Due Presley George by Polly:
For 4¾ cuts wool @ 75¢/cut		$3.50
22 yds. cloth @ 50¢/yd.		11.00
5 yds. thread @ 50¢/yd.		2.50
Boarding one child (who didn’t work) for 5 months		12.00
10 bushels corn @ $1.00/bushel		10.00
30 bushels corn @ $1.00/bushel		30.00
	TOTAL	$69.00
Due Polly by Presley George:
For 3 months’ work “by self” @ $4.00/month		$12.00
For 4 months’ work by son Peter @ $8.00/month		32.00
For 4 months’ work by son Burrell @ $4.00/month		16.00
For 4 months’ work by daughter Siller @ $2.25/month		9.00
	TOTAL	$69.00
Due Presley George by Puss:
For 6 yds. striped cloth @ 50¢/yd.		$3.00
1¾ cuts wool @ 75¢/cut		1.25
10 bushels corn @ $1.00/bushel		10.00
	TOTAL	$14.25
Due Puss by Presley George:
For 4 months’ work @ $3.50/month		$14.00²⁹

Polly and Puss had signed contracts with Presley George under the bureau’s wage labor agreement system, but that act of faith on their part hardly guaranteed them a living wage, or even any cash at all. The bureau recommended that cotton field-hands receive a monthly wage ($10 to $12 per month for adult men, $8 for women) and that employers refrain from using physical force as a means of discipline. However, thousands of freed blacks contracted for rations, clothing, and shelter only, especially during the period from 1865 to 1867. Employers retained unlimited authority in using various forms of punishment, physical and otherwise, and felt free to disregard the agreements at the first sign of recalcitrance on the part of their laborers. In these contracts, prohibitions against movement on and off the plantation were routine; blacks had to promise to “have no stragling about their houses and not to be strowling about at night,” and they needed written permission to go into town or visit relatives nearby. The bureau tolerated and even in most cases approved these harsh and restrictive terms. As the teacher Laura Towne noted, “enforcement” of the contracts usually meant ensuring that “the blacks don’t break a contract and [then] compelling them to submit cheerfully if the whites do.”³⁰

The bureau arranged for the resolution of contract disputes, and agents often made unilateral judgments when one party sued with a complaint; in other cases arbitration boards or military courts handed down decisions. Word traveled quickly among whites when officials particularly sympathetic to planters’ interests opened their offices for business. For example, Agent Charles Rauschenberg, stationed in Cuthbert, Georgia, had little free time once he responded energetically to charges like the one Ivey White lodged against his field-hand Angeline Sealy: “Complains that she is lazy and does not pick more than 35 to 40 lbs. cotton per day.” The verdict: “Charge sustained—receives a lecture on her duties and is told that if she does not average from 75-100 lbs. cotton per day that a deduction will be made from her wages.” Most Northerners in positions of formal authority during the Reconstruction period detested southern planters as Confederate rebels but empathized with them as fledgling capitalists attempting to transition to a “free labor” contract system. Moreover, few Union officials were inclined to believe that freedwomen as a group should contribute anything less than their full muscle power to the rebuilding of the region’s economic system.³¹

High rates of geographical mobility (as blacks moved about the southern countryside, in and out of towns, and to a lesser extent, to the southwestern part of the region) make it difficult to pinpoint with any precision the number of black women in specific kinds of jobs immediately after the war. Charlie Moses’s mother moved the family from one Louisiana farm to another in search of work; “We jus’ travelled all over from one place to another,” he recalled. Freedwomen accepted any work they could find; in Columbia, South Carolina, they took the places of mules and turned screws to press cotton. The seasonal nature of agricultural labor meant that families often had to locate new sources of employment. When the cotton-picking season ended, for instance, Mingo White and his mother cut and hauled wood on an Alabama plantation. Many women had no choice but to continue working as field-hands cultivating staple crops for white landowners, their former masters.³²

Other freedwomen relied on their cooking, gardening, dairying, and poultry-raising skills in an effort to make money as petty tradeswomen. In Aiken, South Carolina, a roving Yankee newspaper correspondent noted with approval that a black woman given fifty cents one day had appeared the next selling cakes and fresh fruit purchased with the money. Some women peddled berries, chickens, eggs, and vegetables along the road and in towns. During the difficult winter of 1865, a Charleston open-air market was “presided over” by “eyesnapping ‘Aunties’” who sold their produce from small stalls.³³

Others tried to turn their special talents into a secure means of making a living. Nevertheless, former slaves were too poor to pay much for the services of midwives and seamstresses, and whites at times did not pay at all. Most freedwomen had to piece together seasonal or part-time labor in any case. Even the small number of literate women who aspired to teaching, an estimated half of all teachers of the freedpeople in 1868, had to rely on the fortunes of local black communities, most of which were unable to support a school on a regular basis. Susie Baker King (married to a Civil War veteran) taught pupils in Savannah soon after the war; she and other independent instructors could hardly compete with a free school operated by a northern freedmen’s aid society, the American Missionary Association (AMA). As a result, she was eventually forced from teaching into domestic service. A tiny number of teachers did qualify for aid from the Freedmen’s Bureau or a private group like the AMA. In Georgia between 1865 and 1870, for example, perhaps seventy-five freedwomen received a modest salary for at least a few months from a northern source. However, New Englanders eager to help the cause of freedpeople’s education preferred to commission white teachers from the northern and midwestern states.³⁴

Although blacks remained largely dependent upon whites for employment and supplies, strikes and other forms of collective action among workers began to surface soon after the Yankee invasion of the South. During the busy harvest season in the fall of 1862, female field-hands on a Louisiana sugar plantation in Union-occupied territory engaged in a slow-down and then refused to work at all until the white landowner met their demand for wages. The men on the plantation also struck within a week. The planter, fearful that his entire crop would be lost if it were not cut and processed immediately, finally agreed to pay them. And in 1866, the “colored washerwomen” of Jackson, Mississippi, organized themselves and established a price code for their services. Though the strike in June of that year was unsuccessful, it suggested the potential inherent in group solidarity where black women predominated in an industry—in this case, laundry work.³⁵

Slowly and grudgingly some whites began to learn a basic lesson of Reconstruction: Blacks’ attitudes toward work depended on the extent to which they were free from white supervision. Edward S. Philbrick, a shrewd Yankee planter masquerading as a missionary on the South Carolina Sea Islands, marveled in March 1862 over the ability of former slaves to organize themselves and prepare hundreds of acres for planting cotton “without a white man near them.” (Under the same conditions the Irish would not have shown as much initiative, he thought.) Frances Butler, daughter of the renowned actress and abolitionist Fanny Kemble but more similar in temperament to her slaveholding father, Pierce, returned to the family’s Georgia estate in 1866. The young woman soon discovered that the elderly freedpeople were “far too old and infirm to work for me, but once let them get a bit of ground of their own given to them, and they become quite young and strong again.” She had discovered that the aged Charity—“who represented herself as unable to move”—walked six miles almost every day to sell eggs (from her own chickens) on a neighboring plantation. And there were other women who derived newfound physical strength from self-reliance. A woman helping to “list” her family’s small plot of land on James Island, South Carolina, startled a northern observer with her “vehement” declaration: “I can plough land same as a hoss. Wid dese hands I raise cotton dis year, buy two hosses!”³⁶

