September 20, 1865 – Letter from Commander of U.S. Forces at Columbia, Louisiana on Mistreatment of Freed Blacks

At the end of the Civil War, America was faced with, as Eric Foner characterized it in Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation & Reconstruction (Knopf, 2005) an event of “biblical proportions” with the transformation of four million slaves from bondage to citizenship. This “critical and revolutionary moment of change” was difficult enough in terms of providing new lives for all these people. Perhaps the bigger barrier was convincing whites, particularly in the South, to come to terms with the new reality.

Foner writes about the excitement over freedom by African Americans; their desire to work, own land, engage in civic activities, vote, and above all, to get educated; and the violent suppression of those aspirations.

Freed slaves were denied their own land as they had been promised (“40 acres and a mule”) and were forced to sign punitive contracts that obligated them and their families to work from sunrise to sunset for whites who might or might not pay them. Only after this labor could they work their own little plot of land to feed their families. Naturally they had more interest in working on the latter than the former. Black men also did not want their women working in white houses, given the history of white sexual exploitation of black women. These attitudes on the part of blacks were translated for public consumption as “lazy.”

Additionally, laws were enacted in the South such as Mississippi’s infamous “pig law” defining the theft of a farm animal as grand larceny. Black men once free soon found themselves imprisoned for minor offenses – often the hapless victims of false accusations – and on chain gangs. Thus with such techniques did whites manage to return the South to a system of cheap, forced labor done by disempowered blacks.

Prisoner stockade for the re-enslavement of blacks by another name, per website of Douglas Blackmon, author of Pulitzer winning Slavery By Another Name

It was in light of these developments that Colonel A. Watson Webber, commander of U.S. forces at Columbia, Louisiana, wrote to his headquarters on September 20, 1865, this day in history, about problems regarding the treatment of freed blacks. He noted:

The people of that parish were many of them members of ‘Harrison’s’ old command, and their treatment of the freed people is reported to me as being fully as bad, if not worse, than in slave times.

The tying up of women by the thumbs, and the cruel punishment of all classes and ages of colored people is indulged in to the heart’s content of these enlightened and humane whites.  Colored people command their esteem less, and awaken their humanities to a far less degree than the miserable curs which they make their pets.  . . .  The people in all this country retain their old ideas with regard to the negro.”

He observed further that in spite of the work blacks were doing for access to food, clothing, and medicine, they were barely better off than “their slave days.” He wrote:

In some cases this payment for services, when made, is sufficient, but as a rule the planters can afford to give these people monthly pay.  As it is, the blacks stand just where they did three years ago as slaves, except that their clothes are more badly worn, and an officer of the government is their driver.  Their proper freedom is yet a myth.”

Colonel Webber had good intentions, but the white people of Louisiana resisted his efforts to improve the situation for blacks. He enclosed a copy of a contract between a black woman and a white “employer” that was shocking to him, explaining there were “others of the same nature”:

I, the within-signed woman of color, do hereby bind myself with E. W. Reitzell as laborer on his plantation from this the 1st day of August, 1865, to the 1st day of January, 1866.  I further agree and bind myself to do all the work he may require of me, to labor diligently and be obedient to all his commands, to pay him due respect, and do all in my power to protect his property from danger, and conduct myself as when I was owned by him as a SLAVE.

For the services of the within-named freed woman of color, E. W. Reitzell binds himself to feed, clothe, house and furnish medical attention to her for the time above specified.  The consideration paid on the part of the employer will be of the same quality and quantity as were furnished the employee while she was the SLAVE of the employer.”

This mistreatment still wasn’t enough for the enraged and resentful whites, as Foner writes. There was one final recourse for Southerners, and that was violence. The Ku Klux Klan, formed in 1866, and other ad hoc groups, did not even feel the need for disguises when they began their reign of terror. They were joined in this struggle by similar organizations such as the White League in Louisiana and the White Brotherhood. The Knights of the White Camelia, pledged to support “the supremacy of the white race,” was founded in 1867 in Louisiana. A white mob in Opelousas, Louisiana killed nearly 300 blacks over the right to vote.

Via Library of Congress

There were some three thousand victims of lynchings carried out between 1882 and 1930, 88 percent of which were African American men, most of whom charged with offenses such as self-defense, effrontery, or sexual offenses against white women (generally found to be false or so harmless as to be ludicrous). Others who were lynched included white shopkeepers or schoolteachers thought to be treating Negroes “fairly” or speaking up for their civil rights.

Foner stresses that the North was complicitous in these crimes: they could not have taken place “without the full acquiescence of the North.” Labor unrest by immigrants in the North made Northerners nervous about setting a “bad precedent” by giving more rights to black workers. Moreover, by the late 1800s, racism was acquiring the “scientific” imprimatur of social Darwinism, phrenology, and other dubious, later-discredited disciplines. Political compromises sealed the South’s fate. (Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was declared the winner of a disputed election in 1876 after agreeing to restore full local autonomy to the South.)

“Jim Crow” laws taking rights away from blacks were enacted in one state of the South after another. The Klan was given free rein to exercise police powers over blacks without fear of reprisal. Schools and other public services for blacks were defunded. History textbooks used in southern schools were designed to teach white superiority and black backwardness, so that children imbibed these ideas from the earliest age.