Negotiating Freedom: Reactions to Emancipation in West Feliciana Parish,

Louisiana

By William Iverson Horne

B.A. in History, May 2008, Loyola University New Orleans

August 31, 2013

A Thesis submitted to

The Faculty of

The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences

Of The George Washington University

In partial fulfillment of the requirements

For the degree of Master of Arts

Thesis directed by

Andrew Zimmerman

Professor of History and International Affairs

ii

© Copyright 2013 by William Iverson Horne

All rights reserved

iii

Dedication

This work is dedicated to my grandmother, Louise Moore Horne, for her tireless

encouragement and support. Her lifelong commitment to education inspired many of her

students and peers to work for a better world. She is dearly missed.

iv

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the many dedicated educators who sacrificed so much time

and energy on such a difficult student. Particular thanks are due to Peggy Brett, Peggy St.

John, John Fuchs, Sara Butler, and Maurice Brungardt, all of whom encouraged me to

examine the world around me in greater detail. Andrew Zimmerman, Tyler Anbinder,

Teresa Murphy, Greg Childs, Jessica Krug, Erin Chapman, and the excellent faculty at

The George Washington University deserve special recognition for their generous insight

and suggestions at crucial stages of my research. Finally, I would like to thank my lovely

wife and full time editor whose patience and support has been essential to my work.

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Table of Contents

Dedication…………………………………………….…………………………........p. iii.

Acknowledgments………………………………………………….…………………p. iv.

Chapter 1: “Introduction: Who Broke Reconstruction?”………………………………p. 1.

Chapter 2: “Flight”……………………………..………………………………….….p. 13.

Chapter 3: “Alliance” ………………………………………………..……………….p. 27.

Chapter 4: “Violence”…………………………………………………..…………….p. 45.

Chapter 5: “Conclusion: Who Reconstructed?”..…………………………………….p. 62.

Bibliography……………………………………………………….…………………p. 64.

1

Introduction: Who Broke Reconstruction?

Nero Mack had high hopes following Emancipation. He was fired from his

position as a laborer on J.W. Ball’s plantation on May 7, 1867 and petitioned the local

Freedmen’s Bureau Agent, Capt. E.T. Lewis, several times over the subsequent days to

regain his employment. Although Mack admitted to missing work due to a hand injury,

he felt he was wrongly discharged because the he had only missed three weeks since his

contract began in late January. He also claimed that the confrontation with fellow laborer

George May over the use of a bridle that ultimately led to his dismissal was the result of

an ongoing conflict with May. According to Mack, May threatened that “if I put the

bridle upon the mule he would break my head, he then undertook to take the bridle from

me.” Mack’s complaints suggested contested meanings for the key concepts of time and

property on the plantation.1 He felt that freedom enabled him to be absent from the

plantation when he was injured and that he had some sort of claim on the property of his

employer that he frequently used for work. These concepts were intertwined for many

freedmen who expected an element of material gain from their ownership of their time

and bodies. For Mack, May, and countless other laborers and planters throughout

Louisiana, time and property were central components of emancipation where roles were

tested, revised, and rejected.

1 Records of the Field Offices for the State of Louisiana, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned

Lands, 1863-1872 (abbreviated hereafter as LBRFAL), M1905, Roll 66, Target 7, Register of Complaints,

May 1867- August 1868, Case 4, Bayou Sara, La, May 8, 1867. For ongoing conflict with May, see

LBRFAL, Roll 64, Target 9, Letters Sent, May-December, 1867, E.T. Lewis to Doct. J.W. Ball, May 9,

1867. Many of the Freedmen’s Bureau records contain idiosyncrasies in spelling and grammar and

punctuation foreign to modern readers. I have chosen to maintain as much as possible from the original

records, although occasionally I have removed unnecessary punctuation that might obscure the author’s

original meaning, particularly within the context of a short excerpt.

2

By the time May “picked up a hoe to strike me [Mack] with,” Mack had

experienced the violence of slavery firsthand, likely in East Feliciana where he and two

of his four brothers, born between 1830 and 1837, lived during the Census of 1870. The

year before his conflict with May, one of the Mack brothers, probably Nero, worked on

Como plantation owned by Lane Brandon, where Rachel Thomas complained in

December that “Mr. Mack” owed her fourteen dollars that he refused to repay.2 Nero

Mack was working for J.W. Ball by January of 1867, where the conflict over the use of

the bridle led Mack to recall that “I took a hatchet and told him [May] to keep away.” By

October of the same year, he was working for J.W. Medbery on Beauchamp Plantation

where he again had a physical altercation, this time with Capt. A. Finch, the Bureau agent

who replaced Lewis. Mack shouted “insulting remarks… and dared capt [sic] Finch to

approach him saying he would whip him if he did.” The failure of Reconstruction to

ensure meaningful economic and political independence had already become apparent to

Mack and the twenty laborers who sided with him on Beauchamp, who undoubtedly felt

2 LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 11, Register of Complaints and Contracts; Letters Sent, Jan. 1866-Mar.

1867, Feb-Mar 1868, Case 61, December 18, 1866. Rachel Thomas’ complaint refers simply to Mr. Mack,

who works on Como Plantation for R [Lane] Brandon, and might have referred to any of the Mack

brothers. It seems likely that she was referring to Nero, however, since changing his employers frequently

fits his employment pattern in which he had as many as three employers over the course of a year. Nero is

also the only of the brothers mentioned elsewhere in the Freedmen’s Bureau records and the only one for

whom there is evidence that he lived in West Feliciana. The U.S. Census of 1870 records Dudley and Nero

Mack living in East Feliciana Parish, with Sampson Mack living in Concordia Parish and Hermon Mack

living in New Orleans. Sipio Mack seems to have been missed in the 1870 census, but appears in the 1900

census living in East Feliciana Parish. That several of the Macks bear the name of Biblical and Roman

heroes (Sipio [Scipio], a famous Roman general; Nero, the fifth Emperor of Rome; and Sampson, the

heroic Biblical figure from the Book of Judges), lived relatively near one another, and were born within a

seven year span suggests that they were members of the same family. Nero Mack, United States Census,

accessed on Ancestry.com; Year: 1870; Census Place: Ward 3, East Feliciana,

Louisiana; Roll: M593_512; Page: 291A; Image: 585; Family History Library Film: 552011. Dudley

Mack, Year: 1870; Census Place: Ward 2, East Feliciana, Louisiana; Roll: M593_512; Page: 262B;

Image: 528; Family History Library Film: 552011. Sampson Mack, Year: 1870; Census Place: Ward 5,

Concordia, Louisiana; Roll: M593_511; Page: 353A; Image: 191; Family History Library Film: 552010.

Hermon Mack, Year: 1870; Census Place: New Orleans Ward 10, Orleans, Louisiana; Roll: M593_524;

Page: 326A; Image: 351; Family History Library Film: 552023. Sipio Mack, Year: 1900; Census

Place: Ward 2, East Feliciana, Louisiana; Roll: 564; Page: 14A; Enumeration District: 0047; FHL

microfilm: 1240564.

3

that their changing roles left them few supporters and fewer options.3 With limited access

to property and political representation, Mack and his fellow laborers employed strategies

of flight, alliance, and violence to pursue more amenable versions of freedom than the

planter establishment and its allies were willing to grant.4

This study focuses on a small geographic area, West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana,

during the period immediately following Emancipation, in an attempt to reconcile the

Reconstruction narrative with the lived experience of the historical actors of

Reconstruction. West Feliciana is a unique area that, prior to the Civil War, was the site

of both large scale sugar and cotton cultivation.5 It was also home to Bayou Sara, a cotton

hub on the Mississippi River, and a railroad line running from Bayou Sara to Woodville,

Mississippi. It was only one generation removed from the frontier, and many of the

wealthy planters in the parish descended from relatively new wealth. It was also an area

that had been defined by the double violence of slavery and war. The Siege of Port

Hudson, where black troops were first engaged in large scale combat, on May 22, 1863,

was only ten miles downriver from Bayou Sara.6 Following Union victory on July ninth

after a prolonged siege, Port Hudson became a Union Army recruiting area where slaves

3 Conflict with May, Case 4, Bayou Sara, La, May 8, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 66, Target 7, Regiester

of Complaints, May 1867- August 1868. Conflict with Finch, Testimony of John H. Medbery, Oct. 20,

1867; Testimony of Phillip Brown, Oct. 20, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 66, Target 6, Miscellaneous

Court Records and Complaints, September 1865- November 1868,. 4 Union commanders in Louisiana at times allied themselves with planters and yeoman Unionists and

occasionally displaced them as plantation authorities themselves. Ira Berlin et al., Slaves No More: Three

Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 123-127;

William Messner, Freedmen and the Ideology of Free Labor: Louisiana, 1862-1865 (Lafayette, La:

University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1981), pp. 35-39; Tunnell records the difficulty of Banks forging a

wartime alliance with Louisiana Unionists, suggesting that race ideology continued to determine economic

and political relationships throughout occupied Louisiana. Ted Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction: War,

Radicalism, and Race in Louisiana, 1862-1877 (Baton Rouge, La: Louisiana State University Press, 1984),

pp. 30-31, 52, 58. 5 Joseph Karl Menn, The Large Slaveholders of Louisiana-1860 (Gretna, LA: Firebird Press, Pelican

Publishing Co., 1998) p. 55. 6 Lawrence Lee Hewitt, Port Hudson: Confederate Bastion on the Mississippi (Baton Rouge, Louisiana:

Louisiana State University Press, 1987) pp. 149-150, 179.

4

fled to participate in freedom’s struggle. Thus, postemancipation West Feliciana was an

area of unique opportunity where black laborers from a wide variety of areas with diverse

skills and attitudes converged, creating greater opportunities for conflict and compromise

than in most parts of Louisiana.

These pockets of possibility present challenges for conventional evaluations of

Reconstruction. Historians widely agree that Reconstruction failed to bring meaningful

and lasting freedom from antebellum-style plantation labor and racial subordination for

many black Southerners. Although Eric Foner rightly observed that “Black

Reconstruction was a stunning experiment in the nineteenth-century world, the only

attempt by an outside power in league with emancipated slaves to fashion an interracial

democracy from the ashes of slavery,” by the end of Reconstruction it was clear that the

experiment had failed.7 As Edward Ayers noted, Redeemer Democrats who “slowly,

tentatively, [and] awkwardly” displaced Reconstruction governments in the South were

“not interested in a biracial coalition.” Rather, through violence, election-rigging, and the

courts, “white [Confederate] veterans with education and property stepped forward to

seize the power they considered rightfully theirs.”8 Even U.B. Phillips, Southern

apologist extraordinaire, trumpeted in “The Central Theme of Southern History” that

Southern “white folk [are] a people with a common resolve indomitably maintained—

that it shall be and remain a white man’s country.”9 Although riddled with racist

7 Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and its Legacy (Baton Rouge, La: Louisiana State

University Press, 1983), p. 40. 8 Edward Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 1992),

pp. 8 (quotes), 34-35. 9 Ulrich B. Phillips, “The Central Theme of Southern History,” The American Historical Review 34(Oct.

1928): 31.

5

contradictions and assumptions, Phillips’ analysis correctly identified reversing

Reconstruction reforms as the primary goal of the Democratic Redeemers.

Fortunately, historians no longer accept the racist fantasies of Phillips and other

Dunning-influenced historians. Their historiographic footprint, however, unveils the

failure of both Reconstruction and many Reconstruction histories. Historians reacting to

Dunning racism often focused on identifying which persons or parties were at fault for

the failure of Reconstruction, focusing more on who “broke” Reconstruction than how it

was experienced. Foner’s masterful historiographic preface to Reconstruction: America’s

Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, reveals the confusion embedded in the Reconstruction

narrative resulting from responses to the Dunning version of events. Since the members

of the Dunning School widely blamed vengeful Radical Republicans for what they

considered the ill-conceived project of black enfranchisement, many subsequent

historians sought other sources of blame to right the wrongs of the Dunning model.10

Countless scholars followed W.E.B. Du Bois in his attempt to revise the Dunning version

of Reconstruction, proposing that significant blame for undermining Reconstruction lay

10

Eric Foner, Reconstruction: American’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (Baton Rouge, La: Louisiana

State University Press, 1988) pp. xvii-xxii. John Rodrigue’s distinction between pre and post Foner

Reconstruction scholarship suggests Foner’s Reconstruction as a critical historiographic juncture.

Accordingly, I have employed Foner’s historiographic essay from the preface of Reconstruction to identify

ways in which Reconstruction historiography has been self-perpetuating in general, and specifically how

Dunningite discourses have become embedded in the broad Reconstruction narrative. Rodrigue’s pre/post

Foner distinction criticizes the unidirectional interpretation of agency in Reconstruction scholarship, noting

that “if scholars of Reconstruction are not to abandon black historical agency as an analytical tool, they

must at some point reconcile the self-determination implicit in agency with the consequent need to assess

what responsibility these historical agents may bear for Reconstruction’s failure.” Viewing agency as a

reaction to the Dunning School is central to my own work, both because Dunning narratives have been

widely discredited and because Rodrigue and Walter Johnson have both demonstrated the need to revise

our notions of agency to encompass what Johnson terms “historical subjectivity.” John Rodrigue, “Black

Agency after Slavery,” in Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 41-44, 65 (quote). Walter Johnson, “Agency: A Ghost Story,” in

Slavery’s Ghost: The Problem of Freedom in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 2011), p. 26. For more on agency, see note 18.

6

with poor Southern whites who aligned their interests with wealthy planters to the

detriment of black laborers.11

According to Foner, the project of assigning blame and revising the Dunning

racist anthologies mirrored the project of Civil Rights in the United States.12

The

complexity of the issue becomes apparent when we examine the genesis of

Reconstruction in the wartime free labor projects of Generals Butler and Banks in

Louisiana. Conservative historians like Charles Roland, no doubt taking up the Dunning

banner, argue that “the Negroes became ‘crazy’” after their “childlike curiosity” was

ignited by Union troops and the possibility of freedom. Roland suggests that this

combination of Union meddling and the racial incapacity of black laborers ensured “that

free Negro labor had proved a complete failure.”13

Revisionists like William Messner,

however, place blame squarely on the shoulders of the General Nathaniel Banks whose

free labor experiments in Louisiana left emancipated slaves “once again tied to the

plantation and held rigidly in the position of landless field hands.”14

Retrospective

analyses of the scope of Reconstruction become even more divergent, blaming the

eventual failure of Reconstruction on either the “Reconstructers” or on the

Reconstruction project itself.15

Deeply embedded in these accounts is the Dunning

11

W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880; Originally published by Harcourt, Brace,

and Co., 1935 (New York: Meridian Books, 1965) pp. 130, 144. Du Bois placed general blame on

pervasive racism existing from the founding of the Republic which he argued manifested itself in the

colonization schemes of Lincoln (pp. 131-132, 147-150). 12

Foner, Reconstruction, pp. xx-xxi. 13

Charles Roland, Louisiana Sugar Plantations During the Civil War, originally published by E.J. Brill,

1957 (Baton Rouge, La: Louisiana State University Press, 1997) pp. 92, 96-97, 103-104, 113. 14

Messner, pp. 59-60, 73 (quote). Tunnell comes to a similar conclusion, noting that “wartime

Reconstruction failed because wrongheaded moderates – Banks, Hahn, and Lincoln – discarded the root

and branch Radicalism of Durant in favor of politics as usual.” Tunnell, p. 36. 15

John Rodrigue, Reconstruction in the Cane Fields: From Slavery to Free Labor in Louisiana’s Sugar

Parishes, 1862-1880 (Baton Rouge, La: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), suggested that planters

were at fault for the failures of Reconstruction because of their strong-arm tactics of “bulldozing” in

7

racism, often coupled with a need to provide an alternative narrative to the Dunning

model. These histories, while often insightful, fail to reconcile their ideological motives

with the lived experience, insofar as it is accessible, of the historical actors as they shaped

and interpreted Reconstruction.

Historians of Reconstruction frequently focus on Radical Republican ideology,

individual and organizational failures, and planter political and economic power to

explain the broken promise of Reconstruction. However, the primary issue for those

involved in the Reconstruction process was emancipation and its potential meanings.

Planters, laborers, and yeoman farmers all viewed emancipation as a jarring event and

wondered how it would impact prevailing definitions of labor and property that were

heavily influenced by slavery. These changes, eagerly anticipated and otherwise, shaped

the experience of freedom and established its parameters, both for former slaves and their

masters. Foner identified this process as an evolutionary one whose outcomes are still

response to black enfranchisement and what they considered “demoralized” labor (pp. 95, 99-102). Richard

Follett, in “Legacies of Enslavement,” in Slavery’s Ghost: The Problem of Freedom in the Age of

Emancipation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) also found planters culpable for the

failures of Reconstruction in their attempts to keep black laborers in “as near a state of bondage as

possible” (p. 62). Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch provide a much more balanced and comprehensive

approach, suggesting that poor whites (pp. 24-26), planters (pp. 21, 36), and black laborers (p. 15) all

shared responsibility for the fate of Reconstruction, noting that “they [black laborers] asserted their

independence and insisted on institutional arrangements more to their liking than those envisioned for them

by whites,” One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation, 2nd

Ed. (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2001) p. 39. Nonetheless, their approach is in many ways a catalogue of black

responses to white oppression, which often come at the expense of negotiation and nuance. On the other

side of the ideological spectrum, Howard White, in The Freedmen’s Bureau in Louisiana (Baton Rouge,

La: Louisiana State University Press, 1970) employed the myth of a prostrate South willing to accept free

labor but unwilling to accept the attempt “to promote Northern business and the fortunes of the Republican

Party” (p. 8). In this version of events, Andrew Johnson protects the South from the “serious violation of

the Constitution” involved in exercising federal authority in state matters (p. 10). He suggests that

“Southern racism was exaggerated” (p. 12) and that Bureau officials were “unbelievably naïve” and

occasionally defrauded laborers (pp. 14-15). A similar and more recent explanation of the failure of

Reconstruction in general, and the Freedmen’s Bureau in particular, suggested that “whites began to

persecute freedmen for subverting traditional Southern values.” Solomon Smith, “The Freedmen’s Bureau

in Shreveport: The Struggle for Control of the Red River District” in Louisiana History: The Journal of the

Louisiana Historical Association 41(Autumn, 2000) 456. The conflict near Shreveport, it seems, was a

conflict between “rampaging freedmen” and local whites, of which the Bureau agents were mere observers

(pp. 459-460).

