A Year in the South (37 page)

The imminent expiration of the contract between the Agnews and their hands was another source of contention. The blacks were unhappy with the contract and wanted a different arrangement for next year. In late November Enoch met with Big George to discuss the matter, and they wound up arguing. Enoch was prepared to pay the hands a set amount of cash for every bale of cotton the plantation produced, which was agreeable to Big George, but the two had very different ideas about the laborers' duties and the employer's authority. “Pa wants his hirelings to do anything he wants,” Sam wrote. “George wants to hire to make a crop only. Pa wants a crop not only made but the farm to be kept up, fences prepared and fire wood got &c.” Neither would budge, and the negotiations ended acrimoniously.
26

The real problem, as Sam came to see, was that the blacks did not want to work as laborers at all, for “They have an idea that a hireling is not a freeman.” What they wanted was to obtain land and live as independent farmers. They chafed under the Agnews' control and resented working for their benefit.
27

Sam regarded this dream of yeoman independence as absurd. Freedmen would never be able to get along on their own, he was certain, for they were too ignorant and foolish and lazy—especially the Agnew hands, who were undoubtedly “the most worthless in the whole country.” They ought to reconcile themselves to dependency, quit complaining, do as they were told, and show their former masters proper respect. He was getting fed up with them, and sometimes found himself wishing they would all pack up and leave. Meanwhile, he was doing more and more chores around the place, including chopping wood and shucking corn, simply because it was easier to do them himself than to wrangle with the blacks.
28

Whenever he talked with other planters, he heard of similar problems. “The inefficiency of negroes is a subject of general complaint.” Many planters were convinced, moreover, that their workers were being stirred up by agitators. The culprits most frequently named were the black U.S. army troops posted in the state, who were reportedly encouraging the freedmen to disobey and urging them not to sign contracts for 1866, claiming that the federal government was going to give them land before the present year was out. These troops were also harassing white people, it was said. Sam heard one such story about a planter named Copeland who lived near Guntown. “It seems that Copeland drove off one of his negroe women and would not let her have her things. She reported him [to federal authorities] and a colored sergeant with a detachment of colored brethren were sent to right the matter. Copeland was cursed and abused by these blacks. One … looked at Copeland and said I know you are a d—d rascal by the look of your eye.” Sam was incensed: “Such things are hard to bear.”
29

A growing number of whites were not just angry about the racial situation but frightened. There were persistent reports from all over the state that the freedmen were plotting some sort of uprising, perhaps abetted by the black troops and their Yankee officers. These rumors were fueled by the increasingly common sight of freedmen carrying rifles and shotguns. When questioned, they invariably insisted that they were just hunting, but whites were skeptical. Sam was disturbed to learn that several of the Agnew hands had been seen in the woods with guns. “They have no use for them,” he wrote, “and they ought to be taken from them.”
30

The rumors multiplied and fed on each other as the weeks passed, and by November many sections of Mississippi were in a state of panic. The freedmen were stockpiling weapons and ammunition, it was said, and were going to rise up on Christmas Day and seize control of the plantations. Some planters were sending their families to safety in other states and preparing to defend their lives and property. Governor Humphreys ordered the local militia to muster in any county threatened by insurrection.
31

As the rumors intensified, Sam scrutinized the behavior of the Agnew hands. Although he saw nothing ominous beyond their having guns, and heard of no other suspicious activities in his community, he remained watchful. Scares of this sort had been common before the war, and Sam knew that they almost always proved to be unfounded, but no one could afford to dismiss this one out of hand. With slavery gone and the blacks unleashed, anything seemed possible.
32

In the latter part of November came alarming reports of a planned “outbreak of the negroe population” in Sam's own county of Tippah. The plot was apparently extensive and well organized. “[T]here is a central committee at Ripley,” Sam heard, “and delegates from every neighborhood in the county. The Central Committee receive their instructions from some Yankees.” The plan was “to rise about Christmas and kill all the white men and boys.” It was supposedly uncovered by a white man who had disguised himself in a U.S. army uniform, won the conspirators' confidence, “and ascertained their plans, numbers and supply of arms.”
33

Once the authorities were apprised of the plot, the county militia sprang into action, fanning out through the countryside in search of insurrectionists and weapons. Dozens of blacks were taken into custody. “One was killed,” Sam learned, “because he ran and would not surrender.”
34

At two o'clock in the morning of November 24, a squad of militiamen descended on the Agnew plantation and forced their way into the blacks' cabins to search for weapons. Less than twelve hours later the same squad reappeared and again invaded the cabins. All together, five guns were confiscated, one of them a rifle “shortened so as to answer for a pistol,” as Sam noted suspiciously. Every freedman's cabin in the neighborhood was likewise raided. No one was arrested, but many guns were seized. “Some of the negroes take this move in high dudgeon,” Sam wrote, “and say they thought they had equal rights with a white man to bear arms.”
35

In the days that followed, Sam anxiously sought more news. The blacks being held in the county jail in Ripley were interrogated thoroughly, he learned, but the authorities could find no evidence of a conspiracy and soon let them go. The frantic rumors persisted for a while, but then died down. By December things were quiet again.
36

Although he remained convinced that disarming the blacks was a prudent measure, Sam eventually concluded that this Tippah County insurrection scare was groundless. The conspiracy rumors “were only the creations of the imaginations of timid people.” As the panic subsided, he reflected ruefully on one of its potential consequences: “the negroes must think that the white people are afraid of them.”
37

