In these circumstances, the Freedmen’s Bureau proved an instrument of inestimable good. Its mediatory and organizing influence prevented outbreaks, and saved thousands from perishing. It assumed the care of homeless blacks and of white refugees. It colonized the former upon abandoned lands, and thence supplied many plantations with labor.
In the month of August, 1865, there were at one of these colonies thirty-four hundred freedmen. “I have been sending paupers to it ever since,” said General Swayne; “and there are now but one hundred and fifty persons there.” This was in January. At that time the Bureau was feeding less than twenty-five hundred blacks, and the number was rapidly diminishing.
No freedmen’s courts had been established by the Bureau in Alabama. “We had not officers enough to establish more than ten courts,” General Swayne told me. “And when those were withdrawn, the negro would have been left defenceless. I therefore preferred to educate the civil courts to do the freedmen justice.” He had displayed considerable diplomatic skill in securing the coöperation of the Convention, and getting an ordinance passed by it, which authorized civil officers to try freedmen’s cases and receive negro testimony. If an officer failed of his duty towards the blacks, his commission as an agent of the Bureau was revoked. General Swayne thought the system was working well; but he confessed that these officers required close watching; and some of his special agents, who came more directly in contact with the people, and with the actual crude state of affairs, while he saw them too much perhaps through the atmosphere of influential State officials, assured me that the justice obtained by the freedmen from these courts was but scanty. “At the outset,” said one, “they meet with obstacles. If they enter a complaint, they must give bail to appear as witnesses, or be lodged in jail. As no white man will give bail for a negro to appear as a witness against a white man, and as they don’t fancy lying perhaps weeks in jail in order to be heard, they prefer to suffer wrong rather than seek redress.”
There were but two freedmen’s schools in the State, one at Montgomery, and another at Mobile, with an aggregate of fifteen teachers and nine hundred pupils.
Everywhere I heard complaints of the demoralization of the people occasioned by the war. There were throughout the South organized bands of thieves. In Alabama, cotton-stealing had become a safe and profitable business. I was told of men, formerly respectable, and who still held their heads high in society, who were known to have made large fortunes by it. These men employ negroes to do the work, because negroes cannot give legal evidence against a white man. During the last three months of 1865, it was estimated that, on the line of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, ten thousand bales of cotton had been stolen.
Crimes of every description, especially upon the property and persons of the freedmen, were very common. General Swayne told me that he stood greatly in need of a force of cavalry, without which it was almost impossible to arrest the offenders.
There was every prospect of a good cotton crop the present year. Since the invention of the spinning-jenny by Arkwright, and of the gin by Whitney, the culture of this great staple has received no such impulse as the recent high prices have given it. The planters were taking courage, the freedmen were at work, and a large amount of Northern capital was finding investment in the State. Even the poor whites, who never before would consent to degrade themselves by industrious labor in the field, seemed inspired by the general activity, and many of them, for the first time in their lives, were preparing to raise a few bales of cotton. Labor was not abundant. “Our best young men went off with the Yankee army; and our best girls followed the officers.” Men of sense and reputation had not much difficulty, however, in securing laborers. “When I got all ready to hire,” said one, “I just turned about four hundred hogs into a field near the road. Every freedman that came that way stopped; and in a week I had as many as I wanted. They all like to hire out where there is plenty of pork.” Others, to fill their quota of hands, were paying the fines of stout negroes on the chain-gangs, and bailing those who were lying in jail.
All sorts of contracts were entered into; and various devices were used to stimulate the energies of the freedmen. Some paid wages; some gave a share in the crop; and I heard of planters who defrayed all expenses, and gave five cents a pound for the cotton raised on their lands. One man, who hired sixty freedmen at moderate wages, divided them into six gangs of ten each, and offered a premium of three hundred dollars to the gang which should produce the greatest number of bales.
General Swayne estimated that there were five thousand Northern men in the State, engaged in planting and trading. Many of them were late army-officers. Business in the principal towns had been paying large profits; and Northern merchants, who purchased their goods at the North, were, notwithstanding the popular prejudice against them, enabled to compete with, and undersell, native traders who bought in smaller quantities and at second hand.
The hilly northern part of Alabama falls off gradually through the rolling prairies and alluvial bottoms of the central, to the low, flat southern portion of the State. Much of this latter region is sandy and barren, producing little besides poor whites and sweet potatoes. There are fertile bottom lands, however, adapted to the sugar-cane; and rice has also been successfully cultivated near the coast.