Reconstruction, the effort from 1865 to 1877 by the Federal Government to restore the conquered territory after the Civil War, nonetheless was a time of continued struggle for many in the South. Although no battles had been fought in Abbeville or Elbert Counties, residents still felt the hardships caused by the severe economic depression that gripped the region long after the gunfire had stopped. Despite their freedom, African Americans were worse off than before the war in some significant ways, even though a few managed to prosper financially. Some were even elected to state legislatures where they helped pass a flurry of laws seeking to right the wrongs resulting from slavery. Most, however, found themselves adrift and woefully unprepared to shape new lives. While as slaves they had enjoyed no rights at all, they had been housed, fed, and clothed by their masters, albeit often in substandard conditions. With slavery over, they were entirely on their own and usually penniless. Most were former field hands, trained only for menial work, and all but a few were illiterate. Indeed, teaching slaves to read and write was a crime in many places before the war.

In town after town, blacks clustered in shanty villages that sprung up on the outskirts of communities and near United States Army bases. The former slaves waited, usually in vain, for the fulfillment of the promised "40 acres and a mule" or some other allotment of land from the government. Officials did make attempts to help, but these efforts often failed because of a lack of money, poor planning, inadequate personnel, and virulent resistance from Southern whites.
 

     Right: Tenant farmers grew much of their own
food, sometimes selling the surplus.

 Because their distrust of former masters, or any Southern white, for that matter, was so deep, many African Americans refused to work for them. A severe labor shortage soon was the result. Captain C.R. Becker, sent by the Federal Government to guide Reconstruction efforts on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River, reported: "...there are none who need want employment, if they only choose to seek it, for in fact I have applications nearly every day from planters who are in want of hands and unable to obtain them." Yet in another report, the captain's own words explained why African Americans were reluctant to return to the fields. Some former slaveholders, he wrote, were still whipping black laborers. In another sign of how hard times were, Becker described increasing thefts of food by hungry former slaves.

Inevitably, deep-seated bitterness and hardships led to mounting violence, again chronicled in official reports of the time. The arm of the government charged with aiding impoverished blacks and whites was the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, also known as the Freedmen's Bureau. The only Freedmen's Bureau office with jurisdiction over Abbeville County, South Carolina, was some distance away in Anderson County, and it was the personnel of this office who compiled some of the documentation about the brutality that erupted during Reconstruction.

One report stated that the former slaves "in this section of the state (are) not freedmen and women.. .they are nominally such, but their condition indeed is worse than bondage itself and ever will be unless this subdistrict is flooded with...cavalry.. ..The U.S. soldiers and the freedmen are alike threatened and despised, and a very little respected. The military authorities are seldom obeyed except when necessity compels, the garrison is limited, hence a majority of the guilty go unpunished."

Violence against African Americans was a frequent topic of reports from the Freedmen's Bureau. The head of the Anderson office had this to say in May 1866: "On Saturday, May 12, about ten o'clock, a freedman by name of Elbert MacAdams was taken from his house by an unknown man and shot three times and then had his throat cut and was dragged into the woods about 100 yards from his house, where he was found dead on Sunday morning. The freedman had come to see his wife on Basil Callahan's plantation, about 16 miles from here... Freedmen report to the office every day that they are being driven off, and my time is entirely taken up looking into the reason and seeing that they get their rights."

White resistance was especially strong against African Americans exercising their new right to vote. Captain Becker described a Ku Klux Klan rampage in November 1868, just prior to the national election. And in another account, he reported an episode involving an entire black community that had apparently fled to avoid election-related violence: "Innumerable persons have been lying out in the woods since sometime before the election to save being murdered in their beds, their houses having in the meantime been frequently visited at night for that purpose."
 

Right: Farmers raised sweet potatoes, corn, and other vegetables.

 Despite deep chasms between them, some blacks and whites eventually were forced to cooperate because of mutual need. Deciding not to leave the South for one reason or another, increasing numbers of field hands eventually returned to the only work they knew. For their part, no matter how much it must have rankled to have to pay former slaves, whites were desperate for laborers.

Owners of small farms and big plantations alike experimented with various ways of organizing workers, with more than a few managing to recreate the worst of antebellum slave conditions for a time. Harsh gang leaders were hired to enforce rigid rules and to ensure maximum production from the laborers, who moved back into the old slave cabins and once again ate rations dispensed by the farmers and planters. The only significant difference from slave times was that workers now received a small wage.

