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Group of freedmen by a canal at Richmond, Virginia. Library of Congress photo, LC-DIG-cwpb-00468 DLC.
One of the questions I may never get answered about my Civil War ancestors is “How did freedom come to the five slaves of the Poore family?”
Did Union soldiers ride up to the farm and announce that they were free? Or did the slaves take a hand in their own fate and flee to Union lines? Or at the end of the war, did they just walk away?
The Emancipation Proclamation, issued 150 years ago today, invited Southern slaves to take a hand in their own liberation and a Union victory. One of the four women slaves may have done so.
By 1864, one of the bondswomen is no longer found in the household. The records are silent as to what happened to her. She may have braved the many dangers to runaway to the federal lines.
By the middle of 1864, even if the Confederacy somehow survived the war, antebellum slave society had been wrecked beyond recovery. In many places in Mississippi those slaves who hadn’t run away to the Yankees could often move about as they wished.
So many white men had been called away to the army that control of slaves on plantations had nearly stopped. Slave patrols couldn’t get enough men to patrol county beats.
Slaves more and more realized that the chains of bondage were coming loose. On plantations with many slaves, the bondsmen set their own work pace or spent more time working their own crops.
On a yeoman farm such as the Poore family operated, the slaves had less room to defy their masters and make changes. The white family members usually worked shoulder to shoulder with their slaves in the fields. The slaves simply didn’t have a larger slave community to support them against the master.
But the rapid spread of news on the slave grapevine no doubt alerted the Poore slaves that freedom was at hand.
Certainly the Poore family’s slaves deserve to be admired for their courage and for holding on to their hope for freedom despite great odds and setbacks. Besides the usual hardships and worries of slavery, they also suffered the same as their masters from the raids on food and supplies during the war.
These extraordinary people endured under the most difficult conditions. What greater example can be found in American history of faith in the meaning of liberty under the Constitution? Where else is there an example of such a patient belief that the guarantee of freedom would eventually be applied to all Americans?
Do you have any stories about how freedom came to the slaves?
so enjoy your postings.. John Chasely Jasper Jr and wife Sue..We do receive your postings..Thank you
John and Sue, thank you for the kind words!
In parts of South Carolina, slavery was replaced by “work contracts” that functioned to keep the former slave working constantly, often for the same family, with none of the safeguards that we would consider basic “workers’ rights” today. This situation gave way to sharecropping, where getting out of debt was impossible. The legal status of blacks in the South, through numerous Jim Crow laws, right up until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was known as “slavery without the chains.”
I suppose I’m taking the pessimistic view that freedom for blacks in 1865 was hardly what the abolitionist movement had anticipated, and after Reconstruction the situation got even worse.
I tend to be more optimistic and positive in my views of the past.
While the war had changed slaves into freedpeople, it had not turned white Mississippians’ into egalitarians on the issue of race.
After Emancipation, the Poore family’s former slaves, if they stayed in Jasper County and Mississippi, certainly faced racism and discrimination that burdened and degraded their lives. White Mississippians’ treatment of African Americans turned particularly harsh after 1890 when Jim Crow laws began to be enacted.
But it would be a mistake, as historians Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen have pointed out, to think only of newly freed blacks such as those from the Poore farm as victims. “To ignore their hard-won genuine gains, or to minimize them as mere exceptions, trivializes their contributions and achievements,” the two historians wrote of all freedpeople.
Too many Southern historians have tended to ignore important African American successes and contributions in order to emphasize white racism and discrimination.
Historian Edward L. Ayers has made a similar observation about the period after 1876 (the end of Reconstruction), but his words apply equally as well to the years before. Speaking of both black and white Southerners, he noted that “We have focused so much on the limitations Southerners endured that we have lost sight of the rest of their lives.”
As a result, Ayers said, Southerners “have become synonymous with the problems they faced. Southerners of both races have become reduced to objects of pity, scorn, romance, or condescension.”
Historian Steven Hahn also argued for a broader view that sees freedpeople as more than mere receivers of freedom from “the Union army, the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Republican party, and black leaders who had for the most part been free before the Civil War. . . . In countless ways, freedpeople built and drew on relations, institutions, infrastructures, and aspirations that they and their ancestors had struggled for and constructed as slaves.”
We don’t yet know where and how the four women and one man who had once been slaves to the Poore family began their new lives in freedom. Their part of this story will have to wait until we can discover more about them.
But we do the Poore freedpeople a disservice if we see them only as actors to be directed by others in the Reconstruction play and ignore their newly won freedom to make their own choices.
Sharecropping wasn’t all bad, despite what they teach in schools today, a lot of which is one-sided bulls*it. It could be bad, of course, like anything else wrought by humanity. But some freedmen whose descendants I know in Mississippi used the system successfully and prospered by it.