Similar spasms of hysterical reaction gripped communities throughout the state in November. Once calm was restored, Mississippians turned their attention to other matters. Among the most important was the progress of the new state legislature, which had been in session since mid-October. The legislators had much to do. The state's government was bankrupt, its economy deranged, its transportation network a shambles, its indigents desperate for relief. All of these problems had to be addressed and the state's course toward the future set.
38

No issue was more pressing, however, than that of race. What role the freedmen should play in the postwar world was an enormously important and difficult question, now further complicated by the uprising scare. President Johnson's position was that the white people of the South, acting through their restored state governments, should be free to define the place of the black race as they saw fit, as long as they did not try to reestablish slavery. Southern whites knew, however, that they must also reckon with the demands of Congress and the Northern public. Few were willing to grant the freedmen anything like equality, but between chattel slavery and full citizenship there lay a vast terrain where the blacks might be situated.
39

The racial statutes enacted by the Mississippi legislature during the fall, known collectively as the Black Code, seemed to Sam and most other whites a reasonable solution. The freedmen were granted certain basic rights: their marriages and other contracts would be legally recognized, they could bring civil suits and criminal charges before the law, their testimony would be accepted in court cases involving a black. They would not, however, be allowed to serve on juries or testify in any case to which a black was not a party. Nor would they be allowed to vote. They were also denied full economic freedom: none would be permitted to rent or lease farmland; any who were unemployed, even temporarily, would be prosecuted as vagrants and forced to work to pay off their fine; any who quit before their labor contract expired would be arrested and sent back to their employer. With the insurrection scare in mind, the legislature also outlawed “seditious speeches” by blacks and barred them from owning guns or bowie knives.
40

Sam followed the legislative proceedings closely in the newspapers. He was also keenly interested in the pronouncements of the Freedmen's Bureau, which had authority to intervene in matters involving blacks. From what Sam could tell, the bureau officials in Mississippi accepted the premise that something less than full equality was sufficient for the Negro race, and they seemed more or less satisfied with the Black Code. In particular, the bureau seemed to endorse the notion that compulsion was necessary to get the blacks to work. In a published statement addressed to the freedmen, the head of the bureau in Mississippi explained why he supported the state's new vagrancy law: “I cannot ask the civil officers to leave you idle, to beg or steal. If they find any of you without business and means of living, they will do right if they treat you as bad persons and take away your misused liberty.” Bureau officials furthermore warned the blacks that there would be no government distribution of land, no “forty acres and a mule.” Dismiss that false rumor, they advised, hasten to sign contracts for next year, and labor dutifully for your employer.
41

Sam wondered how much good these lectures would do. The freedmen remained restless, and even with the Black Code in effect, they had enough leverage in labor negotiations to frustrate the planters. Those on the Agnew plantation continued to haggle over every task and talked of leaving at year's end if they did not get what they wanted.
42

The freedmen were not the only restless spirits in postwar Mississippi. As the fall progressed, Sam noticed a great many white people on the move, particularly young men of the poorer sort. They passed frequently on the road that ran by the plantation, many on foot, nearly all strangers to the county, some from distant parts of the South. While there was nothing threatening about them, they seemed as unsettled as the roving freedmen Sam saw so often. A number of them stopped to inquire about renting or sharecropping land. Among these were two former Confederate soldiers named Sutton and Wardlaw. They were from McNairy County, Tennessee, they told Sam, but they could live there no longer, for the unionists who dominated their community had sworn to run the former rebels out. Others whom Sam met seemed not so much uprooted by the war as liberated by it, sensing in the turmoil of the postwar months new opportunities to make their way in the world.
43

Some of these fortune seekers and refugees had left wives and children at home, intending to send for them once they found a place to settle. Talking with them, Sam was no doubt reminded how much he missed Nannie and Buddy, who had been with Nannie's family in Starkville since early October. He celebrated his thirty-second birthday on November 22 without them, but he was cheered by the knowledge that they were scheduled to return by train the next day. Wiley drove him to Guntown in the carriage to meet them. The train arrived a couple of hours after dark with Nannie and Buddy on board. Sam greeted them joyfully, but his spirits fell as soon as he saw his baby's face, which was “much disfigured by an eruption.… The left cheek was almost a solid black scab, and the right looked very sore.” The little fellow had suffered from this affliction almost the whole time he was in Starkville, but Nannie had never mentioned it in her letters.
44

They spent the night at the inn down the street from the depot, but Sam got little sleep for worrying about Buddy. First thing the next morning, he consulted a doctor in town and was relieved to learn that the condition, while uncomfortable, was not dangerous. It was called milk scab and would clear up on its own.
45

They lingered in Guntown no longer than necessary, for Nannie was anxious to be home and Enoch needed the mules to get his cotton to market. Once the crop was all picked, cleaned, and dried, Enoch and the hands had run it through a gin to remove the seeds and then compressed it into bales using a big screw press. Three bales weighing about 400 pounds each were now bagged and ready for sale.
46

On November 27, the Agnews' big farm wagon set out for Memphis with the cotton. The driver was a hired white man. Enoch, whose health was poor, did not go along in the wagon but, instead, took the train. He returned a week later, having sold the cotton for forty-four cents a pound—considerably more than he had gotten for the two bales from the 1864 crop that he had sold back in July, but less than he could have gotten if he had made it to market earlier in the fall. Two days later the wagon returned, laden with supplies.
47

Wintry weather arrived in the second week of December. When Sam looked out his window early on the eighth, he saw thick frost, and on the thirteenth came a cold north wind. The next morning was frigid. “[E]ven my ink is a solid mass,” he noted. “Old winter has been slow coming but he has come at last.” On the sixteenth there was snow. It fell for two hours, then gave way to a heavy mist that froze as it descended, wrapping the tree branches and twigs in dazzling cocoons of ice.
48