During at least part of Reconstruction, James Edward Calhoun hired laborers in a "squad Crew bosses paid Calhoun half of everything their workers grew system," signing contracts with seven African Americans who hired their own crews and enforced discipline. Among the rules were requirements that the workers could not leave the plantation or have visitors without Calhoun's permission. Three of the seven crew bosses were named Calhoun, indicating they were likely his former slaves. The bosses paid Calhoun half of everything their crews grew and paid the workers from the other half. Gradually, however, at Millwood Plantation and throughout the South, laborers began renting land or sharecropping, usually paying landlords with crops because the region was still so strapped for cash

Landowners provided some land and a house to both sharecroppers and renters. Under sharecropping, landlords also supplied tools and livestock and were paid in return a percentage of the harvests. Renter systems required tenants to provide their own animals and equipment and to pay a set amount to landlords each year as rent.
 

Houses at Millwood Plantation were simply built, but sturdy. They lasted for many years.

Most of those interviewed in the Russell research were raised on tenant farms, and in their conversations returned repeatedly to talk of field work, the land, and their families' experiences with tenant farming. A number either once farmed on Calhoun's Millwood Plantation or had relatives or friends who had worked there. When Calhoun died in 1889, he had 95 tenant farmers on his land. His heirs continued to manage the tenant system, usually through overseers, for years after his death.

Minnie Walker, 88 years old, was one of the last tenants to leave Millwood, a departure in the mid-1920's prompted by plunging cotton prices and the dreaded boll weevil invasion, which ravaged crops from Texas to the Atlantic Ocean. Walker was born April 7, 1892, on a Millwood tenant farm. She didn't remember her father because he abandoned his home when she was a small child and headed west to Mississippi, apparently because of financial troubles.

Walker lived as a young child with her grandmother and her greatgrandmother, who was blind. One of her first vivid memories was of her great-grandmother's funeral. She recalled how the body was "laid out" for public viewing in their small farmhouse. "Her name was Susie," Walker explained, "but everybody called her Suckey." The minister who officiated at the services was the first the child ever saw. "He was black. We had all black preachers and had no white preachers. White people back in them days didn't mix with colored people," she explained.

Among her other childhood memories were conversations with her grandmother about when she was a slave, a time when a woman slave's worth was often determined by her ability to bear children because every new child added to a slaveowner's wealth. Walker's grandmother explained that her own father was sold away from Millwood Plantation to breed more slaves. "My grandmama's father was sold. He, well the way she tell, he was a robust man. And this other white man bought him to raise children on his place. And Calhoun, the old man, didn't let her [Walker's grandmother] have to go out in the field like the rest, because he sold her father....I don't know [who bought him]... Just somebody who had come from somewhere and had a plantation... He [her great-grandfather] was used like a breeding horse. Yeah. That's the way it was back in them days."
 

James Edward Calhoun used roofs with unusual eaves, one of many innovations he tried at his Millwood Plantation.

Most of Minnie Walker's childhood was spent with a family she wasn't related to, although she came to consider the stepparents as her own mother and father. She talked about their tenant farm on Millwood property and her special fondness for the orchard: "My father's peach orchard was, I reckon, about three miles from the river. And he had, oh, all kind of cherries, and apples, and pears. And let me see, what else? Ah, peaches and apples, and corn....We had lots of them, lots of them old fashion peaches... .He'd plant all seasons." Her stepfather paid a set annual rent of 400 pounds of baled cotton, processed by a gin in the nearby small town of Calhoun Falls, South Carolina. Going to the gin was an exciting excursion for the little girl. "[The] gin was out to Calhoun Falls. And.cotton buyers come in from somewhere and buy up the cotton. The gin man just have cotton stacked all around, all around. And this buyer come in and they put the cotton then on a freight train. Wasn't trucks and things to carry things like there is now," she said.

She married a tenant farmer, Mose Walker, on December 22, 1910, after an ardent proposal. "There was a gang of boys from Georgia around in the neighborhood and they all come to our house. And he [Mose Walker] spoke for me in front of all them boys. And I cursed him out. Just showing off in front of these boys."

Mose Walker later returned alone and "...he said, 'Well, I'm back here. You said I was just showing off because I was before them boys. Now I'm by myself and I ain't going to leave here until you tell me that I can come to see you on the thirteenth and I'll marry you."' A lifetime later, she was still amazed at her young suitor's persistence. "You know how long he stayed there? Till the sun went down...I said, 'You ought to be shamed of yourself.' And he stayed right here till the sun went down. And I promised him that I would marry him."

Walker moved into her new husband's two-room house near a small spring on Millwood Plantation. A center chimney opened into a fireplace in each room, providing heat and a place for cooking. Each room also had a door to the outside. Floors were made of wood planks. Eventually, the young couple added paneling to divide one of the rooms into two bedrooms. As a bride, Walker began raising two small children whose mother, her husband's sister, had recently died. "When I got married, married with a family. That was my husband, my niece and nephew, and myself. There was four of us. Children ain't had no mother. Couldn't do nothing for 'em from February up until I got married. And they was in need. I had to make clothes for 'em. And nine months [later], here come my baby... .After the first one, every nine months, here's [another] baby. And farming too. I ain't had time. That's the truth. I spent all my time as a busy person."

