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Capt. James Cobb, who had been sent home
    from duty with the southern army due to poor health, was assigned
    the task of breaking up the gangs of deserters. The e ort spawned
    vendet as that would outlast the war. On June 3, 1865, nearly two
    months after the surrender, Cobb was seized by a group of thirty
    whites and hanged from a tree on his property. Afterward, they
    whites and hanged from a tree on his property. Afterward, they
    ransacked his home, kil ing or stealing his livestock. The former
    Confederate o cer was accused of having named seven of the
    mob's members as deserters. The Blackwel group subsequently
    captured the seven and summarily executed them.31
    Of the handful of Union soldiers sent to Bibb County to oversee a
    nominal local court system during the rst two years after the war,
    one was kil ed on a Centrevil e street corner by a Confederate
    veteran wielding an axe handle.32 Two agents of the Freedmen's
    Bureau were assigned to the area in January and February of 1866.
    The men, named Beard and Higgen-botham, were promptly
    whipped by local whites and driven from the county. Not long
    after, rumor spread that two former slaves named Tom Johnson
    and Rube Russel had been seen around the county sporting ne
    clothes paid for by Freedmen's Bureau agents. The emancipated
    slaves planned to "live like white folks and marry white wives,"
    according to a newspaper account. Johnson was promptly hanged
    from a tree on Market Street. A few mornings later, passersby found
    Russel dangling dead, in a tree not far from the scene of the earlier
    lynching.33
    Yet even as southern whites like those in Bibb County made their
    rejection of the new order so apparent, no alternative was clear
    either. The loss of slaves left white farm families such as the
    Cot inghams, and even more so those on expansive plantations with
    scores or hundreds of slaves, not just nancial y but intel ectual y
    bereft. The slaves were the true experts in the tasks of cot on
    production on most farms; in many cases it was slaves who directed
    the gangs of other slaves in their daily work. Slavery had been
    introduced into the southern colonies in the 1600s with the
    argument that whites, operating alone, were incapable of large-
    scale cot on production. The concepts of sharecropping and farm
    tenancy hadn't yet evolved. The notion that their farms could be
    operated in some manner other than with groups of black laborers
    compel ed by a landowner or his overseer to work as many as
    compel ed by a landowner or his overseer to work as many as
    twenty hours a day was antithetical to most whites.
    Moreover, the sudden wil ingness of mil ions of black laborers to
    insolently demand cash wages and other requirements to secure
    their labor was an almost otherworldly experience for whites such
    as Elisha Cot ingham. Former slaves were suddenly mobile too,
    seeking new lodging away from the farms of their slave lives and
    at empting to put white farmers into competition with one another
    for their work.
    In the absence of any means to supply freed slaves with land, the
    Freed-men's Bureau and northern military commanders stationed in
    the South encouraged blacks to enter into labor contracts with
    whites. The results were writ en agreements between whites and
    black farmhands l ed with provisions aimed at restoring the
    subjugated state of African Americans. One agent of the Freedmen's
    Bureau wrote that whites were unable to fathom that work "could
    be accomplished without some prodigious binding and obligating
    of the hireling to the employer."34
    Some white plantation owners at empted to coerce their former
    slaves into signing "lifetime contracts" to work on the farms. In one
    South Carolina case in 1865, when four freedmen refused such
    agreements, two were kil ed and a third, a woman, was tortured.35
    More common were year-to-year contracts that obligated black
    workers to remain throughout a planting and harvest season to
    receive their ful pay, and