Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama

by Walter L. Fleming

The Black Belt was the richest as well as the least exposed section of the state and fared well until the end of the war. The laborers were negroes, and these worked as well in war time as in peace. Immense food crops were made in 1863 and 1864, and there was no suffering among whites or blacks. Until 1865 there was no loss from Federal invasion, but with the spring of 1865 misfortune came. Four large armies marched through the central portions of the state, burning, destroying, and confiscating. In June, 1865, the Black Belt was in almost as bad condition as the white counties. All buildings in the track of the armies had disappeared; the stores of provisions were confiscated; gin-houses and mills were burned; cattle and horses and mules were carried away; and nothing much was left except the negroes and the fertile land. The returning planter, like the farmer, found his agricultural implements worn out and broken, and in all the land there was no money to purchase the necessaries of life. But in the portions of the black counties untouched by the armies there were supplies sufficient to last the people for a few months. A few fortunate individuals had cotton, which was now bringing fabulous prices, and it was the high price received for the few bales not confiscated by the government that saved the Black Belt from suffering as did the other counties.

Neither master nor slave knew exactly how to begin anew, and for a while things simply drifted. Now that the question of slavery was settled, many of the former masters felt a great relief from responsibility, though for their former slaves they felt a profound pity. The majority of them had no faith in free negro labor, yet all were willing to give it a trial, and a few of the more strenuous ones said that the energy and strength of the white man that had made the savage negro an efficient laborer could make the free negro work fairly well; and if the free negro would work, they were willing to admit that the change might be beneficial to both races.

During the spring and summer and fall the masters came straggling home, and were met by friendly servants who gave them cordial welcome. Each one called up his servants and told them that they were free; and that they might stay with him and work for wages, or find other homes. Except in the vicinity of the towns and army posts the negroes usually chose to stay and work; and in the remote districts of the Black Belt affairs were little changed for several weeks after the surrender, which there hardly caused a ripple on the surface of society. Life and work went on as before. The staid negro coachmen sat upon their boxes on Sunday as of old; the field hands went regularly about their appointed tasks. Labor was cheerful, and the negroes went singing to the fields. “The negro knew no Appomattox. The Revolution sat lightly,—save in the presence of vacant seats at home and silent graves in the churchyard, in the memorials of destructive raids, in the wonder on the faces of a people once free, now ruled, where ruled at all, by a Bureau agent.” Here it was that the master race believed that after all freedom of the negro might be well.[2033] In other sections, where the negro was more exposed to outside influences, people were not hopeful. The common opinion was that with free negro labor cotton could not be cultivated with success. The northerner often thought that it was a crop made by forced labor and that no freeman would willingly perform such labor; the southerner believed that the negro would neglect the crop too much when not under strict supervision. Yet later years have shown that free white labor is most successful in the cultivation of cotton because of the care the whites expend upon their farms; while cotton is the only crop that the free negro has cultivated with any degree of success, because some kind of a crop can be made by the most careless cultivation.

At first no one knew just how to work the free negro; innumerable plans were formed and many were tried. The old patriarchal relations were preserved as far as possible. Truman,[2034] who made a long stay in Alabama, reported that in most cases there was a genuine attachment between masters and negroes; that the masters were the best friends the negroes had; and that, though they regarded the blacks with much commiseration, they were inclined to encourage them to collect around the big house on the old slavery terms, giving food, clothes, quarters, medical attendance, and a little pay.[2035] At that time no one could understand the freedom of the negro.[2036] As one old master expressed it, he saw no “free negroes”[2037] until the fall of 1865, when the Bureau began to influence the blacks. But with the extension of the Bureau and the spread of army posts, the negroes became idle, neglected the crops that had been planted in the spring, moved from their old homes and went to town to the Bureau, or went wandering about the country. The house servants and the artisans, who were the best and most intelligent of the negroes, also began to go to the towns. Negro women desiring to be as white ladies, refused to work in the fields, to cook, to wash, or to perform other menial duties. It was years before this “freedom” prejudice of the negro women against domestic service died out.[2038] The negro would work one or two days in the week, go to town two days, and wander about the rest of the time. Under such conditions there was no hope of continuing the old patriarchal system, and new plans, modelled on what they had heard of free labor, were tried by the planters. In the white counties the ex-soldiers went to work as before the war, but they had come home from the army too late to plant full crops, and few had supplies enough to last until the crops should be gathered. In most of the white counties the negroes were so few as to escape the serious attention of the Bureau, and consequently they worked fairly well at what they could get to do.[2039]

The first work of the Bureau was to break up the labor system that had been partially constructed, and to endeavor to establish a new system based on the northern free labor system and the old slave-hiring system with the addition of a good deal of pure theory. The Bureau was to act as a labor clearing-house; it was to have entire control of labor; contracts must be written in accordance with the minute regulations of the Bureau, and must be registered by the agent, who charged large fees.[2040]

