Youre watching American History tv all weekend, every weekend on cspan 3. Next, university of buffalo professor Carole Emberton discusses the privation of poverty among freed slaves during reconstruction. She describes the governments to provide aid by establishing the Freedmens Bureau and compares the debate over poverty relief efforts during reconstruction to some of those today. Portion of the 2014 civil war and posey hosted by the u. S. Capital historical society. It is about 45 minutes. Come, ihose of you have am the codirector of the u. S. Capital historical society. Justice, they the junior visiting professor of lsu law school. There is an odd connection to paul aber. Is why the law school and lsu is named for him. The various about aspects of war crimes so it is a very interesting connection. Our next speaker is Carole Emberton who is an associate professor of history at the university of buffalo. Carole works on the civil war era as does everyone else here. Her first book was beyond redemption. She is currently working on a book that will be titled a folk history of freedom dealing with the federal projects, writers projects and the interviews of former slaves during the depression era. Her paper today is a hungry belly and freedom rations, refugees and reconstruction after the civil war. I am delighted to introduce Carole Emberton. [applause] everyone for coming to spend a portion of this glorious spring day inside with us. Since i am it is kind of fortuitous that i am the last speaker before lunch, i will talk a lot about food. Let me get started here. There we go. The slaves in winnsboro, South Carolina, anticipated the arrival of william shermans roops before they arrived in 1865. They knew the state capital of columbia which was 30 miles to the south was in smoldering ruins. The fleeing residents and retreating confederate soldiers who had surrendered there brought word of the and it spread like the fire that engulfed the city. While frightened plantation owners worked desperately to bury the families silver, to sew jewelry inside their petticoats and to lose their livestock that remained into the woods, slaves watched and waited with more and dissipation than dread with more anticipation than dread. We looked at the yankees, he like we look now as the angels for the second coming, she recalls. Masterpise the brutal that whipped her mother and sold away her siblings, believe the blue coats brought the fires of atonement with them. Like so many other slaves, she understood the war as divi ne retribution for the slave suffering and her own liberation. Of a joyfulion deliverance were soon dashed. They came one day in february, she remembered, and they took everything off the plantation and burnt the big house, the stables, the barns. Whicheft the slave houses was more than they left who also shed near recalled after they ravaged the whole countryside, the army when across the old river and left this think off dead carcasses and the sky black. Recalled the children sucking their thumbs for want of something to eat. The troops moved on leaving the newly freed to scavenge for their survival. Lots of the children died as did the old folks while the rest of us scoured the woods for hickory nuts, acorns, and artichokes. Barnett spencer who had been a slave in alabama concurred of the recollections of war. Their compliance always controlled through the physical need of food, slaves were accustomed to longer but the Union Invasion heightened in already meager existence. According to spencer, the yankees starved out more black faces than whites. It was hard to, find either food or shelter since many of the buildings on spencers plantation, including the slave quarters, had been burned. Pilesx slaves died in from starvation and disease. Children like spencer with an abstract understanding of freedom that was conditional rather than categorical. Therding to guntharp, inkys throw us in the briar patch and all we can have is freedom. Something we had no more used for than that i have today for one of those airplanes i hear flying around up there in the sky. Like the airplanes that hovered high above her, emancipation left only the faintest trail in her life. Her hungry belly on the other hand grounded her memories in ways that an abstract concept like freedom could not. Given by exonies slaves in the 1930s to the roving bands of interviewers employed to the federal writers project revealed how the most basic of human needs, the need for physical nourishment tempered the experience of freedom from africanamericans across the south. While historians tend to focus on the great booms of formal emancipation, including the granting of National Citizenship through the 14th amendment and the right to vote through the the cursesten avoid that accompanied the wartime expansion of freedom lest we begin to sound too much like the former slave masters who shrills cries about the degradations and the dissolution of postemancipation society we have learned to tune out. Posedhe problem of hunger a very real threat. Not only to the lives of vulnerable populations of friedmans and refugees but also to the political reconstruction of the nation. The food crisis facing the astwar south was constitutional problem and it ideological conundrum that ignited the federal governments long battle with hunger, a battle that continues to this day. Ghost that haunts of the former confederacy in the first two years after the war, hunger shadowed the region with a desperate immediacy. Surely after the surrender, theress authorized assistant commissioner of the bureau of refugees and getFreedmens Bureau to food and shelter from local commanders. In South Carolina, the bureau distributed rations almost immediately. By midsummer, at least 9000 people had received at least 300,000 rations. By the end of the year, the number of rations more than doubled reaching an estimated 25,000 people. One year later, it would be nearly one million rations. 