The following information is from: GRASS-ROOTS RECONSTRUCTION IN TEXAS,
1865-1880
This addresses “adjustments” African Americans had to cope with during
Reconstruction.
RETURN TO INTRO
While Harrison County's whites learned the meaning of defeat and occupation,
the black majority, nearly nine thousand in all, had an even larger adjustment
to make. For the first time in their lives, they owned their own bodies and did
not have to endure as someone else's property. One remembered a fellow
ex-slave saying, "we is free-no more whippings and beatings."
Another, however, recalled that many slaves found freedom frightening because
"they knowed nothing and had nowhere to go." Planters and farmers
generally urged their former bondsmen to remain with them and work for wages,
and apparently a majority of freedmen chose that option, at least for a while.
There was no difficulty in finding labor to pick the r865 cotton crop. On the
other hand, enough freedmen left their former owners that in late June the Texas
Republican complained about hundreds of idle blacks roaming the
countryside. Some ladies, Loughery complained, have been "reduced to the
necessity of doing their own housework without assistance." 16
Blacks might reasonably have expected some assistance
in the transition from slavery to freedom, but the great majority received none
from their former masters and very little from the national government. Local
whites and federal officials alike agreed with the advice Governor Hamilton
gave the former slaves: "You are free-free to work for yourselves and to
do right. No man is free to do wrong and to live upon the labor of
others." The first general order issued by Lt. Col. Wheaton after the
arrival of his troops in Marshall
stated that "Negroes will not be allowed to collect about the city or
camps and all Freedmen must have passes from their employers or they will be
arrested and punished as vagrants." Even the first representative of the
Freedmen's Bureau to arrive in Harrison County, Col. H. Seymour Hall, indicated that African
Americans could expect little more than simply not being enslaved any longer.
Soon after reaching Marshall in November, r865, Hall published a circular urging
freedmen to uphold their labor contracts, be responsible, and earn a living
for themselves.
In spite of repeated statements from Governor Hamilton
and federal officials, blacks in Harrison County persisted in believing that the government intended
to divide the property of slaveowners among their former bondsmen. This rumored
redistribution was to take place at Christmastime r865. Colonel Hall denied the
rumor in a speech to fifteen hundred freedmen in mid-November. Soon, however,
a story began to circulate to the effect that the agent did not speak for the
government, and he had to refute that before another large crowd.