In their desire for household self-determination, blacks defied bureau agents and northern and southern planters alike, challenging both the northern ethos of individualism and the southern imperative of staple crop agriculture. And ultimately the annual contract system failed to yield the benefits anticipated by either group of whites. Northerners underestimated the extent to which black people would be prevented from accumulating cash and acquiring property. On the other hand, Southerners had not counted on the leverage wielded by workers determined to pry concessions out of them in the form of days off and garden privileges, and to press their own advantage during times of labor shortages. Some of this leverage assumed the form of meaningful political power at the local and state levels; for example, South Carolina rice workers (as members of the Republican Party) played a vital role in that state’s political process until Reconstruction ended in 1877. In making certain decisions about how family labor was to be organized, black people not only broke with the past in defiance of the white South, they also rejected a future of materialistic individualism in opposition to the white, middle-class North.³⁷

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF BLACK FAMILY AND COMMUNITY LIFE IN THE POSTWAR PERIOD

The Northerners’ hope that black workers would be able to pursue their interests as individuals did not take into account the strong family ties that bound black households together. More specifically, although black women constituted a sizable proportion of the region’s labor force, their obligations to their husbands and children and kin took priority over any form of personal self-seeking. For most black women, then, freedom had very little to do with individual opportunity or independence in the modern sense. Rather, freedom had meaning primarily in a family context. The institution of slavery had posed a constant threat to the stability of family relationships; after emancipation these relationships became solidified, though the sanctity of family life continued to come under pressure from the larger white society. Freedwomen derived emotional fulfillment and a newfound sense of pride from their roles as wives and mothers. Only at home could they exercise a measure of control over their own lives and those of their husbands and children and impose a semblance of order on the physical world.

At the same time, black women engaged in protopolitical activity when they withdrew from fieldwork, protested exploitation at the hands of employers, and lent their support to grassroots campaigns on behalf of landownership and civil rights. They remained deeply engaged in the momentous question of the day—the true meaning of freedom. That question resonated in the cotton and rice fields of the South, and in the kitchens of white women, no less than in the halls of Congress.

Though the black family emerged as a durable and vital institution after slavery, the strains of war took a tremendous toll on relations between husbands and wives, parents and children. For many households and individuals, the transition between bondage and freedom was a wrenching one, provoking disputes over property, over the custody of children, and over the reciprocal obligations of family members to one another. Some women took advantage of local Freedmen’s Bureau courts to file grievances against abusive husbands or other kin whom they felt had wronged them. Not surprisingly, the dislocations of war in the form of migrations, forced and otherwise, and the reconstitution of families prompted marital difficulties not easily resolved. Some partners refrained from formalizing marital arrangements initiated under slavery, instead preserving informal bonds—but in the process rendering more problematic a whole host of contested issues related to social relationships and property ownership.³⁸

Nevertheless, as soon as they were free, most blacks attempted to set their own work pace and conspired to protect one another from the white man’s (and woman’s) wrath. Plantation managers charged that freedpeople, hired to work like slaves, were “loafering around” and “lummoxing about.” More than one postwar overseer, his “patience worn plum out,” railed against “grunting” blacks (those “pretending to be sick”) and others who sauntered into the fields late in the day, left early to go fishing, or stayed home altogether; “damd sorry work” was the result. Modern economic historians confirm contemporary estimates that by the 1870s, the amount of black labor in the fields had dropped to one-quarter or one-third pre-emancipation levels.³⁹

This fact does not mean that all black women throughout the South were refusing to work, however. We have seen that many single women, especially those with children, continued to toil for whites, in some cases on the same plantation for their former master or mistress. In addition, women in specific crop economies sought to adjust their own work patterns in response to current or historic grievances. For example, in the sugar parishes of Louisiana, black wives constituted a supplemental force and went out into the fields during the busiest seasons, in contrast to their husbands, who labored for wages on a full-time basis. In Mississippi freedwomen broke from their slave past of gang labor and remained alert to wage-earning opportunities that varied with the season of the year—as hoers or as pickers of cotton, or as laundresses. Near Columbus nearly every wife took in washing, receiving nine dollars each month in return, her boiling kettle a testament to her desire to earn money and at the same time care for her children at home. In low-country South Carolina, black women continued to plant and harvest rice, but they refused to do mudwork, the cold and disagreeable wintertime tasks. In response, planters had to hire Irish immigrant day laborers from Charleston and Savannah .⁴⁰

Thus withdrawal of black females from full-time labor in the fields—a major theme in both contemporary and secondary accounts of Reconstruction—constituted a “radical change in the management of [white] households as well as plantations” and proved to be a source of “absolute torment” for former masters and mistresses (in the words of a South Carolina newspaper in 1871). The female field-hand who labored day in and day out, all year long under the ever-watchful eye of an overseer came to symbolize the old order.⁴¹

Employers made little effort to hide their contempt for freedwomen who “played the lady” and refused to join male workers in the fields. To apply the term “ladylike” to a black woman was apparently the height of sarcasm; by socially prescribed definition, black women could never become “ladies,” though they might display pretensions in that direction. The term itself had predictable “racial” and class connotations. Well-to-do white ladies remained cloistered at home, fulfilling their marriage vows of motherhood and genteel domesticity. But black housewives appeared “most lazy”; in the words of disapproving whites, these women stayed “out of the fields, doing nothing,” demanding that their husbands “support them in idleness.” At the heart of the issue lay the whites’ notion of productive labor; black women who eschewed work under the direct supervision of former masters did not really “work” at all, regardless of their family household responsibilities.⁴²

In their haste to declare “free labor” a success, even Northerners and foreign visitors to the South ridiculed “lazy” freedwomen working within the confines of their own homes. Hypocritically—almost perversely—these whites questioned the “manhood” of husbands whom they charged were cowed by domineering female relatives. South Carolina Freedmen’s Bureau agent John De Forest, for example, wrote that “myriads of women who once earned their own living now have aspirations to be like white ladies and, instead of using the hoe, pass the days in dawdling over their trivial housework, or gossiping among their neighbors.” He disdained the “hopeless” look given him by men told “they must make their wives and daughters work.” George Campbell, a Scotsman touring the South in 1878, declared, “I do not sympathize with negro ladies who make their husbands work while they enjoy the sweets of emancipation.”⁴³

Most southern and northern whites assumed that the freedpeople were engaged in a misguided attempt to imitate middle-class white norms as they applied to women’s roles. In fact, however, the situation was a good deal more complicated. First, the reorganization of female labor resulted from choices made by both men and women. Second, it is inaccurate to speak of the total “removal” of women from the agricultural workforce. Many were no longer working full-time for a white overseer, but they continued to labor according to seasonal demands of the crop, and according to the needs and priorities established by their own families.

An Alabama planter suggested in 1868 that it was “a matter of pride with the men, to allow all exemption from labor to their wives.” He told only part of the story. Accounts provided by disgruntled whites suggest that husbands did often take full responsibility for deciding which members of the family would work, and for whom: “Gilbert will stay on his old terms, but withdraws Fanny and puts Harry and Little Abram in her place and puts his son Gilbert out to a trade,” reported Mary Jones, a Georgia plantation mistress, in January 1867. Before the war, her clergyman husband had exhorted his enslaved workers to marry and be faithful to their spouses; now the family responsibilities assumed by black husbands and fathers appeared to threaten the material well-being of white households. At the same time, there is good reason to suspect that wives willingly devoted more time to childcare and other domestic matters, rather than merely acquiescing in their husbands’ demands. A married freedwoman, the mother of eleven children, reminded a northern journalist that she had had “to nus’ my chil’n four times a day and pick two hundred pounds cotton besides” under slavery. She expressed at least relative satisfaction with her current situation: “I’ve a heap better time now’n I had when I was in bondage.”⁴⁴