Sharecropping was still thriving in Mississippi as late as the 1930s because there wasn’t much other employment available. After the war, of course, farming was almost the only kind of employment. The South was in ruins, railroads torn up, many homes and businesses and courthouses burned, so it was catch as catch can for many people, and economic conditions didn’t change much until well into the 20th century. You can argue about why. A lot of Southerners felt the Yankees kept them down economically while they, of course, were keeping the blacks down. Although that was not only in the South. Jim Crow applied in the North as well.
I don’t know exactly how the slaves of my Mississippi ancestors found out they were free, but since the state had been overrun with Union soldiers since 1862 and by the time the war ended some of them were U.S. Colored Troops I expect finding out wasn’t difficult. Lincoln’s Proclamation, of course, couldn’t be broadly enforced until the war ended, even in MS, and it didn’t even apply to the slave states of Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware because they were not “in rebellion.” It would take the 13th Amendment to make it fully legal and binding.
The slave owners on my mother’s side were wealthy and left behind diaries and letters so I know what some of their 100-plus slaves did. Some ran away during the war, usually no farther than to a Union unit for which they worked until the war ended. Many stayed on the plantation north of Oxford, despite its trashing by Union soldiers in late 1862 and again in 1863, and they negotiated contracts for employment there when the war ended.
My gggrandmother wrote her husband in the summer of 1865 to hurry home because there was much competition among landowners for hiring the new freedmen and, she said, their former slaves said they would not negotiate with her but only with him. She was afraid they would take better offers and leave, making working the hundreds of acres impossible. As a woman she had no legal standing to sign a contract, or maybe the freedmen just figured they’d get a better deal from him. Many of them stayed (exactly how many I don’t know) and worked under contract, but fluctuating crop prices in the 1870s eventually drove him bankrupt and much of the plantation was sold piecemeal.
Some of these freedmen saved enough of the money they earned, however, to buy their own land. About a dozen families of them moved a few miles northwest and bought land in an area that’s still farmed by their descendants—on the same land. I tracked down and interviewed two of them in 1999 for a book I’m still working on. These families and others also took my gggrandfather’s surname, Pegues, and I’m told that many others elsewhere, some in Chicago, still use it. It wasn’t out of any great love for him, apparently, but only because at the time that was all they knew and later, under Jim Crow, when some of them might have wanted to change it, they were afraid to. By now I’m sure it would simply confuse all their relations to change the name.
As for the Yeoman slave owners on my father’s side, the freedmen situation is a lot murkier, because I inherited no diaries or letters to speak of. Some of the former slaves apparently stayed on as hired hands. There were only a dozen to begin with. In the 1880 census I found the same names of three former slaves still living with my Civil War veteran ggrandfather and his family. By then, I suppose, the older ones had died and some of the younger ones had moved on.
Thanks for the post, Ralph, I enjoyed recounting this stuff.
Dick, how great that you at least have some diaries and letters to help in your research! I wish I had just one such document.
New historical research is showing that what I call the Grand Narratives of Southern history are wrong. These narratives are the traditional, widely accepted (by professional historians) interprepretations that picture black and white Southerners mainly as sharecroppers and poor, caught in the trap of crop liens and growing cotton.
To some degree that was true. But my Civil War veterans don’t fit that stereotype. I will give just one brief example of my great grandfather William B. Poore to show how some historians have misinterpreted Census data.
In the 1870 Census, William was shown as a hired hand supervising a farm. This would seem to make him fit into the class of veterans not doing well after the war. In fact, he was supervising the farm of his widowed mother-in-law, which I believe indicates that he was the real head of the household.
William eventually became a large landowner of more than 300 acres and listed his occupation as “farmer.” He grew some cotton as almost every farmer did. But from other sources I learned that that was far from his primary occupation. He also operated a grist mill and sawmill. He seems to have made more money from timber and supplying railroads than from farming.
His two brothers had a similar career path. All of them did some farming and growing of cotton, but timber and the railroads were far more important to them than cotton.
The more local history and genealogy research I do, the more I find that my ancestors’ lives just don’t fit the Grand Narratives, although some people do in some places. I truly believe that it is research by amateurs such as we that will eventually cause the Grand Narratives to be rewritten.
A succint explanation of what is going on comes from a scifi book I’m reading called The Hemetic Millenia:
“Simple dramatic narratives are easier to recall than messy historical facts. Flattering narratives are even easier, so [their founders] tend to turn into demigods. Simpler rules are also easier than complex ones, so stagnant societies tend to turn into parodies of themselves.”
Uh, make that Hermetic Millennia, by John C. Wright.