1867, the leanest and the meanest in the postwar years because of crop failures, private and public aid in South Carolina would exceed 300,000. Similar conditions existed across the south. There were tens of thousands without adequate food, clothing or shelter. In alabama, and mixture of private and public a discredited nearly 4 million rations. By the autumn of 1866, prompting it was notd nearly enough. According to the bureaus assistant commissioner, these figures did not keep pace with the evidence of suffering. In a report to the secretary of at all wrote considerable towns, we are seeing emaciated persons who have come a long way in quest for food. Letters and newspaper statements and personal appeals came in from every corner while men of prominence went to solicit contributions in the north to supplement relief afforded by the government. Even the governor traveled to st. Louis to try to bargain for provisions. In the end, he procured 50,000 bushels of corn and ia few bacon. Donations from northern churches and aid societies augmented federal relief, but they could not come close to matching the governments ability to procure, organize and distribute the Staggering Amount of relief necessary to alleviate the extreme want in the postwar south. Incompletecounts are and i have not been able to locate reliable figures for texas, arkansas, missouri, kentucky or indian territories, and very conservative estimate for the number of federal rations issued by the close of 1866 hovers around 20 million. The cost of those provisions conservatively somewhere in the range of at least 2 million. As one historian of the Freedmens Bureau concluded, never before in American History had there been such an organized effort towards such a humanitarian end. Iand the relief was not limited to food. Outbreaks of smallpox made it necessary to burn clothing and bedding and supply the affected communities. The approach of winter left many without warm coats or undergarments. But usually vulnerable to the elements were free people whose masters had traditionally provided them with clothing however limited around christmas time. Out, formerurnt masters refused this applies their ex slaves with much of anything even if they agreed to stay on and work as before. The veil of paternalism stripped away the bones of the social relationship between black and white now laid bare. Bureaus agent in South Carolina found the behavior of loud owners towards the former bondsman to be most appalling. One, the freedmen were turned down by the former owners. In the service theyve spent their strengths the shift for themselves and have not the bureau extended aid, and very many would have inevitably perished. Want did notnd discriminate. Whites, many of them formerly welltodo were reduced to begging to the government they had so recently awarded against. The bureau in trials and those belonging to the upper classes of society in the city are an actual daily want. The want of capital renders their gland worthless and there is no sale for that description of property at present. Bureau records may clear that the majority of rations were in fact distributed to white refugees. Although initial rules prohibited the distribution of rations to disloyal whites, those restrictions were soon lifted when the depth of the crisis became clear. By the spring of 1866, bureau commissioners extracted their agents to interpret the term refugee as liberally as possible and not limited to those white unionists that have been driven from their homes by vengeful confederate neighbors. Thus, confederate widows and children along with the most rabid secessionist and even paroled rebel soldiers lined up. Mealss to wonder if the made from the governments tastednd coffee bitter from the aftertaste of secession. Or if the blankets the bureaus issued were able to fend off the chill of defeat. Feared anything more than starvation it was equality among the races. They reacted violently to any hint of the former bondsman being raised to the level or vice versa. They were forced to confront their greatest fear in the ration line. According to one bureau theyial, on issuing day, saw a white woman of respectability standing sidebyside with the african both awaiting their turn to receive their weekly supply of rations. Perhaps this was why the postwar relief programs relief received so much criticism. Who grewtherners increasingly more aggressive in their condemnation of radical reconstruction saw the bureaus ration policies, among its other activities, as encouraging idleness and dependency among three people despite the fact the majority of food relief went to white refugees. Planters argued relief interviewed interfered with the labor Market Making friedman thus likely to sign labor contracts because they believed the government would support them. They charged the Bureau Agents of selling rations illegally, adding to the growing conception perception that the government was inefficient. While there may have been some truth to this, the overwhelming evidence from the bureaus papers suggest the rations were duly and dutifully dishy beaded when available. The bureauerners, was according to one so the newspaper, a gigantic storehouse created for individual ease and comfort of the freedmen who they believe so long the agency existed would have sing ando do to dance and where the close that would be provided for them. Congress asts in well as moderates within the Republican Party echoed these charges. Theident johnson vetoed 1865 bill extending the bureaus postwar authority because he said it was not consistent with public welfare. Thaton further explained pending the war, many refugees and freedmen received support from the government but it was never intended they should henceforth to fed, clothes, educated and sheltered by the united states. Congress packed the bill over the president s opposition but the old dependency continued to plague expert efforts to feed the south vulnerable population. The most effective opposition actually came from within the bureau itself. 