example, is described by historian Eric Foner as representing the dominant view of the Union officials that, “most freedmen must return to plantation labor, but under conditions that allowed them the opportunity to work their way out of the wage-earning class.”73
As an institution, the Freedmen’s Bureau was a direct descendent of the “experiments in freedom” that occurred throughout the Sea Islands in Georgia and South Carolina, the sugar country outside of New Orleans, and the Mississippi Valley. Since the congressional Confiscation Act of 1862, the Union Army was permitted to seize and claim any land that had been abandoned by its Confederate owners or any land where its owners ceased to pay taxes. It is no surprise then that the concentration of lands that the Union chose to appropriate were where the region’s wealthiest cash crops were produced. In manipulating fugitives and refugees of these areas, the Union set up a pseudo-military slave camp to entice workers to continue to produce crops for the benefit of the northern war effort.74
In the case of the Sea Islands, the cotton plantations were organized by Union textile and railroad capitalists who were sent down to teach Blacks that “the abandonment of slavery did not imply the abandonment of cotton, and that Blacks would work more efficiently and profitably as free laborers than as slaves,” and to instill the free labor ideology that “no man … appreciates property who does not work for it.”75 The experiment on the Sea Islands was a total failure. The free workers preferred growing subsistence crops and refused to produce the profits that had been achieved in years before the war. The Yankees left in 1865, unable to secure a long-term investment in Sea Island cotton. Northern investors did not learn from this failed attempt at disciplining the Black worker through the wage-labor system, and they would continue to impose their definition of freedom as workers moved from subtle tactics of work slowdowns and workplace occupations to destroying the foundational infrastructure of the cash crop system.76
In the summer of 1865, the Freedmen’s Bureau was still redistributing land that was covered under Sherman’s field order while importing northern philanthropic missionaries to staff compulsory schools for children and to teach investment economics to the new landowners.77 At this point, President Johnson received regular hate mail and threats from the previously wealthiest men in America, and would read reports from the Agricultural Department stating that “labor [in South Carolina and Georgia] was in a disorganized and chaotic state, production had ceased and … the power to compel laborers to go into the rice swamp utterly broken.”78 Johnson reversed all orders by the Bureau and sought to immediately repossess the planters of their property.79
It was at this time that the Freedmen’s Bureau revealed itself as the enforcer of the old economy in new terms:
The “two evils” against which the Bureau had to contend, an army officer observed in July 1865, were “cruelty on the part of the employer and shirking on the part of the negroes.” Yet the Bureau, like the army, seemed to consider the Black reluctance to labor the greater threat to its economic mission. In some areas agents continued the military’s urban pass systems and vagrancy patrols, as well as the practice of rounding up unemployed laborers for shipment to plantations. Bureau courts in Memphis dispatched impoverished Blacks convicted of crimes to labor for whites who would pay their fines.80
From late 1865 until its dissolution in 1868, the Bureau’s chief occupation was to attempt, by any means necessary, to convince free Blacks to sign contracts to work for their former masters on plantations or smaller farms. When General Oliver Howard—an architect and proponent of the “Black yeomanry” model of freedom—had to go to Edisto Island, South Carolina, to tell people they were to quit the lands they had been squatting on and return to work on the plantations, the people who had been living free of labor contracts responded as follows:
General we want Homesteads, we were promised Homesteads by the government. If it does not carry out the promises its agents made to us, if the government having concluded to befriend its late enemies and to neglect to observe the principles of common faith between its self and us its allies in the war you said was over, now takes away from them all right to the soil they stand upon save such as they can get by again working for your late and their all time enemies … we are left in a more unpleasant condition than our former.… You will see this is not the condition of really freemen. You ask us to forgive the land owners of our island.… I cannot well forgive. Does it look as if he has forgiven me, seeing how he tries to keep me in a condition of helplessness?81
Refusing to learn from the so-called experiments in freedom of the previous years, and still ignoring the clear words from the Sea Island people, in February 1866, Bureau officials attempted to bring former landowners back to the islands. The inhabitants armed themselves, drove off the bureaucrats and the planters, and barricaded themselves on the land, telling the capitalists, “You have better go back to Charleston, and go to work there, and if you can do nothing else, you can pick oysters and earn your living as the loyal people have done—by the sweat of their brows.”82 Accounts like this one are innumerable from the islands of Georgia and South Carolina in 1865 and 1866. These islands were geographically strategic to squat and defend, as many of the planters had abandoned them at the beginning of the war. The former workers, who knew the ecological and economic flows of the waterways between the islands and mainland, had no intention of leaving.
Snap, Crackle, Pop! Tensions Build in the Rice Fields
Across from the Sea Islands where squatters were defending their land, woven together by intercoastal waterways and tidal marshes, were the mainland rice fields surrounding the port towns of Charleston and Savannah. Second only to the Georgetown County rice kingdom in South Carolina, the Ogeechee Neck in Chatham County, Georgia, was the seat of the most profitable rice bounties in the country before the war. As on the islands, by the summer of 1865, planters were already returning to the Ogeechee River network with the help of Union officials and devising ways to reinvest in the rice crop. When planters returned to find their former lands claimed by multiple new owners, the Bureau worked with them to help them reoccupy their plantations. Planter John Cheves, who owned the 2,014 acres he called Grove Point Plantation, refused to recognize the thirty families who had gained possessory titles to 245 acres of his land in his absence. The Bureau followed his lead. In the true spirit of the capitalist debt economy, the Bureau helped him borrow $11,300 to pay back his debts and reinvest in his plantation. The planters who did not borrow money from the bank simply redivided their land and tried the scheme of the northern capitalists: selling their own plots to the people who already leased the land from the Bureau. Some planters, like the bosses of Wild Horn and Oriza, were so eager to get production up and running again that they simply leased the land to skilled workers in exchange for a portion of the crops.83
The workers who leased, bargained, and contracted with the Bureau and former masters for employment and housing were in the minority of the 4,200 Black people living in the Ogeechee district. Hundreds, if not thousands more were squatting in the pine woods around the swamps and surviving between subsistence hunting, fishing, and farming, and the informal economies that existed throughout slavery with other poor Blacks and whites. Frances Butler Leigh, a Sea Island cotton planter’s widow and mistress of three plantations after the war, attests to this lifestyle:
Our neighbors on Saint Simon’s are discouraged with the difficulties they encounter, having to lose two or three months every year while the Negroes are making up their minds whether they will work or not. There are about a dozen on Butler’s Island who do no work. They all raise a little corn and sweet potatoes and with their facilities for catching fish and oysters and shooting wild game they have as much to eat as they want.84
Most historians who recognize the phenomenon of these Black autonomous communities at the end of the Civil War describe them as solely the result of rice production conditions and the social relations specific to that labor, ignoring the fact that it was the active refusal of those conditions—through attacking and abandoning the plantation society—that secured the possibility of that freedom. It is necessary, however, to examine the history of southern rice cultivation in order to learn