Tenant houses at Millwood and at other large farms were spaced farther apart than slave houses had been. "And the houses weren't piled up on one another," Walker explained, of the post-Civil War era. "It was 'bout a mile in between houses."

Between 1910 and the mid-1920's, Walker bore eight children, four girls and four boys. "The niece child died. And the baby [boy] like to died... .The daddy didn't know how to take care of it, and they got me to raise it... The child, when I got it, wasn't nothing but just skin and bone. I said, 'I believe me and the Lord going to raise this baby.' And I raised it up to be a grown man," she remembered.

World War I erupted about three years after Walker married and threatened her existence. "My husband didn't have to go and all. I know I got upset because I thought he was gonna go in. But he didn't go in and therefore my mind got settled. All I know about World War I, I know it was a whole heap of people come back home dead. They left here walking, but they came back in the casket."

Walker spent much of her early adulthood working in the fields alongside her husband and children. "Every one of 'em [the children] worked, the foster one, too. [The boys] mostly, they did the plowing. The girls, they didn't plow. My girls didn't plow. But I plowed. My husband plowed.... Up until all the children got married, I mostly did the planting with my hand. Dropped the corn and sowed the cotton seed, and things like that." They were self-sufficient on their tenant farm in many ways. "We raised plenty food, just plenty food. [We bought] very little, very little. For a period of time, we didn't buy nothin' but canned goods or something like that. My husband raised wheat, plant potatoes, everything. My husband, he was born on the farm..Yes sir, we raised everything, corn, cane (to make syrup), peanuts, just everything raised on the farm. Growed [the peanuts] for the hogs and mule." Regardless of their hard work, however, the Walkers, like most tenant farmers, barely earned any profits.

Left: An unidentified Elberton, Georgia resident was photographed around 1900.
 

In 1919, boll weevils swarmed into the Savannah River Valley after migrating through the South from Texas. Cotton growing was devastated and demand slackened, causing a panic. Minnie Walker remembered one particular year when hard times almost overcame her family, forcing them to move, to give up renting land, and to begin sharecropping.

Trouble started, she said, when her family bought a mule to help ease farm chores. "That was the year we ain't had nair a penny. Debt we owed, you see. We ain't had nair a penny. 'Cause we just had enough, you know, for to pay our rent. So the man come down from Abbeville and got our mule. You see, what we had [we used] to get food and things. That's when we got [on other land] and shared. And we worked there, oh, quite a few years."

Like many tenant farmers, her husband sometimes left home to find work elsewhere during the off-season. "He worked the farm and then when he'd get through with the farm, he'd go on to Calhoun Falls [to work in a mill] till he finished that... .He stayed to the spring of the year and then he come back and have his farm."

The need for money also pushed Minnie Walker into searching out work away from home. She took in laundry for families in Calhoun Falls. "I got hitched up with people who wanted me to work, wash and iron. I broke down a buggy hauling coal, washing and ironing, to buy clothes and things for my children.... It was getting hard. It was already hard all along. You see, colored people didn't have nothin' to do except get out there and help themselves."

She also cooked for two white women in Calhoun Falls. "The two women, [I went] from one to the other, when I could. I'd work for them. And then when I worked for them, they was so nice to me." She also trained to be a midwife and helped with the births of many local children. Reflecting back on her many occupations, she described herself this way: "Miss Walker had the hardest family in Abbeville County of working people. Awful, awful way women work. We didn't fool around."

Left: Washing clothes at Millwood Plantation in 1875.
 

Hard work was a lifelong tradition among many of those interviewed. Laboring from dawn to dark was how they overcame the frequent obstacles put in their paths. At times, even the earth seemed determined to make their lives hard, some remembered. Soil fertility varied significantly from one tenant farm to the next, with many tenants having to force a living from soils sorely depleted by overuse and erosion. Charlotte Sweeny recalled her father "always cussing" about the sorry state of his farm. "He couldn't raise nothing on it. too poor to even raise a fuss on. Couldn't even raise a good argument on it," she said.

Phoebe Turman was 13 years old when her family abandoned a tenant farm in South Carolina because of unfertile "sandy land" and crossed the Savannah River in search of better ground. They found it in Georgia, not far from the river, in an area African Americans called Flatwoods. "Flatwoods was strong land, black land," she explained.

The trip across the river was firmly etched in her memory. She made the journey with her mother and her mother's brother and all of their possessions. Her parents had separated, with her father taking Phoebe's brother West with him, possibly to Mississippi. Turman remembered that the ferry ride cost 50 cents per person. "But I guess when they put a team [of horses or mules] across there, it cost more.

