Hale County, Alabama: From Slavery to Freedom in a
Black Belt Community

On a bright Saturday morning in May 1867, 4,000 former slaves eagerly streamed into the town of Greensboro, bustling seat of Hale County in west-central Alabama. They came to hear speeches from two delegates to a recent freedmen's convention in Mobile and to find out about the political status of black people under the Reconstruction Act just passed by Congress. In the days following this unprecedented gathering of African Americans, tension mounted throughout the surrounding countryside. Military
authorities had begun supervising voter registration for elections to the upcoming constitutional convention that would rewrite the laws of Alabama. On June 13, John Orrick, a local white, confronted Alex Webb, a politically active freedman, on the streets of Greensboro. Webb had recently been appointed a voter registrar for the district. Orrick swore he would never be registered by a black man, and shot Webb dead. Hundreds of armed and angry freedmen formed a posse to search for Orrick, but they failed to find him. Webb's murder galvanized 500 local freedmen to form a local Union League chapter, which functioned as both a militia company and a forum to agitate for political rights. Such violent political encounters between
black people and white people were common in southern communities. The Civil War had destroyed slavery and the Confederacy, but the political and economic status of newly emancipated African Americans remained to be worked out. The contests over the meaning of freedom reflected the great diversity of circumstances among southern communities. The 4 million freed people constituted roughly one-third of the total southern population, but the black-white ratio in individual communities varied enormously. In some places the Union army had been a strong presence during the war, hastening collapse of the slave system and encouraging experiments in free labor. Other areas remained relatively untouched by the fighting. As a region, the South included a wide range of agriculture, with large plantations dominating certain areas and small
farms others. Large plantations dominated the economy and political life of west-central Alabama's communities. The region had emerged as a fertile center of cotton production just two decades before the Civil War. Typical of the South's black belt, it was an area in which African Americans constituted over three-quarters of the population. Hale County was virtually untouched by fighting until the very end of the Civil War. The arrival of Union troops there in the spring of 1865 emboldened African Americans to
challenge the traditional arrangements by which masters had organized plantation labor. Above all, freed people desired greater autonomy from their old masters, and they began forcing planters to accept changes in the labor system.  Although the organization of work and methods of payment varied throughout the postwar South, the key transformation involved a shift from the gang labor characteristic of slavery to individual families engaged in sharecropping. The slave labor force on antebellum plantations had been typically
organized into large work gangs, under the harsh and continuous supervision of white overseers. Under the
sharecropping system African American families worked small plots of land and received a share of the crop from plantation owners. Sharecropping was less of a victory for newly freed African Americans than a defeat for plantation owners, who resented even the limited economic independence won by the black work force. One owner, Henry Watson, found that his entire work force had deserted him at the end of 1865. "I am in the midst of a large and fertile cotton growing country," Watson wrote to a partner. "Many plantations are entirely without labor, many plantations have insufficient labor, and upon none are the laborers doing their former accustomed work." Black women refused to work in the fields, preferring to stay home with their children and tend garden plots. Nor would male field hands do any work, such as caring for hogs, that
did not directly increase their share of the cotton crop. Overseers and owners thus grudgingly allowed freed people to work the land "in families," letting them choose their own supervisors and find their own provisions. When Wilson O'Berry, longtime supervisor of the large Cameron plantation in Hale County, switched to a sharecropping arrangement in 1867, he reported improved productivity and better work habits among the hands. Over the next few years, the Cameron place was leased and eventually sold in small plots to families of former slaves. African Americans believed owning and farming their own land was the best
way to secure their freedom, keep their family together, and get ahead. An independent black community still exists on the old Cameron plantation today. Only a small fraction--perhaps 15 percent--of African American families were fortunate enough to be able to buy land. The majority settled for some version of sharecropping, while others managed to rent land from owners, becoming tenant farmers. Still, planters throughout Hale County had been forced to change the old routines of plantation labor. Local African Americans also organized politically. In 1866 Congress had passed the Civil Rights Act and sent the
Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution to the states for ratification; both promised full citizenship rights to former slaves. Hale County freedmen joined the Republican Party and local Union League chapters, which operated as the Republican Party's organizational arm in the South. Freedmen used their new political power to press for better labor contracts, demand greater autonomy for the black work force, and agitate for the more radical goal of land confiscation and redistribution. "The colored people are very anxious to get land of their own to live upon independently; and they want money to buy stock to make crops," reported one black Union League organizer. "The only way to get these necessaries is to give our votes to the [Republican]
party . . . making every effort possible to bring these blessings about by reconstructing the State." Two Hale
County former slaves, Brister Reese and James K. Green, won election to the Alabama state legislature in 1869. These new labor arrangements and aggressive black political activism prompted a white counterattack. In the spring of 1868, the Ku Klux Klan came to Hale County. A secret organization of white people devoted to terrorizing and intimidating African Americans and their white Republican allies, the Klan quickly made its presence felt. Disguised in white sheets, armed with guns and whips, and making nighttime raids on horseback, Klansmen flogged, beat, and murdered freed people. The spread of sharecropping and tenant farming dispersed African American families throughout the countryside, making them more vulnerable to
violent attack. Planters used Klan terror to dissuade former slaves from leaving plantations or organizing for higher wages. The Klan was also a potent weapon for punishing African American voters and political activists. An 1871 congressional investigation led to passage of the Ku Klux Klan Act. The Grant administration employed U.S. marshals, army troops, and federal grand juries to crack down on the 
Klan in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Mississippi. Federal intervention did manage to break the power of the Klan temporarily in parts of the former Confederacy. But no serious effort was made to stop Klan terror in the west Alabama black belt. Planters thus reestablished much of their social and political control. Reconstruction was only partially successful. Not until the "Second Reconstruction" of the twentieth-century civil rights movement would the descendants of Hale County's African Americans enjoy the full fruits of freedom --and even then these would be of lesser quality. Events in Hale County typified a struggle that
took place in hundreds of southern communities in the aftermath of the Civil War. The destruction of slavery and the Confederacy forced African Americans and white people to renegotiate their old economic and political roles. During the Reconstruction era, these community battles both shaped and were shaped by the victorious and newly expansive federal government in Washington.