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the Freedmen are working for a share in the crops; the planters prefering to hire them in this way, to payment of stated wages, the incentive to care and industry being greater
As they accumulate property, this system will be replaced by the direct renting of land, which is much preferable but is still above the means of the great mass of the Freedmen.
The numbers of renting and farming land on their own account, are very largely in excess of those of last year, and are constantly increasing. The reports show their farms to be as well managed, and successful, as those of their white neighbors.
In the grain-raising, lumber, and grazing Counties, the Freedmen are mostly employed as laborers at stated monthly wages.
The average monthly wages for males, is nearly ($14) fourteen dollars in specie; of adult females ($10) ten dollars in specie.
The system of Laws, relative to contracts for labor, adopted by the last Legislature of this State, is most vicious, and in violation of every principle of sound sense and justice.
These laws permit the employer to himself fine his laborers, and deduct the fine from the laborers wages. Fines can be imposed for neglect, disobedience, loss of time, impertinence, injuries to property, feigned sickness, etc.
They further provide, that in case the laborer refuses to work, he may be sent to jail, and compelled to labor on the Public roads, until he is willing to return to his employer, and his work.
And if the laborer should leave his employer, no one else is allowed to employ him under penalty of a ruinous fine.
The result of the execution of these laws would be to reduce the whole laboring population to peonage.
But although they are almost a dead letter, yet they have had a most demoralizing effect.
Planters instead of discharging a lazy or worthless laborer, have clung to the idea of making up losses by fines, stoppages, etc; which of course, they would not be permitted to collect; the result is a pecuniary loss to the employer, and to make the idle laborer still more worthless. This can only be corrected, when all such antiquated, and unwise legislative attempts to regulate the relation of employer and employee, are swept from the statute books, and the matter left as it is, in the more advanced States of the Union, to the parties interested, thus securing the personal independance of the laborer and employer from pecuniary loss.
In General Orders, No. 5. dated Headquarters, Bureau Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, State of Texas, Galveston, Texas, February 2nd, 1867, Agents are directed to turn over all civil and criminal cases in which Freedmen are interested, to the State authorities, the exception to this, was, all disputes, settlements, etc., arising from contracts for labor, the adjudication of this class of cases, I thought, it necessary the Bureau should control, owing to the outrageous State Laws on labor.
Criminal cases were turned over to the State Authorities necessarily, the Bureau having no adequate means of punishment, but a strict scrutiny has been kept upon the actions of the Courts, in numerous cases of assault etc, where the Courts assessed a paltry and inadequate fine, the offender has been re-arrested and an adequate fine imposed by the Bureau
In three cases of the murder of Freedmen, where the criminals were acquitted by the State Courts, they were re-arrested by my