8

being determined.16

Within this context, Steven Hahn’s innovation of “look[ing] out from

slavery onto the postemancipation world” becomes essential to understanding the various

meanings of Emancipation.17

Persons who had been enslaved, as well as persons who had

encountered slaves, would certainly have evaluated their own freedom and the project of

emancipation in general through the lens of their prior experiences with slaves and

slavery. Taken in conjunction with Walter Johnson’s insightful work on agency,

Reconstruction should be viewed as an ongoing series of conflicts and compromises

involving all members of society, an attempt to emancipate the present from the past, a

project whose failure was anything but certain.18

16

Foner, Reconstruction, p. xxi. 17

Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the

Great Migration (Harvard University Press, 2003) p. 6. For Rebecca Scott, the end of slavery marked by

“multiple wartime scenes of military, bureaucratic, and individual confusion” were driven by black

Americans who demanded greater access to political and economic resources. Accordingly, the experience

of slavery inspired former slaves to force the collapse of slave labor. Rebecca Scott, “Fault Lines, Color

Lines, and Party Lines: Race, Labor, and Collective Action in Louisiana and Cuba, 1862-1912,” in Beyond

Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies, ed. Frederick Cooper

et al. (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), pp. 65-66. See also Berlin, pp. 112-119 on

former slaves pushing Union policy from colonization to black wartime participation. Eugene Genovese’s

disturbing foray into Southern intellectual history in The Slaveholders’ Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in

Southern Conservative Thought (University of South Carolina Press, 1992), absent its foundation in the

experience of slavery and slaveholding, identifies the difficulty of “looking out from slavery.” Ideologies of

slavery and race became so deeply intertwined in the slaveholding South that Genovese can observe with

unintended irony that “Southerners of all walks of life pondered the prospects for slavery and debated

whether God intended it to last forever” (p. 58). Black slaves were obviously excluded from the category

“Southerners” for Genovese and seemed unlikely to wonder whether or not they ought to be permanently

enslaved. While Genovese labored to preserve an antebellum anticapitalist movement in the form of

paternalist planters, he neglected address planters’ concerns critically or to inquire whether ownership of

persons cause or consequence of global capitalism. For evaluations of Genovese’s later scholarship and

legacy, see James Livingston, “’Marxism’ and the Politics of History: Reflections on the Work of Eugene

Genovese,” Radical History Review 88(2004):30-48; Trevor Burnard, “Who Deluded Whom? Eugene

Genovese and Planter Self-Deception,” Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies

(2013):1-7. 18

Walter Johnson’s essential observations on agency suggest the need for a reexamination of slavery and

postemancipation labor regimes to uncover the complex and at times contradictory relationships between

oppressed groups and their oppressors. His essay, “On Agency,” reveals the ways in which historians

essentialize and trivialize the experiences of slaves and masters by claiming to “giv[e] the slaves back their

agency” and identify “slaveholders’ goals… to ‘dehumanize’ the slaves.” Johnson notes that “they

[historians invoking agency] never really tell you if slaveholders cared that their ideology was

philosophically incoherent.” He aptly concludes that constructing agency as a means of returning humanity

to humans resembles “practicing therapy rather than politics.” The humanity of slaves could no more be

9

Studying freedom in the West Feliciana proved to be a difficult task not only

because the legal boundary between slavery and freedom was at times unclear for parish

residents, but because geographical boundaries were often used as a means of redefining

emancipation for planters and their black laborers. While some enslaved laborers fled the

plantation for freedom, planters and overseers fled the plantation for slavery, preserving

as much of their labor and ideology as they could manage in remote areas. The resulting

geographical focus centers on West Feliciana, but spills over into neighboring parishes

and occasionally reaches as far as Texas and Central America. Likewise, the temporal

narrative emphasizes encounters with freedom and its subsequent meanings, stretching

from early 1863 with accounts of slaves escaping to Union lines through the crop failures

of 1867 and their impact on parish residents, converting a postwar labor shortage into a

labor surplus in early 1868. The resulting narrative is synchronic, privileging experience

over chronology, and demonstrates the three key ways that planters and laborers

responded to the crisis of emancipation: flight, alliance, and violence.

Nero Mack is emblematic of this process of negotiating the meaning of freedom.

His several complaints about his employers and fellow laborers provide evidence of his

goals for emancipation. That freedom occasionally fell short of these goals gives us

taken than returned and the notion that it could and should is both racist and absurd, “a ‘white’ form of

address… admitting the speaker to a ‘Black’ conversation.” Walter Johnson, “On Agency” in The Journal

of Social History 37(Autumn, 2003) 116,119-121. In a more recent essay, “Agency: A Ghost Story,”

Johnson identifies Gutman’s emphasis on “The Sartre Question” as invigorating social history while

depriving it of its complexity. Johnson correctly notes that “agency,” as it is frequently used, deprives

historical actors of their “historical subjectivity,” depicting them as two-dimensional actors motivated

solely by resistance. This formulation leaves the failure of agents’ resistance utterly inexplicable and

wholly unsatisfactory. As Johnson says, “we can do better than ‘agency.’” Perhaps we need to ask “The

Sartre Question” of “The Sartre Question,” that is, to allow our “agents” to function simultaneously as

“subjects,” both reacting to and participating in power. Walter Johnson, “Agency: A Ghost Story,” in

Slavery’s Ghost: The Problem of Freedom in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 2011) pp. 22, 26, 29. Foner also suggests that agency is the key to understanding

Reconstruction as it was experienced, but formulated a notion of agency much closer to that which Johnson

criticizes. Foner, Reconstruction, p. xxii.

10

insight into the ways that Mack and his contemporaries constructed and interpreted

freedom. Mack’s willingness to move in search of better wages and working conditions

allowed him to transform from a plantation laborer in West Feliciana in 1866 and 1867 to

a “farmer” in East Feliciana during the Census of 1870 to a “laborer” in West Baton

Rouge on the Census of 1880.19

His claim that he and his parents were born in Michigan

on the Census of 1880 may have been an attempt to remake himself as having always

been free, deserting his past of servitude. Finally, when these mechanisms of physical and

emotional flight failed to secure a definition of freedom that Mack found adequate, he

employed violence and threats of violence to secure the parameters of freedom as he saw

them. His willingness to resort to violence brought him to confront an alliance on J.W.

Ball’s plantation and into an alliance with his fellow laborers against J.W. Medbery and

the Bureau agent reviewing his claim. Through these three mechanisms; flight, alliance,

and violence; Mack negotiated the meaning of freedom along with countless other West

Felicianans as they attempted to negotiate the project of emancipation.

Mack’s experiences demonstrate the limitations of our current Reconstruction and

postemancipation discourses that emphasize racial and cultural difference, creating new

caricatures of “whiteness” and “blackness” as they displaces older ones. Embedded in our

notions of difference, even roughly one hundred and fifty years after slavery, are issues of

hierarchy and order, vestiges of our plantation past. In this paper I examine three

responses to freedom: flight, alliance, and violence; that both supersede and emanate

19

United States Census, accessed on Ancestry.com; Year: 1870; Census Place: Ward 3, East Feliciana,

Louisiana; Roll: M593_512; Page: 291A; Image: 585; Family History Library Film: 552011. United States

Census, accessed on Ancestry.com; Year: 1880; Census Place: 2nd Ward, West Baton Rouge,

Louisiana; Roll: 474; Family History Film: 1254474; Page: 324B; Enumeration District: 059; Image: 0151.

11

from perceived racial differences and their ties to plantation labor.20

I do not mean to

replace histories of Reconstruction that examine racial and economic difference as

significantly motivating Reconstruction actors; in fact, notions of race, labor, and order

were essential for many residents of West Feliciana as they struggled to negotiate the

meaning of freedom. As Thavolia Glymph and Stephanie McCurry have convincingly

shown, race was a central consideration for white and black Southerners as they

evaluated the twin projects of the Civil War and Reconstruction.21

Joan Scott and John

Rodrigue have also persuasively argued that race and class converged to forge political

20

I originally identified an additional three responses to freedom that appeared fairly consistently in the

primary documents: illness, re-remembering, and religion. Although certainly important facets of

encountering freedom, I felt that including these responses would lengthen the paper to the point of being

unwieldy and would detract from the voices I tried to emphasize in the narrative. Thus, I focused on the

three responses to freedom that I thought appeared most frequently in the documents; flight, alliance, and

violence; which I felt would best represent the experience of freedom for those involved. Those familiar

with Albert Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty will see some parallels between this project and his

notions of exit and voice as signifiers of “social misbehavior” and decline. Although the “social

misbehavior” paradigm hardly describes the interpretation and negotiation involved in determining the

parameters of freedom, the application of exit and voice for black Americans is not lost on Hirschman.

Viewing flight, alliance, and violence as aspects of exit and voice and responses to perceived social

misbehavior reveal the value of Hirschman’s insights for Reconstruction. Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice,

and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge: MA, Harvard

University Press, 1970) pp. 4-8, 109-111. 21

Stephanie McCurry suggests that race was not only an organizing mechanism for plantation labor and

laborer resistance, but ultimately undermined the Confederate project as enslaved persons refused to

behave like objects and welcomed opportunities to rebel. Her discussion of the Second Creek slave revolt,

where black laborers took advantage of the diminished white presence during wartime to pursue freedom,

is emblematic of her thesis that black activism undermined the Confederate war effort. Her sweeping

formulation of black resistance, in which “ex-slaves no longer clandestine in their opposition… [were]

empowered by their claims as the loyal people arrayed against the traitors,” merely inverts the white

supremacist narrative, advocating a version of “blackness” defined largely by resistance rather than

passivity. Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 5-7, 28-29, 33-34, 239-241, 360-361 (quote).

Thavolia Glymph encounters similar issues as she privileges race over gender as a category of analysis.

While her conclusions that the plantation house was a workplace and a site of laborer resistance and that

plantation mistresses were often misconstrued as passive victims are essential to understanding the

transition from slavery to freedom, her analysis nonetheless constructs a two-dimensional notion of

“blackness” that is indistinguishable from resistance. Her depiction of the demands that black women made

on their white employers and the changing power relations between them leave little room for persons to

what Johnson’s notions of “subjectivity” (see note 18), distilling the complexity of interpersonal relations

into the categories “laborer” and “employer.” Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The

Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 9-

14, 17, 169-170, 180-183.

12

alliances in the Louisiana sugar parishes.22

Nonetheless, these histories sometimes reify

as much as they reveal, creating actors who, motivated solely by race and class

consciousness, could never have existed in a world marked by complexity and

uncertainty. I suggest a shift from studies of Reconstruction towards a study of individual

reconstructions emphasizing the lived experiences of millions of Americans whose lives

were forever altered by process of negotiating freedom.23

22

Rodrigue suggested that gang labor on Louisiana sugar plantations enhanced the bargaining rights of

black laborers against white planters and political institutions. Rodrigue, Reconstruction, pp. 78-81.;

Rebecca Scott found a similar association between gang labor and black activism in Degrees of Freedom:

Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge, Ma: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 47-48; Scott,

“Fault Lines,” pp. 68-73. 23

Brown, Reconstructions, pp. 5-7.

13

Flight

Residents of West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana fled their homes for a variety

reasons from 1863 through early 1868. Planters fled advancing Union forces following

the surrender of Port Hudson in July of 1863 to maintain the possession of their human

property and elite status. Enslaved laborers likewise fled their workplaces during the war,

seeking the human dignity of owning their labor time. Following the victory of Union

forces and the end of major hostilities in April, 1865, black and white residents continued

to leave West Feliciana. Some expressed dissatisfaction with the world they had created

through five years of bitter struggle, while others went in search of long lost relatives or

hoped for better opportunity in elsewhere. This highly mobile population significantly

impacted the opportunities for those they left behind, creating a labor shortage that often

forced planters to compete with one another for laborers, generating better working

conditions and occasionally better wages for those laborers who chose to stay. More

importantly, the choices of black and white residents of West Feliciana to leave their

homes and look to possibilities elsewhere implied a powerful dissatisfaction with the

present that was inseparable from the past of slavery.

Black West Felicianans fled the sites of their enslavement just as white residents

fled areas where there were no longer slaves. When William Robinson fled Charles

Percy’s plantation for Union lines in on the 28th

of February, 1865 he was running away

from slavery just as he was running towards freedom. He took a “Horse, Saddle, and

Bridle,” from Percy’s plantation and rode to a Union gunboat stationed nearby on the

Mississippi River. Percy came “soon after” to claim the horse as his property, but was

told that the horse had been confiscated as contraband of war. After obtaining his

14

freedom in February, Robinson “made an honest living working on Steam Boats to until

[sic] the 20th

of November 1865, when he returned to Bayou Sara (intending to return to

his former master) where he was arrested.” Perhaps Robinson returned to reunite with

friends and family on Percy’s plantation or he may have been searching for higher wages

from his former master. Nonetheless, his return brought his confinement for taking the

horse on which he had escaped.24

Ben Rowen’s flight from slavery on J.D. Smith’s plantation, taking place much

earlier in the war, did not benefit from the prospect of immediate Union protection. Smith

claimed that Rowen fled the plantation “in the commencement of the war,” but that

Rowen was “of so little value I never took the trouble to have him arrested.” Rowen

apparently intended to survive on his own, similar to Robert St. Ann’s memories of

Thompson West, who “hide in de woods” until “de Yankees come” when he walked out

and declared his freedom.25

Rowen’s luck took a turn for the worse when a “short time

previous to the surrender of Port Hudson he was captured by the Confederates attempted

to make his escape and was badly shot.” After lying wounded in the woods for two

weeks, Rowen was discovered by a neighbor and returned to Smith where, after spending

24

Malinken felt that Robinson had been wrongly imprisoned since the horse had been taken as contraband

of war, an argument that eventually won Robinson’s release. J.H. Malinken(?) to Captain A.F. Hayden,

December 23, 1865, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 66, Target 6, Court Records and Complaints; Sept. 1865-Nov.

1868. See also Grand Jury Indictment for Larceny, Parish of West Feliciana, Signed G. Merrick Miller,

Acting District Attorney, November Term, 1865; Capt. A.L. Stephens to The Sheriff of West Feliciana

Parish, January 15, 1866; J.N. Cotton, Sheriff, Parish of West Feliciana, to Capt. A.L. Stephens, January

16, 1866, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 66, Target 6, Court Records and Complaints; Sept. 1865-Nov. 1868. 25

“Narrative of Robert St. Ann,” found in Ronnie W. Clayton, Mother Wit: Ex-Slave Narratives of the

Louisiana Writers’ Project (New York: Peter Lang, 1990) p. 191. Many of the narratives from Mother Wit

are written in dialect. As with other idiosyncrasies in spelling and grammar from other records, I have

chosen to maintain as much as possible from the original record. Thus, I have not altered the dialect

recorded by the WPA writers unless it obscures the original meaning.

15

two months recuperating, he “hired himself to one of my Neighbors.”26

Rowen’s tale

illustrates the lengths to which enslaved laborers would go to gain their freedom and the

impact of their demands for freedom on slavery. That Smith did not try to reclaim Rowen

as his property serves as a tacit admission that slavery was becoming increasingly

untenable.

The story of Rowen’s flight from slavery is particularly interesting since it is only

delivered within the context his complaint that Smith refused to pay him for his labor.

Rowen complained that he worked for Smith from 1863 through the fall of 1865 without

being paid for his labor. He further protested Smith’s refusal “to let him take his Corn (12

½ lbs.) and the hog which he had raised with his consent” when he left the plantation.27

While it is unclear why Rowen left Smith’s employment in the fall of 1865, it seems

likely given his complaint that he was dissatisfied with Smith’s failure to pay him for his

labor. Smith’s justification for not paying Rowen, at least in part, was that he had been a

slave. He then accused Rowen of being a squatter on his land before concluding that he

ought to pay Rowen something for his labor. That Smith’s change of heart took place

over the course of a single letter, and that he chose to begin the letter with the account of

Rowen’s flight from slavery, indicates that he was still coming to terms with the

implications of slavery for waged labor. It seems that in both ideology and practice,

slavery was deeply embedded in execution of freedom.

Black West Felicianans found ample reason for flight following emancipation.

Flight was often a means of escaping contracts or employers that they considered unjust.

26

J.D. Smith to Maj. G.M. Elbert, July 21, 1866, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 65, Target 1, Unregistered Letters

Received, Dec. 1865-Dec. 1868. 27

Case 46, July 21, 1866, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 11, Letters Sent, Jan. 1866-Mar. 1867, Feb-

Mar 1868.

