V/O Fan Butler
The next morning, I had the bell rung to summon the people here to sign the contract, and then my work began in earnest...

NARRATOR
Fan Butler was trying to run two Georgia plantations by herself. Her father, Pierce, had died of malaria the year before. Fan had three hundred laborers working for her, many doing backbreaking, dangerous work in the rice fields. By law, she now had to negotiate annual contracts with each of them.

NELSON
She understood that if she made the concessions that these newly freed people wanted, she wouldn't turn a profit. So she basically needs to make enough from them to cover their most minimal demands, and then to make a profit for the plantation.

V/O Fan Butler
For six mortal hours I sat in the office without once leaving my chair, while the people poured in and poured out. One wanted this altered in the contract, another that. One was willing to work in the mill but not in the field. And so it went on all day, each one "making me sensible," as he called it.

WALKER
Neither she nor the other members of her class know how to handle free labor. What they want is a docile, disciplined labor force. They don't want people asking to be guaranteed their wages. They don't want people asking for time off, because this is just completely unacceptable.

NARRATOR
Organizing Fan Butler's workers, making sure their demands were heard, was a formidable adversary. Tunis Campbell felt that he could have more impact working directly with his constituents at the grassroots level. He urged Butler's workers to assert their rights.

DUNCAN
Tunis Campbell told them "If they can get you cheaper, they will. If they can take part of your crop, they will. And Fan Butler is one of the worst abusers of the system, So be tough with her. Say, 'Okay, Ms. Butler, but I've been told that laborers have rights too.'"

NARRATOR
Sometimes Campbell called meetings on the spur of the moment, in the middle of the day. Fan Butler was furious.

V/O Fan Butler
There seemed to be no remedy for this evil, the Negroes throwing all our authority to the wind, and following Campbell wherever he chose to lead them. We had no proper authorities to appeal to, should our Negroes misbehave themselves.

AYERS
No matter where you are in the South, it's white and black trying to forge some kind of workable economy out of all of this. Everywhere you go in the South, it's former slaves trying to find a way to make something out of nothing. Everywhere you go in the South, it's people who had had ownership of other human beings, trying to figure out now, "How do I live without that?"