'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 planters were, of course, quick to see any non-submissive behaviour on the part of the freedpeople, or any interventions on the part of federal agents, as harbingers of grander and more insidious designs; and the blacks themselves, at mass meetings and conventions, frequently took pains to dispute any suggestion that they planned an armed rising.(21) Yet the rumours of land redistribution, which formed so important a part of the Christmas insurrection scare, must not be dismissed as mere `illusions' entertained by ex-slaves or as mere creations of frightened white imaginations. They derived powerful credibility from federal actions, spread widely among African-Americans in the southern countryside, and, despite (or, better, because of) reversals in federal policy, percolated through a myriad of meetings and encounters. Indeed, given the freedpeople's exclusion from the official arenas of political negotiation and the risks they faced in publicly expressing their aspirations and wills, the rumours could have served them as vital points of political contact, conversation and identification; as safer ways in which to introduce themselves as political actors; and as potent means for shaping -- and advancing -- the terrain of political debate. Rumour, one student of politics notes, is a `distinctive form of political learning -- in the sense both of what is learnt and how it is learnt'. And, as the historian Anand A. Yang writes, `The presence of rumours in society does not necessarily signal a breakdown of communication but an attempt at collective conversation by people who wish to enter their sentiments into the public discourse'.(22) The rumours, the `extravagant expectations' of what freedom might bring, that is, played a significant role in defining the political communities of rural blacks newly emerged from bondage.

II

Whatever many planters preferred to believe, the freedpeople did not need tutors or outside agitators to nurture their desire for, or sense of entitlement to, the land. They neither had to be apprised of the advantages that proprietorship would hold nor reminded that their long-endured and uncompensated toil and suffering had built both the South's great fortunes and the nation's prosperity. Yet, the expectations of property division also revealed complex aspirations and sets of beliefs. And they shed considerable light on the ways that African-Americans drew upon the political sensibilities and rituals they had forged under slavery to give shape and substance to the course of emancipation and early Reconstruction: on shared understandings of power and process that the general social relations of slavery had encouraged; on the discrete, and often very different, settings and circumstances in which those relations took hold; and on the new formulations and projects that the military destruction of slavery made possible.

The expectations of land redistribution expressed an almost universally held notion of just compensation for the travails of slavery, of what was rightfully due those who tilled the soil, and of what could provide meaningful security in a post-emancipation world. In this, the ex-slaves closely resembled subject rural folk in many societies, for in one form or another the `land question' charged social struggles in all servile and semi-servile labour systems and surfaced in connection with most servile emancipations.(23) But the expectations reflected, as well, the African-Americans' intensely personal and spiritual conception of the world and the logic of the deliverance narratives that many had heard and embellished as slaves. It is not surprising, therefore, that as their masters' claims to sovereignty were eroded and then undermined by invading Union armies, many slaves could see at work the hands of a powerful protector, one experienced in very immediate terms. More than a few, for example, later remembered learning of their liberation when `Marse Linkum' came riding through their locales.(24)