Abstract: Early Black Farmers on the Island

In 1882, in a northwest Mississippi town, three brothers, sons of a former slave and in fact former slaves themselves, purchased three hundred and fifty acres. This achievement, which took place nineteen years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, is tied to the fact that in that same year, this slave and his children left the Mississippi county where they had been held in bondage and traveled to a contraband camp in the Mississippi River off of Memphis, Tennessee. At the camp for refugees, the elder's desire to become a farmer met with a charge given Superintendent of Freedmen in the western district, John Eaton of New Hampshire, later chaplain of the 27th Ohio. Eaton's legacy is tainted by the claim that he coerced masses of blacks to sign labor contracts, a precedent to sharecropping, yet the case of this one particular slave and his progeny provides proof that Eaton found a way to create farming opportunities for at least some blacks. Freedman's Bureau records, pre-bureau records, and Eaton's own words further support the idea that under his leadership blacks farmed on the island before the end of the war.