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9 In Search of Landed Independence Across the South, former slaves aspired to determine for themselves how they worked and lived. The best way to “be their own masters,” they almost universally believed, was to gain access to land.1 Possessing land, even as renters or squatters, could enable freedpeople to separate themselves from former owners, avoid dependence on wages, and make their own decisions about divisions of labor, the hours 1. The quotation comes from a December 1865 report by a Freedmen’s Bureau agent in Mississippi . Freedpeople who “evidently expected a division of property” had refused to hire for wages another year, he informed his superiors. “Now that they are disapointed in that, they are willing to rent or lease lands, but are anxious to fix it in some shape that they will be their own masters.” (Capt Z. B. Chatfield to Maj Geo. D. Reynolds, 12 Dec. 1865, C-13 1865, Registered Letters Received, ser. 2268, Natchez MS Acting Asst. Comr. of the Southern Dist. of MS, RG 105 [A-9445].) In this essay, quotations and statements of fact that appear without footnotes are drawn from the documents included in the chapter. IN SEARCH OF LANDED INDEPENDENCE 875 and pace of work, and the crops they would raise. But land was more than a productive resource. Control over land, whether a forty-acre farm or a half-acre lot with a house and garden, could offer a sense of permanence, a hub for a community, and a stake in the future. Freedpeople went to great lengths to establish independent proprietorship, drawing not only on their own labor and whatever means they had to work the land, but also on personal and familial ties, the sinews of their communities . Freedpeople’s desire for land was both deeply rooted and a response to new conditions . In places where slaves had lived for generations—in the older states and especially in the rice-growing district along the South Carolina and Georgia coasts— freedpeople had powerful ties to the land where they and their ancestors had been born and raised. They sought control over their old homes or, if that was impossible , land nearby.Where sale and forced migration had brought black people to the area more recently, the connection to particular tracts was weaker but the desire for independent farming just as strong. In some places, wartime experiments that allowed ex-slaves access to land had encouraged freedpeople to envision themselves as independent proprietors. As soon as the war ended, however, President Andrew Johnson set in motion policies designed to restore property to former Confederates, signaling to freedpeople and their allies that efforts to redistribute Southern land would meet powerful opposition. Meanwhile, freedpeople’s experiences with wage labor in the first years after emancipation further intensified their desire for land, as many found that “free labor” involved being ill-treated, cheated, impoverished, and pressured to enter new contracts that promised only more of the same.2 For former slaves, the obstacles to farming independently were formidable. The major economic impediment was their lack of capital. People hoping to work for themselves needed an array of material assets at the beginning of each season— including draft animals, tools, and seed—as well as provisions and clothing that would get them through to the harvest, when the crop could be consumed or sold. Hardly anyone emerged from slavery able to meet these demands, and the 1865 season did little to help. Purchasing land was an impossibility for all but a favored few. Renting required less capital up front and was therefore within reach of more 2. On independent cultivation of land by ex-slaves in the Union-occupied South during the war, see Freedom, ser. 1, vols. 2–3. On the restoration of federally controlled land, see above, chap. 2, and Freedom, ser. 3, vol. 1: chap. 4. On freedpeople’s efforts to attain landed independence during 1865 and the challenges they confronted, see Freedom, ser. 3, vol. 1: chaps. 4, 7, 9–10. For their day-to-day experiences with free labor on the South’s plantations and farms, see above, chaps. 3, 5, 8, and Freedom, ser. 3, vol. 1: chaps. 5, 8, 10. On the meaning of land to the freedpeople and the nature of their claims to the land, see Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge, La., 1983), pp. 55–56; Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the...

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