Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Reconstruction, 1865–1867 463
corn. “The cotton . . . elicits the praise of every body, and old planters say it is as fine
a crop as was ever produced on the farm.” Free labor seemed successful where former
slaves had been allowed self-direction in their work, but one inspector’s report could
not have been expected to budge the deeply ingrained prejudices of so many white
Southerners and Northerners alike. 13
In the summer of 1865, with the year’s crops still growing and the efficacy of free
labor still unproven, Southern planters clung stubbornly to old beliefs. As a captain
of the 113th USCI reported from Monticello, Arkansas, “many of the rebels do not
conceed that the ‘negro’ is yet free.” Similar reports came from all over the South.
A chaplain at Beaufort, South Carolina, told the department commander that local
planters viewed the Emancipation Proclamation as a wartime measure that had lapsed
with the Confederate surrender. West of the Appalachians, although Union soldiers
had occupied parts of Tennessee for more than three years, a captain of the 83d USCI
reported that “slavery, or the next thing to it,” was widespread. At Helena, Arkansas,
which federal troops had also held since 1862, Capt. Henry Sweeney of the 60th USCI
offered an even gloomier view. Black Mississippians who brought complaints to his
office, he told the assistant commissioner for that state, said “that there was nothing in
the worst days of slavery to compare with the present persecutions.” 14
Indeed, white Southerners bent every effort to impose a new social and economic
order that resembled the old as closely as possible. President Johnson’s provisional
governors called state conventions to repudiate secession and slavery, but the elections
that followed relied on voter qualifications that had been in force before the war, when
all voters had been white men and most of them secessionist. The results were not
surprising. When the new Mississippi legislature convened in October, its members
quickly passed a set of laws to govern black residents that together became known
as the Black Code. The principal law bore the title “An Act to confer Civil Rights on
Freedmen,” but most of its sections limited, rather than conferred, any rights that former
slaves hoped to enjoy. First among these was the prohibition of freedmen leasing
or renting farmland. This measure forced the overwhelming majority of former slaves,
who were too poor to own their own land, to work on the large farms and plantations
that were then being returned to possession of their former owners by the president’s
program of amnesty and individual pardon. 15
The Mississippi legislature also decreed that former slaves had to obtain
proof of residence and occupation in the form of annual contracts for farm laborers
or licenses for self-employed workers. Other laws defined vagrancy so as
13 Lt Col D. H. Williams to Maj Gen O. O. Howard, 18 Sep 1865 (W–4), NA M752, roll 22;
Nathan C. Hughes and Roy P. Stonesifer, The Life and Wars of Gideon J. Pillow (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1993), pp. 142–43; Ira Berlin et al., eds., The Wartime Genesis
of Free Labor: The Lower South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 622–50; Hahn
et al., Land and Labor, pp. 681–96.
14 Barker quoted in Maj W. G. Sargent to Capt G. E. Dayton, 31 Aug 1865, NA Microfilm Pub
M979, Rcds of the Asst Commissioner for the State of Arkansas, BRFAL, roll 23; Capt H. Sweeney to
Col S. Thomas, 11 Sep 1865, NA M979, roll 6; Chaplain M. French to Maj Gen Q. A. Gillmore, 6 Jun
1865, Entry 4109, Dept of the South, LR, pt. 1, Geographical Divs and Depts, RG 393, Rcds of U.S.
Army Continental Cmds, NA; Capt R. J. Hinton to “General,” 8 Sep 1865 (H–90), NA T142, roll 26.
15 William C. Harris, Presidential Reconstruction in Mississippi (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1967), pp. 130–31; Edward McPherson, ed., The Political History of the United
States of America During the Period of Reconstruction (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972 [1871]),
p. 81.