The humiliations of slavery remained fresh in the minds of black women who continued to suffer physical abuse at the hands of white employers, and in the minds of their menfolk who witnessed or heard about such acts. It was not surprising then that freedmen attempted to protect their womenfolk from rape and other forms of assault; as individuals, some intervened directly, while others went to local Freedmen’s Bureau agents with accounts of beatings inflicted on their wives, sisters, and daughters. Bureau records include the case of a Tennessee planter who “made several base attempts” upon the daughter of the freedman Sam Neal (his entire family had been hired by the white man for the 1865 season). When Neal protested the situation, he was deprived of his wages, threatened with death, and then beaten badly by the white man and an accomplice. As a group, men sought to minimize chances for white male-black female contact by removing their female kin from work environments supervised closely by whites.⁴⁵

At first, cotton growers persisted in their belief that gangs afforded the most efficient means of labor organization because they had been used with relative success under slavery and facilitated centralization of control. Overseers had only to continue to force blacks to work steadily. However, Charles P. Ware, a Yankee cotton agent with Philbrick on the Sea Islands, noted as early as 1862: “One thing the people are universally opposed to. They all swear that they will not work in a gang, i.e., all working the whole, and all sharing alike.” Freed men and women preferred to organize themselves into kin groups, as evidenced by the “squad” system, an intermediary phase between gang labor and family sharecropping. A postwar observer defined the squad as “a strong family group, who can attach other labour, and bring odd hands to work at proper seasons”; this structure represented “a choice, if not always attainable, nucleus of a ‘squad.’” The squad usually numbered less than a dozen people (seven was average), and performed its tasks under the direction of one of its own members. In this way kinship patterns established under slavery coalesced into work relationships after the war. Still, blacks resented an arrangement under which they continued to live together in old slave quarters grouped near the landowner’s house and lacked complete control over the work they performed in the field. And black women played a pivotal role in the emergence of families and households as units of economic production after the war.⁴⁶

In the late 1860s this tug of economic and psychological warfare between planters determined to grow more cotton and blacks determined to resist the old slave ways culminated in what historians have called a “compromise”—the sharecropping system. It met the minimal demands of each party—a relatively reliable source of labor for white landowners, and, for freedpeople (more specifically, for families), a measure of independence in terms of workplace decision making. Sharecroppers moved out of the old cabins and into small houses scattered about the plantation. Fathers and husbands renegotiated contracts around the end of each calendar year; families not in debt to their employers for equipment and fertilizer often seized the opportunity to move in search of a better situation. By 1870 the “fifty-fifty” share arrangement under which planters parceled out to tenants small plots of land and provided rations and supplies in return for one-half the crop predominated throughout the Cotton South .⁴⁷

The cotton sharecropping system helped to reshape southern class and gender relations even as it preserved a backward agricultural economy. The linking of personal financial credit to crop liens and the rise of debt peonage enforced by criminal statutes guaranteed a large, relatively immobile labor force at the expense of economic and social justice. In increasing numbers, poor whites would come under the same financial constraints that ensnared black people. Before the war, white women of modest means had helped sustain self-sufficient households by keeping gardens, producing cloth, and engaging in other tasks similar to those of the colonial housewife. After 1865, many of these households had to rely on loans from creditors who insisted on crops of cotton as a “lien” on the debt. Poor harvests bankrupted these small farmers. With the descent of these previously independent households into landlessness and tenancy, women were drawn into the cotton fields to pursue single-mindedly the largest crop their family could produce.⁴⁸

Although data from 1870 presents only a static profile of black rural households in the Cotton South, it is possible to make some generalizations (based on additional forms of evidence) about the status of freedwomen five years after the war. The vast majority (91 percent) lived in rural areas. Illiterate and very poor (even compared to their poor white neighbors), they nonetheless shared the mixed joys of work and family life with their husbands, children, and nearby kin. Fertility rates declined very slowly from 1830 to 1880; the average mother in 1870 had six or seven children. The lives of these women were severely circumscribed, as were those of other family members. Most of the children never had an opportunity to attend school—or not with any regularity—and began to work in the fields or in the home of a white employer around the age of ten or twelve. Young women found it possible to leave their parents’ home earlier than did the men they married. As a group, black women were distinguished from their white neighbors primarily by their extreme poverty and by the greater reliance of their families on the work they did outside the realm of traditional domestic responsibilities. (See Appendix B.)⁴⁹

Within the limited public arena open to blacks, the husband represented the entire family, a cultural preference reinforced by demographic and economic factors. In 1870, 80 percent of black households in the Cotton Belt included a male head and his wife, a proportion identical to that in the neighboring white population. (Future commentators who posited that female-headed households revealed an unbroken line between slavery and the twentieth century were mistaken.) In addition, most of the husbands were older than their wives—in more than half the cases, four years older; in one out of five cases, at least ten years older. Thus these men exercised authority by virtue of their age as well as their gender.

Landowners, merchants, and Freedmen’s Bureau agents acknowledged the role of the black husband as the head of his family at the same time they encouraged his wife to work outside the home. He took “more or less land according to the number of his family” and placed “his X mark” on a labor agreement with a landowner. Just as slaveholders had dealt opportunistically with the slave family—encouraging or ignoring it according to their own perceived interests—so postbellum planters seemed to have had little difficulty adjusting to the fact that freedmen’s families were structured “traditionally” with the husband serving as the major source of authority. Patrick Broggan, an employer in Greenville, Alabama, agreed to supply food and other provisions for wives and children—“those who do not work on the farm”—“at the expense of their husbands and Fathers,” men who promised “to work from Monday morning until Saturday night, faithfully and lose no time.”⁵⁰

Freedmen’s Bureau’s guidelines mandated that black women and men receive unequal compensation based on their gender rather than their productive abilities or efficiency. Agents also at times doled out less land to families with female (as opposed to male) household heads. Moreover, the bureau tried to hold men responsible for their wives’ unwillingness to labor according to a contractual agreement. For example, the Cuthbert, Georgia, bureau official made one black man promise “to work faithfully and keep his wife in subjection” after the woman refused to work and “damned the Bureau” saying that “all the Bureaus out [there] can’t make her work.” Left unstated in these contracts was the assumption that black women’s domestic labors—tending gardens and keeping chickens for example— provided substantial support for families and thereby lessened landlords’ need to provide much in the way of cash compensation for a year’s labor.⁵¹

A sharecropper usually purchased the bulk of the family’s supplies either in town or from a rural local merchant, and arranged to borrow or lease any stock animals that might be needed in plowing. He received direct payment in return for the labor of a son or daughter who had been “hired out.” (A single mother who operated a farm might have delegated these responsibilities to her oldest son or another male kin relation, or tried to assume responsibility for them herself.) Finally, complaints and criminal charges lodged by black men against whites often expressed the grievances of an entire household.