16

Charles H. Gibbons recorded on his annual contract with the laborers on Gratitude

Plantation that John Cotton “Run away for no cause” while Richard Johnson and Thomas

Sullivan “went off.” Harriet Matthews reported similar behavior on her contract for April

1866, noting that Sallie Bell, Frances Henderson, and Caroline Morton all “Ran away

from Plantation.”28

Laborers willing to leave their contracts and forfeit their share of the

crop doubtless felt that they had better prospects elsewhere and sometimes fled debts they

considered unfair. Because of the complex credit relations between cotton factors,

laborers, planters, and lessees, laborer indebtedness could be deployed to cause default on

a loan. A. Lartigue apparently attempted to convince Carlos Wilcox’s laborers to desert

their contracts because “they owe me more than they can pay, no use for them to work

any more [sic], they will get nothing.” Wilcox worried, that “he [Lartigue] is trying his

best to get them to bolt off and quit so that he can, as he imagines forfeit the cotton for

his benefit and swindle me and the negroes too, out of their property.”29

Debt-ridden planters were desperate to maintain a subservient labor force and

occasionally responded to the flight of their laborers as if they were still enslaved.

Douglass Hamilton’s complaints to the Bureau agents, Major G.M. Ebert and Captain

A.H. Nickerson, that Abner Peterson and some of his other laborers have fled their

contracts cite freedom itself as the culprit for their behavior. In his initial communication,

28

Charles H. Gibbons, Contract with laborers on Gratitude Plantation, January 28, 1867; Harriet Matthews,

Contract with laborers on Greenwood Plantation for the Month of April, 1866, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 39,

Target 1, Freedmen’s Labor Contracts, Payrolls, West Feliciana. 29

C. Wilcox to R.M. Leake, Oct. 2, 1866, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 65, Target 1, Unregistered Letters

Received, Dec. 1865-Dec. 1868. According to Louisiana law prior to 1868, in the case of a lien on a crop,

the claims of laborers were settled last. Further uncertainty for laborer wages resulted from the contracting

of planter assets (slaves were longer property), the sale of debts to third parties, and the price yielded for

plantation products determined by the timing of their sale. Richard Holcombe Kilbourne, Debt, Investment,

Slaves: Credit Relations in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, 1825-1885 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of

Alabama Press, 1995), pp. 7-12, 29-33. See also Ira Berlin et al., The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The

Lower South (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 369.

17

Hamilton reported that Abner Peterson “left the place and his work” and requested that

“he be made to return to his work and place, and held accountable by fine and otherwise

for loss of time.” Two months later however, after Peterson had been assaulted by Mr.

Chambers, the plantation manager, Hamilton reminded Maj. Ebert that Peterson was

“raised a slave” who had “his freedom suddenly thrust upon him.” Hamilton argued that

emancipation “has increased his natural tendency to impertinence,” suggesting that the

assault was part of the transition from slavery to freedom. 30

Hamilton’s initial argument

that Peterson did not understand the demands of free labor was reconfigured in his second

communication as an indictment of freedom itself.

Hamilton’s second letter to Ebert bears a striking similarity to fugitive slave

advertisements. After the lengthy passage justifying the assault on Peterson, Hamilton

complained that Cornelia Young “absconded” to work for higher wages on Greenwood

Plantation. Hamilton’s demand “that you have her returned to me” represents a claim on

her labor as well as her person that is clearly reminiscent of slavery. Hamilton then

reported that “one of my freedmen, hired for the year, absconded.” His description of

William Brown, “a copper colored, or griffe negro, about 26 years old, about 5 ft. 6, or 7

inches high, stout and well made, but very short legged, or duck legged, and weighs

about 155 lbs.” reads like an excerpt from an 1850s newspaper and seems to claim

Brown’s body as missing property.31

Planters became increasingly aware that their

laborers could seek higher wages elsewhere and increasingly concerned that they would

30

Douglas M. Hamilton to A.H. Nickerson, March 13, 1866; Douglas M. Hamilton to G.M. Elbert, May 10,

1866, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 65, Target 1, Unregistered Letters Received, Dec. 1865-Dec. 1868. See also

G.M. Ebert to Douglas M. Hamilton, Hazelwood Plantation, May 9, 1866, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64,

Target 8, Letters Sent, January 1866-May 1867. 31

Douglas M. Hamilton to G.M. Elbert, May 10, 1866, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 65, Target 1, Unregistered

Letters Received, Dec. 1865-Dec. 1868. See also Case 34, April 15, 1866, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64,

Target 11, Letters Sent, Jan. 1866-Mar. 1867, Feb-Mar 1868.

18

do so. Joseph Murry’s search for higher wages led Emil Boedicker to complain to the

Bureau agent that J.P. Bowman had taken one of his laborers. When Lewis Wilson left

his contract in search of higher wages, A. Finch, the local Bureau agent, wrote his

superior to determine if any action might be taken against Wilson.32

Laborers’ readiness

to leave their contracts for better opportunities elsewhere took planters and Bureau

officials by surprise. It seems that freedmen’s understanding of free labor outpaced that

of their contemporaries.

The freedmen from West Feliciana were more than laborers and their decisions to

leave often reflect personal concerns. Many had been born in other areas and sold into

Louisiana before the war. Emancipation gave these people not only economic freedom

but the social freedom to maintain relationships and visit their families. Arthur Hill, for

instance, was “brought here from Virginia some 25 years ago” and wished to return to

visit his parents before they died. Not being able to afford the trip, he appealed to the

Freedmen’s Bureau for transportation.33

Sarah Collins left her employer, Washington

Hamilton, to visit relatives and when she returned he “shot at her for visiting her

relations.”34

Keziah Arma complained that her children were taken by Eliza Hamilton,

Washington Hamilton’s mother, and that she was not allowed to visit “under pain of

32

E.T. Lewis to Mr. J.P. Bowman, March 11, 1867; E.T. Lewis to Mr. Emil Boedicker, March 11, 1867,

LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 8, Letters Sent, January, 1866-May, 1867. A. Finch to L.O. Parker, July

23rd, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 9, Letters Sent, May-December 1867. The issue had become

so common by early 1867 that E.T. Lewis complained to headquarters that “something very sever ought to

be done with Freedmen who break their contracts without just grounds.” E.T. Lewis to Capt. Wm. H.

Sterling, January 22, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 8, Letters Sent, January, 1866-May, 1867.

Although planters complained when their laborers broke contract, as we will see in the next chapter, they

had no qualms about breaking contract themselves when they found it beneficial. 33

H. Phillips, Acklin Plantations to the Chief Bureau of Freedmen, State of Louisiana, Nov. 7, 1867,

LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 65, Target 1, Unregistered Letters Received, Dec. 1865-Dec. 1868. 34

Case 10, May 21, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 66, Target 7, Register of Complaints, May 1867-August

1868.

19

being shot if she came on the Plantation.”35

Meanwhile, Martha Grayson remembered

being abandoned by her mother in favor of a new relationship with a “Yankee.”36

Arma

and Grayson’s experiences demonstrate not only the potential to visit family and friends

separated by slavery and war but also show that the act of maintaining these relationships

often came at the expense of others.

The case of two unnamed children abandoned by their mother reveals the

hardships some families underwent as they searched for loved ones and made new lives

for themselves. S.O. Powell reported to Captain Nickerson, the local Bureau agent, that

“a Colored Woman abandoned two Children aged three (3) to Six (6) years respectively

and went to N. Orleans.” None of their names are provided in the report but Powell

suspected that the mother “may be found at the residence of her father Reuben

Parkinson,” a carpenter living in New Orleans. There is little clue to the mother’s

motives. She may have intended to visit her father in New Orleans and return for her

children or she may have intentionally abandoned her children for better opportunities in

the city. The mother was never found and the “Two (2) Colored children” were “sent to

New Orleans to be placed in the Colored Orphan Assylum [sic].”37

Although their names

were not recorded, Francis Doby’s memories from the Colored Orphan Asylum shed

some light on their likely experiences. Doby remembered her homesick brother “was just

a-grevin' for de green fields, de praries—and die, sudden death” in the orphanage. Her

sister was “bright complected-- what you call ‘high yellow’—and a white lady done took

35

Case 1, January 22, 1866, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 11, Letters Sent, Jan. 1866-Mach 1867. 36

“Narrative of Martha Grayson,” found in Clayton, Mother Wit, p. 90. 37

Capt. A.H. Nickerson to Capt. A.F. Hayden, January 29, 1866; Capt. A.H. Nickerson to Capt. A.F.

Hayden, February 12, 1866, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 8, Letters Sent, January 1866-May 1867.

20

her away,” but Doby “stayed [a] long time” before she was adopted.38

For many children

like Doby and the two unnamed grandchildren of Reuben Parkinson, the opportunities of

freedom brought many of the uncertainties of slavery with them as families chose where

and how to reconnect following the displacement of slavery and war.

White residents of West Feliciana also found many reasons for flight. Although

they were largely in control of the justice system and thus had more opportunity to exert

control over their lives, many white West Felicianans were unwilling to accept the

consequences of emancipation. Just as their enslaved laborers fled to the safety of Union

lines and freedom, white planters fled the advancing Union forces and the promise of

freedom that accompanied them. Catherine Cornelius remembered that her owner, Dr.

William Lyle, brought his slaves to his mother-in-law’s plantation in West Feliciana after

Baton Rouge was captured by Union forces in April 1862. She recalled that “dey took us

to Bayou Sara to hide us in tents on de plantation dere, but de Yankees found us.” She

recounted having seen Major General Benjamin Butler on his way to the siege at

Vicksburg when Union forces stopped at the plantation. The connection between Union

soldiers, slaves and wealth was not lost on Cornelius, who continued that “de Yankees

took all dere money to Port Hudson in some kind of [a] wagon.”39

Having his property

38

“Narrative of Francis Doby,” found in Clayton, Mother Wit, p. 58. 39

“Narrative of Catherine Cornelius,” found in Clayton, Mother Wit, pp. 46-47. Cornelius refers to “Dr.

Lyles” but probably meant Dr. William J. Lyle, owner of Smithfield Plantation where Cornelius was born.

Reference to Lyle can be found here: http://www.lsumoa.org/content.php?display=collection_dec_silver.

Cornelius could not have seen General Benjamin Butler on his way to the siege of Vicksburg since he was

relieved of his command by General Nathaniel Banks before the siege was officially underway. Although

Banks had originally intended to crush Confederate forces at Port Hudson and join Grant at Vicksburg, he

became bogged down in a siege of his own which only ended after word of the surrender of Vicksburg

reached Port Hudson on July 9, 1863. It is possible, however, that she saw Butler moving around his base at

Baton Rouge early on in August 1862, at the beginning stages of the Vicksburg campaign, during which a

gunboat attacked Bayou Sara where Cornelius was living. She also might have witnessed Banks in the

aftermath of his victory at Port Hudson. See Hewitt, pp. 12-14, 178-179.

21

confiscated and his slaves freed was exactly what Lyle hoped to avoid by fleeing to West

Feliciana with his slaves.

Ann and John Lobdell, the daughter and son-in-law of Lewis Stirling, a prominent

West Feliciana planter, fled to Texas with their slaves to avoid advancing Union forces.

Their letters home provide interesting insight into the mindset of slave owners facing the

prospect of emancipation. John Lobdell observed hopefully that “our negroes are so

anxious to get back to Louisiana I think they will sign the contract without any

difficulty.” He planned to offer them a contract for food in exchange for their labor

bearing striking resemblance to the circumstances of slavery.40

His wife, Ann, was much

more concerned with the changing status of her former slaves. She declared her sympathy

for emancipated slaves, stating “poor things I am sorry for them. their [sic] friends have

been most cruel to throw them on the world so unprepared to support themselves. if [sic]

emancipation had been gradual so that both parties could have come easily into it.”

Clearly Ann Lobdell had trouble adjusting to a world of free black laborers; she had, after

all, fled hundreds of miles to Texas with her slaves to keep them from freedom. While

she casually declared that “I would have preferred [sic] it [gradual emancipation] myself

to slavery,” her sale of several “poor creatures” a few days prior to writing gave a hollow

tone to her self-portrait as a compassionate matron.41

A number of the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives depict Texas as a haven for white

supremacist Confederate holdouts, many of whom migrated there during the war to keep

40

Nephew John [Lobdell] to Unc [Dr. Ruffin Stirling], Near Canton, July 9, 1865, Stirling (Lewis) and

family Papers, Correspondence, 1838-1864, Mss. 1866, B:76 Box 2, Folder 19, Lower Mississippi Valley

Collection, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, cited hereafter as

LMVC. 41

A.M. Lobdell to "My dear Mother" [Sarah Stirling], Near Canton, July 9, 1865, Stirling (Lewis) and

family Papers, Correspondence, 1838-1864, Mss. 1866, B:76 Box 2, Folder 19, LMVC.

22

their human property. Lyttleton Dandridge, born in East Carroll Parish in northeast

Louisiana, remembered being taken to Texas to raise tobacco in 1863. Moreover, his

father “had the care of about fifty youngsters makin’ bullets” in Tyler, Texas to support

the Confederate war effort.42

Joseph Hawkins related his parents’ experiences of

evacuation, which were probably typical of many slaves forced to evacuate from West

Feliciana, after the Battle of “Fort Hudson.” Hawkins recalled that “we moved around so

much in dem times. When the Yanks come down from do North, we went to Texas wid

our masters.”43

Elizabeth Ross Hite remembered the return of Confederate holdouts in

Texas as a time of increased violence towards former slaves. She reported that “a lot of

dem came from Texas and other hiding places after de Yankees left. Dey was scared stiff

of de Yankees.”44

Many slaveholders and poor whites were “scared stiff” of the

emancipation that accompanied Union forces, which they fled to Texas to avoid. After

the white supremacist dream of a slave-friendly Texas died, Confederate holdouts had no

reason to stay, returning to Louisiana and other parts of the South and employing

violence as another means of negotiating the meaning of freedom.

Following the realization of emancipation in Texas, many planters still unwilling

to give up their dreams of a country free for slavery looked to Central and South America

as areas where their laborers could be more easily controlled. A circular letter from

42

“Narrative of Lyttleton Dandridge,” Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project,

1936-1938, Arkansas Narratives, Volume II, Part 2, p. 88. All WPA Narratives are available online at

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html, with the exception of the Louisiana narratives, which

were recorded but are only available in Clayton, Mother Wit. Fred Brown also remembered that his master

ordered the overseer to take his slaves to Texas. “Narrative of Fred Brown,” Born in Slavery: Slave

Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938, Texas Narratives, Volume XVI, Part 1, Ex-slave

stories (Texas). pp. 156-159. 43

“Narrative of Joseph Hawkins,” found in Clayton, Mother Wit, p. 96. 44

“Narrative of Elizabeth Ross Hite,” found in Clayton, Mother Wit, p. 110. She continued that when

freedom came, “our master ran away to France.” Apparently an emancipated Louisiana was unfathomable

to her former owner.

23

William Seward to agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau warned “that plans are on foot to

lead freedmen to move abroad and in particular to Peru, upon a promise of higher wages

than they receive at home.” Seward was putting it mildly when he wrote that “there is

reason to believe that these promises will not be fulfilled.”45

Catherine Hereford, a

daughter of Lewis Stirling, wrote of a similar plot in West Feliciana to bring as many

laborers to Honduras as possible. It seems that “the excitement [of] the negroes here,

about the ballot box” was incompatible with planter notions of racial hierarchy and their

desire for dependent laborers. Hereford felt reassurance in “our having quite an extensive

colony in Honduras if all go that now speak of it.”46

Although nothing came of the plot to

relocate to Honduras, planters were clearly willing to consider relocating, even to foreign

countries, rather than accept the consequences of emancipation.

Often planter flight was much more local than international and offered a way for

planters to escape the plantation void of slavery. Henrietta Butler remembered the impact

emancipation had on her mistress, Emily Haidee. Butler recalled that “when she [Haidee]

found out we was goin' to be free, she raised all kind of hell. De Boss could do nothin' at

all with her. She had two big saddle horses; one name Canaan, the other name Bill. She

got on old Bill and come to New Orleans [a] few days befo' us was set free.” Apparently

Haidee, who was “mean as hell,” could not bear the reality that her human property

would be made free and sought refuge and distraction from her former life in the city.47

C.J. Barrow had similar experiences after returning home from service in the Confederate

45

William H. Seward to O.O. Howard, Oct. 3, 1866, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 65, Target 1, Unregistered

Letters Received, Dec. 1865-Dec. 1868. 46

C.M.H. [Catherine Hereford] to My Dear Mother [Sarah Stirling], West Baton Rouge, May 6th, 1868,

Stirling (Lewis and family) Papers, Mss. 1866, B:76, Correspondence, 1866-1938, Box 3, Folder 21,

LMVC. 47

“Narrative of Henrietta Butler,” found in Clayton, Mother Wit, p. 38.

24

Army, where he found his family plantation “in a dilapidated condition.” No longer able

to mortgage or sell his former slaves, Barrow had “no capital to recommence planting”

and decided “to get a situation in our large and commercial metropolis.” Unable to find a

job in New Orleans, Barrow “went to work with my own hands, (something I had never

done before).” After his crops failed, Barrow became “thoroughly disgusted with

Louisiana as a state to make a living in,” and left for new opportunities Nashville.48

Deprived of their enslaved labor, many planters were unable to maintain their former

lifestyles and chose to leave their plantations rather than accept their changing status.

White West Felicianans also found reason to flee their homes from the sporadic

violence that occasionally erupted in the parish. Although white residents controlled the

justice system in the parish, acts of violence by white individuals occasionally attracted

enough negative attention to make prosecution a serious concern. Such was the case for

William Reynolds, who shot and killed Richard Leake, the Bureau agent for the parish,

during a labor dispute. After shooting Leake, Reynolds, the Irish blacksmith and carriage

maker, “immediately left for parts unknown and has not been heard from.” E.T. Lewis, a

subsequent Bureau agent for West Feliciana, reported that “he intends to come back and

stand his trial, he is expected in this place in a few days… I believe he will be here, and

put himself upon trial, and if he does he will doubtless be acquited [sic].” Reynolds did

not return to stand trial, however, and disappeared from the record after murdering Leake.

