The War Provided an Opening

"The legal foundation that buttressed Negro landownership, strangely enough, was inspired not so much by radical pressures as by the simple requirements of war." (Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction).

Though it is complicated and requires close historical analysis, the Civil War did in fact provide an opening for black landowership. At several refugee or contraband camps, officials did attempt to create such opportunity for a certain class of blacks. As Rose writes (a comment implied by DuBois), superintendents needed not only the labor of masses of blacks but the expertise of the negro driver, who had a thorough knowledge of farm operations. These blacks, who might also know how to navigate the local geography since they had probably done so on business for their masters, naturally became teamsters during the war delivering clothing and other supplies to their black brethren. These men stood ready then to take advantage of any small opening within the war machine.

Openings were created from inconsistency in jurisdiction. At one point, the Department of Freedmen (Army) had control of the camps. At another point, the Treasury Department took control. I have surmised that superintendents had more control over the camps and more opportunity to create avenues to black landownership when the Department of Freedmen was in control. We see this with the example of the President Island Experiment, where John Eaton (via the Federal Government) purchased a local tract of land and divided it among the freedmen.

We see this also at Port Royal where Treasury agents were in constant conflict, and officials themselves thwarted efforts to create black landowners because of their own greed. Nevertheless, a few blacks actually came for a time to occupy in South Carolina the plantations of their masters. By default of taxes, plantations were lost by whites and bought by whites and blacks (who pooled their small earnings) for 1.00 an acre. Though there is a positive side to this story, there is also a negative side since blacks, advised to squat on desired land, were later removed from the land, which was sold out from under them. Still, a number of blacks were able to acquire and maintain the land they had sought.

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.