War Crimes Against Southern Civilians

by Walter Cisco

  Callie Elder, a young slave girl, told how Union soldiers stole money belonging to her master that had been entrusted to the care of her father. The thieves then victimized the slaves. "Grandma was a churnin' away out on the back porch and she had a ten dollar gold piece what she didn't want them soldiers to steal, so she dropped it in the churn," said Callie. "Them Yankees poured that buttermilk out right there on the porch floor and got grandma's money.""'

  Camilla Jackson's master, physician Peter Hoyle, took his slaves and fled the approach of Sherman's army. They returned to find that all the slave quarters had been leveled, but Dr. Hoyle's home inexplicably was still standing. The slaves stayed in the master's house until their own homes could be rebuilt."

  Mrs. Dolly Burge, a native of Maine, was living with her family and their servants on the Madison road, nine miles east of Covington, Georgia, when Sherman's army arrived. A number of young black boys were forced by the soldiers "at the point of the bayonet" to come with them. Mrs. Burge recorded the kidnapping in her journal.

  One (Newton) jumped into the bed in his cabin & declared himself sick, another crawled under the floor, a lame boy he was, but they pulled him out & placed him on a horse & drove him off. Mid, poor Mid, the last I saw of him, a man had him going round the garden looking as I thought for my sheep as he was my shepherd. Jack came crying to me, the big tears coursing down his cheeks saying they were making him go. I said: "Stay in my room," but a man followed in, cursing him & threatening to shoot him if he did not go. Poor Jack had to yield. James Arnold, in trying to escape from a back window, was captured & marched off. Henry, too, was taken, I know not how or when, but probably when he & Bob went after the mules....

  My poor boys, my poor boys, what unknown trials are before you.... Their parents are with me now & how sadly they lament the loss of their boys. Their cabins are rifled of every valuable, the soldiers swearing that their Sunday clothes were the white people's.... Poor Frank's chest was broken open, his money & tobacco taken. He has always been a money-making & saving boy. Not infrequently his crop brought him five hundred dollars & more.'

  Yankee soldiers robbed the home of Allie Travis in Covington. She and a female servant were standing in the yard, watching as the blue-clad troops marched by. Suddenly the slave girl "recognized some of her clothing in the hands of a soldier returning to the street. She immediately investigated the matter, and found that they had broken open her house and were appropriating all that she prized. She soon filled the yard with her shrieks and lamentations."

  "What's the matter with that nigger?" growled one of the Union troops.

  "Your soldiers," replied Allie, "are carrying off everything she owns, and yet you pretend to be fighting for the Negro.""

  Nora M. Canning and her husband, Judge Canning, returned to their plantation home in Jefferson County, Georgia, only to find that Federal cavalry had burned everything, even destroying their crops. "The poor Negroes had fared no better than we had," wrote Mrs. Canning. "Their friends had stolen everything from them as well as from us ... even their shoes were taken from their feet. Their chickens had all been killed and their bed and bedding all carried off."

  Mrs. Canning and her husband noticed one of their slaves "sitting on her door steps swaying her body back and forth, and making a mournful noise, a kind of moaning, a low sorrowful sound, occasionally wringing her hands and crying out."

  "Master," she said, raising her head, "What kind of folks these here Yankees? They won't even let the dead rest in the grave."

  "What do you mean?" asked Judge Canning.

  "You know my child what I bury last week? They take him up and left him on top of the ground for the hog to root. What you think of that, sir?"

  "Her story was true," wrote Mrs. Canning.

  We found that the Vandals had gone to the graveyard and, seeing a new made grave, had dug down into it and taken up the little coffin containing a dead baby, no doubt supposing treasure had been buried there. When they discovered their mistake, they left it above ground, as the poor mother expressed it, "for the hog to

  Mrs. Alfred Proctor Aldrich of The Oaks plantation near Barnwell, South Carolina, hid her valuables herself. Assuming that the servants knew the whereabouts of the silver, one Union soldier put a rope around the neck of a black man named Frank and threatened him with death if he did not reveal the hiding place. Mrs. Aldrich only learned of his ordeal later. "Each of the three times that this man suspended poor Frank in the air he would let him down and try to make him confess," she said. "Not knowing anything, of course he could not give the coveted information. Frank's neck remains twisted to this day.""

