Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

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Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
to limit the mobility of black laborers and consigned black orphans and some
other children to unpaid labor, euphemistically called apprenticeship, until a
girl’s eighteenth birthday or a boy’s twenty-first. Yet another forbade black civilians
from possessing “fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition, dirk, or bowieknife.”
The penalties were forfeiture of the weapon and a ten-dollar fine. Local
companies of the state militia, largely composed of Confederate veterans, began
enforcing the law. Black people were alarmed. “They talk of taking the armes
a way from (col) people and arresting them and put[ting] them on farms next
month,” Pvt. Calvin Holly of the 5th United States Colored Artillery (USCA)
wrote directly to General Howard from his post at Vicksburg. “They are doing
all they can to prevent free labor, and reestablish a kind of secondary slavery.” 16
Still other Mississippi legislation governed the testimony of black witnesses,
limiting their competence to cases that involved at least one black party. During
the fall and winter, legislatures of other Southern states enacted similar laws.
South Carolina charged black shopkeepers one hundred dollars for an annual
license. The most sobering feature of these laws was that they were not drafted
by ignorant rabble-rousers but by some of the most respected jurists in the South.
They reflected the opinion of the most educated and well-to-do white men. 17
The passage of laws by state legislatures was no business of the Army’s.
What concerned federal occupiers was the preservation of public order, for much
of the South continued under martial law until President Johnson declared the
rebellion at an end on 2 April 1866. Even then, General Howard received instructions
that the Freedmen’s Bureau might resort to military tribunals “in any case
where justice [could not] be attained through the medium of civil authority.” The
disorders that concerned the Army were violent for the most part and fell into
several broad categories: those that occurred between white plantation owners
and black laborers; rowdy misbehavior, when individual whites bullied freedpeople,
or attempted to; and, finally, the kind of violence for which the South
became notorious, organized bands of night riders whose purpose was to terrorize
the black population into subservience. To counter this violence, those black
regiments that were not guarding federal property or fortifications moved detachments
of one or two companies into scattered county seats across the South. As
a staff officer at Shreveport, Louisiana, told the commanding officer of the 61st
USCI, the purpose of the troops was “to keep the country quiet, arrest criminals,
protect the weak and defenceless from wrong and outrage, and generally to enforce
obedience to the laws and orders.” 18
The relationship of plantation owners to their workers had become that of
employers to employees rather than that of masters to slaves, but planters were
slow to adapt to changed circumstances. They had “the idea firmly fixed in their
minds that the negroes will not work[,] are impatient with them, and see no
16 McPherson, Political History, pp. 29–32 (“fire-arms,” p. 32); Holly quoted in Ira Berlin et al.,
eds., The Black Military Experience (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 755–56.
17 McPherson, Political History, pp. 31, 36; Carter, When the War Was Over, pp. 187–92; Foner,
Nothing But Freedom, pp. 49–53; Richard Zuczek, State of Rebellion: Reconstruction in South
Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 15–16.
18 Capt B. F. Monroe to Colonel [Lt Col J. Foley], 24 Jul 1865, 61st USCI, Entry 57C, RG 94,
NA; McPherson, Political History, pp. 13–17 (“in any case,” p. 17).