That notion that the freedman was inherently lazy was the most strikingaspect of the revised proslavery argument. ‘T’o antebellum northern visitorswho had looked out upon a vista of slaves working dawn to dusk whilewhites refined the practice of leisure to an art form, it seemed an absurdity.But southern whites believed only the carefully controlled use of forcecould keep the slave at work, maintain the economic viability of southernagriculture, and incidentally, return a profit as well.

a speaker from the s tate capital .75"Southern whites , " a Freedmen's B ur eau agen t observed , "are qu i teindignant if they are not treated with the same deference that they wereaccustomed to " under slavery, and behavior that departed from the etiquette of a n tebellum race relations frequently provoked violence. Conduct deemed manly or dignified on the part of whi tes became exampl esof "insolence" and " i n s u bordination " in the case of blacks

Yet freedom meant more than simply receiving wages . Freedmenwished to take control of the condiLions under which they labored, freethemselves from subordination to white au thority, and carve out thegreatest measure of economic autonomy. As in the case of their families ,churches, and social life, economic emancipation meant freedom fromwhite control.

To white pred1cuons that t hoeywo uld not work, blacks r ponded thal if any clas could be characterized" lazy " it wa lhe planters, who h a d "l"1ved m. " d i1 eness alJ l h ell". 1·1ves on::olen J;bor."

n no realm of Southern life did blacks' efforls to define the terms of theirfreedom have implications as explosive for the entire society as the economy . Blacks brought out of slavery a conception of themselves as a"Working Class of People" who had been unjus tly deprived of the fruitsof their labor.

hted to see ruralblacks establishing churches, lyceums, and schoo

Through o u t the South, blacks emerging· from slavery pooled their2 2resources to purchase land and erect their own churches .

While initially urgi n g·blacks to remain within their congregations, most white minis ters insis tedthat the old inequalities-separate pews, the white monop oly on churchgovernance-mu s t continue. 2

Theirsecret after-dark religious meetings provided a rare opportu n i ty forslaves to con gregate and express their sorrows and aspira tions free fromwhite surveillance . 20

. With the death of slavery ,urban blacks seized control of their own churches , while the "invisibleinstitution" o f the rural slave church ..emerged into the full light of day.The creation of an i ndependent black religious life proved to be a momentous and irreversible consequence o f emancipation

Yet if emancipation not only institutionalizedthe black family but also spawned tensions within it, black men andwomen shared a passionate comm i tment to the s tability of family life asa badge of freedom and the solid foundation upon which a new blackcommunity could flourish. 1

the Southern Homestead Act of 1866 allowed women toclaim a portion of the public domain only if unmarried. Political developments further reinforced the distinction between the public sphere ofmen and the private world of women. In the early days of freedom bothmen and women took part in informal mass meetings, although from thestart men alone served as delegates to organized black conventions. After1867 black men could serve on juries, vote, hold office, and rise toleadership in the Republican party, while women, like their white counterparLs, could not.

Outside events strongly influenced this development. Service in theUnion Anny enabled black men to participate more directly than womenin the strugg·le for freedom. The Freedmen's Bureau designated thehusband as head of the black household, insisting that men sign contractsfor the labor of their entire families and establishing wage scales that paidwomen less than men for identical plantation labor.

With freedom came developments that strengthened patriarchywithin the black family and institutionalized the notion that men andwomen should inhabit separate spheres

For blacks, liberating their families from the authority of whites was anindispensable element of freedom.

here is no question thatmany black men considered it a badge of honor to see their wives workingat home and believed that, as head of the family, the man should decidehow its labor was organized.

Manycontemporaries, who viewed white women who remained at home asparagons of the domestic ideal, saw their black counterparts as lazy andsligh tly ludicrou s .

Beginning in 1 86 5 , and for years thereafter, whi tes throughou t theSouth complained of the d i fficulty of obtaining female field laborers .Thus was lost, as a Georgian put i t , "a very importan t per cent of theentire labor of the South .

Among thetimves them elves, however, labor seems to have been divided alongslaexual lines, with men hopping wood, hunting, and as urning positionsf leadership (such as driver and preacher) , while women washed, s ewed ,oooked, gardened, a nd assumed primary responsibility for the care ofchildren . Like free women, female slaves found that their responsibilitiescdid not end when the "workday" was over.

Reconstruct ion was the with:videdrawal of black women from field labor. The nin teenth century's "cu l tdomes l i ity , ' ' which defined t he home as a woman's proper sphere, wasofever thought t apply to black and certainly not to slaves .

The result was a striking change in Southern urban living patterns. Before the war, blacks and whites had lived scattered throughoutSouthern cities. Reconstruction witnessed the rise of a new, segregated,urban geography: "the main town, populated principally by whites, andcontaining the finest structures; and the 'free town' (which the whitesoften dub Liberia), consisting chiefly of wretched log cabins." For allthese reasons, the urban migration slowed dramatically after 1870 andthe propor

For a variety of reasons, Southern towns and cities experienced9anespecially large influx of freedmen during and immediately after the CivilWar. In the cities, many blacks believed, "freedom was free-er." Herewere black social institutions-schools, churches, and fraternal societies-and here too, in spite of inequities in law enforcement, were thearmy (including black soldiers) and Freedmen's Bureau, offering protection from the violence so pervasive in much of the rural South.

With emancipation, it seemed that half the South's black population took to the roads. "Right off colored folks started.on the move," aTexas slave later recalled. "They seemed to want to get closer to freedom, so they'd know what it was-like it was a place or a city." Blacks'previous treatment as slaves seemed to have little to do with the movement. "Every one of A. M. Dorman's negroes quit him," an Alabamaplanter reported. "They have always been as free and as much indulgedas his children." The ability to come and go as they pleased would longremain a source of pride and excitement for former slaves. "The Negroesare literally crazy about traveling," wrote a white observer in 1877

They dressedas they pleased, black women sometimes wearing gaudy finery, carryingparasols, and replacing the slave kerchief with colorful hats and veils

. As one white writer notedyears later, blacks could not be shaken from the conviction "that the whiterace has barbarously oppressed them:"

Like the Louisiana blacks interviewed by General Banks's agentsduring the Civil War, many former slaves saw freedom as an end to theseparation of families, the abolition of punishment by the lash, and theopportunity to educate their children. Others, like black minister HenryM. Turner, stressed that freedom meant the enjoyment of "our rights incommon with other men." "Ifl cannot do like a white man I am not free,"Henry Adams told his former master in 1865. "I see how the poor whitepeople do. I ought to do so too, or else I am a slave. "

Many Southern whites assumed that blacks confronted the demi e ofslavery entirely unprepared for the responsibilities of freedom. "TheNegroes are to be pitied, ... " wrote South Carolinian Julius J. Fleming,an educator, minister, and public official. "They do not understand theliberty which has been conferred upon them."

Houston H. Holloway, who had been sold three times beforehe reached the age of twenty in 1865, later recalled with vivid clarity theday emancipation came to his section of Georgia: "I felt like a bird outof a cage. Amen. Amen. Amen. I could hardly ask to feel any better thanI did that day .... The week passed olf in a blaze of glory." Six weekslater Holloway and his wife "received my free born son into the world." 1