48

C.J. Barrow to Aunt Anna [Barrow], July 21, 1866; C.J. Barrow to Aunt Anna [Barrow], September 1,

1867, W.M. Barrow family papers, Mss 574, 1847-1874, West Baton Rouge and West Feliciana Parishes,

in Records of the Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations from the Revolution through the Civil War, Series I,

Part 4, Reel 6 of 38, University Publications, Microfilm 1441.

25

For Reynolds, the risk of conviction and the notoriety of the crime doubtless made

returning to stand trial unappealing even in a sympathetic local court.49

Violence and threats of violence also gave many black West Felicianans reason to

flee their friends and family in search of greater safety. Alexander Brown, who had

served in the 4th

U.S. Colored Cavalry, was assaulted and shot in the hand by Alexander

Wible. Captain Nickerson, who witnessed the assault, recalled that “I saw said Wible

beating said Brown about the head with a stick or Club.” Wible and Brown were both

arrested, but after Wible bought a bottle of whiskey for the marshal, Captain Storns, both

were released on bond. It is unclear exactly when Brown left West Feliciana based on the

record, but by February 1867, Brown had left the parish and his bounty claim for

enlisting in the cavalry. When E.T. Lewis tried to contact Brown to convince him to give

testimony against Alex Massie, a previous Bureau agent who had tried to defraud Brown,

he was unable to locate him. According to Brown’s employer, W.A. Smith of Bayou

Goula, he had broken his contract and disappeared.50

Brown apparently had no intention

of returning to the area where he was so badly beaten and his assailant released for the

price of a bottle of whiskey. Amos Lincoln remembered legal troubles of his own after

49

E.T. Lewis to Capt. Wm. H. Stirling, March 12, 1867; Lt. Alex M. Massie to Capt. A.F. Hayden,

November 25, 1866, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 8, Letters Sent, January 1866-May 1867. James V.

White fled the parish after being arrested for a spree of violence against freedmen and several rumored

murders as a guerilla during the war. He was arrested in mid-April and made bail, after which a detachment

of troops was sent to arrest him. Although White had gone into hiding, he was unpopular enough that he

was eventually uncovered and arrested by Union forces. Wm. H. Sterling to E.T. Lewis, June 4, 1867; Geo

Baldey, Secry Civil Affairs to Mr. E.T. Lewis, June 13, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 65, Target 1,

Unregistered Letters Received, Dec. 1865-Dec. 1868. A. Finch to George Baldy, A.D.C and Secty of Civil

Affairs, July 16, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 9, Letters Sent, May-December, 1867. 50

Capt. A.H. Nickerson to Capt. A.F. Hayden, Asst. Adjt. Genl., New Orleans, Jan. 24, 1866; E.T. Lewis to

Mr. W.A. Smith, March 11, 1867; E.T. Lewis to Capt. Wm. H. Stirling, March 25, 1867, Roll 64, Target 8,

Letters Sent, January 1866-May 1867. Military records for Alexander Brown accessed on Ancestry.com,

National Archives and Records Administration (NARA); Washington, D.C.; Compiled Military Service

Records of Volunteer Union Soldiers who Served with the United States Colored Troops: 1st through 5th

United States Colored Cavalry, 5th Massachusetts Cavalry (Colored), 6th United States Colored

Cavalry; Microfilm Serial: M1817; Microfilm Roll: 51.

26

emancipation that forced him to leave his home for Texas. According to Lincoln, a white

man who wanted his land claimed that he stole a barrel and tried to bring him to court.

Lincoln recalled that “I has to stay 'way from Mauriceville for three year 'cause that man

say I thiefed he barrel.”51

For former slaves, a legal system controlled by their white

neighbors and former masters was often more than they could manage as they sought

ways to realize their newly won freedom.

Black and white residents of West Feliciana struggled to reconcile their divergent

expectations for freedom. While black former slaves looked for opportunities to exercise

their new political and legal rights, their white neighbors often sought to undermine these

rights and maintain elements of hierarchy reminiscent of slavery. The resulting friction

often left both black and white residents of West Feliciana uncomfortable with their

changing status and drew many residents, who felt their livelihoods were at stake, into

conflict with one another. The expectations that led to these conflicts, deeply rooted in

the slave system, led many residents of the parish to look for more agreeable versions of

freedom elsewhere. Black laborers often left in search of better wages or greater freedom,

while white residents and planters often left hoping to find versions of freedom involving

minimal or no wages and fewer rights for freedmen. Although they left for vastly

different reasons, black and white West Felicianans used flight as a mechanism for

coping with the disappointment they found in freedom.

51

“Narrative of Amos Lincoln,” Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project,

1936-1938, Texas Narratives, Volume XVI, Part 3, Ex-slave stories (Texas). pp. 18-19.

27

Alliance

West Felicianans negotiating the process of emancipation often looked to one

another for assistance and encouragement. The process of finding allies and forging

alliances, at times unlikely alliances, was crucial for white planters and black laborers as

they defined the limits of freedom. These alliances were occasionally subversive and

even dangerous as many planters seemed willing to go to any length to keep their

laborers enslaved. Even the contract system, the guarantor of free labor, was sometimes

viewed as a pernicious alliance between planters and the Freedmen’s Bureau to keep

laborers financially and geographically immobile. Given that the system of plantation

agriculture was central to life in West Feliciana in the 1860s, alliances were embedded in

the planter-laborer relationship and often formed along racial or ideological lines. When

viewed within the context of interpreting emancipation, however, these instances of

collective action involving persons with similar interests take on new light as a means of

evaluating and establishing the meanings of freedom. As such, these alliances should be

viewed as vehicles of negotiation for both black and white residents of West Feliciana

struggling to define freedom.

Black political activity was an essential area of concern for planters who

considered their political primacy as both an example of their racial superiority and an

instrument of economic control. Black laborers exercising their political rights attracted

the attention of poor white farmers and planter elites concerned with their changing status

in relation to their former slaves. James Anderson experienced firsthand the extent to

which planters would go to undermine black political activities, reporting his

maltreatment in a letter to Major General Phillip Sheridan. Anderson complained that he

28

had “received a circular from Headquarters Republican P. of La, I not knowing how to

read it, I brought the same to my employer Miss Reaves for her to read.” For Reaves, the

mere possession of a pamphlet threatened to “demoralize her laborers” and was grounds

for dismissal. Anderson reported the matter to the Bureau agent, E.T. Lewis, who

“refused to interfere and would not give me a reason for so doing.”52

It seemed that the

Bureau and planter interests aligned in imagining political participation as a white

prerogative.53

Anderson’s complaint reveals the difficulty of political organization for many

black laborers who risked losing their livelihood to exercise their rights. Perhaps it was

these dangers of political participation that inspired Lyttleton Dandridge to remark that “I

used to vote Republican when I was interested in politics but I have no interest in it

52

James Anderson, Black Water, near Bayou Sara to Mjor Gen Sheridan, New Orleans, La, June 9, 1867;

L.O. Parker to E.T. Lewis, Through Bvt Lt. Col. G.F. Schayer, June 13, 1867; E.T. Lewis to A. Finch, June

25, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 65, Target 1, Unregistered Letters Received, Dec. 1865-Dec. 1868. By

June 25, Lewis had resigned his post, reporting that “I got completely tired of it.” Given the timing of his

note, it’s possible that his resignation may have been a response to L.O. Parker’s directive to look into

Anderson’s case. John Rodrigue suggests that the gang labor regime on sugar plantations enhanced black

political power. His passage on “demoralized laborers” illustrates planter fears that laborers could focus on

something other than labor. John Rodrigue, “Labor Militancy and Black Grassroots Political Mobilization

in the Louisiana Sugar Region” in The Journal of Southern History 67(Feb, 2001): 117, 133. Instances of

black alliances are scarce in the historical record compared to those of their white and planter peers. This is

partly due to the biases of the record itself; black alliances were only recorded if they were uncovered and

deemed threatening by their white neighbors or if they lobbied as a group for assistance or redress. Thus,

records of black political alliances are as much a record of planter fears and desires as of black aspirations

and should be treated with care. For Edward Blum, whiteness was so ingrained in American notions of

political sovereignty that many Northerners whether rebellious Southerners could really be considered

white, conceiving of them as an inferior race “biologically and morally inferior to whites.” Edward Blum,

Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898 (Baton Rouge, La:

Louisiana University Press, 2005), pp. 6-9, 28-29 (quote). David Roediger similarly found that free labor

ideology and citizenship were based on the presumed racial superiority of whiteness when contrasted with

blackness. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class

(New York: Verso Press, 1991), pp. 48-50, 56-57, 174-179. 53

A. Finch considered black political activism a form of laziness, providing an excuse to avoid work,

writing that black laborers were “gone at times two and three days at a time with damage to thier selves and

there working in the crop with them, they say they are on political bisness I think in many casess this is

only thier absance as they have contracted to work all the time Satterdays excepted when the safty of thier

crops will prmit.” A. Finch to Lt. W.H. Webster, Sept. 21, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 9,

Letters Sent, May-December, 1867.

29

now.”54

Apparently Anderson had at least some political connections that allowed him to

appeal to Major General Sheridan since he could not read on his own and thus probably

required a sympathetic scribe to pen the letter on his behalf. Although it is unclear exactly

how widespread black political activism in West Feliciana was following emancipation,

the responses of several planters and their plots to subvert black political activity provide

interesting insight into the scope of black political alliances. Isaac Maynard, for example,

blamed the crop failures of 1867 on “black political meetings,” the result of “designing

demaugouges [sic]” who convinced laborers “to leave… from the fields.” Under the right

circumstances, he felt sure that he could “compel them to work better and more faithfully,

than they have ever done, provided they are not tampered with again.” Although

Maynard’s explanation for the crop failures of 1867 conveniently neglected the role of

the cotton worm, he certainly felt that black political activity was pervasive enough to

cause “great loss, as they [freedmen] now are fully aware.”55

One of Maynard’s earlier epistles provides significant insight into the mindset of

planters which ties their apprehension of black enfranchisement to their dissatisfaction

with free labor. Maynard wrote that:

“The right to vote has completely destroyed the value of the Negro as a Laborer

especaly under Radical teachings. Two thirds of them ignore the Whte race

throughout the South. Under such teachings agreculture is destroyed. Again the

present sistem of sharing the crops with Laborers is wrong and can not suceed.

54

“Narrative of Lyttleton Dandridge,” Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project,

1936-1938, Arkansas Narratives, Volume II, Part 2, p. 89. 55

Isaac N. Maynard, Beech Grove Plantation to Capt. Finch, Dec. 21, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 65,

Target 1, Unregistered Letters Received, Dec. 1865-Dec. 1868. A. Finch was much more clear about the

causes of the crop failure, noting that the “cotton worm has done thier [sic] work of destruction throughout

the parish.” Most of Finch’s letters are riddled with errors in spelling and grammar, one of the most

common of which is his spelling of their as “thier.” As much as possible, I have tried to maintain his

spellings and grammar. A. Finch to Lt. W.H. Webster, Sept. 21, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 9,

Letters Sent, May-December, 1867.

30

The Negro has no Idea of the Value of time… great social crimes may be the

result of the present state of things.”56

For Maynard, black enfranchisement represented a real danger that, along with wages for

laborers, ought to be avoided. Maynard’s rhetoric fits well with the euphemistic

complaints of many planters of their “labor problems.” After describing his dismal crop,

J.W. Ball wondered “Where are we drifting and what is to become of us, politically and

agriculturally?”57

The implications of such language were clear; planters felt that their

economic success was dependent on the failure of black enfranchisement. It seems that

the only solution for Ball and Maynard was a return to the political and economic

constraints of slavery.

One way that planters tried to respond to freedom and the expanded rights that

their black laborers exercised was to incorporate limits on freedom of movement and

expression into their contracts with freedmen. Planters communicated the terms of these

contracts to one another and often served as witnesses to the signing of their neighbors’

contracts. The contract between J.J. Wade and the laborers on Ellerslie Plantation

exemplifies planter attempts to limit the freedom of their laborers within the legal

framework of the contract. Wade’s contract stipulated that “boistrous [sic] assemblies

shall not be allowed on the plantation and all religious and festive meetings shall be

conducted with propriety and decency.” Wade determined whether behavior was too

“boistrous” or “festive” and could fire laborers without compensation if he felt the

56

J.N. Maynard to J.M. Lee, sent to Genl Mower, Nov 29, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 9,

Letters Sent, May-December, 1867. 57

[J.W.] Ball to James P. Bowman, July 5, 1867 Turnbull (Daniel) Family Papers: Mss. 4973 (1803-1913),

Box 1, Folder 5, LMVC.

31

contract had been violated.58

Nero Mack and Abner Peterson were both fired for violating

clauses similar to this one, Mack for being a “troublesom [sic] negro” and for

“impudence and lawless acts of insubordination” and Peterson for “violation of the rules

of the place and gross impertinence.”59

That Wade’s contract was witnessed by Bennet J.

Barrow, a fellow planter, in an environment where planters regularly used similar

coercive stipulations to undermine the freedom of their laborers, amplified the power of

the clause.60

These coercive clauses left planters with considerable power over their

laborers, giving them leeway to fire laborers in instances of crop shortages or simply to

avoid paying them after benefiting from their labor.

Black laborers, faced with a powerful network of planter-associates, responded by

forming networks of their own. Laborers formed clubs and attended meetings, often on

58

Contract between J.J. Wade and laborers for 1867 on Ellerslie Plantation, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 51,

Target 1, West Feliciana and Winn Miscellaneous Agreements, 1865-1868. 59

E.T. Lewis to Doct. J.W. Ball, May 21, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 9, Letters Sent, May-

December, 1867; Bowman Turner, Hades Plantation to E.T. Lewis, May 23, 1867; Douglas M. Hamilton to

A.H. Nickerson, March 13, 1866, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 65, Target 1, Unregistered Letters Received, Dec.

1865-Dec. 1868. Douglas Hamilton, in his lengthy diatribe on Abner Peterson paused to reflect that “Freed

negroes” are too independent and that “planters can never succeed by free labor unless contracts are

religiously observed.” Douglas M. Hamilton to , G.M. Elbert, May 10, 1866, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 65,

Target 1, Unregistered Letters Received, Dec. 1865-Dec. 1868. Plantation labor time books also reveal the

ways in which planters used their contracts to penalize their laborers of wages and even terminate their

employment. The Rosedown Plantation Diary of James P. Bowman reveals frequent fines for “disorderly

conduct,” “shooting,” “absenting himself,” “not working on Saturdays,” “lost time” during 1866.

Rosedown Plantation Diary, pp. 104-106, Turnbull-Bowman-Lyons family papers, Mss. 4026, Reel 3,

Records of the Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations, Series I, Part 4, Reel 36. Lewis Stirling’s “Labor Time

Book” for Wakefield Plantation revealed frequent fines for “caught riding a mule,” “refused to work,”

“very impertinent,” etc. The entry for August 25, 1865 reveals that these fines could lead to dismissal as 20

of the 77 laborers Stirling employed were fired. “Labor Time Book,” July-August, 1865, Stirling (Lewis)

and family Papers, Labor Time Books, 1865-1884, Account Book, 1881-1901, Mss. 1866, B:81 box 17,

Volume 1, LMVC. 60

J.W. Woodruff to Mr. J.P. Bowman; Report from Bayou Grasse Tete, Iberville, La; July 12, 1867,

reveals the extent to which planters tried to stay informed on what their peers were doing. Woodruff

mentions that “A few good Showers would do the cane good all of the cane an [sic] the Bayou is small

some of the Planters on the Bayou are dun [sic] laying off and Some of them are not,” suggesting that

planters in other areas felt comfortable firing workers to avoid paying them when the crop was small.

Turnbull (Daniel) Family Papers: Mss. 4973 (1803-1913) Range C:96, Box 1, Folder 4, LMVC. Catherine

Hereford’s letter reveals a similar network of communication when she mentions that a large number of

planters considered relocating to Honduras. C.M.H. [Catherine Hereford] to My Dear Mother [Sarah

Stirling], West Baton Rouge, May 6th, 1868, Stirling (Lewis and family) Papers, Mss. 1866, B:76,

Correspondence, 1866-1938, Box 3, Folder 21, LMVC.

32

other plantations, creating contacts from neighboring areas with similar circumstances.

Bat Henryham intended to meet up with several acquaintances to attend one such meeting

in “Mr. Wade’s field” when he was assaulted by William and Charles Barrow along with

several others. After the assailants learned that the party was attending a meeting, they

“whipped the Girls, Stripping them and using a leather strap to inflict the violence. they

then left the woman go, keeping me, Charles beating me with a sword and William using

his pistol and kicking me with his foot and threatening and saying he was going to kill

me.”61

Armed with information from other plantations about other employers, freedmen

enhanced their collective bargaining power and exercised their newly won freedoms of

speech and movement. Charles and William Barrow, sons of the wealthy planter William

H. Barrow, doubtless felt it was in their interest to ensure that their former slaves did not

exercise these newly won rights.

Solidarity was essential to the organization of these black political clubs and

meetings. Laborers could use their contacts on other plantations to gain information about

employers and bargain for better wages, but only if it at least appeared that they were

acting together. Politically and socially engaged freedmen, faced with the debilitating

power of planters armed with constraining contracts, apparently coerced reluctant fellow

laborers to join clubs and attend meetings. This seemed to be the case for members of the

“Washington club on beecher [sic] plantation” where A. Finch visited to “due [sic] away

with the impression that freedmen would be fined and imprisoned for not attending [the]

61

Bat Henryham v. William Barrow and Charles Barrow and Others, Testimony of Bat Henryham, Port

Hudson, La, September 7, 1865, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 66, Target 6, Court Records and Complaints,

September 1865-November 1868. Barrow was fined one hundred dollars and eventually released on bond.