Thus the gendered division of labor that had existed within the black family under slavery became more sharply focused after emancipation. Wives and mothers and husbands and fathers perceived domestic duties to be a woman’s major obligation, in contrast to the slave master’s view that a woman was first and foremost a field- or houseworker and only incidentally the member of a family. Now women also worked in the fields when their labor was needed as gauged by husbands and wives. At planting and especially harvest time, they joined other family members outside. During the late summer and early fall, some would hire out to white planters in the vicinity to pick cotton for a daily wage. Seasonal fluctuations in labor patterns extended to men as well. In areas where husbands could find additional work during the year—on rice plantations or in phosphate mines or sugar mills, for example—they left their “women and children to hoe and look after the crops.” Yet in general, women’s agricultural labor partook of a more seasonal character than that of their husbands.⁵²

The fact that black families depended heavily upon the fieldwork of women and children is reflected in the great disparity between the proportion of working wives in Cotton Belt white and black households; in 1870 more than four out of ten black married women listed jobs, almost all as field laborers. By contrast, fully 98.4 percent of white wives told the census taker they were “keeping house” and had no gainful occupation. Moreover, about one-quarter (24.3 percent) of black households, in contrast to 13.8 percent of the white, included at least one working child under sixteen years of age. Rates of black female and child labor are probably quite low, since census takers were inconsistent in specifying occupations for members of sharecropping families. In any case, statistics indicate that freedmen’s families occupied the lowest rung of the southern economic ladder; almost three-fourths of all black household heads (compared to 10 percent of their white counterparts) worked as unskilled agricultural laborers. By the mid-1870s no more than 4 to 8 percent of all freed families in the South owned their own farms.⁵³

The rural paterfamilias tradition exemplified by the structure of black family relationships after the Civil War did not challenge the value and competence of freedwomen as field-workers. Rather, a distinct set of priorities determined how wives and mothers used their time in terms of housework, field labor, and tasks that produced supplements to the family income. Thus it is difficult to separate a freedwoman’s “work” from her family-based obligations; productive labor had no meaning outside the family context. These aspects of a woman’s life blended together in the seamless fabric of rural life.

Slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction

As enslaved workers and as freedwomen, black wives and mothers labored for white masters and mistresses even as they sought to provide for the everyday needs of their own families. Most enslaved women toiled in the fields for a great part of their lives (1). They formed an integral part of the labor force within the cotton economy that dominated the South’s staple-crop system of agriculture throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (2). During the Civil War, the advance of the Union army left intact the broad outlines of black women’s work. Some worked as servants (3) or laundresses for soldiers in military camps (4), where patterns of enforced deference to white men resembled those on antebellum plantations. For families who sought refuge behind Union lines, life remained hard and uncertain. With slavery abolished and the last cannon silenced, an enduring image of black womanhood remained etched in the minds of white southerners—that of a servant who responded to the daily demands of white people of all ages (5). The postbellum sharecropping economy was characterized by high rates of residential mobility within a circumscribed area, as families sought out a new landlord, and a better contractual arrangement, after the annual “reckoning” at the end of December (6).

1. Enslaved man and woman plowing rice in the soft soil of the Georgia low country. Photo by O. Pierre Havens. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

2. Enslaved workers of all ages picking cotton. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

3. Union General Fitz John Porter and his staff of officers, with servant. Headquarters of the Fifth Army Corps, Army of the Potomac, Harrison’s Landing, Virginia (1862). Photo by Mathew Brady. National Archives.

4. “Contraband of war” at Union army camp, Yorktown, Virginia (1862). Library of Congress.

5. Enslaved nurse with white baby (c. 1845). Massachusetts Historical Society.

6. A sharecropper on the move. National Archives.

Since husbands and wives had different sets of duties, they needed each other to form a complete economic unit. As one Georgia black man explained to George Campbell in the late 1870s, “The able-bodied men cultivate, the women raise chickens and take in washing; and one way and another they manage to get along.” When both partners were engaged in the same kind of work, it was usually the wife who had stepped over into her husband’s “sphere.” For instance, Fanny Hodges and her husband wed the year after they were freed. She remembers, “We had to work mighty hard. Sometimes I plowed in de fiel’ all day; sometimes I washed an’ den I cooked.” Cotton growing was labor-intensive in a way that gardening and housework were not, and a family’s ability to obtain financial credit from one year to the next depended upon the size of past harvests and the promise of future ones. Consequently the crop sometimes took precedence over other chores in terms of the allocation of a woman’s energies.⁵⁴

Age was also a crucial determinant of the division of labor in sharecropping families. Participation in household affairs could be exhilarating for a child aware of her own strength and value as a field-worker during these years of turmoil. Betty Powers was only eight years old in 1865, but she long remembered days of feverish activity for the whole family after her father bought a small piece of land in Texas: “De land ain’t clear, so we ’uns all pitches in and clears it and builds de cabin. Was we ’uns proud? There ’twas, our place to do as we pleases, after bein’ slaves. Dat sho’ am de good feelin’. We works like beavers puttin’ de crop in.” Sylvia Watkins recalled that her father gathered all his children together after the war. She was twenty years old at the time and appreciated the special significance of a family able to work together: “We wuked in de fiel’ wid mah daddy, en I know how ter do eberting dere ez to do in a fiel’ ’cept plow.”⁵⁵

At least some children resented the restrictions imposed by their father who “raised crops en made us wuk in de fiel.” The interests of the family superseded individual desires. Fathers had the last word in deciding which children went to the fields, when, and for how long. As a result some black women looked back on their years spent at home as a time of personal opportunities missed or delayed. The Federal Writers Project Slave Narrative Collection contains examples of fathers who prevented daughters from putting their own wishes before the family’s welfare during the postbellum period. Ann Matthews told a federal interviewer: “I didn’t go ter schul, mah daddy wouldin’ let me. Said he needed me in de fiel wors den I needed schul.” Here were two competing “needs,” and the family came first.⁵⁶

The status of black women after the war cannot be separated from their roles as wives and mothers within a wider network of kinship. Like poor people in general, blacks in the rural South relied upon kin and community in ways that defied the liberal ethos of unfettered individualism. Local communities shaped people’s everyday lives. Indeed, more than one-third of all black households in the Cotton Belt lived in the immediate vicinity of people with the identical (paternal) surname, providing a rather crude—and conservative—index of local kinship clusters. As the persons responsible for child nurture and social welfare, freedwomen cared not only for members of their nuclear families, but also for dependent relatives and others in need. This post-emancipation cooperative impulse was a legacy of a collective ethos developed under slavery, but also a characteristic of all kinds of impoverished rural communities.⁵⁷

The former slaves’ attempts to provide for one another’s needs appear to have been a logical and humane response to widespread hardship during the 1860s and 1870s. Nevertheless, whites spared from physical suffering, including southern elites and representatives of the northern professional class, often expressed misgivings about this form of benevolence. They believed that any able-bodied black person deserved a “living” only to the extent that he or she contributed to the southern commercial economy. Blacks should reap according to the cottonseed they sowed, the rice they planted, the sugar cane they harvested. Soon after she returned to her family’s Sea Island estate in 1866, Frances Butler thought there was nothing else “to become of the negroes who cannot work except to die.” In this way she masked her grief over the death of slavery with professed concern for ill, young, and elderly freedpeople. But within a few months she declared with evident irritation, “It is a well-known fact that you can’t starve a negro.” Noting that about a dozen people on Butler’s Island did not work in the cotton fields and so received no clothes or food supplies, the white woman admitted that she saw “no difference whatever in their condition and those who get twelve dollars a month and full rations.” Somehow the field-workers and non-workers alike managed to take care of themselves and one another by growing vegetables, catching fish, and trapping game. Consequently they relied less on wages paid by their employer. The threat of starvation proved to be a poor taskmaster in compelling these freedpeople to toil for Frances Butler.⁵⁸

Too many blacks, according to bureau agent John De Forest, felt obliged to look after “a horde of lazy relatives” and neighbors, thus losing a precious opportunity to get ahead on their own. This tendency posed a serious threat to the South’s new economic order, founded as it was, in De Forest’s view, on individual effort and ambition. He pointed to the case of Aunt Judy, a black laundress who barely eked out a living for herself and her small children. Yet she had “benevolently taken in, and was nursing, a sick woman of her own race . . . The thoughtless charity of this penniless Negress in receiving another poverty-stricken creature under her roof was characteristic of the freedmen. However selfish, and even dishonest, they might be, they were extravagant in giving.” By calling the woman’s willingness to share a “thoughtless” act, De Forest implied that a “rational” economic being would labor only to enhance her own material welfare.⁵⁹

