Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867: Series 3, Volume 2: Land and Labor, 1866-1867

Chapter 8. Workers on the Move

8 Workers on the Move Emancipation conferred on former slaves one of the most cherished prerogatives of free laborers: the right to move where they chose. Forced migration had been a hallmark of life in bondage, from the Middle Passage that brought Africans to mainland North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, through the Second Middle Passage that relocated slaves from the seaboard deep into the Southern interior in the nineteenth century, to the “refugeeing” of slaves away from Union armies during the Civil War. Freedom allowed former slaves to embark on migrations of choice, making for themselves the myriad decisions involved in uprooting and re-rooting their families. Those decisions were made under pressing circumstances , to be sure, chief among them the freedpeople’s poverty and the determination of white Southerners to keep black workers in place and available for hire. Nevertheless, the right to move at their own initiative was both new and welcome. WORKERS ON THE MOVE 789 At the end of 1865, most freedpeople were still on the same plantation or farm where the conclusion of the war had found them. Between then and the spring of 1867, many of them changed their location, moving over distances that ranged from a few miles to hundreds or even thousands. Short moves were far more common than long ones; more often than not, freedpeople relocated from one place to another within a single neighborhood or from one neighborhood to another within the same county. But significant numbers of former slaves initiated long-distance migrations they had been unable or unwilling to undertake immediately after becoming free. A lengthy journey was a daunting prospect, requiring substantial economic resources, advance planning, and collaboration with others, including kinfolk , neighbors, prospective employers, and, at times, federal officials. Such moves opened new opportunities, but they also presented new challenges and evoked new forms of opposition. In leaving their old residences and making new lives elsewhere, migrants reshaped both the communities from which they departed and the ones they joined.1 Freedpeople’s decisions about whether and where to move were entwined with decisions about how and for whom they would work. Like other free laborers in the United States and elsewhere, former slaves migrated to escape privation, to seek material prosperity and economic independence, and to give their families a fresh start on new terrain. Other motives grew out of experiences and aspirations particular to former slaves: to reunite families separated during slavery, to return to a place they considered home, to escape former owners, and to claim rights of citizenship on more favorable ground. Others besides the migrants themselves had a stake in whether and where freedpeople moved. Planters, farmers, and other employers in a given neighborhood sought to keep black workers in place in order to enjoy continued access to their labor. At the same time, prospective employers from other areas—some nearby, others far away—offered them inducements to relocate. Freedmen’s Bureau agents and military authorities also concerned themselves with the migration of freedpeople . Determined to close contraband camps and other relief establishments and to reduce the number of ex-slaves in the South’s cities, they encouraged (and sometimes compelled) unemployed or irregularly employed freedpeople to go to places 1. In this essay, quotations and statements of fact that appear without footnotes are drawn from the documents included in the chapter. Published accounts of migration by freedpeople in 1866 and early 1867 include William Cohen, At Freedom’s Edge: Black Mobility and the Southern White Quest for Racial Control, 1861–1915 (Baton Rouge, La., 1991), chaps. 1, 3–5; Michael P. Johnson, “Out of Egypt: The Migration of Former Slaves to the Midwest during the 1860s in Comparative Perspective,” in Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora, ed. Darlene Clark Hine and Jacqueline McLeod (Bloomington, Ind., 1999), pp. 223–45; Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York, 1979), chap. 6; Leslie A. Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2009), chaps. 2–5. 790 WORKERS ON THE MOVE where work was available. Bureau officials also helped ex-slaves move from areas of low labor demand and correspondingly low compensation to locations where they could earn higher wages. In so doing, the Northerners believed they were abetting the “natural” workings of a labor market temporarily disrupted by postwar...