Freedmen

By: Delano Greenidge-Copprue

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Freedmen

When Frederick Douglass used the phrase “an American slave” in his 1845 autobiography, he touched upon a fundamental contradiction in the founding of the United States: the idea that a person could be both an “American” and a “slave.” The struggle for individual freedom that Douglass chronicled in his first autobiography became, less than two decades later, a collective struggle when the freedmen—4 million African American men, women, and children, newly emancipated—began to reconstruct their lives in the land where they had once been enslaved.

During the Civil War: Freedom at High Cost

On 23 May 1861 three African Americans, the slaves of a Confederate soldier, entered the Union camp at Fortress Monroe, Virginia. General Benjamin Franklin Butler refused to return them to their owner as fugitives and instead labeled them “contrabands of war.” Reasoning that the U.S. government could not hold them as slaves, Butler deemed them free. The three went on to work for the army, helping build forts and roads. While General Butler's gesture was indeed grand, by 6 August 1861 it was within U.S. law. On that date President Abraham Lincoln signed the first Confiscation Act, which stipulated that any slave who worked for the Confederate cause was subject to seizure.

“The Effects of the Proclamation— Freed Negroes Coming into Our Lines at Newbern, North Carolina,” wood engraving from a drawing submitted by a reader, printed in Harper's Weekly on 21 February 1863, along with his account (dated 26 January 1863): “I inclose a sketch of a very interesting procession which came to Newbern from ‘up country’ a few days ago. It is the first-fruits of the glorious emancipation proclamation in this vicinity, and as such you may deem it worthy of engraving in your illustrated Weekly. On our late expedition into Greene and Onslow Counties our company (Company C, Fifty-first Massachusetts Regiment) was out on picket duty the night before our return to Newbern, when an old slave came in to us in a drenching rain; and on being informed that he and his friends could come to Newbern with us, he left, and soon the contrabands began to come in, with mule teams, oxen, and in every imaginable style. When morning came we had 120 slaves ready to start with their little all, happy in the thought that their days of bondage were over. They said that it was known far and wide that the President has declared the slaves free.”

New York Public Library, Picture Collection, Branch Libraries; Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

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As the Civil War continued, slaves increasingly fled southern plantations for Union forts, where they gained their freedom. In 1860 there were about 3.9 million slaves in the United States, and of this group nearly 1 million made it behind Union lines to freedom before the war's end. Of the two hundred thousand black soldiers and sailors who fought in the United States military during the Civil War, about 80 percent came from slave states.

With the growing number of freedpeople, national interest in their collective fate increased. In print and in conversations, people wanted to know how these newly free men and women should be treated. As early as 1861, Union soldiers confiscated abandoned southern land, and in 1862 General William Tecumseh Sherman fixed the wages of freedpeople working on plantations, encouraging them to remain on the land. Sherman's efforts were to some degree precursors to those of the federal Freedmen's Bureau after the war.

The slave population in the United States at the start of the Civil War was 13 percent of the nation's total population, 33 percent of the South's, and roughly 90 percent of all blacks in the nation. Although the Civil War did not begin as a war about the condition of the slaves, it did gain the dimension of a moral crusade when Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863, placing in the minds of civilians and soldiers alike the idea that a Union victory would result in the freeing of nearly 4 million people.

Throughout the war slavery's bonds continued to unravel. As the number of white men leaving southern communities and joining the Confederate armed forces increased, white authority decreased, and African Americans on plantations began to wander in search of family members on their journey to freedom. These slaves did not wait for freedom to be granted. They ran for freedom and took it whenever and wherever the opportunity presented itself. In a notable case in 1862 the slave Robert Smalls, with family and friends, commandeered a Confederate war boat full of military supplies and sailed to the Union blockade at Charleston Harbor. Having gained freedom for himself and those with him, he gave the boat to the Union Army to help in its war efforts.

In the early stages of the war, refugees and contrabands were treated according to the discretion of individual camps and commanders. As the war progressed the treatment became more organized. Along with pay for their labor, freedpeople were provided with schools and clothing. In 1863 the Treasury Department took charge of freedpeople as well as confiscated land. Under the department's administration freedpeople worked in camps and on plantations. In 1864 general agents were assigned to separate regions of the South to supervise freed slaves, refugees, and abandoned property. That same year freedmen's labor colonies were established that provided wages and education. As Union soldiers entered the South, they set up “contraband camps” offering refuge for displaced slaves seeking asylum. In desperation the Confederate Congress voted in 1865 to allow the enlistment of a large number of slaves in the Confederate Army with the permission of their masters, with freedom for those who fulfilled their duties. The offer came too late, going into effect only days before the Confederate surrender at Appomattox.

