A Renegade History of the United States Read online

  John and Clarissa Freeman were fictional ex-slaves who were the main characters in a textbook used in government-run schools to teach the former slaves how to think and behave as “free men.” They were the promise—and the demand—of Reconstruction. And they were no different, except for skin color, than the heroes of schoolbooks that white children all over the United States were forced to read.

  Reconstruction began in the early months of the Civil War, in the fall of 1861, when the Union army first captured plantations in the South. Some political leaders in the North believed the newly freed slaves should remain permanently on the plantations, under the management of white landowners. Others thought that they should be allowed to compete with whites for jobs anywhere, North or South, in the country or in the cities. And the boldest of the Reconstructionists—so-called “Radical Republicans”—advocated that the government assist the ex-slaves in acquiring their own farms. But virtually all leaders of the Union cause agreed that the freed slaves had to be trained to become good citizens. This became more and more urgent with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the Union army’s conquest of large parts of the South during the war, and the states’ ratification in 1865 of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude. By the end of the Civil War, four million slaves, carrying a culture that was in many respects antithetical to American citizenship, had been let loose upon the land.

  So when conquering Union officers rode onto plantations and were suddenly faced with a group of newly emancipated slaves, they often spoke to them of their new status as free people. They explained that freedom meant giving up all the pleasures they had created for themselves on the plantations. They would work harder as citizens than as slaves, and they would surrender their own desires to national obligations. Some slaves welcomed this odd kind of freedom. They became soldiers in the Union army, civil servants, diligent farmers, and devoted family men and women. But others ignored what their liberators had to say, wandering across the land, refusing to work, refusing to marry, and refusing to sacrifice for the government that now claimed them as its people. So at the war’s end in 1865, Congress created the Freedmen’s Bureau, an agency of the army that would provide food and housing for the ex-slaves, and most important, train them to become citizens in a democratic republic. The ex-slaves soon learned that democratic citizenship is as much about responsibilities as it is about rights, and that protection of those rights by the government always comes with a steep price. Many slaves willingly and eagerly paid the price. Others, like many white renegades who had resisted and ignored the calls for obligation and sacrifice since the War of Independence, decided it was too high to pay. They took the vote but turned down the rest of democracy.

  FREE TO WORK

  Slaves generally considered work to be only a means to wealth, but after emancipation, Americans told them that work—even thankless, nonremunerative work—was a virtue in itself. “You must be industrious and frugal,” Freedmen’s Bureau agents instructed newly freed slaves. “It is feared that some will act from the mistaken notion that Freedom means liberty to be idle. This class of persons, known to the law as vagrants, must at once correct this mistake.” One bureau agent named Charles Soule greeted a group of newly freed slaves in Orangeburg, South Carolina, with a new kind of whipping:

  You must remember that your children, your old people, and the cripples, belong to you to support now, and all that is given to them is so much pay to you for your work. If you ask for anything more; if you ask for a half of the crop, or even a third, you ask too much; you wish to get more than you could get if you had been free all your lives. Do not ask for Saturday either: free people everywhere else work Saturday, and you have no more right to the day than they have. If your employer is willing to give you part of the day, or to set a task that you can finish early, be thankful for the kindness, but do not think it is something you must have. When you work, work hard. Begin early—at sunrise, and do not take more than two hours at noon …

  Remember that all your working time belongs to the man who hires you: therefore you must not leave work without his leave not even to nurse a child, or to go and visit a wife or husband … If you leave work for a day, or if you are sick, you cannot expect to be paid for what you do not do; and the man who hires you must pay less at the end of the year …

  When ex-slaves flooded into the Freedmen’s Bureau schools, they were probably expecting to learn how to read, write, and do arithmetic. The schools did teach those things, but when the illiterate ex-slaves listened to their teachers read from storybooks like John Freeman and His Family, they heard a very different kind of lesson. In the opening scene of John Freeman, the master and missus run away from the plantation, and the slaves greet their freedom with a “jubilee shout” and “the greatest excitement, crying, laughing, leaping, and dancing.” But John quiets his fellow freedmen with sober counsel that freedom is not fun. “ ‘Now we are free,’” he tells them, “‘we must work.’”

  “Now, children, we’ve blessed the Lord for that, the next thing is to inquire what we are going to do; what it is to be free. It is not to be let loose like the wild hogs in the woods, to root along in the bogs and just pick up a living as we can. No; we are men now, and we’re free men, too; and we’ve got to do just what free men do. You look round and you see every freeman, black and white, works for a living; works, I say, not grubs and roots.”

  Then there is Prince, “a lazy and careless fellow” who resents the new work discipline and misses his less strenuous days as a slave. John and the other freedmen scorn him, and a white teacher singles him out for a special lesson:

  “[E]very body must work, Prince. God has made us to work. Adam and Eve, the first man and woman who were made, were placed in a garden to dress and keep it. God knew they would be happier to have something to do, and he knows that we shall be, and so he has made it a duty to labor.”

  All the other freedmen happily agree with this new idea that work in itself is good. But “Prince said nothing.”

