CHAPTER FIVE
The Freedmen’s Bureau
Meanwhile, the Freedmen’s Bureau had been established. General Swayne promulgated an order recognizing as agents of the bureau former civil magistrates who could and would obtain endorsement of negroes; but, as a rule, carpetbaggers filled the places. Offices were opened at the county seats, where complaints of freedmen were lodged and investigations conducted. The agents prescribed a uniform division of products of the soil between planters and hands. They supervised all contracts and regulated the conduct of affairs between employer and employe, and their dicta were absolute and final, being enforced, if necessary, by soldiers of the garrison.
The agents gave notice that nobody would be allowed to employ freedmen unless the contracts were submitted to and approved by them and left in their custody. They gave ear to any tale of complaining freedmen, arrested the white man complained of, tried and punished him, unless he proved willing to purchase immunity. Sometimes after the planter had contracted in the prescribed manner with freedmen, and had his crops in process of cultivation, the hands would quit work, and only intervention by the agent would make them return. Such intervention cost as high as ten dollars per hand, and the occasion for it might recur before the crops could be gathered. Some of the agents secured plantations and used them as refuges for dissatisfied freedmen, who were fed and clothed.
The agents were as a rule “fanatics without character or responsibility, and were selected as fit instruments to execute the partisan and unconstitutional behests of a most unscrupulous head.” (Senator Beck, in an official report.) Some of them were preachers, and had been selected as being the most devout, zealous and loyal of a certain religious sect. In league meetings they told the negroes that although they had been married according to plantation custom for many years, they must procure licenses and be remarried. Thus they made large sums in fees, in many instances from old couples who had grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
All of this was humiliating and irritating to the planters, but submitted to so long as the agents confined their activities to legitimate functions. But they soon became mischievously meddlesome, and discovered in their powers means for promoting their political fortunes.
As a body, the negroes had been conducting themselves with propriety, and good feeling prevailed. Their greatest delight was in the dignity of unaccustomed surnames, duster coats, gauntlet gloves, albums, clocks and other wares, with which enterprising northern peddlers tempted them. Their childish delight in these novel possessions for a while filled the measure of their happiness. But some of them who had been following armies contracted nomadic habits; others were incapable of rational exercise of their novel privileges, and became disturbers of the peace. Their depredations soon rendered stock raising impracticable. Every plantation had a gin-house, and these houses, with their valuable contents, were exposed to incendiaries seeking revenge for real or fancied grievances, and many were destroyed. Men with the “easy money” acquired during the period of cotton stealing set up crossroad stores at every available point and dispensed vile whiskey in barter for bags of loose cotton and corn, ostensibly the “shares” of those offering them, but really often stolen from lint rooms and cribs, and even from the ungarnered crops in the fields. These traders did an immense business, many of them setting up gins and baling screws. The existing “sundown and sunrise” law was enacted to destroy this nefarious traffic. It prohibited the sale of farm products between sunset and sunrise.