Thread by @ErikLoomis

This Day in Labor History: November 7, 1861. The Port Royal Experiment begins, an attempt to employ black agricultural workers outside slavery. Let's talk about the limits of abolitionists to re-imagine black labor and how ex-slaves had strong economic demands.

It’s a little hard to imagine the debates about black work in 1861. The idea that African-Americans were inherently lesser than whites was so ingrained, it was a real and open question in the North whether black people would work without white supervision.

In part, this is what the Port Royal Experiment was about. What would black people do on the cotton farms without their masters? Moreover, the North really needed the cotton.

Meanwhile, slaves were walking away from the plantations. In the Sea Islands, fleeing white owners just left slaves behind. So what would become of them. The now ex-slaves had clear demands: they wanted land and they wanted freedom. How would northern whites respond?

Making this more complicated is that northern textile factories had suddenly lost their raw supplies when the Civil War began and the U.S. had lost one of its leading export products to Britain, which Lincoln desperately hoped to keep out of the war.

So a series of factors came together in South Carolina to create the need to figure out what a post-slave economy might look like.

By January 1862, the military was working with the black population to grow cotton for the army instead of for the slaveholders. General Thomas Sherman sent a request to the north for teachers to come and work with the slaves.

The official beginning of the Port Royal Experiment was that April, when Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase appointed Edward Pierce to organize a relief effort and training program for the slaves that included allowing the slaves to buy land and farm for themselves.

By May, 53 missionaries and educators were on their way to South Carolina. The ex-slaves were employed in growing cotton for the wage of $1 for every 400 pounds they harvested.

Edward Philbrick led the labor plan. He ended the slave system of gang labor, gave workers garden plots for themselves, and provided a variety of incentives for the workers.

Ultimately, men like Philbrick wanted to implement the free labor ideology at the heart of the Republican Party in the South and teach it to the ex-slaves. As the government took over more plantations during the war, it began to implement Philbrick’s plan in confiscated lands.

What was free labor ideology? Basically, northern whites believed that under a capitalist system, people would rise and fall based on their own work ethic and that the benefits of the system would be spread relatively equally to those who wanted it. Slavery threatened that.

The real threat of slavery to most northern whites was how it affected WHITE people. They largely didn't care about or were openly hostile to slaves. But would slavery under the white man's republic? That was the core ideology of the Republican Party.

They saw the South and saw a bunch of violent elite men living like kings using slave labor and a lot of poor whites with no place in society. That was the republican and Republican nightmare. But they also had to start thinking about the actual role of African-Americans in 1861.

So the question in the North was, "would the ex-slaves actually work?" Because northern whites were largely opposed to actually helping the ex-slaves. After all, that was WELFARE that would create DEPENDENCY. These terms are capitalized because they should remind you of today.

And nothing, nothing, nothing meant more to northern whites than private property, at least the non-human kind. So to threaten private property rights, even when people committed treason in defense of slavery, that was very scary.

In short, it's hardly surprising that many abolitionists both opposed actually doing much for ex-slaves to allow to succeed once freed and also hated labor unions with a white hot passion. The ideology was there at the beginning for this.

In 1863, President Lincoln built on this program by allowing for the limited confiscation of Confederate plantations and the division of the land among the slaves. Limited to 40,000 acres of abandoned plantations, most of the impact took place in the sea islands.

The land was sold for $1.25 an acre. Although most African-Americans could not afford anything near this price, local freed slaves bought about 2,000 acres of land with the money they could scrape together. But they idea of giving slaves land? Too scary for Republicans.

Northern whites could also buy the land and did so, creating new plantations for themselves worked by paid laborers. The freed slaves also founded their first free town in South Carolina, Mitchelville, on Hilton Head Island.

By 1865, it had 1500 residents. Largely these residents wanted to live away from white people, whether from the North or the South. They wanted freedom, autonomy, and independence to make their own decisions about life and work.

The government’s role in redistributing the land and taking care of the ex-slaves was, like much in the Civil War, deeply contradictory and filled with bureaucratic chaos. The soldiers under Sherman and the civilians sent down by Chase clashed constantly.

The soldiers--yes, Union soldiers--routinely beat and raped the slaves, stealing their food and their land. All of this outraged the missionaries and of course the freed slaves, but little was done, despite the official complaints.

Congress never clarified what exactly should happen in the sea islands. Chase’s military men cared about getting the cotton in any way possible while his civilians wanted to teach citizenship to the ex-slaves.

No cohesive plan ever developed and thus the success of the experiment was compromised from the beginning. The cotton did come, but not to the extent that it had before the war, in no small part because a lot of the ex-slaves did not want to grow cotton.

A boll weevil epidemic also took a major toll on the crop. Philbrick himself believed the experiment a failure because the ex-slaves did not do precisely as he wanted them to do. He ended up selling off the plantation he had bought to the residents in small plots.

The Port Royal Experiment was tremendously successful in one way–it demonstrated to skeptical northerners that black people would work for themselves. Again, I recognize that this seems obviously self-evident but that was not the case in the early 1860s.

Unfortunately by 1865, support for the redistribution of Confederate land to the ex-slaves had become very low throughout the North. Even among most Republicans and abolitionists, the sanctity of private property would be more important than economic redistribution.

The suffrage became the key for abolitionists to lock in black rights, despite the fact that the first thing the ex-slaves wanted was access to land.

As for the land already redistributed in 1863, Andrew Johnson ordered it given back to the original white landowners in 1865, even after William Tecumseh Sherman had extended it through Field Order No. 15.

The Port Royal Experiment came to a sad end. But not all of the land was claimed by the ex-owners and black landowning remained significant in the area well into the 20th century.

In the 1930s, Sam Mitchell, one of the last living people who lived through this said, “I think slavery is just a murdering of the people. I think freedom been a great gift. I like my master and I guess he was as good to his slave as he could be, but I rather be free.”

If you want to read more about the Port Royal Experiment, this old but still good book by Willie Lee Rose, who sadly died recently, is worth your time

amazon.com/dp/0820320617/…

I also discuss some of this in Chapter 2 of my new book, where I talk about the most significant labor action in all of American history--the slave general strike of the Civil War.

amazon.com/History-Americ…

Back tomorrow to discuss the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency and to push back on the ideas that environmentalists and workers are not natural allies.