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THE "TALISMAN POWER": DAVIS TILLSON, THE FREEDMEN'S BUREAU, AND FREE LABOR IN RECONSTRUCTION GEORGIA, 1865-1866 Paul A. Cimbala Soon after Prestoent Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, an increasingly vocal segment of theRepublican party argued that some sort of federal agency should take up the task of guiding the slaves of the rebellious states from bondage to freedom. The result of the debate over the necessity and propriety of such an extraordinary institution was an act of Congress passed and signed into law on March 3, 1865, which created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands. In May, Major General Oliver Otis Howard took charge ofthe agency as its commissioner. With his establishment of a network of assistant commissioners throughout the South, form began to give solid meaning to a vaguely defined congressional charge to care for the freedmen.1 According to Howard, his agency's "first business was to regulate labor," or, in other words, to assure the success of a new free labor system in the South.2 To carry out that task in Georgia, he appointed in September a fellow native of Maine, BrigadierGeneral Davis Tillson, to organize the Bureau in a state where an earlier summertime attempt had met with little success. Tillson's activities, especially thoserelatingto the regulation of labor, earned him a reputation for being—to quote his Bureau commander—"a conservative and harmonizer, leaning possibly The author thanks Raymond Arsenault, Leslie Rowland, and Harold Woodman for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this study. He wishes to extend special appreciation to Dan T. Carter for reading several drafts of this article and to Randall M. Miller and Jerry Thombery for suggesting it in the first place. 1 George R. Bentley, A History of the Freedmen s Bureau (Philadelphia, 1955), chaps. 1-3. 2 Kennebec Journal (Augusta, Maine), 11 Aug. 1865. Eric Foner best explains the importance of free labor ideology during Reconstruction and the Freedmen's Bureau's role as its agent in "Reconstruction and the Crisis of Free Labor," included in his Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (New York, 1980), pp. 97-127. Civil War History, Vol. XXVIII, No. 2 Copyright®1982 by The Kent State University Press 0009-8078/82/2802-0003 $01.00/0 154CIVIL WAR HISTORY to the side of the white employers."3 Some members of the postwar northern press were less kind, accusing him of beingnothing more than a planters' pawn.4 This characterization has led some historians to question Tillson's commitment to his black charges, accusing him of being insensitive to the freedmen's hopes, hesitant in securing their rights, and too accommodating to the planters' labor needs.5 Certainly the transplanted Down Easterner carried south in his intellectual carpetbag conservative prejudices which many of his northern contemporaries shared with him. For example, he did not believe that the Bureau should or could secure political rights for the freedmen in 1865 or 1866. But then he saw nothing wrong with depriving Yankee women of the vote, and he once publicly questioned the wisdom of allowing uneducated northern masses to exercise the franchise. For Tillson, social equality for the freedmen was out of the question; after all, "it never existed among white people."8 However, this conservatism should not obscure another belief Tillson brought south, a belief that best explains his approach to his duties. The assistant commissioner was committed to making the free labor system work. Because of his belief in free labor, Tillson did not perceive the freedmen's place in southern society to be static. Change was possible, but primarily through the freedmen's own hard work—the "talisman power" he once called it, "which can remove your poverty and ignorance and replace them with wealth, knowledge and happiness."7 3 O. O. Howard, Autobiography, 2 vols. (New York, 1907), 2:286. 4 For example, see the National Anti-Slavery Standard, 16 June 1866. Also, the JVeu; York Tribune accused him of saying blacks were better off as slaves than as free men, and apparently the paper was a nuisance to Tillson's reputation throughout his tenure in Georgia. D. Tillson to O. O. Howard...

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