The contraband camps spread throughout the South with the coming of the Union Army. The camps were hardly pleasant havens. They harbored the poor and the sick in crowded and often miserable conditions. In some camps one-quarter of the residents died. Yet black workers housed in the camps earned wages for their labor (although the pay was lower than that of white workers or what the blacks could have commanded on an open market). Moreover, northern philanthropists set up schools in many camps. The contraband camps thus foreshadowed the type of work that would continue with the establishment of the Freedmen's Bureau. This is not to say that Union soldiers did not fall to some base actions when dealing with the former slaves. At times soldiers in blue robbed, raped, and beat freedpeople or forced them off plantations against their will. The racial prejudice they faced caused some African Americans to distrust Union soldiers.

For their labor freedpeople were paid only at year's end, and freedom came with restrictions: in some camps freedpeople were not allowed to purchase guns or alcohol unless granted permission by the U.S. government, they were not allowed to sell merchandise for a profit to complement their low wages, and they could not leave the property of their employers. With black males serving in the Union Army, African American women and children were contracted to work on plantations run by the military and the Treasury Department. At times it must have seemed to freedpeople that they had only switched masters.

As they began to create new lives for themselves in a land that tried to strip them of their humanity, freedpeople built on the foundations of family, church, and school. They wandered, looking for spouses and children taken from them under slavery; their churches became places where the community gathered; and education was placed alongside liberty as indispensable to beginning a new life, a life shaped by freedom.

Freedom after the War: The Freedmen's Bureau and Beyond

The labor plantations and contraband camps continued until the launching of the Freedmen's Bureau, which began its work on 15 May 1865, with General Oliver Otis Howard as commissioner. The bureau focused on six strategic points to aid freedpeople: land, wages, education, supplies, health care and hospitals, and financial services.

Land was hotly contested. In his Special Field Orders Number 15, General Sherman in January 1865 granted the Sea Islands and the nearby coastal regions of South Carolina for the settlement of freed slaves. The Freedmen's Bureau supported this order by moving thousands of freedpeople to what had been abandoned lands. In the spring of the following year, however, after Lincoln's assassination, President Andrew Johnson offered amnesty to all former southern landowners, and those African Americans who had settled in the areas set aside by General Sherman found themselves displaced. On 21 June 1866 the Southern Homestead Act was passed, giving freedpeople a chance to become landowners. For the most part, however, the act failed to offset the effects of President Johnson's amnesty.

Under the Homestead Act, Florida was the most successful former Confederate state in making blacks landowners, with over three thousand homesteads granted to African Americans. The number, however, is slightly misleading because freedpeople were often faced with clearing and tilling bad land, sometimes without the basic necessities of farming—ox, horse, or plow. Along with homesteading, sharecropping emerged in the late 1860s as a strategy by which African Americans hoped to gain some protection against white planters who did not pay after a crop had been harvested. Black tenants agreed to keep two-thirds to one-half of whatever crop the land yielded as payment for their labor. This proved to be only a temporary solution. Although it did provide some autonomy and some degree of protection against loss, it tied the sharecroppers to the land with little prospect of ownership.

During the summer of 1866 the Freedmen's Bureau began to emphasize the education of freedpeople and made room in the budget to build institutions of learning for former slaves—from elementary schools to universities and theological seminaries. On 2 March 1867 Congress voted to dedicate $500,000 to bureau schools for freedpeople, adding to the $521,000 the bureau had set aside the previous year for this purpose. In 1868 Congress decided to place unspent money under the discretion of Commissioner Howard to use for education of freedpeople.

By 1869 each southern state had at least one school for training African American teachers, and many African Americans took the opportunity to enter the teaching profession. At the end of the Civil War northern white teachers dominated schools for African Americans in the South, but by 1869, of the 1,871 documented teachers in southern schools for African Americans, nearly one-half were black. Through its programs, the bureau was radically changing the face of education for freedpeople in the South. By 1870 the money devoted to educating freedpeople reached nearly $1 million, up from the $27,000 set aside in the first Freedmen's Bureau budget in 1865. Yet a history of the bureau shows that the organization always struggled with gathering enough funds to meet the needs of the people it served. As the bureau moved toward its inevitable end, less money was dedicated to education. By the 1870s the bureau was disbursing funds only for hospitals and pay for black veterans.

Outside the purview of the Freedmen's Bureau, freedpeople confronted the challenges of living free in a nation facing swift change, and resistance to change. They were vulnerable, often caught between benevolent but paternalistic philanthropists and outright racists who wished them harm, or even death. Although the federal government, before the advent of the Freedmen's Bureau, had fed more than seventy-five thousand former slaves while maintaining contraband camps and had spent more than seventy thousand dollars on supplies, freedpeople were still subject to exploitation, with some white planters refusing to pay black laborers fair wages. In addition, although the government set up black communities in such places as the Sea Islands and Mississippi—for example, Negro Paradise, which included Davis Bend, the plantation owned by the brother of the former Confederate president, Jefferson Davis—there remained those whites who preferred to see African Americans displaced and dispossessed. Legislation and morality did not connect.

