On contacts:

Only a slim majority in Congress recognized that the freedpeople needed substantial assistance and were willing to grant it under the general welfare clause of the Constitution. The bureau had four divisions: Land, Educational, Legal, and Medical. The ex-slaves were sick and needed care; they were largely illiterate and needed education. Health and literacy seemed obvious requirements for contract freedom that would involve negotiating the sale of bodily labor. The Legal Division would supervise the contracts the freedpeople negotiated with their ex-owners

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With Johnson having blocked the redistribution of land, the Freedmen’s Bureau put enormous pressure on the freedmen to enter into contracts. Agents regarded labor as the quickest way to wean the freedmen from dependence on the government, to resurrect the Southern economy, and to teach the freedmen the lessons of free labor. Contracts, as Howard put it, were not only a mark of freedom but a form of discipline: “If they can be induced to enter into contracts, they are taught that there are duties as well as privileges of freedom.” By signing contracts black people would prove that they “deserved” freedom

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Actual labor contracts, however, varied widely and were often hard to mistake for freedom. There were standard bureau contracts, but there were also contracts written by the employers. And there were oral contracts. In some places, such as the sugar fields of Louisiana, slaves would use contracts to their own benefit. The bureau hoped to supervise all contracts, but white Southerners often had the contracts executed before a local magistrate. Given the discrepancy in the power and status of those making the contracts, the illiteracy of many ex-slaves, and white Southerners’ resort to violence and coercion, the possibilities of abuse were manifold.62 The first labor contracts negotiated by the Freedmen’s Bureau certainly seemed evidence that the new order differed only in the details from the old. In South Carolina, Charles C. Soule, a white officer in the black Fifty-fifth Massachusetts Infantry, described how he talked to thousands of whites and blacks, explaining to the whites “the necessity of making equitable contracts with their workmen, of discontinuing corporal punishment and of referring all cases of disorder and idleness to the military authorities.” In this, he seemed a messenger of a new order. But to freedpeople he also said, “Every man must work under orders … and on a plantation the head man who gives all the orders is the owner of the place. Whatever he tells you to do you must do at once, and cheerfully. Remember that all your working time belongs to the man who hires you.” Soule told the freedpeople “you will have to work hard, and get very little to eat, and very few clothes to wear,” and husbands and wives on separate plantations would not live together. The new freedom might seem reminiscent of the old slavery. But, “remember even if you are badly off, no one can buy or sell you.” Soule thought, “only actual suffering, starvation, and punishment will drive many of them to work.” It was no wonder that many ex-slaves initially regarded men like Soule as “rebels in disguise.”63 Contracts could produce exactly the kind of subordinated labor force ex-slave owners desired. The bureau’s fear of black dependency often created black dependency by driving freedpeople into contracts that impoverished them and made them reliant on their old masters. Bureau agents were right in thinking that the mere fact of a contract forced the white employer to recognize the black employee as his legal equal, but this triumph was purely nominal and yielded only marginal benefits to black laborers. At their extreme, contracts were little more than slavery under another name. In South Carolina in the immediate aftermath of the war, William Tunro in South Carolina asked his former slaves to sign a contract for life. Refusal led first to the expulsion of Robert Perry, his wife, and two others from the plantation, and then to their pursuit and murder by Tunro’s neighbors.64 Contracts could replicate conditions that the freedmen thought emancipation had ended forever. In many areas of the South contracts ran for a year. The freedmen agreed to labor “for their rations and clothing in the usual way,” which is to say the same way as they labored under slavery. Many often received very little beyond this. The New Orleans Tribune, the most consistent advocate for the rights of the freedmen, attacked the idea that an annual contract was compatible with free labor. Why, it asked, was it necessary for freedmen to have to sign yearlong contracts when northern workers could quit their jobs and take another at any time? Answering its own question, it said the aim of the contracts was to replicate the old system and tie the laborers to the plantation.

This is from The Republic For Which It Stands