Freedom of movement was also impeded by bribing steamboat captains not to transport freedmen as in the

case of Rose Charles. Capt. A.H. Nickerson to Brvt. Col. M.A. Reno, Pro Mar Genl. Bureau, February 17,

1866, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 8, Letters Sent, January 1866-May 1867.

33

metting [sic].”62

The plantation laborers leading and organizing the meeting of the

Washington club probably wanted to give the impression of solidarity to demonstrate

their bargaining power to their employer. This was also possibly the case in Laurel Hill, a

small town in West Feliciana Parish midway between the two cotton hubs of Bayou Sara,

Louisiana and Woodville, Mississippi. Local white residents there complained that black

participants arrested “all negroes who refused to attend.”63

Although perhaps exaggerated

by local white residents trying to subvert black political activity, it seems that the

participants of the Laurel Hill meeting were willing to force the participation of their

peers when they thought it necessary.

Perhaps the most sensationalized aspect to the Laurel Hill political meeting was

its use of “fire arms [sic]” and “pickets.” The original allegation by white residents of

Laurel Hill made no mention of politics, but claimed that the group was militia assembled

for the purpose of “drilling” that represented a “great danger” to the white population.

When reporting the complaints of local whites, Finch was quick to qualify the claims,

stating that “there has been no disturbance or collision and whether the alarm be well

founded or not I cannot presume to say.”64

Upon visiting the Laurel Hill meeting, Finch

discovered that the freedmen “assembled at Larrell [sic] Hill for the purpas [sic] of

62

A. Finch, August 8, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 6, Registers of Letters Sent, May 1867-

March 1868. There is no record of a “Beecher Plantation” in West Feliciana. Finch may have been referring

to Beech Grove plantation owned by Isaac Maynard. If it was Maynard’s plantation, it’s likely that his

laborers felt the need to organize a club since he expressed several times that free labor was ineffective and

proposed significant constraints for laborers. 63

A. Finch to L.O. Parker, July 27, 1867; A. Finch to Brvt Maj Gen B.A. Mower, August 10, 1867,

LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 9, Letters Sent, May-December 1867. Finch corroborated local accounts

that members of the Laurel Hill political meeting were arresting freedmen not in attendance and bringing

them to the meeting. 64

A. Finch to L.O. Parker, July 27, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 9, Letters Sent, May-December

1867.

34

organising [sic] a political club.”65

Although he managed to convince the participants in

this black political club to discontinue their practice of meeting armed, it is of particular

interest that they felt compelled to quite literally defend their political activities from

attack. Clearly the experiences of Bat Henryham and countless other victims of white

political violence, whose cases probably went unreported, weighed heavily on black

political alliances. The threat of planter-conspirators who longed for a return to slavery

was never far from the minds of these former slaves who fought to exercise their rights.

Black alliances were not limited to politics and often took the form of collective

bargaining on the plantation for higher wages. Laborers on large plantations, used to the

dehumanizing rigors of gang labor, had the distinct advantage of a ready-made

organization that they could deploy against planter coercion. Dr. Wm. Wilcox

complained to Nickerson that “I have a number of Freedmen on my place, who have

contracted to work, and refuse to do so.” Wilcox had apparently neglected to pay them

and after suffering “harsh treatment” his laborers stopped working.66

A similar difficulty

occurred on Star Hill Plantation where Lewis reprimanded workers for “neglecting your

work and refuse to obey the orders he [Harry Lewis] gives you.” E.T. Lewis attributed

the work stoppage to laziness, and lectured the laborers that “the harder you work the

more money you will have at the end of the year” and that “I hope to hear no more

complaints of this character in future and that you will work as you ought.”67

Nonetheless, a complaint filed by two laborers at Star Hill indicates that the work

65

A. Finch to Brvt Maj Gen B.A. Mower, August 10, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 9, Letters

Sent, May-December 1867. 66

W. Wilcox to Capt. Nickerson, May 7, 1866, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 65, Target 1, Unregistered Letters

Received, Dec. 1865-Dec. 1868. G.M. Ebert to Capt. Hayden, Asst Adjt Genl. May 10, 1866, LBRFAL,

M1905, Roll 64, Target 8, Letters Sent, January 1866-May 1867. 67

E.T. Lewis to the Hands on the Star Hill Plantation Employed by Harry Lewis, May 25, 1867, LBRFAL,

M1905, Roll 64, Target 9, Letters Sent, May-December 1867.

35

stoppage probably began over dissatisfaction with abusive treatment and the distribution

of rations. Rosie and Delphine Scott reported that the overseer, Harry Lewis, and their

uncle, Bill Scott, had been “whipping them, abusing them and depriving them of their

Rations.”68

Here we see a double-alliance as black laborers and poor whites gravitated

towards and occasionally united in positions of power, exploiting the scant resources of

the postwar plantation in much the same way as planters and bringing laborers together in

a symmetrical response to these inequalities.

A work stoppage on J.W. Ball’s Hades Plantation in September 1867 illustrates

the growing tension that caused these acts of defiance. Ball ordered several large boilers

to repair a cotton gin on his plantation and demanded that his laborers “haul a barrel of

lime” to be used for the brickwork housing the boilers. The laborers, led by Dan Sears,

“promptly and positively refused” Ball’s order stating that he “had no right to order them

to haul a barrel of lime” because “it was not in the[ir] contract.” Sears or one of the other

laborers probably also mentioned that the task ought to be performed by mules since the

testimony of at least one witness, James Blacher, referred to the mules as being too

“abused and ill treated” to perform the work. Ball considered this refusal to work as so

thoroughly undermining the racial hierarchy of the plantation that he felt there was “no

safety for the persons or property of the whites in this neighborhood except in the prompt

interposition of the military.” For Ball, the refusal of black laborers to obey the orders of

their white former masters could only lead to interracial warfare and insurrection.69

68

Case 15, May 27, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 66 Target 7, Register of Complaints, May 1867-August

1868. E.T. Lewis to Doct. Henry Perkins, May 27, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 9, Letters Sent,

May-December 1867. 69

J.W. Ball to Capt. A. Finch, Sept. 12, 1867; Sworn testimony of James Rudman before Charles B.

Collins, Sept. 12, 1867; Sworn Testimony of James Blacher before Charles B. Collins, Sept. 12, 1867,

36

Three claims from the eyewitness testimony suggest that the conflict between Ball

and his laborers, rather than a spontaneous eruption of “insubordination,” had been

brewing for a considerable time. The first, by James Blacher, one of the freedmen

employed by Ball, reported that fellow laborers Tom Sears and Frank Winders had

anticipated being asked to haul the barrel of lime and had coordinated their response in

advance. The second indication was the suspicion of Ball that the cause of the conflict

was “secret armed clubs which weekly meet in our midst.” The third and final sign of

ongoing dissatisfaction was the observation of Wm. Town, a mason working for Ball on a

temporary basis, that “they [freedmen] believed that he [the Bureau agent] was paid for

coming.”70

Taken together, these statements suggest that dissatisfaction with Ball had

been building among his black laborers who, feeling mistreated by Ball and neglected or

even undermined by Finch, banded together in “secret armed clubs” to defend their rights

and ensure that their contracts were executed fairly. Surely it was no coincidence that this

LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 65, Target 1, Unregistered Letters Received, Dec. 1865-Dec. 1868. Edward

Rugemer suggests that planters felt that black freedom, particularly literacy, would ultimately lead to

interracial warfare. Edward Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the

American Civil War (Baton Rouge, La: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), pp. 9-11, 76-83. Blum

noted a similar ideological trend among Northern pastors who “considered racial segregation the only way

to stave off a war between the races.” Blum, p. 39. 70

J.W. Ball to Capt. A. Finch, Sept. 12, 1867; Sworn Testimony of James Blacher before Charles B.

Collins, Sept. 12, 1867; LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 65, Target 1, Unregistered Letters Received, Dec. 1865-

Dec. 1868. The claim that the Bureau agent was employed by the planters to undermine the laborers was

fairly widespread, and seems to have been started by the planters themselves, probably in an attempt to

curtail freedmen’s complaints to the Bureau. This is suggested by a letter from A. Finch to J.W. Earley in

which he addresses the claim that “you [Earley] also sait [sic] that you could buy me for a few dollars to do

as you wished. I will take this opportunity to inform you that you can not [sic] purchase me to do your duty

and your dirty work at any price.” A. Finch to Mr. J.W. Earley, July 29, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64,

Target 9, Letters Sent, May-December, 1867. Finch uncovered several ways that planters tried to convince

their laborers not to report their claims to the Bureau, one of which was to pretend an alliance with the

Bureau, to suggest an alliance with the laborer against the Bureau, or to claim the ability to do violence

against the Bureau at will. Finch noted that “whites in those places try to prevint [sic] the freedman from

coming to this office with thier [sic] complaints sayint [sic] to them that they the freedman will be charged

for the service done to by the agent them and the employers say they will shoot any damed yankee [sic] that

dare com on thier [sic] place.” A. Finch to Mr. W.H. Webster, Sub Ass Comiss Bureau RF and AL, Sept. 2,

1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 9, Letters Sent, May-December 1867.

37

work-stoppage occurred just four months after Nero Mack was dismissed from the same

plantation without pay, a decision that was endorsed by then Bureau agent E.T. Lewis.71

Ball’s laborers probably considered themselves exploited, subject to dismissal

without a fair hearing from the Bureau based on contracts that privileged the employers’

interests over their own. Within this context, Dan Sears’ defiant remark to Finch “that he

will doe [sic] as he thinks proper right or rong [sic],” far from being insubordinate,

represented an attempt to cope with what he perceived was a planter alliance with the

Freedmen’s Bureau.72

Finch’s solution to these misunderstandings, recorded in a report to

his superiors at the Bureau’s headquarters in New Orleans, suggested that “If the planters

will due [sic] what is just by the freedmen they can make good labor[er]s of them is by

treating them as free men.”73

Had the laborers on Ball’s Hades Plantation had the

opportunity to read Finch’s remarks, it certainly would have been with no small hint of

irony. For these black laborers, E.T. Lewis had seemed all too ready to assume that Mack

was a “troublesom [sic] negro” and the planter-initiated rumors that the Bureau agent

could be purchased for a “few dollars” probably sounded all too likely.74

These laborers

found allies in the only place they felt sure to find them, among one another on the

plantation, and used their numbers and position to expand the meaning of freedom to fit

their expectations.

71

E.T. Lewis to Doct. J.W. Ball, May 21, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 9, Letters Sent, May-

December 1867. Bowman Turner, Hades Plantation to E.T. Lewis, May 23, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll

65, Target 1, Unregistered Letters Received, Dec. 1865-Dec. 1868. 72

A. Finch to L.O. Parker, Sept. 13, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 65, Target 1, Unregistered Letters

Received, Dec. 1865-Dec. 1868. 73

A. Finch to Lt. Jesse M. Lee, Oct. 1, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 9, Letters Sent, May-

December 1867. 74

E.T. Lewis to Doct. J.W. Ball, May 21, 1867, A. Finch to Mr. J.W. Earley, July 29, 1867, LBRFAL,

M1905, Roll 64, Target 9, Letters Sent, May-December, 1867.

38

The threat of work-stoppages was a primary concern for planters who had become

accustomed to the whip-driven regime of slave labor, extracting maximum effort from

their laborers for minimal costs. To ensure their dominance over their laborers, planters

depended on the courts to enforce their coercive contracts and to occasionally provide

them with unfree labor to repair their levee and transportation systems.75

The courts were

unpredictable, however, and often created unlikely allies as litigants tried to maneuver a

system that was deeply affected by issues of ideology and loyalty. The case of Riley v.

Percy exemplifies the difficulties of navigating the legal system largely defined by

loyalty in which witnesses were often bound more by their wartime allegiance than the

facts of the case. The suit began when, in the fall and winter of 1863-1864, D.T. Riley

sold Charles Percy goods smuggled across Union lines from New Orleans. Riley was

suspected of having Unionist sympathies and was forced to leave Bayou Sara before he

could collect on Percy’s account. Although Percy’s mother and sister had made the

purchases on his account, Percy claimed that he did not authorize their purchases, despite

having signed off on the receipt.

Percy probably would have been forced to pay the debt had it not been for the

issues of loyalty which motivated the courts. Riley felt certain that his claim would go

uncollected if tried in a civil court.76

Instead of taking the case to the local courts, Riley

75

A letter from the Freedmen’s Bureau to Lewis Stirling’s laborers reveals the degree to which West

Felicianan laborers were at the mercy of the courts. “Those who are discharged must find work

immediately. Else they will be arrested and put to work on public roads, as vagrancy, will under no

circumstances be allowed in this parish. Any failure to comply with the requirements of this order will

subject the party so offending to arrest and punishment.” Office Asst. Supt. Freedmen Br of West Feliciana,

Bayou Sara, La to laborers on Wakefield Plantation owned by Lewis Stirling, August 31, 1865. Stirling

(Lewis and Family) Papers, Legal Records, 1784-1902, Mss. 1866 B:77, Papers, Legal Records, 1784-

1902, Box 4, Folder 38, LMVC.

76

E.T. Lewis to Capt. Wm. H. Stirling, March 12, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 8, Letters Sent,

January 1866-May 1867. Riley’s concerns certainly seem justified given Lewis’ concern that William

39

transferred the debt to Benjamin Simmons, “a free man of color,” in exchange for a

parcel of land that Simmons owned. Riley and Simmons apparently intended for the case

to be tried before a military commission through the Freedmen’s Bureau and avoid the

near-certain defeat at the hands of a local Confederate-sympathizing court. That Percy

seemed more than willing for the case to be tried before “a Jury of his countrymen”

suggested that he, too, was aware of Riley’s unpopularity as a Unionist. As Riley

observed in his written argument presented to the Bureau, the justice dispensed by the

local courts “is commonally [sic] practiced by the Chivalry to play the d___d Yankees

(as they call us) for stealing their negroes.”77

Although the Freedmen’s Bureau eventually

referred the case to the civil courts, it revealed the creative ways that Unionist and black

residents of West Feliciana formed alliances to seek justice in an unfriendly judicial

system.

Although Riley was unable to collect on the debt, his alliance with Simmons

suggests an understanding of planter willingness to subvert authorities that they

considered “d___d Yankees” and to reclaim “their negroes.” While the alliance between

planter elites and the justice system favored planters with strict vagrancy laws, planters

looked for other ways to limit the freedoms of their black laborers.78

Catherine

Reynolds would go free if charged for the murder of R.M. Leake, the Bureau agent who he shot and killed.

The civil courts claims were further doubtful based on the wrongful imprisonment case of William

Robinson, who was sentenced to three months in prison for horse stealing, ignoring the fact that the horse

was seized by the Union gunboat captain as contraband of war. J.H. Malinken(?) to Captain A.F. Hayden,

December 23, 1865; Capt. A.L. Stephens to The Sheriff of West Feliciana Parish, January 15, 1866; J.N.

Cotton, Sheriff, Parish of West Feliciana, to Capt. A.L. Stephens, January 16, 1866, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll

66, Target 6, Court Records and Complaints, Sept. 1865-Nov. 1868. 77

D.T. Riley, Atty for Ben Simmons; testimony of Sarah Cox; testimony of D.T. Riley; closing arguments

of D.T. Riley and Charles Percy, Riley v. Percy, trial, March 7, 1866, Roll 66, Target 6,

Miscellaneous Court Records and Complaints, September 1865-November 1868. 78

Wealthy planters were often agents of the justice system, and could use their influence to further limit the

rights of their laborers, as was the case with Thomas Butler, who had been a judge prior to the war, and

took the oath of office as Parish Attorney in November, 1868. Oath of Office; Oath of Eligibility,

40

Hereford’s mention of a plot to settle “an extensive colony in Honduras if all go that now

speak of it” reveals the geographical extent to which planters would go to limit the

freedom of freedmen.79

For many planters, the indenture system, sponsored by the

Bureau to provide for orphans, secured a much more palatable form of unfreedom. Ginny

and Annie Gaines were indentured to Mrs. Elizabeth Percy, a cousin of both Charles

Percy and a relative of Lewis Stirling by marriage, on May 16, 1868. Although their

indenture read that they were the “orphan[s] of Adam Gaines,” it is clear that Adam

Gaines was alive until at least May 18, 1868, when he requested assistance from the

Bureau in the form of “300 lbs cornmeal… and 150 lbs meat” as the lessee of Egypt

Plantation. Perhaps he arranged the indenture because he was afraid he could not feed

Annie and Ginny due to the “failure of last years [sic] crop;” perhaps the indenture was a

payment for debt.80

Although his motives for the indenture have not survived, it is clear

that the indenture was not legal since the girls were not orphans and that Elizabeth Percy

November 24, 1868, Thomas Butler and Family Papers, Mss 2850, 1804-1945, West Feliciana, Louisiana,

Microfilm 1441, Series 1, Part 5, Reel 10. For West Felicianan vagrancy laws see Office Asst. Supt.

Freedmen Br of West Feliciana, Bayou Sara, La to laborers on Wakefield Plantation owned by Lewis

Stirling, August 31, 1865. Stirling (Lewis and Family) Papers, Legal Records, 1784-1902, Mss. 1866 B:77,

Papers, Legal Records, 1784-1902, Box 4, Folder 38, LMVC. 79

.M.H. [Catherine Hereford] to My Dear Mother [Sarah Stirling], West Baton Rouge, May 6th, 1868,

Stirling (Lewis and family) Papers, Mss. 1866, B:76, Correspondence, 1866-1938, Box 3, Folder 21,

LMVC. 80

Gaines was probably alive at least until July 20, 1868, when he made a final request for rations for Egypt

Plantation. Although the paperwork reads Adam Gaines, the signature reads Andrew Gaines. Since Gaines

was leasing a portion of Egypt Plantation with his family, the signature “Andrew” is likely a clerical error.