  Unlike the writers of our textbooks today, the authors of freedmen’s textbooks and the leaders of Reconstruction understood the dark side of democracy. At the turning point in John Freeman, a Yankee lieutenant addresses the ex-slaves: “ ‘You have come out from your bondage, my friends, to enjoy the blessings of freedom, and have put yourselves under the protection of the United States government… . But, if you come to this flag for protection, you must be willing to do service for the flag.’” When a man in the crowd pledges to “ ‘work for you,’” the lieutenant concludes, “ ‘That’s it; we’ll help each other. We will be brothers, as God made us to be. All we want is for you to be industrious and orderly, and we will take care of you.’” There was no racial double standard here. The lesson that the government secures our rights only if we abide by democracy’s demand to sacrifice and restrain ourselves had been broadcast to white citizens since the Revolution. All citizens and potential citizens were told that the more they worked and the less they lived for themselves, the more they were entitled to protection.

  Other freedmen’s textbooks hammered home the work ethic as a necessary component of citizenship. Clinton B. Fisk, a former abolitionist and Union army colonel and a senior officer in the Freedmen’s Bureau, wrote Plain Counsels for Freedmen as a manual for citizenship. “I was myself brought up to hard work from my very childhood, and I am not speaking to you upon a matter that I know nothing about,” Fisk wrote, correctly offering himself as a model American. “No, my friends, I love work, and nothing would be a greater punishment to me than enforced idleness.

  I would rather work ten days than to be idle one day.” His devotion to work was ruthless and complete: “I would rather every one of my children should die and be buried thus, than that they should be raised in idleness, and thus be exposed to dishonesty.” Fisk and the Reconstruction project replaced the master’s whip with a new, internal lash.

  Good and
great men are all hard workers. And do you know what it is that makes a free state so rich and strong? It is, above all things save God’s blessing, patient, honest work… . Now free labor does not imply that you may perform your work irregularly, carelessly, and dishonestly; and that your employer must put up with it, and say nothing about it. When you were a slave, it may have been your habit to do just as little as you could to avoid the lash. But now that you are free, you should be actuated by a more noble principle than fear.

  The whip of leather that fell upon their skin could not make them work well. But a whip of shame that fell upon their conscience could make them work like mules. For the first time in their lives, the ex-slaves were “bad” for not working.

  Some ex-slaves adopted the work ethic. The Southern Workman, a magazine published with assistance by agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau, featured letters from ex-slaves preaching the gospel of labor to their brethren. The most famous black proponent of the work ethic was the ex-slave Booker T. Washington, who spent decades after the Civil War extolling “the dignity of labor” and discouraging agitation for equal rights. But early civil rights leaders were also powerful transmitters of the lessons taught in the Freedmen’s schools. Frederick Douglass, now regarded as one of America’s greatest freedom fighters, revered the regimented labor he saw among northern workers:

  I saw industry without bustle, labor without noise, and heavy toil without the whip. There was no loud singing, as in southern ports, where ships are loading or unloading—no loud cursing or swearing—but everything went on as smoothly as the works of a well adjusted machine … Men talked here of going whaling on a four years’ voyage with more coolness than sailors where I came from talked of going on a four months’ voyage.

  Ida B. Wells, another member of the early civil rights pantheon and upholder of the work ethic, considered her education in Freedmen’s Bureau schools to be a gift from God: “All my teachers had been the consecrated white men and women from the North who came into the South to teach immediately after the end of the war. It was they who brought us the light of knowledge and their splendid example of Christian courage.” Some employers of freedmen happily reported that their workers had learned the new lesson of labor. A planter in Mississippi was delighted to find that “the Negroes on our plantation were industrious and efficient, and we had little reason to complain of them in this regard.” Two ex-Union officers who owned a plantation in Alabama exclaimed that they had “never employed so docile, industrious, and good humored a set of people in all our experience.” It appears, however, that far more ex-slaves had little use for the work ethic.

  After the war, a great many northerners bought plantations in the South, taking advantage of cheap prices for land and labor and assuming that the ex-slaves would be as industrious as northern workers. Nearly all of these men challenged the racist notion that blacks would not work as hard as whites. They argued that their “Negro brethren” were fully human and that it was therefore perfectly natural for them to absorb the work ethic. What they did not understand was that there was nothing natural about a life devoted to labor.

  Only a few months after the Freedmen’s Bureau started placing ex-slaves in jobs on plantations owned by northerners, where time and work practices were regulated, stories began to circulate about “an unaccountable prejudice among the colored people [against hiring] themselves to Northern people.” One ex-slave working on a plantation in Georgia had a good question for his northern employer: What was the use of a man being free “if he had to work harder than when he was a slave?” One freedman, Frank Smith, moved from Alabama to Illinois but didn’t like the kind of freedom he saw there: “I didn’t lak de Yankees. Dey wanted you to wuk all de time, and dat’s sump’n I hadn’t been brung up to do.” The white abolitionist Charles Stearns moved with his wife from Massachusetts to a Georgia plantation after the war to help civilize the freedmen. But he found constant resistance to demands for regularity and discipline among his black employees. His hands insisted that they be allowed to take their guns into the field and stop their work whenever a game animal happened by. To Stearns’s consternation, this considerably limited productivity, but when he instructed his employees that free men do not take such breaks, they informed him that to change the practice “was a great encroachment upon their rights as freemen.” Even Margaret, Stearns’s cook, who had worked for years in “big houses” as a slave, required constant supervision to perform her duties in a timely and efficient manner. But Margaret was having none of it. She threatened to quit and declared, “Dem Yankees is a darn sight meaner than de old rebs; it’s no use to try to suit ’em.” Other northern employers were shocked that ex-slaves refused to work in conditions that would not daunt a farmer in the North. When one asked his employees to work in inclement weather to clear some cotton out of clogged ditches, they replied that “dey was free, and dey wouldn’t work in de mud and de water for nobody.”