But her family had little in the way of possessions, she recalled. "They brought their households, their furniture, what they had. Didn't have nothing...mattress, quilts, chairs, everything...Didn't have a wood stove. We cooked on the fireplace, [had] skillet, pots." They didn't own a horse or wagon, so the owner of the land they were going to farm sent a wagon to the river to carry them to their new home.

The trip held the promise of a new life for the young girl, who, when she stepped off the boat, was touching Georgia soil for the first time. Farming, however, proved equally disappointing on both sides of the river. "We worked a third patch," she explained. "You get a third of everything you make, potatoes, cotton, corn, everything." The landlord got the rest.

Even the meager amount tenants earned wasn't pure profit because to varying degrees, depending upon their arrangements with a landlord, farmers were required to buy their supplies, tools, and provisions from him. Tenants often could buy these goods on credit, then repay their debt from their share of the harvest. But the arrangement was rarely satisfactory, frequently resulting in little reward for months of hard work for the tenants. Turman remembered that after paying the landlord his share of the harvest, "Then you settle up and if there is anything left for you out of your third, then you gets that... .You come out in debt every month."

Although the boat ride to her new home was a first for Phoebe Turman, crossing from one side of the river to the other by ferry or flat boat, as the crafts were also called, was commonplace in the days before bridges spanned the water. Landowners along the river banks often ran ferries as money-making ventures and used their slaves to operate them and collect fees. Besides providing vital transportation links between Georgia and South Carolina, ferries continued after slavery ended as a source of employment for African Americans. Even after automobiles became important, ferries continued to flourish, only relinquishing their role in the area in 1927 with the opening of the Georgia-Carolina Memorial Bridge.

Joe Isom piloted a ferry for about seven years, starting when he was about ten years old. He was working on a farm at the time for a white man who also wanted him to manage the ferry. Isom remembered that the boat was about 30 feet long. "Well, I reckon it would be near about that. It's long enough for two whole wagons to fit in there... .I was puttin' folks across the river. Put the flats across, carrying people back and forth... .A wagon cost 50 cents and a buggy cost a quarter. If he [a person was walking, he wouldn't pay so much. It would cost, if you walking, a nickel or dime, or something [like that]."

Born in 1874, Isom was raised by a grandparent because his own parents died when he was an infant. At 107 years of age, he could look back on a time before railroads were a significant economic factor along the upper Savannah River. Flat-bottomed keel boats were the dominant transportation for moving heavy goods-including cotton bales-up and down the river when he was a young boy.

As a child, he watched as crewmen, many of them black, used long poles to push the shallow boats across the water. "You know, folks got trucks now to carry the cotton to different states. But they didn't have none when I was a boy. They had a boat that they carried the cotton in....The boat was long, long, long as this house here... They ship [the cotton] to Augusta [Georgia]. I ain't never been to Augusta. They say it's bad to go down the river... .They had poles, the boat didn't have no steam... Wasn't no trouble to go down there, but coming back they had to push it in the water using man power."

Traveling along the river evoked other memories, as well. For some, ferry boat trips were happy and exciting times. Louella Walker associated the Lindsey Bryant Ferry, which crossed the Savannah River near her tenant farm, with fun-filled excursions she made to Georgia as a teenager. "Our mother would be watching to see if the boys would be coming home with us from Georgia.he [Lindsey Bryant], ran the ferry from South Carolina to Georgia. He took people across and back in the flats... .Big, old flats...you know, you could put two buggies or two automobiles in there and they had a cable and the cable would help carry [the ferry]."

Heavy rains could make crossing the river dangerous, and people on both the Georgia and South Carolina banks shared tales about those who had drowned or barely escaped drowning. Minnie Walker remembered an episode when the river had frightened her terribly. A young relative of her husband's had come to see them for a visit, accompanied by his new bride. "I preferred them to spend the night with us. And the next morning when we got up, the river was up. Oh, it was up! That water was just jumping. And that young girl, she cried so. She'd never stayed away from home. My husband pleaded and pleaded with her [not to go across the flooded river]. And finally in the evening, they decided they would go. And I walked with 'em up there where I could see 'em when they got on the other side."

Walker's anxiety mounted as the couple launched the boat into the choppy water. She watched fearfully as they drifted quickly away from shore, then lost sight of them when they went behind an island. Long moments passed while she waited for them to reappear.

At last, they came back into view. "But they made it all right. What saved 'em, the boy had sense enough, this big oak tree was coming down [the river] and he turned the boat with the tree, until the tree got passed 'em. And that's what saved 'em. Hadn't been for them knowing to do that, why it would just have torn them all to pieces."

Tenant Farming

---