Labor Militancy and Black Grassroots Political Mobilization in the Louisiana Sugar Region, 1865-1868

Abstract

IN EARLY AUGUST 1868 THE FREEDMEN'S BUREAU AGENT FOR IBERVILLE Parish, Louisiana, Charles E. Merrill, was called upon mediate one of countless labor disputes that occupied much of his and other bureau agents' time. In this instance, Merrill investigated complaint of John Williams, a freedman and head laborer Belle Grove plantation, who claimed that his employer, Henry Ware, had dismissed him on account of his political opinion. Merrill ultimately concluded that Williams's dismissal did not involve his political views. Nonetheless, because political and labor conflicts had become inseparable in highly charged atmosphere surrounding 1868 presidential campaign, Merrill found it necessary remind local justice of peace, James C. Adamson (whom Williams had at first evidently petitioned success), that planters must not be allowed use their authority as employers interfere with their workers' political rights. Ware has no right discharge any of his laborers account of their political opinion, Merrill lectured Adamson, adding that [i]f planters carry politics into fields they will find it bad business. Planters who could not convince freedmen to join their party by fair and honorable means were leave them alone. If Mr. Ware does not want republican laborers his plantation, let him pay them in full for time contracted for, and they will leave his plantation at once, Merrill insisted. If he wants their labor, let them go work, regard politics.(1) Merrill's sentiments notwithstanding, planters in Louisiana sugar region and throughout South would have found it impossible--even had they been so inclined--to let freedmen go work without regard politics.(2) As Eric Foner, Michael W. Fitzgerald, and Julie Saville have convincingly shown, black grassroots political mobilization profoundly shaped labor arrangements southern plantations in years after emancipation.(3) Instances of black political mobilization in South had appeared before war's end but tended be dominated at first by antebellum free black elite and confined largely urban areas. With onset of Radical Reconstruction in 1867, by contrast, this mobilization expanded include mass of former plantation slaves, who formed political organizations, held rallies and engaged in debate, registered and voted en masse, and banded together for self-defense and preserve internal unity. These activities injected politics into questions concerning freedmen's working lives, as conflict over seemingly mundane aspects of plantation routine underscored larger contest over decision-making authority between former slaveholders and freedmen. Black politics transformed social landscape by shifting balance of power plantations. In fluid labor markets of early Reconstruction, it even tilted that balance--albeit briefly--in freedmen's favor. While it is true that black grassroots political mobilization altered southern labor arrangements, most scholarly attention has focused how this development unfolded in cotton South, where freedmen's success in rejecting gang labor and in gaining access land had unintended consequences. The various forms of sharecropping and tenancy that came dominate in cotton production, whatever their much-debated origins, eventually undermined very solidarity that had strengthened former slaves' bargaining position in first place. As individual black families or households spread out over cotton plantations, it became increasingly difficult for them mobilize for self-defense or act collectively in other ways. Ironically, Michael W. Fitzgerald observed in his study of black political mobilization and emergence of sharecropping, the freedmen's success in renting land dispersed them widely throughout countryside, making them more vulnerable attack. …