After the Bureau: The Rise of African-American Debt Peonage and Convict Labor in the South following Reconstruction Debt peonage and convict-lease labor were the dark realities for many African Americans in the years following southern Reconstruction. Based on the contract labor laws of the Reconstruction Era, peonage, the practice of holding someone in labor service pending repayment of a debt, and convict leasing, the renting out of convict labor, were popular methods of involuntary servitude employed by the southern white landowning class from 1877 through the early 1940s. Historians argue as to the direct cause of these systems of involuntary servitude; however, most will agree that the issue is deeply rooted in the policies of Reconstruction. For over one hundred years, historians have viewed Reconstruction through contemporary eyes. Early historiography, led by the William A. Dunning school, portrays Reconstruction as a dark time of government corruption, epitomized by scalawags, carpetbaggers, and a nefarious Freedmen’s Bureau, with Radical Republicans at the helm. Turn of the century historians viewed Andrew Johnson as a hero who battled Radical Republicans as they inflicted black supremacy on an innocent and struggling white South. Viewed as a dark, oppressive time in history, the light returned to the South only when the southern Democratic Party garnered victory in state legislatures and in Washington thereby allowing the rebel states’ “Redeemers” to re-establish “Home Rule,” a euphemism for white supremacy.1 1 Eric Foner, “Reconstruction Revisited,” Reviews in American History 10, no. 4 (Dec., 1982): 82-83. 3 The traditionalist view of Reconstruction remained fairly consistent until the 1960s, when revisionists placed Andrew Johnson in the role of the bigoted politician attempting to impede the work of Radical Republican idealists. These historians focused on the positive aspects of Reconstruction represented in the political, educational, and economic progress of southern blacks. However, revisionists tended to gloss over the reality of potentially corrupt local and federal agencies.2 By the 1970s, “‘post-revisionists’” such as C. Vann Woodward and August Meier argued that Reconstruction had little overall effect on the country as a whole. These historians did not consider Reconstruction as a radical departure, but instead as a fairly conservative attempt at change. Some, such as Eric McKitrick, John and LaWanda Cox, Michael Perman, and William Gillette, favored the concept that moderate rather than radical Republicans, motivitated by the preservation of the Union and cooperation with southern whites instead of betterment for the freedmen, molded Reconstruction legislation. In effect, Reconstruction prompted little social change in the New South.3 More recently, works by historians such as Eric Foner revive the perspective in W.E.B. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction. Foner studies the role of citizenship and the challenge of defining freedom for former slaves, illustrated by the proactive nature of African Americans as they established their identity separate from white authority. The development of black churches, black social and political organizations, and black schools, as well as the reuniting of the family unit, and securing the right to vote, exemplified the expanse between slavery and freedom. Freedmen struggled in the face of oppression and bigotry to define freedom on their 2 Ibid., 83 3 Ibid., 83-84 4 own terms, and readily appropriated the benefits of Reconstruction policies in an attempt to better their economic and political situation.4 Within the realm of Reconstruction history lies the story of involuntary servitude, which arose from the dust of Reconstruction. Many historians disagree concerning the root cause of post-bellum peonage in the South. Some, such as Donald Nieman, argue that political and economic issues, particularly the suppression of land ownership for African Americans, racism and the depression that began in 1873 drove many southern freedmen into the debt peonage system.5 Whereas Pete Daniel posits that social issues including the law, violence, and illiteracy created the peonage system with legal “coercion” as the key to the movement between freedom and peonage.6 Still, Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch broach the subject from the standpoint of economy and class. The lack of available traditional financing for agricultural workers and landowners shifted the responsibility of credit supply to the merchants. Power was in the hands of these merchants, who demanded payment in cotton and who were often the freedmen’s only resource for daily living supplies. Thus, merchants created exploitive monopolies by controlling the money lending, the sustenance, and the crop. Northern investors demanded cotton, and this demand fueled the monopoly system. These merchants wielded enough power to force debtors into the production of risky but profitable commercial crops like cotton in lieu of subsistence farming, thus perpetuating a cycle of debt.7 4 Ibid., 86-87 5 Donald G. Nieman, “Introduction,” From Slavery to Sharecropping: white Land and Black Labor in the Rural South 1865-1900, vol. 3, African American Life in the Post-Emancipation South, 1861-1900, ed. Donald E. Nieman (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), x, xi. 6 Pete Daniel, “The Metamorphosis of Slavery, 1865-1900,” The Journal of American History 66, no. 1 (June 1979): 89. 