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Vol. 30:3 ISSN 0160-8460 September 2002
"We is come to the law now": Freedpeople, the Federal Government, and the Changing Face of Power in the South, 1861-1867
by Steven F. Miller
Chaplain Joseph Warren of the Freedmen's Bureau presiding over the wedding of a black soldier and his wife at Vicksburg, Mississippi. Harper's Weekly, June 30, 1866, Library of Congress.
The emancipation of 4 million Southern slaves during the American Civil War launched a revolution that reconfigured relations between black people and white, workers and employers, and citizens and the nation state. In becoming free people and citizens, former slaves entered into new relationships with officials of the Federal Government and recast their views about power and authority. The interaction between freedpeople and Government agents in the South during the war and the ensuing political reconstruction shaped the course of emancipation. It also produced and preserved documentation that provides an extraordinary glimpse into the lives of a people in transit from bondage to freedom and citizenship.
In the antebellum world of slaveholders and slaves, power wore a human face: the face of the owner, who possessed the persons and commanded the labor of the slaves. Slaves experienced their owners' overwhelming power directly and personally, and it affected every aspect of their lives. The laws and governmental institutions of the slave states bolstered the slaveholders' prerogatives, and Federal officials usually avoided interfering with them. If national authority bore lightly on the everyday existence of most Americans before the war, that was even more true for Southern slaves.
The secession of 11 slave states and the outbreak of civil war in 1861 launched events that altered the balance of power. Although Union President Abraham Lincoln initially pledged not to wage a war against slavery, the mobilization of the Confederacy for war and the Northern invasion of the South unleashed disruptive forces that rendered that promise moot. Slaves fled to Federal lines seeking freedom and offering to work or fight for the Union. Soldiers and commanders grew increasingly willing to accept the offers and increasingly unwilling to remand runaways to bondage. By the summer of 1862, the Federal Government had committed itself to protecting the liberty of fugitive slaves and mobilizing their labor for the Union war effort.1
Affirming the transformation of the Civil War into a war for freedom, Lincoln's final Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, declared free the slaves in the seceded states, announced the Union's intention to recruit ex-slave men as soldiers, and advised other freedpeople to "labor faithfully for reasonable wages." When the war ended in April 1865, about 200,000 African American men, most of them former Southern slaves, had served in the Union army and navy, and tens of thousands more had toiled as military laborers. Their contribution to Union victory helped end slavery in the United States, and their continued presence in the South in the postwar army of occupation symbolized the new relationship between former slaves and the Federal Government that had been forged during the war.2
Freedpeople remained mindful of that relationship as they seized the possibilities opened by emancipation after the war. Repudiating the detested hallmarks of their owners' sovereignty under old regime- particularly whippings and other corporal punishments, disruption of their family lives, long hours of uncompensated labor under close supervision, and restrictions on their ability to move about- ex-slaves fashioned new lives as free men and women. Their struggle proceeded on many fronts. Moving from their antebellum quarters to new homes untainted by association with their enslavement; addressing a former owner as "mister" instead of "master"; signing a contract for wage labor; sanctifying marriages that had been denied legal status; reuniting family members separated during slavery; organizing churches, schools, and other institutions befitting a free people – such seemingly ordinary acts took on special meaning for men and women learning to navigate the unfamiliar ground of freedom.
Freedpeople came quickly to understand that their newly won freedom would be insecure unless they enjoyed fundamental rights of citizens: to be secure in their lives and property, to enjoy justice under law, and to petition the officials who governed them. In contending for those rights, they cited their wartime service to the Union as well as the nation's stated commitment to the principle of human equality. "It is scarcely needful for us to say, that during the late Rebellion we have been true and loyal to the United States, Government," black leaders in middle Tennessee assured Federal authorities in July 1865. "As in the past, we have by our labors enriched our masters, in many instances, besides supporting ourselves and our families. We now, simply ask that we may be secured as others, in the just fruits of our toil: protected from unjust, and illegal punishments, and we are sure we will keep our families from want, and do our part as good citizens of the United States to add to the wealth and glory of the Country."3 Similar premises undergirded arguments to extend political rights, including suffrage, to African American men.
In their quest for legal equality, freedpeople recognized the changed basis of power and authority in the post-emancipation South. Power was no longer wielded unilaterally at the whim of a slaveowner, it was now mediated through impersonal law. "[W]e have no massa now- we is come to the law now," declared Florida ex-slaves soon after the end of the war, articulating a sentiment shared by their counterparts across the South.4 For men and women who were accustomed to being under the personal dominion of their owners, being suddenly subject to abstract law- learning its language and understanding its obligations- entailed manifold changes in their everyday lives.