Nonetheless, it is clear that Gaines was alive when his children were indentured. The indenture required

Elizabeth Percy to act as a legal guardian to the child, providing food, clothing, and education in exchange

for the child’s unpaid labor, usually for a term of several years. A total of nine indentures were registered

with the Freedmen’s Bureau for West Feliciana Parish, at least one of which was successfully contested as

fraudulent. For fraudulent indenture, see M.A. Reno to A.H. Nickerson, February 3, 1866; Indenture of

Benjamin to Haygood, January 22, 1866, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 65, Target 1, Unregistered Letters

Received, Dec. 1865-Dec. 1868. Affidavit of Adam Gaines, Signed Andrew Gaines (his mark), July 20,

1868, sworn by C. Goodman; Affidavit of Adam Gaines, Signed Adam Gaines (His Mark), May 18, 1868,

sworn by E.D. Remondet, Dept. Clerk, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 66, Target 9, Miscellaneous Records

Relating to Supplies, March, 1867-November 1868. Indenture of Annie Gaines, orphan of Adam Gaines, to

Mrs. Elizabeth Percy for nine years, May 16th 1868; Indenture of Ginny Gaines, orphan of Adam Gaines,

to Mrs. Elizabeth Percy for six years, May 16th 1868. Roll 66, Target 9, Indentures, December 1865-May

1868.

41

was more than willing to have two children bound to her as unfree laborers for six to nine

years.

Eliza Hamilton and her son Washington had expectations for unfreedom that

indenture was unable to meet. In the “fall or winter” of 1865, the Hamiltons abducted

five children and threatened their parents not to visit or reclaim them “under pain of

being shot.” These white planters held their captives illegally, refusing demands by

Bureau agents to release them, and apparently intended to keep them in a permanent state

of semi-bondage. Keziah Arma registered a complaint against the Hamiltons for

abducting her two children, Alice and Matilda, in early January 1866, and although their

return was ordered nearly a month later, Eliza Hamilton refused to return the girls to their

mother. By April 1866, Alice Arma had been returned and Richard Leake was sent by

Captain Nickerson to determine how to recover the children of Ned Ferris, Adaline and

Masson, and the remaining child of Keziah Arma, Matilda. Although Masson Ferris was

eventually returned to his father, his sister had escaped from the Hamilton’s plantation,

“run off into the woods and [was] not recovered.” The fifth child, Andrew Turner, was

returned with Masson Ferris after the arrest of Washington Hamilton by the U.S. Army,

but Eliza Hamilton still refused to return Matilda Arma to her mother. Washington

Hamilton was never tried for these abductions, although he was forced to “agree on my

honor as a Gentleman” to return the children. By transferring the children between their

two plantations in Woodville Mississippi and Laurel Hill, Louisiana, the Hamiltons tried

to evade the reach of the Freedmen’s Bureau and maintain the unfreedom of their

42

captives.81

It seems that these planters would go to any length to limit the meaning of

emancipation.

When intimidation failed, planters often turned to violence to discourage

challenges to their authority and disrupt alliances between their laborers and the

Freedmen’s Bureau. Although this violence was frequently focused on freedmen, as

when Washington Hamilton “threatened to shoot” Aaron Cummings if he returned to

collect his wages, planters occasionally organized to threaten or kill Union officials that

they deemed particularly troublesome.82

E.T. Lewis, upon investigating the death of

Richard Leake, wrote that “I am credibly informed that a man in this Parish Said a few

weeks before Mr. Leake was assassinated that he would give ($1000) One thousand

dollars to have him put out of the way.” Lewis never mentioned the claim again and

William Reynolds, the gunman, never returned to corroborate the allegation. Nonetheless,

Lewis’ allegation provides a powerful motive for the blacksmith to kill the Bureau agent

81

Of the five children abducted, the records indicate that only three, Alice Arma, Andrew Turner, and

Masson Ferris, ever saw their parents again. Matilda Arma refused to return with A. Finch in August 1867

after nearly two years of separation from her mother, Keziah. Although her reasons are unclear from the

record, she may have been motivated by Hamilton’s original threats of violence against her mother, she

may have felt she had better prospects working for Hamilton, or she may have developed relationships with

her coworkers that she was unwilling to sacrifice to return to her estranged mother. There is no record of

Adaline Ferris returning to her father, Ned, after running away from Hamilton’s plantation. Case 1, January

22, 1866; Case 5 [6], January 29, 1866; Case 30, March 24, 1866, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 11,

Letters Sent, Jan. 1866-Mar. 1867, Feb-Mar 1868. Capt. A.H. Nickerson to Washington Hamilton, Laurel

Hill, La, February 21, 1866; Capt. A.H. Nickerson to Capt. Wm. R. Gallian, February 21, 1866; Capt. A.H.

Nickerson to Comdg Officer, Port Hudson, La, March 6, 1866; Capt. A.H. Nickerson to R.M. Leake, clerk

and Asst., April 14, 1866, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 8, Letters Sent, January 1866-May 1867. A.

Finch to Brvt. Gen J.A. Mower, August 27, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 9, Letters Sent, May-

December, 1867. E.P. Loring, Commanding Officer at Port Hudson, to A.H. Nickerson, March 13, 1866;

Bond of Washington Hamilton sent to A.H. Nickerson, March 19, 1866, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 65, Target

1, Unregistered Letters Received, Dec. 1865-Dec. 1868. Karin Zipf discusses the issue of indenture in

Reconstruction North Carolina in Chapter 3 of Labor of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship in North

Carolina, 1715-1919 (Baton Rouge, La: Louisiana State University Press, 2005). Although North Carolina

law gave planters significantly more latitude to indent child laborers than their Louisiana counterparts, the

practice Zipf describes was similar to that in Louisiana. 82

E.T. Lewis to Mr. Washington Hamilton, May 22, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 9, Letters

Sent, May-December, 1867.

43

and at the very least, an alliance headed by a planter-conspirator seemed credible to

Lewis.83

Certainly Leake’s willingness to confront planters like Washington Hamilton

over the children he abducted earned him powerful and unscrupulous enemies.

An incident involving Dr. Patterson Whicher provides insight into the ways in

which violence revealed planter motives and alliances. Nickerson wrote his commanding

officer that “the Mayor and Council of this place [Bayou Sara] with a Dr. Whicher as

Spokesman called upon me in relation to a case of small pox at a place near by [sic].”

Nickerson and the party agreed to send anyone infected with the disease out of town to

prevent its spread. Whicher then sent the husband of the afflicted woman, who was also

infected with smallpox, to Nickerson’s office, despite having been instructed to send

them out of town to avoid further infection. Nickerson confronted Whicher, who grew

enraged and “left saying he would send ‘any god damned Nigger case of small pox he

could get to this office.’” Whicher continued to send extremely sick patients to Nickerson

and “sent word that it was his instruction to ‘give the freedmans [sic] bureau hell.’”

Nickerson requested that Whicher be charged with “wilfully [sic] and maliciously

attempting to spread a dangerous and Malignant disease.”84

Although Whicher claimed to

be acting alone, it is clear that Nickerson thought that he was working in conjunction with

the mayor and town council, and resigned his post two months after the incident. Whicher

was never charged.

83

E.T. Lewis to Capt. Wm. H. Stirling, March 12, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 8, Letters Sent,

January 1866-May 1867. 84

Capt. A.H. Nickerson to Capt. A.F. Hayden, March 9, 1866, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 8, Letters

Sent, January 1866-May 1867. Nickerson believed that Whicher was working in conjunction with “other

parties with the view of working me in a quarrel,” by which he was almost certainly referring to local

planters who had a vested interest in depriving their laborers of legal counsel and protection.

44

Planters, poor white yeomen, Unionists, and black laborers sought allies and

forged coalitions to pursue and protect their varying interpretations of emancipation.

Freedmen occasionally found themselves allied with Unionists and Bureau agents as they

struggled to protect their mutual interests against planters who lamented their “labor

problem” and became increasingly nostalgic for the antebellum labor regime. More often,

however, these former slaves found themselves with few allies apart from one another,

and used political clubs and work-stoppages as outlets for expressing dissatisfaction and

pursuing better treatment and wages. These alliances proved astoundingly successful

during the period directly following emancipation, in part due to the diminished postwar

labor supply and the willingness of planters to compete with one another over laborers.

However, black laborers found their options slowly eroding as planter elites united to

regain control of the legal system and used their contracts to enhance their bargaining

power over freedmen. While this trend exemplifies the failure of Reconstruction to

provide definitions of freedom amenable to planters or their former slaves, this end

should not be taken for granted. The willingness of white planters, yeomen, Unionists,

and black laborers to forge alliances, at times even breaking racial and class boundaries,

illustrates the enormous uncertainty generated by freedom and the dedication of all West

Felicianans to guarantee interpretations of freedom amenable to their worldview. Planters

did not emerge as inevitable victors, but as a powerful alliance whose greater resources

eventually snatched success from the creators of that wealth: their former slaves.

45

Violence

Postwar West Feliciana was constructed on two sites of violence: the battlefield

and the plantation. These foundations of violence, both firmly grounded in slavery,

created an environment where assaults were frequently a part of disputes over wages,

property, and power. The towns of Bayou Sara and St. Francisville, in West Feliciana,

were situated just ten miles upstream on the Mississippi River from Port Hudson, where

black troops experienced their first major combat of the war and proved their willingness

to die for the cause of freedom.85

Thus, the Civil War battlefield weighed heavily on

residents of the parish, many of whom had taken up arms to determine the fate of

plantation slavery. White planters and yeomen often deployed violence and threats of

violence, reminiscent of antebellum slavery and their martial attempts to secure it

permanently, to subvert interpretations of emancipation that they considered

dissatisfying. Black laborers, perhaps in response to planter violence or the uncertainty of

the meaning and permanence of emancipation, banded together and occasionally used

violence and threats of violence to protect their newly won rights. The conflicts that the

battlefield and the antebellum plantation represented did not end at Appomattox,

however, as many residents, black and white, continued to fight for conflicting

interpretations of freedom.86

85

Hewitt, pp. 149-150, 179. Although blatantly sympathetic to the Confederacy and the Lost Cause

narrative, Hewitt concedes that “participation by Negroes in the war” at Port Hudson was a turning-point

that “hasten[ed] the downfall of the Confederacy” (p. 179). 86

For more on Reconstruction violence, particularly within the context of Louisiana, see James Hogue,

Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction (Baton

Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Scott, Degrees of Freedom, chapters 1-2; Rodrigue,

Reconstruction in the Cane Fields, Chapter 4; Gilles Vandal, Rethinking Southern Violence: Homicides in

Post-Civil War Louisiana, 1866-1884 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2000). For an

overview of Civil War violence and its Reconstruction implications, see Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic

of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2008), pp. 266-271. Thavolia

46

The planter-laborer relationship in West Feliciana was deeply embedded in the

violence of antebellum slavery. This violence was not only a prewar memory for black

laborers in the parish, but also represented a central aspect of plantation laborer for many

freedmen. When a dispute arose between Mrs. S.J. Deaton and Elias Ward, her white

neighbor, over the grazing rights of a hog, Ward alluded to the plantation discipline

familiar to many black laborers when he “invited me and my daughters out to whip us.”

Deaton’s complaint revealed that although Ward had killed one of her hogs, it was his

allusion to antebellum violence that caused her to bemoan that she had been “ill treated

by Elias Ward and family in such a cruel manner that I cannot stand it any longer.”87

A.

Finch counseled Ward to appear at the Bureau office in Bayou Sara and settle the claim

where Ward “acknowledged in part the charge and promised to do better in future.”88

Ward was hardly a wealthy planter, but his ability to harness the antebellum

violent plantation rhetoric of his planter contemporaries had a profound effect on Deaton,

his black neighbor. For Ward and many others acquainted with plantation discipline,

violence was a white prerogative and often a contractual obligation. An 1833 contract

between West Felicianan sugar planter Lewis Stirling and his overseer, John Hardy,

stipulated the various expected uses of Hardy’s “whip stick.”89

Violence was not only

Glymph provides an excellent overview of sketch of plantation violence in Out of the House of Bondage,

Chapters 1-2. 87

Mrs. S.J. Deaton to Mr. Provost martial [A. Finch], July 10, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 65, Target 1,

Unregistered Letters Received, Dec. 1865-Dec. 1868. 88

Case 20, July 10, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 66 Target 7, Register of Complaints, May 1867-August

1868. See also A. Finch to Mr. Elias Ward, July 10, 1867, LBRFAL, Roll 64, Target 9, Letters Sent, May-

December, 1867. 89

Contract between John Hardy and Lewis Stirling, February 13, 1833, Stirling (Lewis and Family)

Papers, Legal Records, 1784-1902, Mss. 1866 B:77, Box 4, Folder 35, LMVC. The portion of the contract

regarding violence is as follows. “to guard against the possibility of abuses, it is hereby distinctly

understood that the Sd. Hardy is never to strike a Negroe [sic] with the But end of his whip stick or any

other weapon by which the negroe [sic] might be injured, that he is never to punish a Negroe [sic]with

more than a Dozen strikes over his Shoulders with the lash of his whip except in extreme cases when he

47

expected of an overseer in West Feliciana, it represented one of his central duties and

comprised roughly a third of the language in Hardy’s contract. Plantation violence

enhanced planters’ power over their laborers and was a central aspect of their former

positions that they tried to reclaim following emancipation. Caroline Simmons, for

example, complained “that her employer Oscar Howell beat and threatened to kill her

without provocation.”90

G.M. Ebert, the local Bureau agent, noted that Simmons

apparently “brought on this chastisement by her insolence to the lady of the house,” and

sent her back to her employer. Although Ebert directed Howell “to treat her better in

future,” it seems that he felt that violence was simply an aspect of plantation life.91

The memories of former Louisiana slaves, recorded by the WPA, provide an

important insight into the legacy of plantation violence that continued to influence the

relationship between black laborers, planters, and white yeomen long after emancipation.

Cecil George, sold from his native South Carolina into Louisiana slavery, remembered

Louisiana as a “heathen part of de country” where “Down here dey strip you down naked,

and two men hold you down and whip you till de blood come. Cruel! O Lawd.”92

One

particularly gruesome practice mentioned by several former slaves in Louisiana was the

practice of beating pregnant women. Robert St. Ann recalled that when an overseer

wanted to beat a pregnant woman, “dey make a hole big enough for her to put her

thinks the cault [sic] merits a whiping [sic] on the naked skin, and then he is not to exceed twenty strikes

which must be laid on the Buttocks and in such a manner as not to cut the Skin, that in any Case wherein

the Sd. Hardy may judge that the negroe [sic] deserves a greater punishment than he is authorized by this

instrument to inflict he is to submit the case to the Sd. Lewis Stirling and the then Sd. Lewis Stirling is to

be the sole Judge of the amt. of Punishment to be inflicted.” 90

Case 43, June 19, 1866, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 11, Letters Sent, Jan. 1866-Mar. 1867, Feb-

Mar 1868. 91

G.M. Ebert to Oscar Howell, June 19, 1866, G.M. Ebert to Capt. A.F. Hayden, June 20, 1866, LBRFAL,

M1905, Roll 64, Target 8, Letters Sent, January 1866-May 1867. 92

“Narrative of Cecil George,” found in Clayton, Mother Wit, p. 84.

48

stomach in. Dey raise her clothes and beat her wid a strap till de blood come, den dey

pour brine over her.” 93

Edward De Buiew told his interviewer a similar story about his

being “born in de fields.” De Buiew’s mother, beaten by an overseer while working in the

fields, went into labor and “die[d] a few minutes after dey brung her to the house.” His

story reveals the enduring legacy of such brutality since “my pa told me about things dat

happen in slavery-days. I don’t ‘member nothin’ ‘bout it myself.”94

Although unable to

remember the violence of the plantation firsthand, De Buiew’s life had been profoundly

influenced by the plantation beatings that deprived him of his mother. As De Buiew’s

interview demonstrated, the legacy of this plantation violence did not end with slavery,

but profoundly shaped the experience of freedom for former slaves and their families.

The case of Winsley v. Barrow revealed the impact of the plantation discipline of

slavery on the parameters of freedom, both for former slaves and their former masters.

Daniel Winsley reported that “last Friday or Saturday William B. Barrow charged me

with having ridden a horse belonging to him and put a rope around my neck saying he

would kill me if he did not find the horse.” When asked if there was any other reason for

the attack, Winsley replied “No Sir. It was just about the horse.” After the horse was

found, Barrow continued the attack and “assaulted me and struck me with his fist on the

face and also threatned [sic] to shoot me.”95

For Barrow, who was also involved in the

93

“Narrative of Robert St. Ann,” found in Clayton, Mother Wit, p. 190. Francis Doby also remembered that

“Dey use to dig a hole in de ground so dere stomach could just fit in dat hole, and dey lay flat on deir belly.

