LITMIR.BIZ

      This engraving depicts the burning of a railroad depot, potentially in Atlanta, by Sherman’s troops in the fall of 1864. Below the flames, fugitives and refugees—symbolized by their carried belongings—are seen in the wake of Sherman’s army, representing the thousands that followed behind the advance of Sherman’s troops to Savannah.

      In the pre–Civil War era, slavery resisters made constant and diverse attacks against cash crop production to interrupt the flow of profit and to gain autonomy. With the war winding down, the introduction of federal troops, and the planters’ attempt to return to the land, there was a distinct turn toward generalized expropriation and destruction by former rice and cotton workers in order to force the end of the system of plantation labor, prevent planters from recovering the wealth stored in their properties, and resist assimilation into wage slavery. These actions speak to the desires of the saboteurs, those who refused to forgive and forget their exploitation and who did not wait for Union bureaucrats to settle matters between the planters and themselves.

      More than in any other part of the South, the accumulated resentments of slavery burst forth in violence. In Georgetown, plantation homes and meat houses were pillaged by the freedmen. Chicora Wood,69 the home plantation of Robert W. Allston before his death in 1864, was ransacked by his slaves—every article of furniture was removed and his meticulous plantation records destroyed.… On another Georgetown plantation, Blacks “divided out the land and … pulled down fences and would obey no driver.” Farther to the south, the magnificent plantation home at Middleton Place near Charleston was burned to the ground and the vaults in the family graveyard were broken open and the bones scattered by the slaves, including some who had escaped to enlist in the Union Army and who now returned with General Sherman to wreak vengeance.70

      Surrounded by bands of refugees, fugitives, and guerilla soldiers, and with more showing up each day, Sherman couldn’t leave Savannah until he made an attempt to address this impending crisis. Chiefly concerned with the fact that they were all unemployed, the Secretary of War General Edwin Stanton came in from Washington immediately to investigate the matter and work with Sherman toward a solution. After a few days of “examining the condition of the liberated Negroes,” Stanton chose twenty men whom he determined were fit to be leaders, whose backgrounds ranged from barbers and ministers to former overseers, and sat them down with Sherman to discuss a plan of action.71

      From there, General Sherman issued the infamous “Sea Island Circular” of January 18, 1865, also known as the “Special Field Orders, No. 15,” which ordered the redistribution of all abandoned and confiscated lands from Charleston, South Carolina, to St. John’s River, Florida, including the Sea Islands and coastal waterways thirty miles inland. In effect, the majority of the South’s coastal rice and cotton plantations were to be divided into lots to be leased or sold to their former workers. Having no presidential or congressional authorization for this wartime act, Sherman appointed General Rufus Saxton, who became an abolitionist before the war, to deal with the details. Saxton would go on to direct the divisions of the Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida when they were established in March 1865.72

      Charged with managing this process of redistribution and political transition, many contemporary historians consider the leaders of the Freedmen’s Bureau to have been well-intentioned victims of their own bureaucracy. Regardless of individual Union officials’ sentiments toward racial harmony, however, it is clear that the larger function of the Freedmen’s Bureau and its policies was the smooth transition from one kind of class society to another, normalizing modern notions of landownership, contractual labor, and alienation. Another prominent leader of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General Oliver Howard, for example, is described by historian Eric Foner as representing the dominant view of the Union officials that, “most freedmen must return to plantation labor, but under conditions that allowed them the opportunity to work their way out of the wage-earning class.”73

      As an institution, the Freedmen’s Bureau was a direct descendent of the “experiments in freedom” that occurred throughout the Sea Islands in Georgia and South Carolina, the sugar country outside of New Orleans, and the Mississippi Valley. Since the congressional Confiscation Act of 1862, the Union Army was permitted to seize and claim any land that had been abandoned by its Confederate owners or any land where its owners ceased to pay taxes. It is no surprise then that the concentration of lands that the Union chose to appropriate were where the region’s wealthiest cash crops were produced. In manipulating fugitives and refugees of these areas, the Union set up a pseudo-military slave camp to entice workers to continue to produce crops for the benefit of the northern war effort.74

      In the case of the Sea Islands, the cotton plantations were organized by Union textile and railroad capitalists who were sent down to teach Blacks that “the abandonment of slavery did not imply the abandonment of cotton, and that Blacks would work more efficiently and profitably as free laborers than as slaves,” and to instill the free labor ideology that “no man … appreciates property who does not work for it.”75 The experiment on the Sea Islands was a total failure. The free workers preferred growing subsistence crops and refused to produce the profits that had been achieved in years before the war. The Yankees left in 1865, unable to secure a long-term investment in Sea Island cotton. Northern investors did not learn from this failed attempt at disciplining the Black worker through the wage-labor system, and they would continue to impose their definition of freedom as workers moved from subtle tactics of work slowdowns and workplace occupations to destroying the foundational infrastructure of the cash crop system.76

      In the summer of 1865, the Freedmen’s Bureau was still redistributing land that was covered under Sherman’s field order while importing northern philanthropic missionaries to staff compulsory schools for children and to teach investment economics to the new landowners.77 At this point, President Johnson received regular hate mail and threats from the previously wealthiest men in America, and would read reports from the Agricultural Department stating that “labor [in South Carolina and Georgia] was in a disorganized and chaotic state, production had ceased and … the power to compel laborers to go into the rice swamp utterly broken.”78 Johnson reversed all orders by the Bureau and sought to immediately repossess the planters of their property.79

      It was at this time that the Freedmen’s Bureau revealed itself as the enforcer of the old economy in new terms:

      The “two evils” against which the Bureau had to contend, an army officer observed in July 1865, were “cruelty on the part of the employer and shirking on the part of the negroes.” Yet the Bureau, like the army, seemed to consider the Black reluctance to labor the greater threat to its economic mission. In some areas agents continued the military’s urban pass systems and vagrancy patrols, as well as the practice of rounding up unemployed laborers for shipment to plantations. Bureau courts in Memphis dispatched impoverished Blacks convicted of crimes to labor for whites who would pay their fines.80

      From late 1865 until its dissolution in 1868, the Bureau’s chief occupation was to attempt, by any means necessary, to convince free Blacks to sign contracts to work for their former masters on plantations or smaller farms. When General Oliver Howard—an architect and proponent of the “Black yeomanry” model of freedom—had to go to Edisto Island, South Carolina, to tell people they were to quit the lands they had been squatting on and return to work on the plantations, the people who had been living free of labor contracts responded as follows:

      General we want Homesteads, we were promised Homesteads by the government. If it does not carry out the promises its agents made to us, if the government having concluded to befriend its late enemies and

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