As freedpeople grappled with the opportunities and challenges of the new world of freedom, they faced opposition from former owners who regarded emancipation as a bane rather than a boon. Although weakened by emancipation and military defeat, ex-slaveholders still controlled the bulk of the South's productive resources and wielded substantial political influence. Almost universally they denigrated the freedpeople's ability to support themselves in freedom, let alone enjoy the privileges of citizens. Point by point they contested the ex-slaves' efforts to enlarge the scope of freedom, determined to deny the freedpeople liberties they and their white neighbors took for granted.
A Virginia planter spoke for many of his fellows when he insisted that "the negroes will not work unless they are forced to do so" and advocated "[a]n organized system of force labour" to replace slavery.5 During late 1865 and 1866, after Lincoln's successor, President Andrew Johnson, made acceptance of emancipation and the extension of rudimentary civil rights to freedpeople a condition for restoring state and local governments in the former Confederate states, political leaders grudgingly met Johnson's terms while simultaneously enacting "black codes" that denied former slaves political rights and imposed Draconian new restrictions. That done, they demanded an end to military occupation and a return to self-government, with freedpeople excluded from the polity.
As the former slaves' enemies re-instituted state and local governments staffed heavily with former slaveholders, alarmed freedpeople looked to Federal authority as a counterweight. They turned especially to officers of the Union army and agents of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (Freedmen's Bureau), an agency established in 1865 to supervise the transition from slavery to freedom. Stationed at posts scattered across the South, army and bureau officials became personifications of Federal authority to former slaves, who flocked to them from miles around with questions, complaints, and grievances.
These agents in the field not only made decisions that affected the course of emancipation in their jurisdictions, they also provided freedpeople with conduits to the highest levels of authority in Washington. Vigilant in defense of their new and imperiled freedom, freedpeople scrutinized the agents' actions minutely, commending men they deemed sympathetic to their interests and seeking the removal of those they judged to be unsympathetic or ineffective. Often they presented an official's dereliction as a betrayal of the Federal Government's beneficent intentions, as did former slaves on one Georgia plantation who, after objecting to the counsel of their local bureau agent, insisted "that a true Agent of the Government would be along about Christmas to tell them better."6
The duties of Freedmen's Bureau agents and army officers involved them, at one time or another, in virtually every area of the freedpeople's lives. Disputes between ex-slaves and their former owners or new employers, particularly over labor, were probably the most routine item on their dockets. But freedpeople also brought more private, personal concerns before Federal agents. Appeals for help locating and reuniting with long-lost kinfolk were common, since the broad geographical reach and bureaucratic structure of the agencies facilitated inquiries over long distances and across state lines. Federal authorities also adjudicated disputes between former slaves ranging from controversies over ownership of property to allegations of marital infidelity.
As such, historians and other students of emancipation are beneficiaries of the special relationship forged between former slaves and the national government during the Civil War and early Reconstruction. The public records of the army, the Freedmen's Bureau, and other Federal agencies provide the fullest known documentation of the public and private lives of people passing from bondage to freedom.
Steven F. Miller is co-editor of the Freedmen and Southern Society project, a longtime recipient of NHPRC support.
Notes
- On emancipation during the war, see the volumes of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, a series based on documents from the National Achives and Records Administration: The Destruction of Slavery, ed. Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Thavolia Glymph, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland (Cambridge, U.K., 1985); The Black Military Experience, ed. Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland (Cambridge, U.K., 1982); The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Upper South, ed. Ira Berlin, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland (Cambridge, U.K., 1993); and The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South, ed. Ira Berlin, Thavolia Glymph, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, Leslie S. Rowland, and Julie Saville (Cambridge, U.K. 1990).
- For the proclamation, see United States Statutes at Large, Treaties, and Proclamations of the United States of America, vol. 12 (Boston, 1863), pp. 1,268-69. For the numbers of black Union soldiers and sailors, see Freedom's Soldiers: The Black Military Experience in the Civil War, ed. Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland (Cambridge U.K., 1998), pp. 16-17, 20-21.
- Rev. Lewis Bright et al., to General Fisk, 27 July 1865, B-36 1865, Registered Letters Received, series 3379, Tennessee Assistant Commissioner, Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, Record Group 105, National Archives Building, Washington, DC (hereafter, BRFAL).
- J. S. Fullerton to Maj. Gen. O. O. Howard, 28 July 1865, F-123 1865, Letters Received, series 15, Washington Headquarters, BRFAL.
- M. Q. Holt to Col. Brown, 5 Dec. 1865, H-4 1865, Registered Letters Received, series 3798, Virginia Assistant Commissioner, BRFAL.
- Capt. C. C. Richardson to Capt. W. W. Deane, 28 Nov. 1865, Unregistered Letters Received, series 632, Georgia Assistant Commissioner, BRFAL.
