![]() I have also had considerable experience in employing white labor, having, as quartermaster, frequently had large numbers of laborers under my control. That was my own experience in employing several thousands of them in cultivating the soil. One man from the North, a man of capital, who employed large numbers of freedmen, and paid them regularly, told me, as others have, that he desired no better laborers that he considered them fully as easy to manage as Irish laborers. But the freedman is ready and willing to contract to work for any northern man. The freedman has no faith in his former master, nor has his former owner any faith in the capacity of the freedman. The system of slavery has been one of concealment on the part of the Negro of all his feelings and impulses and that feeling of concealment is so ingrained with the very constitution of the Negro that he deceives his former master on almost every point. I think that the former slaveholders know really less about the freedmen than any other class of people. They desire to keep the Negroes landless, and as nearly in a condition of slavery as it is possible for them to do. I believe it is the policy of the majority of the farm owners to prevent Negroes from becoming landholders. They all desire to get small homesteads and to locate themselves upon them, and there is scarcely any sacrifice too great for them to make to accomplish this object. The object which the freedman has most at heart is the purchase of land. What is disposition in regard to purchasing land, and what is the disposition of the landowners in reference to selling land to Negroes? Text source Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction (Washington, 1866) electronic version placed on-line by Stephen Mintz at the University of Houston. This selection, from his testimony before Congress's Joint Committee on Reconstruction in 1866, offers his assessment of the freedmen's aspirations and the former Confederates' attitudes toward them. He also shared the Radical Republicans' desire to see a society of small, independent producers replace the plantation system. Like a number of Union officers in this area, and like Thaddeus Stevens, he believed that only an economic reorganization of the South could prevent the return of former rebels to power. Who Owns This Land Rufus Saxton, Testimony Before Congress, 1866 Major General Rufus Saxton commanded the area that included Georgia's Sea Islands and later became the Freedmen's Bureau's assistant commissioner for Florida, Georgia, andSouth Carolina. ![]()
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