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Freedom To Work, Nothing More Nor Less: The Freedmen’S Bureau, White Planters, And Black Contract Laborers In Postwar Tennessee, 1865-1868, David Stanley Leventhal

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the black labor situation in postwar Tennessee from 1865 to 1868. Using a wide array of primary sources from Tennessee, the research unveils an inherent bias in the Freedmen’s Bureau’s forced contract system of labor. My conclusions highlight the collusion and complacency of bureau officials and planters who confined freedpeople to agricultural labor during the initial years of African-American freedom. Whites—Northern and Southern—worked cohesively toward common goals of agricultural prosperity, law and order, and white supremacy.

The bureau’s contract system was devised as an emergency measure to put idle blacks back in their “appropriate” positions as agricultural …