The collective self-consciousness demonstrated by black women and men within their own kin networks found formal, explicit expression in the political arena during Reconstruction. Blacks immediately demanded full citizenship rights with the end of slavery. After enfranchisement in 1867, freedmen actively participated in postwar Republican politics, and political leaders came to constitute a new and influential class within black communities, though rivalries among members of this group could at times be intense. Throughout the South, class relationships that had prevailed before the war now shifted, opening up possibilities of cooperation between the former slaves and non-elite whites. The two groups met at a historical point characterized by landlessness and economic dependence, but they were on two different trajectories—the freedpeople on their way up (no matter how gradually) from slavery, the poor whites on their way down from self-sufficiency. Nevertheless, the vitality of the political process, tainted though it was by virulent and violent racial ideologies, provided black men with a public forum, one that their womenfolk also embraced, albeit in relatively indirect ways.⁶⁰

Black men predominated in this arena because, like other groups in nineteenth-century America, they believed that males alone were responsible for and capable of the serious business of politicking. This notion was reinforced by laws that barred female suffrage. However, black husbands and fathers, unlike their white counterparts, perceived the preservation and physical welfare of their families (including protection from terrorists) to be distinct political issues, along with obvious measures like land reform and debt relief. In partisan political activity, freedmen extended their role as family protector outside the boundaries of the household. Black women did not serve as formal delegates to the many political conventions held during this period—the local and state gatherings during which men formulated and articulated their vision of a just postwar society. At the same time, they often attended these gatherings and made known their strong convictions about specific issues such as land, labor, and education. In instances of labor struggle, for example when whites cut the wages of seasonal laborers, black women were the chief victims and reacted accordingly, lending their voices and their defiant demeanor to mass meetings. Indeed, both verbal and visual accounts of postwar partisan and labor politics reveal the active participation of black women in wide-ranging discussions about labor, land, and civil rights. The artist who drew a picture of a July 1868 political meeting (published in Harper’s Weekly) showed a group of women listening intently to a male speaker. Still, the sight of black wives patiently tilling the soil while their husbands attended political conventions, at times for days on end, convinced at least one white teacher that freedwomen deserved to participate more actively and directly in the community’s public life. Elizabeth Botume wrote in 1869:

We could not help wishing that since so much of the work was done by the colored women,—raising the provisions for their families, besides making and selling their own cotton, they might also hold some of the offices held by the men. I am confident they would despatch [sic] business if allowed to go to the polls; instead of listening and hanging around all day, discussing matters of which they knew so little, they would exclaim,—

“Let me vote and go; I’ve got work to do.”

In praising black women and their potential for political leadership, Botume denigrated black men. Like so many Northerners, she could hardly express positive sentiments toward one gender without belittling the other.⁶¹

It is true that freedmen monopolized formal positions of power within their own communities during Reconstruction; approximately six hundred served in elected positions throughout the South, thousands voted, and many lobbied and petitioned, participating in the full realm of the partisan-political process. But that did not necessarily mean that women quietly deferred to them in all matters outside the home. For example, in some rural areas two sources of religious authority—one dominated by men, the other by women—coexisted uneasily. In these cases formal role designations only partially reflected the “influence” wielded by individuals outside their own households. In the process of institutionalizing clandestine religious practices formed during slavery and separating them from white congregations, freedpeople reserved church leadership positions for men. In other ways, individual congregations fashioned a distinctly inferior role for women; some even turned women out of the sanctuary “before the men began to talk” about matters of church policy. On the Sea Islands, whites reported the public censure of freedwomen who had committed marital transgressions by showing a lack of proper respect for their husbands’ authority. The biblical injunction “Wives submit yourselves to your husbands” provided preachers with a succinct justification for church-based decisions that seemed arbitrary or unfair to the women involved.⁶²

These examples must be contrasted with equally dramatic cases of women who exercised considerable influence over their neighbors’ spiritual lives but outside of formal religious bodies and, indeed, of Protestant denominationalism altogether. Elderly women in the long line of African and Afro-American conjurers and herb doctors continued to wield considerable influence among persons of both genders. On the Georgia Sea Islands, African-born Maum Katie was “a great ‘spiritual mother,’ a fortune-teller, or rather prophetess, and a woman of tremendous influence over her children,” as were other women whose pronouncements and incantations were believed to be divinely inspired. Rural communities had two (in all probability competing) sources of spiritual and secular guidance—one a male and formal, the other female and informal—and this pattern magnified the gender-role differentiation within individual households.⁶³

Rejecting the forced pace of the slave regimen and embracing a family-based system of labor organization, freedpeople exhibited a preference for work patterns typical of a “traditional” rural society in which religious, regional, and kinship loyalties are the dominant values, as opposed to personal ambition and self-seeking. Indeed, very soon after emancipation emerged black households—set within larger networks of kin and community—that closely conformed to the “premodern” family model. In this case the terms traditional and premodern are misleading, however, because the sharecropping family that lived and worked together actually represented an adaptation, or a response, to postwar conditions rather than a clinging to old ways. This development, initiated so boldly by blacks, was particularly significant because it contrasted sharply with trends characteristic of late-nineteenth-century northern society, in which making a living was increasingly carried on by individuals for cash wages, apart from family life.⁶⁴

NEW DRESSES, DEFIANT WORDS AND ACTIONS, AND THEIR PRICE

In the fall of 1865 a Freedmen’s Bureau officer stationed in Wilmington, North Carolina, remarked to a northern journalist that “the wearing of black veils by the young negro women had given great offense to the young white women,” who consequently gave up this form of apparel altogether. In recounting the story, Sidney Andrews asked his readers a rhetorical question: “Does this matter of veils and parasols and handkerchiefs seem a small one?” and then he proceeded to answer it himself: “It is one of serious import to the bitter, spiteful women whose passionate hearts nursed the Rebellion.” Andrews shared with other Yankee travelers in the South the opinion that white women stubbornly remained Confederates at heart long after their husbands had admitted military defeat. More important, his comments suggest the larger social significance of clothing in an era when social relations were at least temporarily in a state of flux.⁶⁵

Rossa Cooley, a New England white woman who taught on the Sea Islands in the early twentieth century, offered a most perceptive statement on the role of women’s clothes during the transition from slavery to freedom:

Slavery to our Islanders meant field work, with no opportunity for the women and girls to dress as they chose and when they chose. Field workers were given their clothes as they were given their rations, only the clothes were given usually as a part of the Christmas celebration, “two clothes a year,” explained one of them as she remembered the old days. With the hunger for books very naturally came the hunger for clothes, pretty clothes, and more of them! And so with school and freedom best clothes came out and ragged clothes were kept for the fields. Work and old “raggedy” clothes were . . . closely associated in the minds of the large group of middle-aged Island folk.