  Organized strikes of freedmen broke out all over the South over issues of wages, working conditions, hours, and treatment from managers. But many employers also reported frequent, spontaneous, and informal work stoppages when their black workers felt as if they were working too much or paid too little. Stearns noted with great irritation that whenever his employees “deemed it necessary for their physical welfare that they should enjoy a holiday, they took that holiday however different might be our opinion on the subject.” A great number of freedmen also supplemented their wages by another entirely un-American means. Meat, corn, livestock, clothes, jewelry, bales of cotton, and vegetables planted in gardens disappeared from free-labor plantations all over the South. Employers put their pantries, smokehouses, barns, and homes under lock and key, but to little avail. “The truth is,” one plantation owner admitted, “that with all our vigilance, the niggers will steal, & we may congratulate ourselves if they do not get the Lion’s share.”

  Historians assume that the freedmen universally desired land, and there is certainly evidence that many did want to become independent farmers. Some leaders of Reconstruction wanted to give land to the freed-men, in part because they knew that nothing disciplines a person faster or more thoroughly than handing them a portion of uncultivated earth from which they must produce all of their livelihood. The life of someone who must grow all of his own means of support is a life of constant toil. Thad-deus Stevens, a leader of the Radical Republicans, argued that giving the ex-slaves “a small tract of land to cultivate for themselves” would “elevate the character of the freedman.”

  Nothing is so likely to make a man a good citizen as to make him a freeholder. Nothing will so multiply the productions of the South as to divide it into small farms. Nothing will make men so industrious and moral as to let them feel that they are above want and are the owners of the soil which they till. It will also be of service to the white inhabitants. They will have constantly among them industrious laborers, anxious to work for fair wages.

  Some slaves saw such a life as freedom, but many others seemed more interested in something that could be gotten and enjoyed immediately: money. Employers of ex-slaves reported relentless demands for higher pay. The planter Edward Philbrick found it difficult to attract workers, since most would work for him only if they were paid “a great deal more than they were last year.” Whitelaw Reid complained that “nothing seemed more characteristic of the Negroes than their constant desire to screw a little higher wages” out of him. James Waters, a Louisiana planter, suffered constant demands from his black employees for more: “Always several of them grumble and complain & are impudent and sometimes even have cried (the women only) because they thought they had not been paid enough.” According to historian Lawrence N. Powell, ex-slaves “seldom received their wages without challenging the planter’s accounts.” They were also quick to demand overtime payment when they were asked to work past their contracted hours. On the South Carolina Sea Islands, some expected overtime pay even if the workday lasted only fifteen minutes longer than what they h
ad agreed to. Freedmen’s demands for land were sporadic, according to Powell, “but the demand for money was constantly heard throughout the region in these years.” It appears that in the minds of most ex-slaves, work remained a means to an end, not a good in itself.

  Further evidence of the ex-slaves’ resistance to the demands of American culture is the great number who were arrested for “loitering” and “vagrancy,” which were euphemisms for willful unemployment. All the new state legislatures established after the war enacted sets of laws known as the Black Codes, which gave power to local officials to arrest any black person who appeared to be unemployed and to fine them for vagrancy. Thousands of black men were rounded up for refusing to work. Any arrestee who could not afford to pay the fine, which was nearly all, would be hired out to private employers to satisfy the fine. Many in the North thought this to be an attack on the humanity of the freedmen, who they believed would “naturally” desire to work if allowed to do so on their own volition. In response to what it considered to be outrages committed by the Southern states with the help of the Tennessee-born president Andrew Johnson, in December 1865, the Radical Republicans, who controlled the Congress and who led the Reconstruction project, refused to seat the representatives from the Southern states that had been “restored” by Johnson and which did not allow blacks the vote. The Radicals then showed that they were deadly serious about making ex-slaves into citizens.

  In April 1866, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which declared African Americans to be citizens of the United States and gave the federal government the power to intervene on their behalf against the states if state officials abridged their rights. In July 1866, Congress passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill, which extended the life of the bureau and gave it the power to nullify any work agreements forced on ex-slaves under the Black Codes. Both bills were passed over Johnson’s vetoes. But local officers of the Freedmen’s Bureau complained that a great many ex-slaves still had not acted on their natural inclination to work. Frustrated with the freedmen’s misunderstanding of freedom, the bureau encouraged state governments to round up shiftless black men and force them to sign labor contracts on plantations.