"We Can Take Care of Ourselves Now": Establishing Independent Black Labor and Industry in Postwar Yorktown, Virginia

Abstract

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• "We Can Take Care of Ourselves Now"Establishing Independent Black Labor and Industry in Postwar Yorktown, Virginia
• Rebecca Capobianco Toy (bio)

In May 1866, Lt. F. J. Massey, the Freedman's Bureau agent in charge of York County, Virginia, wrote to his superior officer of a recent conversation between himself and a formerly enslaved man. "When asked if the new freed-people would be able to provide for themselves," the newly emancipated man had replied, "'We used to support ourselves and our masters, too, when we were slaves, and I reckon we can take care of ourselves now.'"¹ In this assertion, the interviewee highlighted the reality that white observers often missed: formerly enslaved people had always been the backbone of the Southern economy. They emerged from slavery with the skills necessary to support themselves and knew that they were capable of doing so. In their interactions with the Freedmen's Bureau and other white benevolent workers, Black residents of York County frequently expressed their desire to direct the course of their own labor and resisted the bureau's attempts to manage their freedom. While the efforts of the federal government and benevolent organizations to establish a wage labor economy in the postwar South are well documented, a reevaluation of ground-level sources reveals the ways Black Southerners worked to negotiate and direct that process for themselves through locally specific "personal economies" such as subsistence farming, fishing, oystering, and shipping. In [End Page 43] defining the terms of their own labor, Black York County residents sought to manifest their own visions of freedom rather than have the terms of their freedom determined for them.

A Jim Crow South was not inevitable. During the years of slavery's demise, and as Virginians began to imagine the nation without its peculiar institution, opportunities remained to define what that Commonwealth would look like.² While postwar political debates between Republicans and Democrats are well documented, the vision of freedom that Black Americans brought to this period is less so. Told from the perspective of federal agents or white Northerners, as events of this period so often are, formerly enslaved people found themselves in desperate need of intervention and direction from white authorities. Yet, buried in the often mundane Freedmen's Bureau records and those of other benevolent organizations, are the clear articulations of what freedom meant to Black Virginians, what they expected of their postwar worlds, and their intentions to make those visions reality. Focusing on sources at the level at which most Black Americans negotiated their lives—within their local communities—reveals the strategies they used and the types of work they valued. Black Americans in York-town believed that freedom and citizenship entitled them to have political rights and education but also to direct the course of their own labor as well as the products of that labor, and they fought mightily to maintain that definition of independence.

The record reveals that York County's freedpeople struggled against federal agents like Massey and other benevolent workers who approached the postwar South believing that formerly enslaved people had to be taught how to be free. As Julie Saville maintains, white Northerners who engaged in the work of reconstruction believed they were "planting … a new social order." This order rested on an assumption of what "free labor" should look like based on their experiences in the North. Their work was part of an ongoing conversation that had commenced long before slavery began to crumble about the merits of free labor and what composed a functional economy.³ [End Page 44]

Recent studies of refugee communities have identified the ways that the Civil War created new opportunities for enslaved people to seek freedom and how the wartime context of this struggle limited what Black Southerners could achieve. Both Chandra Manning and Amy Murrell Taylor have highlighted the logistical pressures of attempting to carve out a measure of independence in an environment of scarcity and violence. In particular, the changeability of refugee communities and their dependence on the presence of the US Army for security meant that wartime freedom was unstable and unpredictable.⁴

However, in places along the coast, such as the Virginia Peninsula...