After Slavery

Northern victory in the Civil War brought an end to slavery, but marked the beginning of a struggle on the part of freedpeople and their allies to invest their new freedom with real substance. Their ability to mobilize in their own interests varied from one community to the next, particularly in the early aftermath of the war. In the rural interior, embittered Confederate veterans known as ‘bushwhackers’ organized into gangs and wreaked their vengeance upon freedpeople and more than a few vulnerable whites. By the late spring of 1865 whites in parts of the Carolina piedmont and upcountry were attempting to resurrect the antebellum ‘slave patrols,’ requiring that freedpeople traveling the roads carry a ‘pass’ from their white employers and punishing those who did not. Elsewhere, however, ex-slaves were in a better position to assert their rights in the new context: along the South Carolina coast below Charleston, freedpeople took possession of the abandoned plantations divided out under General Sherman’s Special Order no. 15, looking to a future as independent farmers. To the north in Georgetown and into coastal and northeastern North Carolina, freedpeople never benefited from land redistribution, but they did take advantage of early Union army occupation to begin to establish free communities on secure foundations. Their strength in numbers in port cities like Charleston and Wilmington offered some protection against violence and gave them leverage in dealing with landowners and employers.

Historians have been struck by the capacity and enthusiasm for organization shown by freedpeople in the early months and years after their release from slavery. In the past scholars hostile to the ex-slaves sometimes attributed this to their manipulation by ‘carpetbaggers’—entrepreneurial adventurers from the north—and ‘scalawags’—their home-grown southern equivalents. Implicit in these explanations was a deep-rooted assumption that on their own, blacks could not have mustered the intelligence and determination to mobilize in their own interests; they required white leadership and guidance. Over the past generation, we have come to understand that even in the desperate conditions which confronted them under slavery, African Americans found ways to develop the resources with which to resist. In a system that denied the broad slave population literacy, preachers and ministers from with in the slave community would play a disproportionate role in holding together communities before emancipation and leading them afterwards. Some evidence exists (included here) that fraternal orders like the freemasons and benevolent societies had made inroads among the slaves even before was banned

Sources:
Document 1. A Wartime Encounter between Two South Carolina Slaves
Document 2. Rev. Henry McNeal Turner Reports on Organizing among Freedpeople in Georgia
Document 3. A Black Organizer Reports on the Reception for Republican Orators among Freedpeople in South Carolina
Document 4. A Destitute Local Union League President Seeks Aid from the Governor of North Carolina
Document 5. John T. Costin Reports on the Difficulties of Organizing
Document 6. A Union League Organizer Seeks Permission to Bargain on Behalf of Women and Children
Document 7. A Federal Officer Reports that Freedpeople are Organizing Military Companies on the South Carolina Sea Islands
Document 8. White Conservatives Complain that the Union Leagues are Organizing Labor Strikes South of Charleston
Document 9. A Charleston Newspaper on the 1868 Municipal Elections