Patient and Persistent Legal Means: Contract Labor, Military Justice, and the Making of the Black Public in Union-occupied Southern Louisiana

• In Event: Remaking Freedom: Black Rights Claims in the Age of Emancipation

Abstract

In early 1863, Union military forces occupying southern Louisiana instituted a new labor system designed to restart the plantation economy after months of upheaval. Ever since federal troops first arrived in New Orleans in the spring of 1862, enslaved Black people in the city’s hinterland had been fleeing their owners and striking out for freedom behind Union lines. Slavery was disintegrating and the region’s plantation economy was on the brink of ruin. Inaugurated by General Nathaniel P. Banks, the new contract labor system was intended to restore order and revive the prospects of Louisiana’s sugar planters. Although Black plantation workers were now to be compensated for their labor, Union troops would strictly enforce their “duty” to work–in many cases, on the plantations of those from whom they had fled. General Banks’s labor system prompted strong criticism from Northern critics of slavery and the politically-active community of free people of color in New Orleans. And yet, for all that it was intended to serve the interests of the plantation economy and restore a degree of labor peace in southern Louisiana, the contract labor system also presented opportunities for Black people to advance their interests in new and unprecedented ways. The form of governance under slavery, in which the enslaver had wielded arbitrary and personal power over the people he or she owned, was replaced by a system of military governance based on provost marshals and provost courts. These new relations of governance, based–in theory, at least–on abstract and impersonal principles of law, gave enslaved people novel public tribunals before which they could defend what they thought to be their rights. Black people seized the opportunity to do so, advancing demands for mobility, family, just compensation, and fairer treatment at the hands of those who were now their employers. In so doing, Black Louisianans constituted themselves as a public: a political community with a set of recognized common interests and an increasing ability to make those interests felt in the realm of policy.

Author

• James Illingworth, Freedmen and Southern Society Project, University of Maryland