'Extravagant expectations' of freedom: rumour, political struggle, and the Christmas insurrection scare of 1865 in the American South

Past & Present, Nov, 1997 by Steven Hahn

The insurrection scare thereby revealed and embodied much of the tenor of political engagement in the immediate post-war South, and illuminated many of the nascent dynamics of Reconstruction. It exposed the gnawing apprehensions, the confusion and disarray, and the enduring sources of power that the old master class brought out of military defeat and economic debilitation. It gave expression and direction to the tensions, ambiguities and developing trajectory of federal policy. And, above all else, it dramatized the political sensibilities and resources that ex-slaves possessed and built upon in the aftermath of emancipation. For them, the rumours of land redistribution not only resonated with widely shared aspirations; they also served as instruments for political debate and mobilization well before the granting of the franchise, and provided important leverage in contents for local power. In the end, the christmas insurrection scare of 1865 may too have helped to propel the wheels of Reconstruction in a more radical political direction and advanced the cause of enfranchisement itself?

I

Like rumours of slave or peasant rebellions and emancipations that erupted intermittently in many rural societies, those associated with the Christmas insurrection scare have murky and mysterious features. It is not entirely clear when and where the rumours first surfaced, how widely they circulated, or whether some of them ever had much substance. If the reports of alarmed southern whites and concerned federal officials together provide clues, word of general property division and black-inspired violence began to circulate along the coast of North and South Carolina by the early summer of 1865, and then spread quite rapidly, especially through those areas of the South where freed-people could be found in largest numbers. By November, both the expectations of blacks and the apprehensions of whites had been raised in the plantation districts of Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Texas, and more widely still in South Carolina and the Mississippi Valley states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee. One Freedmen's Bureau official familiar with Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee and Alabama reckoned that `a majority of the colored population positively believed that the government would take the plantations, with their old masters who had been in rebel service, cut them up into forty acre parcels, and give them to the colored people'.(8)

Ex-slaves as well as ex-slaveowners had good cause to lend such rumours more than a little credibility.(9) By the time the Civil War ended -- owing to congressional legislation, military field orders and wartime planter flight -- the federal government controlled nearly 900,000 acres of southern land and had authority to set it apart for eventual acquisition by 'loyal refugees and freedmen'. Much of that land lay in the fertile areas of the southeastern seaboard and the lower Mississippi Valley, and a good bit of it, chiefly in the low-country of South Carolina and Georgia, was already occupied by freedpeople who expected to obtain formal title. Although President Andrew Johnson, in his Amnesty Proclamation of 29 May 1865, made provision for the restoration of most of this property to its former owners, the 'land question', like the more general issues of social and economic reorganization, remained very much alive. `We are but at the beginning of the war', a worried North Carolina conservative could write that July.(10)