This Day in Labor History: January 16, 1865: General William Tecumseh Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, granting coastal plantation properties from Savannah, Georgia to the St. John’s River in Florida to ex-slaves. Let's talk about black labor rights after Civil War.
First, slaves freed themselves. Among the core facts of the Civil War everyone must know, it's 1) The South seceded to defend slavery, 2) Slaves freed themselves, and 3) Northern and southern whites both strictly limited what emancipation would look like.
Slaves weren't waiting around for whites to free them. They freed themselves. They walked away whenever they could. And William Tecumseh Sherman marched through Georgia, tens of thousands fled to his lines, looking for freedom.
In fact, it was slaves pushing the issue by freeing themselves and demanding military protection that forced Abraham Lincoln to move toward the Emancipation Proclamation.
Sherman himself had little interest in black welfare; a racial conservative, he found his status among the slaves as a Moses bemusing. Some of his soldiers committed atrocities against the freed slaves.
Moreover, after the war, Sherman would lead one of the greatest genocidal campaigns of the 19th century, seeking to use his total warfare tactics against Native Americans.
But wanting to crush the treason of the slaveholding South, Sherman sought to help the slaves, if for no other reason to get them to stop following his army, slowing them down and forcing him to feed them at the same time his own forces were foraging off the land.
Sherman met with black leaders on the SC & Georgia coast and asked what they wanted. Their leader, a 67-year old Baptist minister named Garrison Frazier, replied, “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land and turn it and till it by our own labor.”
This was central to what slaves wanted. They had their own vision about emancipation. They wanted land and they wanted to work that land for themselves. They wanted as little to do with whites as possible. Subsistence farming and the building of black communities was the goal.
Sherman didn't care about any of this. But he did want to be rid of these people following him around as he moved north. So he issued Special Order No. 15, which granted 40-acre plots of land to African-Americans and the use of an Army mule in the coastal areas of those states.
The idea of 40 acres and a mule became a powerful demand for freed slaves because it meant control over their labor and their independence from whites.
But even without Sherman, slaves were moving to take control over the land they worked and over their own labor.
In March 1865, now freed slaves took over the Keithfield rice plantation in South Carolina. During the next year 150 people worked it on their own. When the owner returned in early 1866, she asked her neighbor Frances Parker to help her recapture it.
Parker had executed escaped slaves during the war. He hired a former slave driver named Dennis Hazel to be the new overseer. When the ex-slaves saw Parker and Hazel, they erupted in a bloody riot.
Led by the plantation’s women, they threatened to kill the interlopers. The freed people beat them with their working tools and then attacked a soldier accompanying them.
A former slave named Becky hit Parker in the right eye with a club, causing blood to gush across his face. Finally, they dove into the river to escape. Former slaves would fight to the death to control their land and labor
Sadly, the US government and other ideas about black labor. Northern whites believed in free labor ideology, which was the control of your land and labor. But central to that was private property rights. And giving away property, even that of treasonous slavers, was a no-no.
In the Sea Islands during the early stage of the war, when owners fled Union troops, the Port Royal Experiment attempted to determine whether blacks would work without compulsion.
I am aware such a debate seems insane, but it was a real debate in the North. So the Army stated planting cotton with the use of paid black labor. Of course, it worked out OK. But giving the land to the ex-slaves? Crazy talk.
In 1863, there was a plan to sell off some of the Sea Islands, but at prices way higher than slaves could afford. Still, they pooled money and purchased about 2,000 acres.
But for the most part, northern whites believed that blacks should be growing cotton for white plantation owners. Just that they should get paid a little bit. This reflected both capitalism and racism in action.
The North wanted to ramp up cotton production immediately to build the economy and pay off war debts. Self-sufficient black farms did not serve these goals. And the actual needs of free blacks was not something capitalists cared about.
Many northerners, including military officers, began buying up southern plantations with every intention of employing black laborers growing cotton at low wages.
Making this situation even worse was Andrew Johnson's ascension to the presidency after Lincoln's assassination. Johnson hated the plantation owners but he also hated black people. He almost immediately overturned Special Order 15 and returned lands to whites.
On the plantations, former owners sought to either force workers back into total subservience, kick them out, or murder them.
Ex-slave Henry Adams, remembering the postwar days near Shreveport, Louisiana, reported “over two thousand colored people killed trying to get away, after the white people told us we were free.”
Another freed slave in Mississippi wrote “Some are being knocked down for saying they are free, while a great many are being worked just as they ust to be when Slaves, without any compensation.”
Sharecropping eventually became the compromise on the plantations. Freed slaves simply refused to work under slave levels of supervisions and demanded the right to live where they wanted. It was a bad compromise for them, but one nonetheless.
When we think about Reconstruction, we think about the loss of political rights and the rise of segregation in its aftermath. That's all true of course. But it's only part of the tragedy.
Slavery was a labor system. And Reconstruction was a period trying to solve a labor problem. Freed slaves had their own vision for their own labor. And that was unacceptable for whites, north and south.
By erasing the core goal of economic emancipation from our public understanding of Reconstruction--just as we do with the civil rights movement a century later--we marginalize the concerns that most challenged American power structures.
And of course, this is a day after we talk about MLK's one line from one speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which demanded a $2 minimum wage. What is that today? $16 an hour.
But economic critiques are almost erased in the public memory of black liberation movements, even among sympathetic whites. Whether Reconstruction or civil rights movement or today, it's easier for whites to talk about civil rights than economic rights.
But economic rights were as central--or even more central--to the demands of freed slaves than other rights. And they remain central today, if we just listen to actual people in the struggle.
That seems a sufficient end to this thread, but I could go on about this stuff all day.
