options that had been unavailable only a few months earlier. That prospect provided a leaven of hope after an interval marked by deflated expectations. Important developments in the waning months of 1865 shaped the perceptions of both black and white Southerners and of the Northern officials charged with supervising labor relations. Of particular significance was the diminished federal military presence. Most volunteer regiments had mustered out by the fall, and the forces occupying the South grew smaller and more widely scattered with each pass1 . In this essay, quotations and statements of fact that appear without footnotes are drawn from the documents included in the chapter. 2. On the outcome of the 1865 crop, see, in addition to the relevant documents in this chapter, above, chap. 8. [34.201.28.181] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:16 GMT) lessons leArneD 911 ing month. Meanwhile, President Andrew Johnson’s amnesty and pardon of former Confederates, together with the reinstitution of state and local governments, had bolstered the power of re-enfranchised white property owners. Mere months after their defeat in battle, erstwhile rebels were assuming political control throughout the South, framing and enforcing state laws and local ordinances to govern unenfranchised former slaves. At the national level, the Republican-controlled Congress, which had been out of session throughout the summer and fall, convened in December with the political reconstruction of the South and the future of the freedpeople uppermost on its agenda. Like their constituents throughout the North, members of Congress kept a close watch on the behavior of former slaves and former slaveowners, as well as the actions of the reconstituted civil governments . Events on the ground, they believed, would gauge the progress of freedom. In the South itself, employers—especially those who had been slaveholders— almost universally denounced the first season of free labor as an abject failure. Bluntly in discussions among themselves and more circumspectly in communications with federal officials, they issued a litany of complaints. Absent the discipline of slavery, they charged, freedpeople had become lazy, ungovernable, unreliable, and insolent. The incentives and penalties sanctioned by Northern free-labor practice were insufficient to keep them at work, much less impel them to labor...