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Land and Labor, 1866–1867 A new year promises new beginnings, and the winter of 1865–1866 presented a broad field of possibilities in the erstwhile slave states. On the South’s plantations and farms, crops had been harvested, and former slaves and former slaveholders were making arrangements for the next year’s work. The Thirteenth Amendment, which became part of the U.S. Constitution on December 18, 1865, abolished slavery throughout the nation, ensuring that the crops of 1866 would be the first since the seventeenth century to be produced by a labor force without a single slave. In Washington , Congress convened in December after being out of session in the critical months following the conclusion of war. Empowered to enforce the new amendment “by appropriate legislation,” the lawmakers assembled with reconstruction of the former Confederate states and the future of the emancipated slaves at the top of their agenda. For former slaves and their former owners, free labor remained unfamiliar ground they were learning to navigate. Slavery had not expired until the previous spring and summer—even later in remote parts of the defeated Confederacy and in the Union states of Kentucky and Delaware.1 In its place stood the hastily instituted labor arrangements of 1865 under which federal authorities had prohibited corporal punishment and insisted that ex-slaves be compensated for their work, but otherwise awarded employers authority in the workplace. Freedpeople on plantations and farms had labored under agreements that required them to remain to the end of the year and delayed payment until the contract was fulfilled, while employers had been required to feed and house all the ex-slaves on their estates, workers and nonworkers alike. Intent on maintaining order and securing the harvest, federal officials had discouraged freedpeople from leaving the places where they resided at the conclusion of the war. With the year’s end, however, they were now at liberty to negotiate new terms of work with their current employers or to go elsewhere, while former slaveowners and other employers were at liberty to hire whomever they wished. It was, in a sense, a second emancipation.2 Brief though it was, the postwar debut of free labor had left a legacy of issues that would remain contested for the remainder of Presidential Reconstruction and well 1. On the delayed arrival of emancipation in parts of the seceded states, see Freedom, ser. 3, vol. 1: chap. 1. In both Kentucky and Delaware, developments during and after the war had seriously undermined slavery, but only with ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment were all the slaves in those states freed. On the slow death of slavery in Kentucky, see Freedom, ser. 1, vol. 1: chap. 8; Freedom, ser. 1, vol. 2: chap. 6. 2. On the labor arrangements of 1865, see Freedom, ser. 3, vol. 1. 2 LAND AND LABOR, 1866–1867 beyond. Freedpeople and their employers had clashed over the extent and character of supervision; the days, hours, and pace of labor; modes of discipline; the form and amount of compensation; access to garden plots and other productive resources; and myriad other matters. Former slaves complained that employers had inflicted corporal punishment, failed to pay them as promised, and intruded into their familial affairs and nonworking hours. Those who labored on plantations objected to being driven in gangs as of old, under the supervision of overseers. Employers countered that the freedpeople had worked poorly, resisted supervision, behaved impudently , and deserved no more than they had received in year-end settlements. Questions persisted about responsibility for the care of elderly, disabled, and otherwise dependent ex-slaves, and about the disposition of land that freedpeople were occupying in parts of the South, either under federal auspices or at their own initiative. The federal troops and Freedmen’s Bureau agents who had overseen free labor in 1865 remained on the scene, although it was by no means clear how long they would continue to do so or how numerous they would be. By January 1866, the number of troops still in service had already plummeted to 148,000, some 25,000 of whom were members of the regular army. In the former Confederate states, 88,000 were on duty, a good many of them posted along the border with Mexico rather than in areas with large ex-slave populations. Throughout 1866 and into 1867, demobilization continued apace, sending all the remaining volunteer regiments home. By October 1866, the army of occupation in the former Confederacy had...

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