The result of these regulations was to destroy industry where an alien Bureau agent was stationed, for the planters could not afford to have their land worked on such terms. In some of the counties, where the native magistrates served as Bureau agents, no attention was paid to the rules of the Bureau, and the people floundered along, trying to develop a workable basis of existence. In the districts infested by the Bureau agents the negroes had fantastic notions of what freedom meant. On one plantation they demanded that the plantation bell be no longer rung to summon the hands to and from work, because it was too much like slavery.[2041] In various places they refused to work and congregated about the Bureau offices, awaiting the expected division of property, when they would get the “forty acres and one old gray mule.” When wages were paid they believed that each should receive the same amount, whether his labor had been good or bad, whether the laborer was present or absent, sick or well. In one instance a planter was paying his men in corn according to the time each had worked. The negroes objected and got an order from the Bureau agent that the division should be made equally. The planter read the order (which the negroes could not read), and at once directed the division as before. The negroes, thinking that the Bureau had so ordered, were satisfied. In the cane-brake region the agents were afraid of the great planters and did not interfere with the negroes except to organize them into Union Leagues; but elsewhere in the Black Belt the planter could not afford to hire negroes on the terms fixed by the Bureau.[2042]

Northern and Foreign Immigration

With the break-up of the slave system the planter found himself with much more land than he knew what to do with. He could get no reliable labor, he had no cash capital, so in many cases he offered his best lands for sale at low prices. The planters wanted to attract northern and foreign immigration and capital into the country; the cotton planter sought for a northern partner who could furnish the capital. Owing to the almost religious regard of the negro for his northern deliverers, many white landlords thought that northern men, especially former soldiers, might be better able than southern men to control negro labor. General Swayne, the head of the Bureau, said that the negroes had more confidence in a “bluecoat” than in a native, and that among the larger planters northern men as partners or overseers were in great demand.[2043]

For a short time after the close of the war northern men in considerable numbers planned to go into the business of cotton raising. DeBow[2044] gives a description of the would-be cotton planters who came from the North to show the southern people how to raise cotton with free negro labor. They had note-books and guide-books full of close and exact tables of costs and profits, and from them figured out vast returns. They acknowledged that the negro might not work for the southern man, but they were sure that he would work for them. They were very self-confident, and would listen to no advice from experienced planters, whom they laughed at as old fogies, but from their note-books and tables they gave one another much information about the new machinery useful in cotton culture, about rules for cultivation, how to control labor, etc. They estimated that each laborer’s family would make $1000 clear gain each year. DeBow would not say they were wrong, but he said that he thought that they should hasten a little more slowly. Northern energy and capitol flowed in; plantations were bought, and the various industries of plantation life started; and mills and factories were established. Because of the paralyzed condition of industry the southern people welcomed these enterprises, but they were very sceptical of their final success. The northern settler had confidence in the negro and gave him unlimited credit or supplies; consequently, in a few years the former was financially ruined and had to turn his attention to politics, and to exploiting the negro in that field in order to make a living.[2045] Both as employer and as manager the northern men failed to control negro labor. They expected the negro to be the equal of the Yankee white. The negroes themselves were disgusted with northern employers. Truman reported, after an experience of one season, that “it is the almost universal testimony of the negroes themselves, who have been under the supervision of both classes,—and I have talked with many with a view to this point,—that they prefer to labor for a southern employer.”[2046]

Northern capital came in after the war, but northern labor did not, though the planters offered every inducement. Land was offered to white purchasers at ridiculously low rates, but the northern white laborer did not come. He was afraid of the South with its planters and negroes. The poorer classes of native whites, however, profited by the low prices and secured a foothold on the better lands. So general was the unbelief in the value of the free negro as a laborer, especially in the Bureau districts, and so signally had all inducements failed to bring native white laborers from the North, that determined efforts were made to obtain white labor from abroad. Immigration societies were formed with officers in the state and headquarters in the northern cities. These societies undertook to send to the South laboring people, principally German, in families at so much per head. The planter turned with hope to white labor, of the superiority of which he had so long been hearing, and he wished very much to give it a trial. The advertisements in the newspapers read much like the old slave advertisements: so many head of healthy, industrious Germans of good character delivered f.o.b. New York, at so much per head. One of the white labor agencies in Alabama undertook to furnish “immigrants of any nativity and in any quantity” to take the place of negroes. Children were priced at the rate of $50 a year; women, $100; men, $150,—they themselves providing board and clothes. One of every six Germans was warranted to speak English.[2047] Most of these agencies were frauds and only wanted an advance payment on a car load of Germans who did not exist. In a few instances some laborers were actually shipped in; but they at once demanded an advance of pay, and then deserted. Like the bounty jumpers, they played the game time and time again. The influence of the Radical press of the North was also used to discourage emigration to the South;[2048] consequently white immigration into the state did not amount to anything,[2049] and the Black Belt received no help from the North or from abroad, and had to fall back upon the free negro.