Even for the women who never attended school, the old forms of dress—plain, drab, and heavy, serving only a practical and not an expressive function—were scorned in favor of more colorful, elaborate garments.⁶⁶

If clothes served to announce a freedwoman’s awareness of her new status, they also revealed the change in male-female relationships from slave unions to legal marriages. Black husbands took pride in buying fashionable dresses and many-colored ribbons, pretty hats, and delicate parasols for their womenfolk. When a freedman walked alongside his well-dressed wife, both partners dramatized the legitimacy of their relationship and his role as family provider. A white landowner in Louisiana reproached one of his tenants for spending all the proceeds of his cotton crop on clothing, “the greatest lot of trash you ever saw,” but the black man assured his employer that “he and his wife and children were satisfied and happy,” and added, “What’s the use of living if a man can’t have the good of his labor?”⁶⁷

White city dwellers in particular often associated “insolent” behavior with modes of freedwomen’s dress that defied the traditional code of black subordination. In his description of a Charleston street scene in the mid-1860s—“so unlike anything we could imagine [before the war]”—Henry W. Ravenel implied that there was more than a casual connection between the two: “Negroes shoving white persons off the walk—Negro women drest in the most outré style, all with veils and parasols for which they have an especial fancy—riding on horseback with negro soldiers and in carriages.” The abandonment of deference and old clothes, plus the presence of proud black soldiers in uniform, signaled an imminent struggle over “social equality,” according to apprehensive whites. Another South Carolinian stated the crux of the matter: “The airs which the negroes assume often interfere with their efficiency as laborers.”⁶⁸

Freedwomen throughout the South apparently adopted a pugnacious personal style that complemented their “disrespectful” forms of dress. In their descriptions of southern society during the fifteen years after the war, northern and foreign observers conveyed the distinct impression that black women were particularly outspoken and aggressive (by implication relative to black men and white women) in their willingness to confront white authority figures, “Freedmen’s Bureau officers not excluded,” noted one shocked Georgia agent. In December 1868, in the Ogeechee rice district near Savannah, freedpeople staged an uprising against exploitative planters, raiding the homes of whites and spiriting away large amounts of rice. Sent to investigate and quell disorder, a posse consisting of one of the planters and a local sheriff and his deputies arrived at the scene to find a group of black men armed with muskets, axes, and clubs. Their womenfolk, “with sticks and hatchets in their hands,” threatened the white men. Recalled the planter, the women were “all jabbering together like a pack of magpies. They were striking the ground with sticks, flourishing them in the air, and other things of that kind.” The sheriff refused to speak to the women, insisting on negotiating with the men instead. The incident culminated in the arrest and conviction of several of the men.⁶⁹

Two possible explanations helped to account for this recurrent theme in contemporary sources. First, large numbers of freedwomen might in fact have found a release for their anger by publicly denouncing their white tormentors, taking their grievances to a local bureau agent, or goading into action other blacks more reticent or fatalistic than themselves. It is also possible that northern and southern white journalists, officials, travelers, and planters were intrigued by exceptionally strong-willed freedwomen and so tended to highlight individual cases and exaggerate their importance. Defenders of the notion of early Victorian (white) womanhood could not help but be struck by black women who openly challenged conventional standards of female submissiveness. Freedwomen were described as “growling,” “impertinent,” “impudent,” “vulgar” persons who “spoke up bold as brass” and, with their “loud and boisterous talking,” demanded fair treatment for “we people [left] way back.” In the process of ridiculing these women, Northerners often indirectly revealed their ambivalent attitudes toward black men. Apparently an aggressive woman existed outside the realm of “natural” male-female relationships, with her own truculence counterbalanced by the weakness of her husband, brother, or father; but ironically in such cases, male relatives were often perceived to be much more “reasonable” (that is, prone to accept the white man’s point of view) than their vehement womenfolk.⁷⁰

For example, John De Forest later recounted the respective reactions of an elderly couple who had used up in supplies any profit they might have earned from a full year’s labor. The man remained “puzzled, incredulous, stubborn,” and insisted there must be some mistake. His wife was not about to accept the situation so politely: “trembling with indignant suspicion, [she] looked on grimly or broke out in fits of passion. . . . ‘Don’ you give down to it, Peter,’ she exhorted. ‘It ain’t no how ris’ible that we should ‘a’ worked all the year and git nothin’ to go upon.’” De Forest, who elsewhere complained of black “female loaferism” prevalent in the area, showed a curious lack of sympathy for this hardworking woman. In other cases, Yankee planters, professed abolitionists, responded to the demands put forth by delegations of female field-hands with contempt for their brashness.⁷¹

In the months and years immediately after the war, black women embraced their new roles as citizens. Domestic servants and laundresses waited patiently in line to open accounts in the new Freedman’s Savings and Trust Bank, created by Congress in 1866. Susie Baker King’s grandmother Dolly Reed, who established a successful trading business in and around Savannah, eventually deposited $3,000 in the bank, the fruits of, in the words of her granddaughter, “her hard labor and self-denial before the war,” and her faith in the future. When the bank failed in 1874, the result of poor investments, Reed remarked, “I will leave it all in God’s hand. If the Yankees did take all our money, they freed my race; God will take care of us.”⁷²

In other arenas too black women availed themselves of the services and benefits that were due them from the federal government, making claims not as dependents but as citizens entitled to certain rights and privileges. They resisted mightily, although not always successfully, the efforts of whites to “apprentice” black children and reduce them to slavery. We have seen that in some instances they took their grievances in the realm of social and labor relations to local Freedmen’s Bureau agents for redress or negotiation. And while the bureau was in operation, from 1865 to 1868, women pressed for bureau-sponsored schools for their children, for rations for their families, and for protection from abusive landlords. Eventually, black nurses for the Union army and widows of Union soldiers would attempt to exercise their rights in applying for the pensions to which they were entitled. Yet these efforts were not always successful, compared with those of their white counterparts. For example, while 84 percent of white widows received pensions, the figure for their black counterparts was only 61 percent. Many black women were too poor to travel long distances to cities to fill out the requisite documents; lacking identification papers, they could neither meet official requirements nor persevere in the face of long delays imposed by indifferent clerks and pension officials.⁷³

As a group and as individuals, freedwomen paid dearly for their assertiveness and for that of their sisters who dressed, spoke up, shouted, and acted like free women. Maria Mitchell was “talking loud”—“for her rights and would as much as she pleased and as loud as she pleased”; but the white man who was the object of her wrath hit her hard in the face five times and broke one of her teeth. One night in April 1867, Harriett Murray, a servant in the home of Dick Porter near Panola, Mississippi, was dragged from the house into the nearby woods by her employer and another white man. There “her hands were tied to the fork of a limb” and she was whipped “until the two men were tired out; two candles were burnt out in the time.” Porter then took her down from the tree, stripped her of her clothing, and held her while the other man continued to beat her. The cause of the assault is unknown, although the advice given to the victim by a local magistrate—that she should accept $38 in pay from Porter and forget about the whipping—indicates that a wage dispute was involved. Neither assailant was arrested.⁷⁴

Lacking any alternatives, some freedwomen continued to toil as they had under slavery and thus remained susceptible to “punishment” for any number of “offenses.” The amount and quality of work performed by women, and disagreements over the compensation due them, provoked the rage of white men who were slave masters in all but name. In Athens, Georgia, Margaret Martin left her place of work to visit her niece one day in the spring of 1868 and was “badly beaten and choked” by her employer upon her return. The defiant freedwoman Caroline appeared before a Greensboro, North Carolina, Freedmen’s Bureau official and reported that Thomas Price had failed to pay her for her services; when she next appeared on Price’s plantation, the white man “knocked her down and Beat her with his fist” and ordered his overseer to bring him “the strap”; “then he whipped her with it holding her head between his knees on the bare flesh by turning her clothes up.” The overseer also administered “a hundred lashes or more” after Price told him to “ware her out.” Lucretia Adams of Yorkville, South Carolina, endured a night of terror initiated by eight drunken white men (she recognized all her assailants, including Oliver and Charles Boehmgart and Bill and Newman Thomas). They “just talked as anybody would” and told her, “We heard you wouldn’t work. We were sent for . . . to come here and whip you, to make the damned niggers work.”⁷⁵

