I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction

by Kidada E. Williams

According to one Freedmen’s Bureau agent, problems generally arose when white men could not “throw aside the dogma” of mastery and accept the “unpalatable truth” of slavery’s end and Black people being able to reap the rewards of free labor.84 Whites sabotaged the transition to free labor whenever they could with the hope of “embarrassing” the United States and compelling Congress to “revive slavery,” the agent observed.85 In the new contract and sharecropping systems that emerged, the planter class found their opening to deny families economic freedom and sovereignty. Employers and laborers wrestled over the terms of the work people performed. Enslavers-turned-employers who had their finances disrupted by the war rarely had cash on hand, so they agreed to pay laborers like Edward Crosby’s family in shares of the crop. Some attracted workers by offering large parcels of land, only to reduce the promised acreage within a year, using the threat of violence to force families to accept the new terms or move with nothing to show for it.