1865, one bureau agent, a man named charles called the freed people in his district together he said he had to disabuse the faultat he called and exaggerated ideas of freedom that they seemed to possess in his eyes. Here is what he told them you are talking too much. You are waiting too much. You are asking for too much. Was era tended that free people were demanding shorter workdays as well as provisions of food and clothing as well as shelter and medical care. He warned them that the deprivation and suffering that they were experiencing was inevitable. Freedom might be worse than slavery, at least for a while. He endeavored to explain to them the difference between slavery and freedom as he understood it. Free, butou are now you must know the only difference you can feel between slavery and freedom is not either neither you or your children can be bought or sold. You may have a harder time now that you ever had and it will be the price you pay for your freedom. Well, the linee between slavery and freedom was fine. The only thing severing the two conditions was the custom of attaching money to someones physical body. Although they could no longer be bought and sold as property, the free peoples expectations that they should receive some kind of reprieve from the endless, unpaid work was to him outrageous. He told them, if you get through this year alive, you should be thankful. Sewell was not alone in his belief that there was a value and suffering for the free people. Fearful that a shortage of labor stemming from former slaves suspicion of the contract system would endanger agricultural production, many freedmens areau agents implemented variety of course of policies and that reducing dependency on Government Support and ensuring eedmens cooperation. The commissioner ordered his assistance to take steps to eliminate what he says was the false pride that renders some of the refugees more willing to be supported in idleness than to support themselves. According to many of his agents, the distribution of rations and gendered this false pride. Howard instructed them to reserve the monthly allotment of one bushel of corn and eight pounds of pork for only those who were agent and infirmed and half of that amount to very young orphans, both of home he believed were obviously incapable of self support. In both of those cases, relatives or caretakers could claim rations for those indigent individuals who they were caring for in their homes. All other ablebodied free people were to be denied assistance in the hope of inducing them to sign contracts and go to work. Hough some agents rejected protected that without rations, salvation was certain. Howard assured them that suffering is preferred to slavery and is to some degree the necessary consequence of events. Howard within halt alloward would right shins except for people hospitals andin children confined to or from asylums. Suspicions that free people were cheating the system and claiming rations for people who could actually work, family and friends could no longer claim assistance for the elderly and very young living in their homes. You had to now be either in a hospital or in an orphanage. While howard understood his actions as integral to the bureaus norwich Larger Mission of teaching slaves freedom, it gave them a dubious choice work or starve. Did. E many of them foundhose who worked themselves unable to break the vicious cycle of debt and dependency that howard believed could be avoided with enough hard work and determination. One South Carolina agent reported a typical case. 24 freed slaves who contracted to work for the local planter and at the end of the year, their share of the cop crop came to 543. Supplies andon for food they had received in advance of their share coming in, seven of the 24 men received 4. 5s ranging from about to a little over eight dollars for a years work. The other 17 workers ended up owing more than their shares amount from a little under two dollars to over 73 for one of them. That was the power and glory of free labor. Cases such as list one compelled howard to set aside additional 1867 for rations despite his earlier admonitions that only those confined to hospitals or orphanages could receive assistance. Many agents continued to blame the freed men for not managing their money well enough or not spending enough time attending their crops to ensure a better harvest. Ness thatdheaded resulted in the idleness and theft that he claimed to witness and was the main cause of half the destitution that existed throughout his district during the year. Deforest another South Carolina agent who grown tired of freed peoples pleas for dish and will assistance likewise did missed their destitution as the inevitable result of their own laziness. He informed the people in his district regular labor is the only thing that will keep you from suffering despite mounted evidence to the contrary. Deforest to the fied the ambivalence with which many Bureau Agents viewed their jobs. Reports from the field routinely expressed concerns for the freed peoples and palmers meant an outraged at the treatment they received at the hands of their former masters. At the same time, condemnation for what agents perceived as ignorance, laziness and dishonesty. Deforest showed particular sympathy for children without proper winter gear and he fought to secure clothing and shoes and blankets from the army for them. However, he felt rations of food and begrudgeding anything to those he described as the notoriously idle, the human chewable the habitual beggars and prostitutes. Recalling the chaos that he said would abrupt on the days of the rations that were distributed, derided the proper classes who he said made for me like paiks fern oaktree in autumn like pigs in a adultery in autumn. His hostility towards the poor was not uncommon. As chad goldberg notes, traditional poor relief in the antebellum. Withd conflated deviance. Riminality modern efforts to establish a rational system of government sponsored social where fair of first euro was the the bureau was the first was no less susceptible to the racial prejudice of their predecessor. Despite the bureaus attempt to standardize the aid process and a guiding belief that the organizations functions as a protective force that was indispensable to the souths reconstruction, agents remained suspicious of certain aspects of the government intervention, particularly its Material Support o