De master don't want to whip de poor little niggah baby dat ain't born yet.” “Narrative of Francis Doby,”

found in Clayton, Mother Wit, p. 55. Rebecca Fletcher recalled that “Some of the overseers were mean

men: They wanted slaves to have babies 'cause they was valuable. So when a slave was about to produce a

baby and he wanted her whipped, he had a hole dug in the ground and made her lay acrost it. And her

hands and foots were tied, so she had to submit quiet-like to the beatin' with a strap.” “Narrative of Rebecca

Fletcher,” found in Clayton, Mother Wit, p. 66. 94

“Narrative of Edward De Buiew,” found in Clayton, Mother Wit, p. 48. 95

Captain Alex Bailie, who oversaw Barrow’s trial, identified the fundamental issue as involving plantation

discipline, observing that the idea that “people imploying [sic] Freedmen are at liberty to be their own

49

brutal beating of Bat Henryham and his companions, a missing horse was grounds for a

brutal assault. That the violence continued even after the horse was found demonstrated

that the attack was more a form of discipline than a mode of inquiry.96

Another such case

of employer discipline revealed the difficulty black laborers faced in a legal system that

privileged the claims of their former owners. When Nat Carroll was assaulted by his

employer, James Howell, he reported the incident to E.T. Lewis but ultimately decided

not to press charges. Following his interview with Carroll, Lewis wrote to remind Howell

“in [the] future not to take the ‘law in your own hands.’” Although Carroll’s reasoning

was not recorded, it seems doubtful that expected much fairness from “the tribunals of

Justice.”97

Although individual acts of violence by black laborers on their white peers were

comparatively rare, several instances of black violence provide insight into their motives

for violence and their interpretations of freedom. One such instance was recorded in a

judges in cases between themselves and their employers is all wrong and must be abandoned.” Winsley v.

Barrow, September 7, 1865, Captain Alex Bailie to Wm H.(B) Barrow Esq, Port Hudson, La, September 7,

1865, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 66, Target 6, Miscellaneous Court Records and Complaints, September 1865-

November 1868. 96

Captain Alex Bailie to Wm H.(B) Barrow Esq, Port Hudson, La, September 7, 1865, LBRFAL, M1905,

Roll 66, Target 6, Miscellaneous Court Records and Complaints, September 1865- November 1868. 97

E.T. Lewis to Mr. J. Howell, June 8, 1867, LBRFAL, Roll 64, Target 9, Letters Sent, May-December,

1867. Similar sentiments doubtless inspired the report of Dr. Whicher of a dispute between a black laborer

named Elix and an unnamed freedmen and the “threat of Mr. Davis to take the Matter into his own hands

and ‘put him Elix at rest.’” Capt. A.H. Nickerson to Capt. A.L. Stevens, January 31, 1866, LBRFAL,

M1905, Roll 64, Target 8, Letters Sent, January 1866-May 1867. The prospect of freedom was a motivation

for violence for many planters. As Henrietta Butler recalled, “My damn old missis was mean as hell. You

see dis finger here? Dere is where she bit it de day us was set free. Never will forget how she said, ‘Come

here, you little black bitch, you!’ and grabbed my finger [and] almost bit it off. Her old name was Emily

Haidee. When she found out we was goin' to be free, she raised all kind of hell.” “Narrative of Henrietta

Butler,” found in Clayton, Mother Wit, p. 38. Much of this violence undoubtedly went unreported, although

Bureau agents were aware “of cruelties practiced [sic] on the freedmen by employers and overseers; you

are instructed to make a strict and minute inquiry throughout your District in regard to this matter, making

use of such sources of information as may be at your command.” J.H. Mahnkin to A.H. Nickerson, April 9,

1866, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 65, Target 1, Unregistered Letters Received, Dec. 1865-Dec. 1868. In many

ways, the experience of violent acts by employers on their laborers bridged the legal divide between slavery

and freedom.

50

complaint by J.D. Smith that one of his former employees, Jim Pemberton, had made

repeated threats of violence against him. Although Pemberton’s motivation for his threats

is unclear from the complaint, it is likely that he was dissatisfied with his working

conditions or contract, which was a frequent complaint made by his peers to the

Freedmen’s Bureau. Pemberton clearly felt that mere threats were not enough and

apparently stole Smith’s “horse and taken him into the woods and shot it.” This act seems

to have left Smith terrified, and although Pemberton had been arrested, Smith expressed

“fears [that] said Pemberton will be bailed out of jail and if so his property and indeed his

own life he will consider in great danger.” Pemberton’s threats and his violence against

the horse achieved their desired effect on Smith. Shooting the horse represented not only

an attack on Smith, but a means of depriving him of his property and the status planters

associated with horse ownership.98

Pemberton’s assault on Smith’s horse echoed the case of Spence Lane in its use of

violence against animals as a means of threatening owners. Lane repeatedly complained

to his white neighbor, William Lytle, for allowing his oxen to run loose and graze in

98

Case 119, April 30, 1867, LBRFAL, Roll 64, Target 11, Letters Sent, January 1866-March 1867,

February-March 1868. The symbolism of shooting the horse should not be overlooked. Daniel Winsley, for

instance, was threatened with lynching by William Barrow for being accused of having taken a horse.

Many of the complaints fielded by Bureau agents involved horses having been taken from freedmen by

planters and overseers or having been sold under false pretenses. Labor contracts also frequently forbade

the riding of horses and mules by laborers, who were occasionally fined and even fired for doing so.

Mitchell Baily, a young child employed by Harriet Matthews, was fired “for taking a horse without

permission.” Planters and overseers clearly saw horse ownership as a way to maintain their elite status in

relation to their laborers in the wake of emancipation. Winsley v. Barrow, September 7, 1865, Captain Alex

Bailie to Wm H.(B) Barrow Esq, Port Hudson, La, September 7, 1865, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 66, Target 6,

Miscellaneous Court Records and Complaints, September 1865- November 1868. For examples of

controversies over the ownership and use of horses, see Case 20, February 17, 1866; Case 21, February 17,

1866; Claim 56, Dec 1, 1866; Case 91, Feb 13, 1867; Case 107, March 27, 1867; Case 118, April 26, 1867,

LBRFAL, Roll 64, Target 11, Letters Sent, January 1866-March 1867, February-March 1868. For examples

of restrictions on riding horses on plantations, see Contract between Eliza West and laborers on Hamilton

Plantation for 1868; Contract between W.C. West and laborers on Home Place for 1867, LBRFAL, M1905,

Roll 51, Target 1, West Feliciana and Winn Miscellaneous Agreements, 1865-1868. Payment Ledger for

the Month of May 1866, Harriet Matthews, Greenwood Plantation, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 39, Target 1,

Freedmen’s Labor Contracts, Payrolls, West Feliciana.

51

Lane’s cornfield. After several failed attempts to convince his neighbor to properly

secure his oxen, Lane found the oxen in his field and “Shot [them] with Bird Shot.”

Although Lytle may have merely been an irresponsible neighbor, Finch seemed to think

that he was looking for a pretense to confiscate the property of his black neighbor.

Moreover, it appears that the oxen were not seriously injured by Lane’s actions, which

were probably meant more as a warning for Lytle than as an attempt to harm the animals.

Lane’s black neighbor, John Turner, testified that he did “not think that the oxen were

materially injured… my crop on the same place has Been injured about $50.00 Dollars

worth by Said ox." Even a neighboring planter, Dr. Henry Perkins, claimed that the oxen

were fit and working on his plantation.99

Nonetheless, Lane was taken to court and his

property confiscated by his white neighbor, William Lytle, for injuring the oxen,

demonstrating the risks black laborers ran when employing violence, even against

animals owned by whites.

The cases of Pemberton and Lane reveal the dangers for black laborers employing

violent acts as tools to negotiate equitable working and living conditions with their white

neighbors. Feeling they had few other options, Pemberton and Lane performed acts of

violence on their white neighbors’ property to defend the parameters of freedom as they

defined them. Unsuccessful as they were at navigating a judicial system fraught with

racism and sympathetic to former Confederates, their acts of violence nonetheless suggest

99

A. Finch to Lit. [sic] L.O. Parker, Sept 21, 1867; A. Finch to Lit. Jesse M. Lee, October 1, 1867 (quote),

LBRFAL, Roll 64, Target 9, Letters Sent, May-December, 1867. Spence v. Lane, Ruling, August 28, 1867,

Signed F. Fischer, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 51, Target 1, West Feliciana and Winn Miscellaneous

Agreements, 1865-1868. Fred Fischer, the justice of the peace who ruled in favor of William Lytle in his

case against Spence Lane was the same justice who dismissed the case against James White for stabbing

Reuben Ogden with a warning (see below). For the affidavits in favor of Lane, see Affidavit of John Harris,

freedman, September 4, 1867, sworn before A. Finch; Affidavit of Dr. Henry Perkins, Sept. 4, 1867 sworn

before A. Finch; Affidavit of John Turner, freedman, Sept. 4, 1867, sworn before A. Finch (quote),

LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 51, Target 1, West Feliciana and Winn Miscellaneous Agreements, 1865-1868.

52

a freedom bound by uncertainty whose meaning was still being negotiated. Despite the

legal action against them, for Pemberton and Lane, the potential rewards of a more

thoroughly defined freedom outweighed the risks of fine and imprisonment. Many former

slaves, however, doubtless perceived the cost of actual violence as far too great,

preferring threats and intimidation aimed at negotiation as a lower-risk alternative. These

threats of violence, as in the armed political meetings at Laurel Hill, left as much to the

imagination of listeners as the insinuation of speakers, and occasionally led to actual

violence.100

Threatened violence was particularly effective for planters, due no doubt to the

actual violence that former slaves had experienced firsthand on the plantation. Many

planters used these threats of violence to minimize the impact of emancipation in their

attempts to force laborers to work harder and longer hours and challenged laborers’ right

to property. When Aaron Cummings demanded wages for his labor, Washington

Hamilton “threatened to shoot him if he came on your [Hamilton’s] place again.”101

Duncan Fisher found himself in a similar situation when the overseer on Frank Powers’

plantation, along with several other laborers “pointed revolvers at him, and otherwise

threatened to kill him.”102

Whitman Wilcox was dissatisfied with the rate at which Lewis

100

A. Finch to L.O. Parker, July 27, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 9, Letters Sent, May-

December 1867. Matthew Clavin and Edward Rugemer both identify the violence of the Haitian

Revolution as weighing heavily on the minds of Southern slave owners. This potential, imagined violence

provided both a challenge to and a rationale for white planter hegemony and was a significant factor in the

eventual secession of many of the slave states. Rugemer, pp. 8-13, 43-44. Matthew Clavin, Toussaint

Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), pp. 12-13, 18-20. Vandal discusses the planer-

imagined postemancipation association between slaves, freedom, and violence. Vandal, pp. 159-161. 101

E.T. Lewis to Mr. Washington Hamilton, May 22, 1867, LBRFAL, Roll 64, Target 9, Letters Sent, May-

December, 1867. 102

Case 36, May 5, 1866, LBRFAL, Roll 64, Target 11, Letters Sent, January 1866-March 1867, February-

March 1868. See also G.M. Ebert to Col. Frank Bowers [Powers], May 5, 1866, LBRFAL, Roll 64, Target

8, Letters Sent, January 1866-May 1867.

53

Gooding transported merchandise for him and frustrated that he had left a barrel of flour

in town because his cart “was so heavily loaded.” Wilcox became enraged, told Gooding

to “mind how I behaved on this place,” and “accused me [Gooding] of killing his goats.”

Wilcox “then drew his revolver on me and put it at my throat and said dry up or I will

bore a hole through you.”103

For Wilcox and many of his planter peers, laborers’ ability

to choose how and when to work was an unacceptable facet of freedom. These planters

used threats of violence to mitigate the consequences of emancipation and maintain, as

much as possible, elements of unfreedom within the free labor regime of

Reconstruction.104

Wealthy planters were not the only ones willing to employ threats and violence to

dissuade black laborers from exercising their newly won rights. White yeomen and

craftsmen saw the status they associated with their skin color as significantly diminished

103

Case 116, April 19, 1867, LBRFAL, Roll 64, Target 11, Letters Sent, January 1866-March 1867,

February-March 1868. E.T. Lewis to Dr. Whitman Wilcox, April 22, 1867, LBRFAL, Roll 64, Target 8,

Letters Sent, January 1866-May 1867. 104

Planters occasionally threatened one another, as appears to be the case when E.T. Lewis reported that a

“letter was brought to me by a Freedman making complaint that certain parties in his neighborhood would

not allow to work for a Mr. B.F. White. I herewith forward to you a copy of said letter which I have in my

possession I sent for Mr. White to report here immediately but have not heard from him as yet. The

Freedmen says the parties that wrote the letter are unknown but are suspected my impression is the reason

Mr. White has not reported is through fear. this letter was found in his yard on the morning of the 20th inst.

I had the name of the Freedman who brought and where he lives I can not [sic] now find it it having been

misplaced. I think he told me how ever that Mr White lives about 15 Fifteen miles from here. I would also

state that Doctor L.A. Burgers has rented his place to Freedmen and has fears that they will do the same

thing with his place that is threatened in the Enclosed Letter. I herewith forward a copy of a certificate left

here by Doct. Burgers.” Although the attached letter was not filed, it appears that local planters were

threatening landowners willing to rent their land to freedmen, suggesting a desire to control black laborers’

access to wealth. E.T. Lewis to Capt. Wm. S. Sterling, January 29, 1867, LBRFAL, Roll 64, Target 8,

Letters Sent, January 1866-May 1867.

Threats were often employed in disputes over property, as in the case of Henry Merridy’s guinea hens

which Doctor Johnson claimed as his own and threatened to shoot Merridy if they were not handed over.

Case 92, February 14, 1867, LBRFAL, Roll 64, Target 11, Letters Sent, January 1866-March 1867,

February-March 1868. Delphia Smith also experienced a contest over her property with James Fletcher, her

husband’s employer. Although Fletcher did not threaten her life, he did take her food, which he refused to

return. “their provisions Delphia Smith states Mr. Fletcher took from them and locked up; they worked for

1/2 the crop and found [fed] themselves. The provisions which he took consisted of 10 Shoulders and Hams

and 4 Sacks Corn.” Case 103, March 18, 1867, LBRFAL, Roll 64, Target 11, Letters Sent, January 1866-

March 1867, February-March 1868.

54

by emancipation. Many poor whites used threats and violence to convince their black

neighbors to accept a more limited interpretation of freedom.105

Likely frustrated with the

changes of Reconstruction, John P. Joor, a gunsmith in Bayou Sara and former

Confederate private in the Third Louisiana Cavalry, stole money and several guns from

local freedmen seeking to have their firearms repaired.106

Following one such incident,

Ned Brown complained that he left his “double barreled shot-gun” with Joor and that

“Joor not only refused to give it up, but struck him with his fist, and threatened to kill him

on the spot” when he demanded its return. Whether or not he thought that property or gun

ownership were white prerogatives, it is clear that Joor used the legal and social

uncertainties of Reconstruction to profit at the expense of his black customers.107

Many poor white West Felicianans were apparently less concerned with property

and profit than their diminished status. James White embodied this desire to perpetuate

105

An example of the animosity of poor whites to their black peers already mentioned was the assault of

Alexander Brown by Alexander Wible, a local merchant who had been in business with Carlos Wilcox, the

son of Whitman Wilcox. During his assault on Brown, Wible “drew a revolver and fired one or two shots at

said Brown without effect and upon two white men attempting to stop him (Wible) from executing his

threat of killing ‘the damned nigger’ he also said he would kill any ‘God damned White Man’ who would

take a ‘Niggers part.’” For Wible, race and status were at stake, not just for him but for his white peers who

dared to defend the rights of their black neighbors. Capt. A.H. Nickerson to Capt. A.F. Hayden, Asst. Adjt.

Genl., New Orleans, Jan. 24, 1866, LBRFAL, Roll 64, Target 8, Letters Sent, January 1866-May 1867. For

Wible’s merchant activity with Wilcox, see Bill of John Harrison, Wilcox and Wible, Forwarding and

Commission Merchants,” December 5, 1866, found in documents relating to James Butler v. Benjamin

Rowens and all Freedmen, November 20, 1866, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 66, Target 6, Miscellaneous Court

Records and Complaints, September 1865- November 1868. Wilcox apparently simply crossed out Wible’s

name on his bills of purchase following Wible’s arrest. 106

Private John P. Joor, National Park Service. U.S. Civil War Soldiers, 1861-1865 [database on-line].

Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2007. Film Number M378 roll 15. 107

Case 38, May 5, 1866, LBRFAL, Roll 64, Target 11, Letters Sent, January 1866-March 1867, February-

March 1868. A freedmen listed only as Ben complained “that he left a pistol with a gunsmith named J.P.

Joor Bayou Sara for repair. Joor sold the pistol and refuses to pay for it or get the man another.” James

Datson also complained that Joor refused to return “a double barrelled [sic] shot gun” and money for

repairs.” See Case 29, March 24, 1866; Case 49, Sept. 23, 1866, LBRFAL, Roll 64, Target 11, Letters Sent,

January 1866-March 1867, February-March 1868. Only the assault on Brown drew an official written reply

from G.M. Ebert, ) “that you [Joor] not only have refused to give up to him a double barreled shot-gun left

at your house for repairs but abused and threatened to kill the man.” Whatever his motives, Joor was forced

to settle with Brown as Ebert recorded that “the gun was produced.”G.M. Ebert to J.P. Joor, May 5, 1866,

LBRFAL, Roll 64, Target 8, Letters Sent, January 1866-May 1867.

