Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Reconstruction, 1865–1867 461
and slavery and pave the way for the state’s representation in Congress. Delegates
to the convention had to have been eligible voters in the 1860 election—that is,
white—and to have taken an oath of allegiance to the United States since the fighting
ended. During the next six weeks, he issued similar proclamations for Alabama,
Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, and South Carolina. These seven proclamations,
and the Unionist state governments established in Arkansas, Louisiana,
Tennessee, and Virginia during the war, set all the former Confederate states on the
road to reunion. 8
More pressing even than political matters was the business of tending and
harvesting that year’s crops, for the federal government was already feeding
thousands of destitute Southerners, black and white, and sought to reduce the financial
burden. Efficient management of the agricultural labor force would help
to diminish government expenditures just as surely as did the rapid mustering
out of Union regiments and might forestall a famine that was otherwise sure to
come with winter. Unfortunately for those who hoped to manage the laborers,
many of the South’s former slaves were absent from their home plantations that
spring and summer. Reasons for the mass movement were many. Some of the
migrants searched for relatives from whom they had been separated, whether
by slave sales before the war or by forced removal from the paths of advancing
Union armies during the fighting. Other migrants wished to avoid the kind
of confrontation with former masters that the change from slave to free labor
was sure to bring. Still others merely sought safety in numbers within growing
black urban communities, for freedom meant that former slaves were no longer
protected property, but instead were fair game for any evil-tempered white man
with a deadly weapon. 9
Chaplain Homer H. Moore of the 34th USCI traveled across northern Florida in
May and June. When the official announcement of freedom in the Department of the
South came in late May, he said, “large numbers of negroes left their homes, & began
flocking into the towns, causing great inconvenience to the Military Authorities, &
great danger to the growing crops.” Moore and two civilian officials set out across
the state to investigate conditions and to try to explain the workings of a free labor
system to former masters and former slaves alike. “In so far as it was the purpose of
our mission to induce the negroes to remain at home, & work for wages, we think
we were very successful,” he reported, “for having heard from their masters that
they were free, but still having to work very much the same as before, they naturally
believed they were imposed upon; & that to secure perfect freedom they must get to
some place occupied by U.S. troops. But hearing from us, unquestionable Yankees,
that they were free wherever they were, & that the Government would protect them,
8 Brooks D. Simpson, The Reconstruction Presidents (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,
1998), pp. 73–75; Hans L. Trefousse, Andrew Johnson: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton,
1989), pp. 210–11, 216–22. Texts of the amnesty and state government proclamations are in OR, ser.
2, 8: 578–80, and ser. 3, 5: 37–39.
9 Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf,
1979), pp. 305–16; Hahn et al., Land and Labor, pp. 7, 80; statistic in Dan T. Carter, When the War
Was Over: The Failure of Self-Reconstruction in the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1985), p. 157.