In liberated Louisiana

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Gerteis, "From Contraband to Freedman: Federal Policy Toward Southern
Blacks 1861-1865":

In his own efforts to rid New Orleans of vagrants, Superintendent Hanks was
more careful than most officers to distinguish slaves from antebellum free
blacks. His success in rounding up unemployed members of the former class
was attributed in part to the cooperation of several "discreet colored
auxilliaries," which apparently informed the superintendent of the
whereabouts of undesirable vagrants. At the same time, provost guards
received instructions not to arrest free blacks or Negro servants employed
by whites. In any case, persons who were "well dressed," and had the
appearance of being able to support themselves, were not to be molested.
Nevertheless, New Orleans free blacks were repeatedly victims of harassment
and arbitrary arrest. Not surprisingly, they remained hostile to General
Banks' labor policies and provided articulate leadership for the city's
Negroes.

The free Negro elite openly opposed Banks' labor regulations and agitated
for the practical emancipation of plantation hands. The federal labor
system seemed to leave the institution of slavery essentially unaltered.
Official emancipation, the free blacks believed, produced only
"mock-freedmen." Every restriction against freedom of contract and travel
received their condemnation as did the continued existence of Conway's
Bureau of Free Labor, which by March 1865 was denounced as "inconsistent
with freedom." A mass meeting of the "Colored Citizens of New Orleans"
demanded the creation of a "tribunal of arbitrators," composed partly of
freedmen, to review and adjust the actions of provost marshals throughout
the department and thus protect black laborers as well as city residents
from unjust contracts and arbitrary arrest.

What influence, if any, this articulate protest had on the mass of black
laborers in the parishes is difficult to determine. Superintendent Conway,
who was the target of some of the protest, thought the New Orleans free
blacks excited the "ignorant Freedmen, giving them an idea that they are
oppressed," and thus created discontent with the government's regulations.
Unrest in the parishes, however, seems to have run considerably deeper than
the conventional political protest in the city.

Unlike New Orleans free Negroes, plantation hands were not agitated by the
loss of traditional privileges. Federal forces worked to maintain the
continuity of plantation life. General Banks' superintendent for
confiscated plantations discovered quite early, in fact, that if expected
allowances of food, clothing, and tobacco were not forthcoming, there was
little hope of inducing hands to labor. Before work could begin,
Superintendent Samuel W. Cozzens therefore felt "obliged" to provide hands
with the goods, particularly tobacco, which they expected. The
superintendent also found it expedient to favor industrious hands with
weekly rations of coffee. Successful plantation management required that
Yankees be at least as indulgent toward labor as the antebellum masters.

But if plantation hands found themselves no worse off as a result of
federal occupation, their condition was generally no better. Superintendent
Conway acknowledged that planters tried every means to continue "their old
habits regarding the slaves." At the same time, the unsettled conditions
resulting from the war made it "next to impossible" to administer
effectively "any general system of protection for the laborers." There was,
then, little to stop planters from treating their hands as slaves. Conway
acknowledged this, but was nonetheless convinced that the evils resulting
from the injustice and heartlessness of some employers were not as
dangerous as the fate awaiting a population of idle blacks. Better that
they labor essentially as slaves than not labor at all.

Although Conway's control over planters was far from absolute, he assumed
that hands were generally content and "socially, and morally" improved.
Most planters, he thought, followed the regulations, and he expected
laborers to end the season with average savings of fifty dollars. But if
hands actually enjoyed such earnings, Conway made no" mention of it in his
later reports. Rather, what Conway described as "average" earnings
represented a theoretical maximum. He was well aware that the wages
stipulated in Banks' orders struck outsiders as pitifully low, and in an
effort to dampen criticism in the North, he suggested that blacks could
earn profits, in addition to their wages, from crops grown on their
one-acre plots. "First-class hands receive one acre of ground," announced
Conway, "which will produce one bale of cotton, worth at present more than
$400. There are many who will derive this addition to their stipulated pay."

This pleasant description of affairs was entirely disingenuous. The
one-acre plots assigned to heads of families were specifically designed as
vegetable gardens; some blacks had been strictly prohibited from raising
anything else. The fact was that the very best a first-class male hand
could earn under Banks' system in 1864 was five dollars per month after
authorized deductions were made for clothing. If the man had only himself
to support, consumed nothing (like soap and tobacco) on credit, and lost no
more than two months due to sickness, bad weather, and slack seasons, he
might end the year with fifty dollars. It seems more likely, however, that
the mass of blacks fared no better than those near Brashear City who
remained perpetually in debt to their former masters once deductions were
made for time lost and goods purchased on credit.

Wages were largely illusory, but for blacks the continuity of social
controls, rather than the absence of pay, was perhaps the best measure of
the white man's intentions. General Banks' labor regulations virtually
prohibited individual travel without written permission from a white
employer or provost marshal. Unauthorized movement in cities or parishes
was considered vagrancy, and offenders were subject to arrest and forced
labor. The justifications for such restrictions, of course, were never
stated in antebellum terms (the danger of communicable diseases, many
officers said, made such controls necessary), and enforcement was not absolute.

But large-scale movements as well as mass meetings of blacks were strictly
controlled. When blacks at Donaldsonville advanced plans for celebrating
the Fourth of July in 1864 together with neighboring plantation hands,
their efforts were promptly halted by Superintendent Hanks. "The colored
population can take part in the celebration of the 4th of July," he
directed, "but in no extraordinary numbers." In any case, plantation hands
were not to enter the city. Likewise, although the black residents of
Thibodaux were allowed to hold a New Year's Eve ball, their revelries were
strictly regulated. A provost guard was assigned to "enforce order and
protect the colored people in their enjoyments," and the festivities
abruptly ended at midnight at the soldiers' direction.

Most provost marshals shared local prejudices against blacks and enforced
standards of racial subordination. Time and again the provost marshal in
Ascension Parish heard and sustained charges against blacks who, by any
objective standard, were guilty only of self-defense. In one case, the
Union officer sentenced a female plantation hand to thirty days in prison
for "insolence and disobedience of orders." The woman had offended her
mistress by refusing to accept a weekly ration of meat, claiming it was not
sufficient. The planter and his overseer later entered the woman's cabin,
disarmed her of a knife, and while restraining her husband at gun point,
administered, by the planter's own account, about forty or fifty blows with
a stick. "This woman," the planter charged before the provost marshal,
"cursed us all the time, using very insolent language."



Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org