hahnetal2008

@Book{ hahnetal2008,
	editor = {Steven Hahn and Steven F. Miller and Susan E. O'Donovan and John C. Rodrigue and Leslie S. Rowland},
	title = {Land and Labor, 1865},
	address = {Chapel Hill},
	publisher = {University of North Carolina Press},
	year = 2008,
}

Part of A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, ser. 3, vol. 1.

Texas is presented as one of the exceptional regions that remained somewhat insulated from the wartime disintegration of slavery:

Facing their slaves’ determined resistance and the rebellion’s declining military fortunes, some slaveholders had given up on slavery even before the Confederate surrender. Others, however, redoubled their efforts to keep black people in thrall. Such efforts were most successful in regions remote from Union armies and on the periphery of established networks of transport and communication—the interior of Florida, Georgia’s southernmost counties, central Alabama, most of Texas, those parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi at a distance from the Mississippi River. Elsewhere they were less effective, being continually undermined as the federal army expanded its reach and slaves seized opportunities for freedom (72-73).

After the war, they remark, “Texas, with its vast expanses and tiny federal occupation force, attained notoriety as the last stronghold of de facto slavery” (77).

On Refugeed Slaves

The editors note on pp. 60 and 61 that many Refugeed Slaves who had been brought to Texas (which they estimate at 125,000) desired to return home, citing “Freedmen’s Bureau Orders,” House Executive Documents 70, pp. 308-13. “Large numbers set out to remedy separations inflicted by former owners, particularly the widespread sundering of families by sale or forced migration” (60-61).

The editors amplify this point later, writing that “from regions that had received large numbers of refugees during the war—Texas, central Alabama, southwestern Georgia, and upcountry South Carolina, among others—streamed thousands of former slaves en route to old homes. Toward the end of 1865, some 300 per day traversed the Texas-Louisiana border along a single road” (82-83), citing a RG 105 document [A-3365].

There is also evidence of refugee planters forcing slaves back to Louisiana after the war, using violence or threats to coerce them into unfavorable contracts. For example, “A planter en route with his former slaves from their wartime refuge in Texas to their home in Louisiana abruptly threatened to jettison any of them who refused to accept a contract dictated by him. With no alternative but to be abandoned by the wayside, they acquiesced” (322).¹

Within Texas, violence was also used to keep freedpeople from moving away from where they were, according to the account of a subassistant commissioner for the Freedmen’s Bureau in Texas: “Committies have been established in some counties to prevent the freedmen from going to their homes in other states,” he wrote from Houston in November 1865 (167).²