The black codes—laws that severely limited the civil liberties of African Americans—were examples of the legislated inequality freedpeople faced as they tried to gain a toehold in the United States. In November 1865 Mississippi became the first postwar state to enforce a black code. Although the federal Civil Rights Act of 1866 granted citizenship to all persons born in the United States (except Indians, who did not pay taxes), it did not protect freedpeople against the effects of the racial and political turmoil of Reconstruction. Not only were freedpeople the victims of beatings, exploitation, and even murder, but also they could find little justice in the courts of their states or of the United States.

Frederick Douglass's Perspective: Self-help over Charity

The renowned civil rights leader Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave, voiced deep doubt about the relief efforts on behalf of freedpeople. He believed it best to leave freedpeople alone, because it was outside interference in their lives that had caused their enslavement in the first place. As Douglass saw it, charity and benevolence prevented freedpeople from producing their own goods and developing the skills necessary for survival. In a 2 May 1865 letter to the Reverend J. Miller McKim, the leader of the American Freedmen's Aid Society, Douglass wrote, “I ought to tell you frankly that I have my doubts about these Freedmen's Societies. They may be the necessity of the hour … but I fear everything looking up to their permanence. The negro needs justice more than pity, liberty more than old clothes.” This view was nothing new for Douglass, who had advocated black selfreliance during the 1850s. The realities of the Civil War, however, complicated his firm belief in economic self-help.

Distrusting private philanthropy, Douglass eventually supported the Freedmen's Bureau even as he declined to become its director in 1867 when President Johnson sent out feelers to determine if he would accept the post. Douglass and others recognized the offer as a ploy to ensure the demise of an organization Johnson despised. With his 1866 veto of the Freedmen's Bureau Bill overridden, Johnson banked on racism to do the job, believing that white workers would refuse to work under the direction of a black commissioner. Reflecting on Douglass's refusal, Theodore Tilton of the New York Independent wrote on 12 September 1867 that “the greatest black man in the nation did not become the tool of the meanest white.”

Douglass held contradictory views about freedpeople, preaching both self-reliance and philanthropy. This contradiction had coherence. Believing the chief failure of Reconstruction to be economic, Douglass called on the government to provide emancipated slaves with genuine enfranchisement—education, suffrage, civil rights, and equal wages—which required reforms that only the federal government could legislate. Douglass believed that by gaining enfranchisement, freedpeople would exercise the self-reliance necessary to make lives for themselves. Douglass continued to advocate both self-reliance and philanthropy for years after the Civil War, as racism undermined the success of Reconstruction-era projects and the spirit of freedpeople.

Douglass did not approve of the confiscation of Confederate lands and the redistribution of that land to freedpeople in forty-acre plots. True to his doctrine of economic self-reliance, he wanted only for freedpeople to have the same means of acquiring land as whites had. Along with suffrage and education, landownership was a requirement for the establishment of freedpeople in the United States, Douglass believed. To assist freedpeople in acquiring land, Douglass in 1869 proposed that Congress establish the National Land and Loan Company to sell land to freedpeople at affordable rates. The proposal never materialized and was a failure that Douglass deeply regretted.

Douglass began to speak to growing crowds of freedpeople during the 1870s, attempting to fortify their collective will as they faced the uncertainties of their new lives. He preached industry and thrift and encouraged freedpeople to provide for themselves rather than beg, which he said was un-American. A recurrent theme in Douglass's speeches and writings during this period was dignity, a dignity that would come only from gaining wealth and property. In the 1880s Douglass, in moments of reflection, noted that freedpeople, without property, had been sent into the world empty-handed.

Although Reconstruction formally ended in 1877, and although freedpeople suffered violence and injustice, they made stunning progress in their struggle for freedom. In 1860 only 2 percent of blacks were enrolled in school; by 1880 the number had risen to 34 percent. At the end of the Civil War black illiteracy exceeded 90 percent. In less than four decades 70 percent of African Americans were literate. In addition, even under the daunting economic conditions presented by sharecropping, 25 percent of African American farmers owned the land they worked by the turn of the twentieth century. With persistence and courage, freedpeople entered a world that had been hostile to them and made a way out of no way. Their heroism and their determination to reconstruct their lives—lives decimated by slavery—served as the foundation for the flowering of African American culture.

See also Black Church; Black Family; Civil Rights; Civil Rights Act of 1866; Civil War; Class; Confederate Policy toward African Americans and Slaves; Demographics; Discrimination; Douglass, Frederick; Education; Emancipation; Emancipation Proclamation; Entrepreneurs; Free African Americans before the Civil War (North); Free African Americans before the Civil War (South); Freedmen's Bureau; Health and Medicine; Howard, Oliver O.; Identity; Integration; Johnson, Andrew; Laws and Legislation; Lincoln, Abraham; Lynching and Mob Violence; Native Americans; Poverty; Progress; Race, Theories of; Racism; Reconstruction; Reform; Religion; Religion and Slavery; Segregation; Sharecropping; Slavery; Stereotypes of African Americans; Tilton, Theodore; Union Army, African Americans in; Violence against African Americans; and Work.

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