of this unusual situation to refuse to share her earnings with her owner,
William Stiles, but he was too fearful that she would leave him permanently to press the issue. The proximity of Union troops and the widely understood possibility of flight put pressure upon those in charge of slaves to find ways of keeping them at work. Many slaves understood this and pressed for advantage. In the autumn of 1864, on Colonel Thomas Jones’s
place in DeSoto County, Mississippi, Nat Green was offered wages to stay on. He agreed and worked through the winter and spring but finally had to appeal to the provost marshal of freedmen to try to get his pay. Owners also attempted to hold laborers to the land or induce runaways to return by agreeing a division of the crop with them. In the winter of 1862–63 a Mississippian
“contracted with my negroes
to work for half of the cotton, and the corn still to be raised for the use of the place . . . A portion of them remained and fulfilled the contract during the years 1862, 3 and 4.” Some masters,
anticipating the end of the system, let their slaves go before the arrival of the northerners.
Alfred Scruggs, near Huntsville, Alabama, was free as early as. He hauled wood with a team loaned him by his ex-master and used what he made to acquire a team of his own in 1863. He also had sufficient resources to rent forty acres and raised a crop of cotton and corn that year He rented annually from two other local whites up to the end of the war,“hauling working and making money in anyway I could in an honorable manner
A slave from Sumner County, Tennessee, was hired out by his owner but also worked on his own behalf. He was given a half Saturday at times to work for myself leased a small plot of land, and cleared it with the help of another slave.
Sharing the proceeds, the two raised about four acres of corn in the summer and autumn of 1862. These cases exemplify the element of continuity in wartime with the practices of the earlier informal economy.”
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