cept for a few animals secreted from the Yankees by his neighbor Hill Carter
of Shirley plantation across the James. General Grant’s cabin still stood
on Eppes’s once-magnificent lawn. His mansion (where Grant’s staff had
lived) was uninhabitable. Yet Eppes was determined not to practice medi-
cine, which he had done only briefly, for the Confederates, but once again
to farm—if he could borrow money to rebuild. Here Eppes was fortunate
in having a Philadelphia-born wife whose family were glad to assist him.
Among Eppes’s astute managerial strokes during his personal recon-
struction was the purchase at a bargain price from the federal government
of Union barracks that had been constructed on his property. These be-
came Eppes’s workers’ quarters, a pull, as it were, to homeless, wandering
freedmen and their families—and a bargaining tool and weapon (if need
be) to control labor. By the beginning of January , Eppes, John Seldon of
Westover plantation, and the redoubtable Hill Carter, among others, were
conspiring on Turkey Island (up the James in Henrico County) as a James
River Farmers association to fix wages according to classes of labor (i.e.,
men and women), to determine terms of employment, and especially to
reestablish planters’ authority to discipline. This was no return to slavery,
but a golden opportunity for planters to rationalize labor without slavery’s
‘‘welfare’’ obligations to the young, old, and infirm.^15 Sugar planters’ transi-
tion to free (yet repressed) labor was complicated by flood damage and dis-
continuities of plantation ownership, but altogether theirs and the world
of Virginia grain planters must be said to have improved.
Elsewhere, especially in the sprawling interior cotton-corn belts, cash
and credit were hard to find, and sometimes U.S. army agents persisted
in trying to represent and protect freedmen’s rights. Here a new labor sys-
tem for plantations evolved tentatively and with difficulty. Finally (to gen-
eralize) a deal was made: Freedmen wanted their own farms but had no
money. Planters wanted to drive labor in gangs at their discretion but had
no money for wages, either. Freedmen seem to have initiated the solution to
cashlessness in some places. In order to claim discrete ‘‘farms’’ and homes
and to work as individuals and families rather than in gangs under con-
stant supervision, they would share half the market value of a cotton crop
with a planter willing to fragment his estate and forgo central manage-
ment and gang labor. Planters—now as often called landlords—would also
be obliged to provide sharecroppers with animal power (usually mules),
harnesses, tools, and other farming equipment. Landlords (who were liter-
ate and usually experienced in business) would market crops and deduct
from sharecroppers’ halves their shares of fertilizer costs, shipping, insur-