The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South by Bruce Levine

Author:Bruce Levine
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, Sociology, LA, State & Local, MS, NC, United States, VA, WV), South (AL, GA, SC, Military, KY, Civil War Period (1850-1877), FL, TN, AR, History
ISBN: 9780679645351
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

Sales, leases, and the return of lands to recently secessionist owners left the vast majority of blacks in Union-occupied parts of the Confederacy working the soil not as property owners or even as renters but as poorly paid employees of wealthy whites.119

Some freedpeople refused to go along—refused any longer to labor for others on lands they considered rightfully their own. Others made it clear that if circumstances compelled them to do that, they intended at least to influence the terms of that labor. They would not submit docilely and in all things to their employers’ will.120 On the sea islands, for example, some who worked on Edward Philbrick’s plantation stubbornly raised corn for their own consumption where they were told instead to grow cotton for their employer. One man, upbraided for misusing Philbrick’s land, angrily retorted, “Man! Don’t talk about Mr. Philbrick lan’. Mr. Philbrick no right to the lan’. ”121

White employers complained endlessly of the bold spirit of self-assertion that seemed to have gripped their employees. The upheavals of the war had broken the life-and-death power that Mississippi valley landowners had previously exercised over black labor and awakened the laborers to new possibilities. When the northern teacher Elizabeth Hyde Botume talked with black refugees in Savannah at the end of 1863, she found them confident “that emancipation had lifted them out of old conditions into new relations with their fellow beings.” They were “no longer chattels,” but had “rights and privileges like their neighbors.”122 Their experiences had also given them a new sense of their own potential collective power. Union provost marshal John W. Ela reported in mid-1863 that former slaves would “not endure the same treatment, the same customs, and rules—the same language—that they have heretofore quietly submitted to.” They had gained “a spirit of independence,” he wrote.123

At first their demands were mostly defensive ones. They would not tolerate whipping or any other physical punishment from the landowners. They would not permit employers to harm family members or intervene in their family lives.124 But over time, freedpeople became bolder and readier to act in concert to advance their common interests. Now, Ela noted, “the negroes band together, and lay down their own rules, as to when, and how long they will work etc. etc. and the Overseer loses all control over them.”125 They refused to work under such overseers in gangs as so many had been forced to do in the old South.126 In general, they refused to work as intensively as they had under slavery. They wanted the same right to move about freely that white people enjoyed, and they began to insist on a shorter workweek and a shorter working day than had previously been imposed upon them. They wanted better food, shelter, and clothing. Families, furthermore, should have the right to withdraw women from the fields so they might work in their homes and care for their children.127 Children, too, must be relieved of field duty so that they could help their mothers or attend school.

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