The incidents just described were exceptional only in that they were reported to northern officials. Like Mississippi’s Harriett Murray, most women heeded the warnings issued by their attackers to remain silent or leave the area if they did not want to be killed. Victims or relatives who tried to prosecute these white men inevitably discovered that violence against freedpeople was not only sanctioned, but sometimes initiated by so-called law-enforcement authorities as well. Local officials often refused to make arrests despite overwhelming evidence against a man or group of men; most shared the view—expressed candidly by a Mississippi deputy—that “there was neither money nor glory” in making such arrests.⁷⁶

Even if a white man were held to await trial, post-emancipation southern justice was less than forthright, rivaling mythical Wild West lawlessness for sheer outrageousness. In specific cases concerning freedwomen, a town mayor assisted in helping an accused rapist to make his escape; and a judge charged with beating a woman presided over his own trial, declared himself innocent, jailed his victim, and then forced her husband to pay for her release. Cases for black women plaintiffs were argued by drunken lawyers, and jury members stood up in the midst of proceedings to expound on behalf of the defendant. In June of 1868 an Upperville, Virginia, white man accused of assaulting a black woman leaped up during the trial and began beating her ferociously; he was acquitted. This last case revealed that a black woman who brought charges against her abuser often put herself in jeopardy. The Upperville white man was pronounced not guilty, the woman was fined court costs and remanded to jail because she was unable to pay.⁷⁷

The viciousness aimed at freedwomen was particularly significant as a phenomenon in American women’s history. Unlike the cold-blooded slaughter of Native Americans by U.S. army troops, these were personal attacks, carried out face-to-face by men who knew their victims and their families. Northern factory and sweatshop owners routinely exploited poor and immigrant women, but they rarely took up arms against a single recalcitrant worker. During Reconstruction, terrorist attacks against freed men, women, and children revealed all the anxieties related to gender roles and power that remained locked in the South’s collective consciousness.⁷⁸

OUT OF THE FIELDS: CITY LIFE AND SCHOOLING

Although only one out of ten southern blacks lived in towns with populations greater than 2,500 in 1870, the lives of urban freedwomen reveal variations on larger themes related to the postwar southern political economy. Connections between work and family patterns in the cities differed from those in rural areas, mainly because of the difference in demand for the labor of black men; but these connections were no less explicit. Moreover, as early as 1870, southern towns had begun to expose the dilemmas that would characterize African American urban communities for years to come, in the North as well as the South. In essence, family stability was sacrificed to the vitality and possibilities of city life. Under these conditions, black women’s work, always accorded the least possible respect and remuneration by white employers, increased in importance to family survival.

The large urban in-migration among newly freed slaves and the predictably cynical reaction of southern whites to it have been amply documented in state and regional studies of Reconstruction. Black men, women, and children came to the city, whites charged, to partake of whiskey, and to avoid an honest day’s work. But, in fact, many freedpeople (often referred to as “hordes” or “swarms” by whites) fled the war-torn countryside to seek food and safety in populated areas. Hostility among whites, many of whom believed that the city was “intended for white people,” coupled with a lack of housing and employment for the newcomers, caused a black exodus back to the cotton fields in 1866 and 1867. Still, the urban black population increased markedly during the 1860-1870 decade (by a rate of 75 percent overall), especially in certain large cities. Five years after the war, for example, Atlanta, Savannah, Richmond, Montgomery, and Raleigh each had almost equal numbers of black and white residents.⁷⁹

Women were overrepresented among freedpeople who remained in the cities permanently after the war and among those who participated in a gradual migration cityward throughout the South during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Single mothers in rural areas found it difficult to support themselves and their children by renting land or working as sharecroppers or wage laborers, and they sought employment in population centers. As a result, southern towns and cities were characterized by an unbalanced sex ratio in favor of women; in seven southern cities (1870 to 1880), women outnumbered men by ten to eight. In 1870 the ratio in both Atlanta and Wilmington, North Carolina, was about four to three. In New Orleans the number of black females aged fifteen to forty-five exceeded that of men in the same age bracket by more than 50 percent. Predictably, the percentage of female-headed households in the towns was greater than on the countryside—perhaps as high as 30 percent, twice the figure for rural households.⁸⁰

Most black women secured jobs in only a limited number of occupations, all clustered at the bottom of the wage scale. These involved traditional “women’s work”—(or rather, in the South, traditional black women’s work)—domestic services performed for nonfamily members for nominal pay. A single woman could barely support a family of any size on her wages alone. Most urban freedwomen labored as servants or laundresses, with smaller numbers working as cooks, nurses, seamstresses, and unskilled laborers (in tobacco factories in Richmond, for example). In several cities, servants represented about half of all black working women, and laundresses another one-fifth. At the same time, as black people tried to provide for themselves and promote their own institutional life, the job options for women expanded accordingly. For example, the efforts of black communities throughout the South to establish schools opened up a limited number of teaching positions for women, some of whom had conducted clandestine schools for enslaved children before the war.⁸¹

For several reasons it is difficult to state exactly the number of urban freedwomen gainfully employed in 1870, though estimates for different places have ranged from 50 to 70 percent. Census data, probably the best single source, reveals a person’s reported occupation but not necessarily her employment status at the time of the interview. The categories of cook, servant, and laundress were fairly flexible, and a woman might have worked in one capacity or another at different times of the year, or in all three simultaneously. The extent of seasonal work was not recorded; some women probably went out in the countryside during the late summer and early fall months to earn wages picking cotton. In the South’s seaports and river ports, the busy season on the docks (late fall to late spring) created a high demand among longshoremen for the services of black laundresses, cooks, and the peddlers of fresh fruits and vegetables. Finally, those listed by summertime census takers as “at home” or “keeping house” might have been earning money by keeping boarders or selling garden produce even though they were not listed as part of the urban workforce.⁸²

In cities, black women shouldered a heavy burden to support their children. Three times as many black women (proportionate to white) listed an occupation; in 1870 almost two-thirds of single black women but only one-quarter of single white women reported jobs. For married women the respective figures were 31 percent and 4 percent. An equal proportion (30 percent) of black and white households were headed by females. However, black family income amounted to less than 60 percent of white family income, and a black woman tended to remain in the workforce all her adult life, rather than entering or dropping out in response to other factors—such as changes in her husband’s income or the number of children at home. Black children contributed relatively little to the overall family income because as a group they left home earlier than their white counterparts. In black and white families of similar structure and income, freedwomen with children were still more likely to work than white mothers.⁸³

In financial terms, the quality of city life had little to offer the vast majority of freedpeople. Black men had a hard time finding steady work. Although about one-fifth made their living as artisans, they were bound to encounter the resentment of white competitors and the prejudice of potential white customers. Municipal ordinances imposed discriminatory licensing fees on black craftsmen, and vagrancy statutes limited their ability to move around in search of other possibilities. By the late nineteenth century these measures had the cumulative effect of reducing the proportion of skilled blacks in urban areas. For menial laborers the outlook was even grimmer; most probably worked on an irregular basis when they worked at all. The unpredictable labor demand in cities thus presented a striking contrast to the situation in rural areas ruled by King Cotton, where work cycles conformed to the ageless rhythm of the seasons and laborers were eagerly—and mercilessly—sought after by white landowners.⁸⁴