55

racial hierarchy through violence, earning a special distinction among parish residents as

being “one of the very worst men that ever lived.” White had served as “guerilla during

the war,” a corporal in the 13th Battalion of Louisiana Partisan Rangers, “and since then

has had particular animosity to Union Men and Negroes.”108

Thompson was probably a

white Unionist or Northerner, which apparently motivated White to “beat… [Thompson]

with a board drew a knife and threatened to kill him.”109

Thompson’s case was “referred

to the Civil Authorities” which further complicated matters since it appeared that White

held “a Commission as Parish Constable” and was thus a member of the civil

authorities.110

Given his notoriety and his position as constable, it is no wonder that

White’s second known act of violence, “shooting in the house of George B. Cable,” went

unreported for more than a year.111

The turning point for White came with his threats and assaults on the Ogden

family in late 1866 and early 1867. In late October 1866 he was “charged with having

cut, with a dangerous weapon, one Reuben Ogden,” but when the case was brought

before a local justice of the peace it was dismissed with a warning for “White to keep the

108

A. Finch to George Baldy, A.D.C and Secty of Civil Affairs, July 16, 1867, LBRFAL, Roll 64, Target 9,

Letters Sent, May-December. Corporal James P. White, National Park Service. U.S. Civil War Soldiers,

1861-1865 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2007. Film Number M378

roll 31. 109

Case 12, February 9, 1866, LBRFAL, Roll 64, Target 11, Letters Sent, January 1866-March 1867,

February-March 1868. Thompson was probably a white Unionist or Northerner given that he is recorded as

a “Citizen” in the Bureau notes. “Citizen” referred exclusively to white residents in the Bureau notes. Black

residents were referred to as “freedman” or “f.m.c.,” standing for “freedman, colored.” It seems most likely

that Thompson was a Northern migrant to West Feliciana since he reported the incident to the Freedmen’s

Bureau, representing the U.S. Army, instead of the local authorities, suggesting both that he identified

Union soldiers as authorities and that he considered it less likely that his case would be addressed by local

authorities. Also, he does not appear on either the 1860 or 1870 U.S. Census in West Feliciana, which

further supports the case that he was a Northerner. 110

E.T. Lewis to Capt. William H. Sterling, April 15, 1867, LBRFAL, Roll 64, Target 8, Letters Sent,

January 1866-May 1867. 111

Geo Baldey, Secry Civil Affairs to Mr. E.T. Lewis, June 13, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 65, Target 1,

Unregistered Letters Received, Dec. 1865-Dec. 1868.

56

Peace.”112

In April 1867 he assaulted Henry Ogden, Reuben’s father, after becoming

frustrated that he could not use the Ogdens’ skiff.113

Enraged, White “fired at my dog and

killed it” and then followed Ogden to his house and fired his shotgun into the house, “but

fortunately hit no one.”114

Whether it was shooting his dog, stabbing his son, firing into

his house, or repeatedly demanding his skiff, White had finally pushed Ogden to file an

official complaint with E.T. Lewis at the Freedmen’s Bureau. The power of Ogden’s

decision to file a complaint inspired Samuel McGlaucklin and Simon Washington,

victims of White’s “depredations” on the same night, to accompany Ogden to the Bureau

office in St. Francisville and file complaints of their own. Henry Ogden’s complaint

prompted a flurry of statements by parish residents whom White had terrorized, forcing

his eventual flight from prosecution to northern Louisiana.115

112

R.M. Leake to J. Irvine Gregg, Brvt Col Asst Genl Sup Intendant, New Orleans, La. Oct. 11, 1866 113

According to the U.S. Census of 1870, Henry Ogden’s occupation was listed as “drayman,” a wagon

driver and we know from Bureau reports that he also owned a skiff, suggesting that he was wealthier than

most freedmen, which may have been the source of White’s animosity towards him and his family. Henry

Ogden, United States Census, accessed on Ancestry.com; Year: 1870; Census Place: Bayou Sara, West

Feliciana, Louisiana; Roll: M593_535; Page: 405A; Image: 391; Family History Library Film: 552034. 114

Case 113, April 14, 1867, LBRFAL, Roll 64, Target 11, Letters Sent, January 1866-March 1867,

February-March 1868. 115

The revolutionary nature of the complaints of Ogden, McGlaucklin, and Washington should not be

overlooked. When at McGlaucklin’s house, White taunted him, saying “let them go to the Freedmens [sic]

Bureau and they will find out that I am Jim White.” Case 114, April 14, 1867; Case 115, April 14, 1867,

Letters Sent, January 1866-March 1867, February-March 1868. Lewis gives a summary of the three cases,

an overview of White’s activities, and mentions the difficulty of prosecuting White. E.T. Lewis to Capt.

William H. Sterling, April 15, 1867, LBRFAL, Roll 64, Target 8, Letters Sent, January 1866-May 1867.

The case against White built rapidly after the complaints of Ogden, McGlaucklin and Washington as West

Felicianans, mostly freedmen, came out of the woodwork to report their maltreatment by White. The flurry

of activity caused E.T. Lewis to worry that White might learn of the case building against him and “leave

the place as soon as he found out Troops were sent here for his arrest.” The civil authorities initially refused

to arrest White, but after learning that troops might be sent to arrest White and his accomplices, John

Niblin, the sheriff of the parish, arrested White on an outstanding charge. It seems that even white residents

sympathetic to White’s actions would rather arrest him themselves than allow him to be tried by the U.S.

Army. Lewis frantically gathered evidence against White, who had apparently already escaped conviction

for the murder of Mr. Hodges in Woodville, Mississippi. After the original frenzied search for evidence and

witnesses against White, the case becomes unclear. It appears that White did make bail on the original

charges and was arrested a second time by the U.S. Army. Perhaps the concerns of A. Finch came to

fruition and the charges were dismissed, or perhaps White made bail again and fled. Nonetheless, it appears

that he was not convicted and by 1880 was living roughly 200 miles northwest of St. Francisville in

57

The ability of James White to evade the lengthy list of charges of which he was

guilty demonstrates the vastly differing options available to black and white West

Felicianans willing to employ violence to protect their interpretation of freedom. There

was no black version of James White, meting out his personal version of justice for

perceived violations of the parameters of freedom. Indeed, the existence of the actual

James White precluded the creation of his black counterpart; he was a parish constable

and was relatively immune from prosecution in the local courts, controlled as they were

by former Confederates and Confederate sympathizers. Yet White’s willingness to

commit “lawless and rascally acts on both Whites and Blacks” soured his local support

and revealed the outer limits of violence as a means of negotiating freedom.116

A racially

unidirectional system of violence, which White eventually undermined, was an integral

component of white West Felicianans’ expectations for Reconstruction and ultimately led

white residents to disavow White.117

This white formulation of violent negotiation left

black West Felicianans with few options to pursue freedom’s promise. Nonetheless, these

former slaves occasionally banded together, employing threats of violence to protect their

Bienville, Louisiana. See James P. White, United States Census, accessed on Ancestry.com;

Year: 1880; Census Place: 1st Ward, Bienville, Louisiana; Roll: 448; Family History Film: 1254448;

Page: 551C; Enumeration District: 006; Image: 0446. For the various attempts to solidify charges against

White, see E.T. Lewis to Capt. William H. Sterling, April 15, 1867; E.T. Lewis to Capt. Wm. H. Stirling,

April 26, 1867, LBRFAL, Roll 64, Target 8, Letters Sent, January 1866-May 1867. E.T. Lewis to Captain

William H. Sterling, June 6, 1867; A. Finch to George Baldy, A.D.C and Secty of Civil Affairs, July 16,

1867, LBRFAL, Roll 64, Target 9, Letters Sent, May-December, 1867. Geo Baldey, Secry Civil Affairs to

Mr. E.T. Lewis, June 13, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 65, Target 1, Unregistered Letters Received, Dec.

1865-Dec. 1868. 116

E.T. Lewis to Capt. William H. Sterling, April 15, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 8, Letters

Sent, January 1866-May 1867. Finch felt that White’s propensity for violence undermined his relationship

with the majority of white West Felicianans. He wrote that “this is the general and expressed opinion of the

people here, they say, 'he is just where he deserves to be.' The arrest of James P White has made the

Military population here and actually I do believe that it has done more to popularize the American

Government than anything that could have happened.” A. Finch to George Baldy, A.D.C and Secty of Civil

Affairs, July 16, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 9, Letters Sent, May-December 1867. 117

Vandal, pp. 162-163, 169-171.

58

newly won freedoms from the encroachment of white planters and yeomen.118

Their

willingness to define freedom using violent language demonstrates both the uncertainty

of the Reconstruction project and courage of these former slaves who risked their lives to

confront their former masters as equals.

Black laborers most frequently threatened violence over what they viewed as

unfair contracts and working conditions on the plantation. The conflict between Nero

Mack, J.W. Medbery, and A. Finch on Beauchamp Plantation provides an excellent

example of the ways in which this negotiation tool could quickly escalate into actual

violence. The conflict began between Medbery and his laborers over their wages.

Medbery then asked Finch to mediate a settlement, presumably because his laborers had

either slowed or stopped working. Given the rumors that Bureau agents were paid to do

the bidding of planters, it is no surprise that Medbery’s willingness to call Finch was met

with suspicion, particularly by Mack, who doubtless felt betrayed by E.T. Lewis’

handling of his dispute on J.W. Ball’s plantation earlier that year. Mack accosted Finch

and “after having laid violent hands upon Said Agt… dared capt [sic] Finch to approach

him saying he would whip him if he did.” Mack was reinforced by about twenty of the

laborers on Beauchamp Plantation who seemingly shared his suspicion of the Bureau

agent, after which Mack threatened that “if he [Mack] should be made to leave the Place

Capt Finch better look to his own Safty [sic].”119

Dissatisfied with the Bureau’s

conception of freedom, Mack united his fellow laborers to pursue an alternate vision of

freedom emphasizing employer responsibility to their laborers.

118

Rodrigue, Reconstruction in the Cane Fields, pp. 100-103. Scott, Degrees of Freedom, pp. 38-40, 47-48.

Vandal, pp. 175-179. 119

Testimony of John H. Medbery, Oct. 20, 1867; Testimony of J.W. Medbery, Oct. 20, 1867, LBRFAL,

M1905, Roll 66, Target 6, Miscellaneous Court Records and Complaints, September 1865- November

1868.

59

Mack’s actions reveal the tenuous relationship between threats and acts of

violence for black laborers. Mack probably intended to use intimidation as a negotiating

tool as he had originally only made “insulting remarks,” referring either to his employer

or Finch. Although these remarks were apparently ignored by Medbery and his son,

“Finch passd [sic] out upon the Gallery and failing to quiet said Mack, attempted to arrest

when said Mack refused to be arrested.” Finch, who was still relatively new at his post,

seemed surprised at this form of protest and was further alarmed when the other freedmen

present “openly refused to obey his orders [to arrest Mack] and took sides with Nero

Mack.” 120

The power of this threatened violence to alter the course of negotiations was

clear to all present, with the possible exception of Finch, who converted it from

threatened to actual violence. The power of these threats of violence was amplified in the

imaginations of listeners, as Elizabeth Ross Hite recalled violent fantasies of “de slaves

beatin’ up dere master.”121

This imagined violence existed not only in the minds of black

laborers, but permeated those of their white peers as well, who expressed fear that “they

are in great danger” due to black political activism and “implore protection.”122

The

association of interracial violence with black activism eroded white authority while

simultaneously providing a rationale for its extension in the minds of white elites.123

In

this sense, the potential for black activists’ violent rhetoric to spill over into actual

120

Testimony of John H. Medbery, Oct. 20, 1867; Testimony of J.W. Medbery, Oct. 20, 1867, LBRFAL,

M1905, Roll 66, Target 6, Miscellaneous Court Records and Complaints, September 1865- November

1868. 121

“Narrative of Elizabeth Ross Hite,” found in Clayton, Mother Wit, p. 107. Hite remarked in her

interview that “I had de dollars for de slaves dat beat up dere masters, I would be rich.” 122

A. Finch to L.O. Parker, July 27, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 9, Letters Sent, May-

December 1867. 123

J.N. Maynard to J.M. Lee, sent to Genl Mower, Nov 29, 1867, LBRFAL, Roll 64, Target 9, Letters Sent,

May-December, 1867. For more on planter association of emancipation and interracial war, see Rugemer,

pp. 8-13, 43-44; Clavin, pp. 12-13, 18-20; Vandal, pp. 159-161.

60

violence actively undermined their quest for freedom, feeding into planter fantasies of

racial hierarchy.

The culture of violence and the limited resources in postwar south Louisiana

made enemies of seemingly natural allies, creating an atmosphere where violence was

much more than a means of racial representation. The violence that erupted between Nero

Mack and George May over the use of a bridal was symptomatic of the ways in which

individual interests became blurred by the uncertainties of Reconstruction. While we

might expect black laborers to unite against their white employers, this was certainly not

the experience of Pleasant Green, who was assaulted by his fellow freedmen “together

also with four white men” who “beat me so much that I have been hard up for Several

days, they now have my horse and gun.”124

When Lucretia Gidlean was threatened with a

knife by another laborer, E.T. Lewis wrote to her employer that “I wish you to read this

letter to them and give them to understand that unless they behave themselves they will

be sevearly [sic] dealt with.”125

Actual violence undermined freedom since former slaves

had the unique distinction in postwar Louisiana of having been long considered less than

full persons. Thus while James White was depicted as something of a Confederate

holdout for his reign of terror on white and black West Felicianans, black residents were

the unfortunate subjects of centuries of race ideology that designated them as unable to

pursue or protect their own interests a priori.126

124

Case 8, Bayou Sara, La, May 15, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 66 Target 7, Register of Complaints, May

1867-August 1868. 125

E.T. Lewis to Doct. Smith, February 5, 1867, LBRFAL, M1905, Roll 64, Target 8, Letters Sent, January

1866-May 1867. 126

Rugemer, pp. 8-13, 43-44; Clavin, pp. 12-13, 18-20; Vandal, pp. 159-161, 163-165.

61

Black laborers’ threats and acts of violence frequently occurred in the relative

safety of large groups and left white planters anxious about “great social crimes” that

would surely result from “ignor[ing] the Whte [sic] race.”127

The euphemistic suggestion

by white planters that freedom of speech, even violent speech, would lead to interracial

warfare was an ironic inversion of the actual violence perpetrated by planters and poor

whites on black West Felicianans. Ellen Brass recalled absurdity of white fears of

interracial violence, noting that “niggers handle everything they wears and hands them

everything they eat and drink. Ain't nobody can get closer to a white person than a

colored person. If we'd a wanted to kill 'em, they'd a all done been dead. They ain't no

reason for white people mistreating colored people.”128

White residents had greater

opportunity to exercise violence against their black neighbors than vice-versa, and took

advantage of those opportunities to limit the meanings of freedom available to black

laborers. Nonetheless, the willingness of these former slaves to employ threats and

violence to negotiate more expansive meanings of freedom in a legal and social system

that privileged their oppressors only further demonstrates their ability to act as persons in

a dehumanizing and demoralizing landscape.

127

J.N. Maynard to J.M. Lee, sent to Genl Mower, Nov 29, 1867, LBRFAL, Roll 64, Target 9, Letters Sent,

May-December, 1867. 128

“Narrative of Ellen Brass,” Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-

1938, Arkansas Narratives, Volume II, Part 1, pp. 246-248.

62

Conclusion: Who Reconstructed?

Reconstruction is not a story of black or white, North or South, slave or free. It is

the narrative of a nation struggling to redefine itself, a people’s attempt to create new

identities from the ashes of injustice. The failure of Reconstruction to guarantee equal

rights and representation for all Americans does not nullify the participation of all

Americans in its outcomes, projecting their conflicting notions of freedom into its

execution. Our histories of emancipation in the United States tend to look for righteous

heroes in a world of villains, doubtless tempered by the evils of slavery and our collective

attempts to make sense of millions of acts of senseless oppression. As Walter Johnson

observes, “we must admit we are practicing therapy rather than politics: we are using our

work to make ourselves feel better and more righteous rather than to make the world

better or more righteous.”129

As historians, we have not deprived anyone of their agency

any more than we have returned it; doing so would prove next to impossible. Instead we

have granted legitimacy to illegitimate discourses, accepting race as meaningful even as

we seek to alter its meanings.130

Negotiating Freedom is the story of emancipation as it was encountered, of

Reconstruction as it was enacted. Black and White West Felicianans’ behaviors and

experiences tended to overlap even as they continued many of the material and social

conditions of slavery. Parish residents of all backgrounds struggled to respond to their

129

Johnson, “On Agency,” p. 121. 130

Barbara Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review

181(1990):97-100. Fields questions the meaning of race as a category of analysis and criticizes racialized

forms of determinism. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History

(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995), pp. 73-77, 90-92. Trouillot suggested that the power of race ideology

caused contemporaries and subsequent historians to misrepresent the Haitian Revolution to preserve their

racialized notions of order. Trouillot famously observed that “the Haitian Revolution thus entered history

with the peculiar characteristic of being unthinkable even as it happened” (p. 73), suggesting a crucial

distinction between history as it occurred and as it is represented by contemporaries and historians.

63

changing environments, often confronting obstacles well beyond their control. White

planters fled a landscape void of human property just as black laborers left areas where

planters had claimed them as slaves. These migrants sought to preserve or create versions

of freedom or unfreedom integral to their identities. Those that remained discovered new

challenges amid the ashes of the old plantation order and forged alliances to protect their

changing interests. Former slaves occasionally found friends among the agents of the

Freedmen’s Bureau and self-proclaimed Unionists. Increasingly, however, white planters

and yeomen formed alliances with Reconstruction authorities based on longstanding race

ideology that left freedmen to depend on and defend one another even as they competed

among themselves for the scant resources of the postwar plantation. White planter and

their allies were able to deploy violence where their black neighbors could not, bound as

they were by legal and social systems that increasingly privileged planters’ property and

whiteness. If we are tempted to look past the initial uncertainty of emancipation to the

continued association of race and class and the collapse of Reconstruction’s potential, we

must remind ourselves of this initial period of flight, alliance, and violence in which

categories were challenged and defined. We cannot afford heroes and villains from a past

defined by agents. Everyone Reconstructed.

64

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