7 Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, “Debt Peonage in the Cotton South After the Civil War,” The Journal of Economic History 32, no. 3 (Sept., 1972): 642-643. 5 However, Donna Franklin maintains that during Reconstruction, Congress designed the Freedmen’s Bureau as a means of protecting the planter, intentionally binding the freedmen to the planter class through labor contracts. Group contracts, she argues, simply reinstated the plantation system and too closely resembled slavery.8 Thus, Reconstruction and the Bureau were economic and social failures from their inception according to Franklin. On the contrary, as argued in this study, both Reconstruction and the Bureau could claim initial social successes for the freedmen. Failure only came with the Bureau’s premature withdrawal from the South in 1872. Without social and legal protection provided by the authority of the federal government, the instances of debt peonage rose significantly. At the same time, state laws subjected freedmen to unjust arrest, conviction, and sentencing as state and local convict laborers. This constant fear of imprisonment on the horrific chain gang deterred freedmen from breaking, or in many cases, even questioning labor contracts. With the termination of the Bureau, Congress missed its opportunity to effect significant change in the lives of southern freedmen by abandoning its commitment to the cause of freedom. Ironically, the Bureau unwittingly laid the foundation for the peonage system with the establishment of contract labor as a quick means of ameliorating the employment issues of the freedmen, as well as fulfilling the desires of the northern economists and businessmen to return the South to its pre-war agricultural status. To achieve this economic strategy, blacks would have to return to the plantation system as laborers. Under the group contract system, an individual freedman signed a written agreement with the landowner on behalf of a large group 8 Donna Franklin, Ensuring Equality: The Structural Transformation of the African-American Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 29. 6 of African-American workers, who then worked the land in exchange for a portion of the crop.9 For instance, this representative may have contracted the labor of all of the emancipated slaves from one plantation. Nonetheless, at the same time, the Bureau served the African-American community as a voice of reason between the blacks and the whites, in a sense “protecting” the poverty stricken (both black and white) from exploitation by the landowning class. During the Bureau’s existence, the southern African-American population had a stronger voice in the court system and the labor system. Federal law empowered the Bureau to squelch the attempts of unscrupulous southern white landowners to force a freedman into a position of involuntary servitude. The Bureau and the Army together protected black voters. Bureau presence also aided in the continuation of the African-American school system, and served as a legal buffer in disputes between blacks and whites. Although powerless to end completely violence and exploitation, the Bureau certainly served as helpmate to freedmen by providing an authoritative voice. Therefore, the freedmen’s position in the labor structure did not develop immediately, but was characterized by gradual change, challenges, and conflict, shifting between group contract labor, tenantry and sharecropping. 10 Lacking a solid plan, the white southern landowners re-built their new labor system based upon a “plantation economy,” characterized by white oppression over black workers;11 or, as Daniel claims, the system was much like a 9 Eric Foner, Short History of Reconstruction 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), 69, 79. 10 C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford UP, 1955, 1957, 1966, 1974, 2002): 6. 11 N. Gordon Carper, “Slavery Revisited,” Phylon (1960-)37, no.1(1976): 87. 7 “unfinished patchwork quilt . . . constructed on the frame of chattel slavery.”12 As C. Vann Woodward shows, the Bureau’s departure did not signal white supremacy immediately. With the agency’s demise, however, white supremacy was free to rise, unchecked. Debt peonage, an exploitive labor system illegal in the United States as defined by the Thirteenth Amendment and the Peonage Statutes of 1867, grew out of the contract labor system.13 With contract labor in place, the evolution of tenant farming and sharecropping followed. For some, among those who chose to remain in agriculture, these forms of labor served them well, while others quickly became a subjugated class of people held in place by debt, violence, and deceit. The long-lived state of racism was impossible to overcome without government support, for a group of people who were struggling to establish themselves as free, independent members of society within a social context of white supremacists who resented their very freedom.https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/1811/6551/After_the_Bureau-pdf.pdf;jsessionid=5D3EA270F7D11355C5617C920D02A0D2?sequence=1
Posted on: Wed, 16 Jul 2014 16:45:38 +0000
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