Economic and political conditions had a crushing effect on the health, stability, and welfare of the urban black family. City life was hard and dangerous. White people’s demand for cheap black labor was revealed in chain gangs consisting of women as well as men on streets all over the South. Yet at the same time, cities and towns afforded rich cultural, educational, and religious opportunities not available to blacks under slavery or to freedpeople scattered about the southern countryside. The social structure of black urban communities was much more complex than in areas where everyone made a living from the soil, and a favored few tradesmen and professionals in cities achieved a relatively comfortable standard of living. Large Baptist and Methodist churches provided religious and social services and a core of urban leadership devoted to both worldly and spiritual concerns. Like their counterparts all over the South, the freedwomen of San Antonio, Texas, sponsored a variety of fund-raising efforts to construct and further the mission of local churches. A variety of educational institutions—public and private, from elementary to college level—were concentrated in the towns. City children, freed from the never-ending demands of fieldwork and often near a school of some type, attended classes in greater numbers and with more regularity than their cousins in the country.⁸⁵

Black women supported auxiliaries of the many fraternal orders and lodges founded by men immediately after the war. Cities such as Savannah and New Orleans had many societies dedicated to a wide array of political, labor, charitable, recreational, cultural, and religious purposes. Some of these were burial societies, while others brought together the members of a particular church, and still others had an overt political purpose—in Savannah, the Ladies Union League, for example. Women sponsored picnics, parades, dances, and other social events, and they pooled their modest resources to care for indigent community members. Mutual-aid societies reinforced black community solidarity in the face of overwhelming prejudice and violence. In Virginia, the freedwoman Mary Prout founded the Independent Order of Saint Luke three years after the war; a burial and mutual-aid association, the order institutionalized efforts by women to care for the ill and other vulnerable members of the community. Finally, working women found it less difficult to band together and stage collective job actions in the city. Striking laundresses in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1866, and in Galveston, Texas, in 1877, for example, demonstrated a high degree of class and group consciousness. Freedwomen helped to nourish urban communities in both social and economic terms.⁸⁶

The social consequences of freedom—the coming together of families to work and live—were accompanied by changes in the way women worked, dressed, and thought about themselves. But if liberation from bondage brought tangible, immediate benefits to some women, for others it represented but a fervent hope that their children would some day live as truly free people. A mother’s belief that the future might be better for her offspring gave proof of the passing of slavery. The cook who “said she should die very happy, feeling that her children can spend ‘the balance of their days in freedom, though she had been in bonds’” conceived of freedom in terms of her family’s future welfare and not her current material condition. Black women throughout the South joined with men to form local education committees, build schoolhouses, and hire teachers at a time when their neighborhoods’ resources were slim indeed.⁸⁷

These mothers tried to prepare their children for a new kind of life. Poor but proud women refused to let their sons and daughters accept clothing (donated by whites) they considered ill-fitting or immodest; it was considered “highly indecorous to have the feet and ankles show below the dress,” for example. Northern teachers and Freedmen’s Bureau officials often lacked sensitivity toward these women who chose self-respect over convenience. Mary Ames, a Yankee teacher, recorded a revealing incident in her diary: “One girl brought back a dress she had taken home for ‘Ma says it don’t fit, and she don’t want it.’ It was rather large and short, but she was very dirty and ragged, and we told her she must keep it.” In other instances, parents disciplined their children with the liberal use of the rod, but they reserved the right to decide how and whether it should be used. Two years after the war, a Georgia bureau agent sustained charges brought against Eliza James because she had “impudently” refused to punish her son at the behest of a white man “and said she would not whip her child for no poor white folks etc.” For a white person to demand the punishment of a child smacked of slavery, and this freedwoman would not tolerate it.⁸⁸

The elderly Sea Island evening-school pupil “who was much bent with rheumatism” but said she was “mighty anxious to know something”; the Savannah laundress who fastened her textbook to the fence so that she could read “while at work over the wash tub”; and the Greenville, South Carolina, dressmaker who attended classes in the morning and worked at her trade in the afternoon were three of the few freedwomen to receive some formal education soon after emancipation. (In 1870 more than eight out of ten southern blacks were illiterate.) For most women, the rigors of childbearing and rearing, household chores, and outside employment represented a continuum from slavery to freedom, unbroken by schooling or other opportunities to expand their horizons beyond the cabin in the cotton field.⁸⁹

The Alabama Freedmen’s Bureau agents assigned to conduct a “Negro Census” for 1865 in the Athens-Huntsville area probably resented spending so much time and energy on what they considered bureaucratic nonsense. Before long they became careless in recording the ages and previous occupations of people they interviewed. However, for a while initially, they dutifully noted the required information: each person’s name, age, gender, address, former owner, slave occupation, and “present employment.” The first few pages of the census include these bits of data on about three hundred people. More than the gory details of an “outrage” report, or the tedious wording of a labor contract, this remarkable document chronicles the quiet revolution wrought in the lives of black women after emancipation.⁹⁰

Consider the Jones family: Caroline, formerly a house servant, and her daughter, Savannah, both of whom had been owned by John Haws, were now reunited with husband William (previously owned by a white man named Crawford). Caroline reported no occupation but instead said she was “caring for her family.” William continued to work in a railroad shop. Two months before the census interview they had celebrated their new life together with the birth of a son, James, who was listed as “Free born.” Nearby, Nelson and Phoebe Humphrey and their five children came together from two plantations (Nelson from one and Phoebe and the children from another). Both former field-hands, Nelson was doing “Miscellaneous: for other people” and Phoebe took in laundry. Joanna (aged fourteen), who used to work as a house servant, was now attending school, and her thirteen-year-old sister, Elizabeth, no longer worked in the fields; she probably helped her mother with the washing.⁹¹

Not too far away two young women in the Hammond clan took up employment as laundresses so that Easter (sixty), a former domestic, would no longer have to work; she was listed as ill. The women, Nettie (thirty-three) and Ata (twenty-nine), had six children between them, but no husband was listed for either. In the same neighborhood resided a second Jones family, consisting of Gilbert (fifty) and Julia (forty-eight) and the children they had retrieved from two different slave masters. The father had found work as a blacksmith and son William (twenty-one) continued to labor as a field-hand. Gilbert Jr. (fourteen) stayed at home rather than work in the fields as he had before, and Amanda (eighteen), also a former hand but “subject to fits,” was now able to “help her mother.”⁹²

Freedwomen like Phoebe Humphrey and Julia Jones would have had no difficulty listing the blessings of freedom: a reunion at long last with their families, the opportunity to devote more time to household affairs, and children attending school. Although it would be difficult to argue that their work was any less arduous than that of their enslaved mothers and foremothers, these women were now in a position to decide, together with their husbands, how and when various family members should contribute to the welfare of the household. Nettie and Ata Hammond probably had fewer alternatives when it came to supporting their children, but at least they were able to relieve the elderly Easter of her duties as a house servant.

Still, black women continued to occupy two distinct statuses that shaped their daily lives. In their neighborhoods they commanded respect as wives, mothers, and upholders of cultural tradition. In the eyes of whites busy laying the foundations for the “New South”—planters and federal officials—they were still workers who belonged to a despised caste, considered a lowly class apart from white women no matter how downtrodden. Yet freedwomen perceived freedom to mean not a release from back-breaking labor, but rather the opportunity to labor on behalf of their own families and kin within the protected spheres of household and community. In the late nineteenth century, southern black people would continue to define their interests as separate from those of white merchants and landowners.

IN PURSUIT OF FREEDOM

BLACK WOMEN AS “FREE LABORERS,” 1865-1870

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF BLACK FAMILY AND COMMUNITY LIFE IN THE POSTWAR PERIOD

NEW DRESSES, DEFIANT WORDS AND ACTIONS, AND THEIR PRICE

OUT OF THE FIELDS: CITY LIFE AND SCHOOLING