  "Daddy" John Gardener, in Orangeburg, South Carolina, was similarly threatened by soldiers searching for loot. "The Yankees put a pistol to his head," remembered a witness, "telling him he knew where his master had buried certain things they wished to get hold of." Though he was standing over the place where the hidden treasures were stashed, he told them, "Please God, boss, you'll have to shoot. I can't tell you anything about my master's affairs.""

  "Where is all the white people's gold and silver?" soldiers demanded of slaves at another South Carolina home. "My Ma said she didn't know," remembered Adeline Grey, a young girl at the time. "`You do know!' they said, and choked her till she couldn't talk." When the soldiers left, they made Adeline's mother come with them, forced to carry a sack of stolen meat. Her children rejoiced to see her return later that night. "She said she slipped behind, and slipped behind," said Adeline, "and when she came to a little pine thicket by the side of the road, she darted into it, dropped the sack of meat they had her carryin', and started out for

  Soldiers also kidnapped twelve-year-old slave Sam Rawls of Lexington County, South Carolina.

  I was in marse's [John Hiller's] yard. They come up where the boss was standing ... grabbed him and hit him. They burned his house, stole his stock, and one Yankee stuck his sword to my breast and said for me to come with him or he would kill me. 0' course I went long. They took me as far as Broad River, on t'other side of Chapin; then turned me loose and told me to run fast or they would shoot me. I went fast and found my way back home by watching the sun."

  "What did the Yankees do when they come?" asked former slave Andy Marion.

  They tied me up by my two thumbs and try to make me tell where I hid the money and gold watch and silver, but I swore I didn't know. Did I hide it? Yes, so good it was two years befo' I could find it again. I put everything in a keg, went into the woods, spaded the dirt by a pine stump, put the keg in, covered it up with leaves and left it. Sometime after, we looked for it, but couldn't find it. Two years later, I had a mule and cart in the woods. The mule's foot sunk down into the old stump hole and there was the keg, the money, the silver and the watch. Master was mighty glad that I was a faithful servant, and not a liar and a thief like he thought I was."

  All too often, threatened slaves had to comply with the demands of the robbers. Cureton Milling remembered that two Yankees rode up to the plantation kitchen, demanding that servants disclose where valuables were hidden. "Tell us or we'll beat you worse than you ever got from the lash of the patrollers," he quoted one soldier as saying. "They was as good as their words," he continued, "they got down and grabbed us and made us tell all we knew."'"

  "They'd go through the house an' take everything," said Daphney Wright, a young slave woman of Hardeeville, South Carolina. "Take from the white, an' take from the colored, too. Take everything out the house! They take from my house ... But I didn't have anythin' much ... Had a little pork an' a week's supply of rations."-"

  "Mom" Hester Hunter's family was threatened and terribly frightened by the invaders. "Oh, my God, them Yankees never bring nothin' but trouble and destructiveness when they come here," she

  Penny Alsbrook may have felt fear, but certainly did not show it. When Yankee soldiers demanded something to eat for themselves and water for their horses, "She coolly informed them," said a witness, that if they wanted anything,
"they could get down and get it, she never had waited on no poor white trash and never intended to." She stood by in silence as soldiers invaded her kitchen, "got the bread tray for the horses to eat out of, broke up the dishes, knocked down the stove, broke out the window panes and did, as she expressed it, `everything devilish they could."' The vandalism continued, but Penny "stood by and watched them without a word, until one of them started to pick the baby of the household up in his arms. She tore at him like a tiger and clawed his face and hands and grabbed the baby and ran."z'

  "First thing they look for was money," remembered bondsman Lewis Evans. "They put a pistol right in my forehead and say, `I got to have your money, where is it?"'

  There was a gal, Caroline, who had some money; they took it away from her. They took the geese, the chickens and all that was worth takin' off the place, stripped. Took all the meat out of the smoke-house, corn out the crib, cattle out the pasture, burnt the gin-house and cotton. When they left, they shot some cows and hogs and left them lyin' right there. There was a awful smell 'round there for weeks after.24

  Anna Hasell Thomas of Mount Hope plantation near Ridgeway, South Carolina, remembered of the blue-clad invaders:

  [They] had treated the Negroes shamefully; stolen the little silver some had, killed, eaten or stolen their fowls, and they had some heads to prove how many had been killed. One of the slave girls, they had dressed in their own regimentals and carried her off. They had left the slaves nothing eatable except cow peas, which they had probably never seen before, and did not know that they were eatable.25

  A Federal officer confessed that soldiers would "plunder the houses of the blacks of the last mouthful of food and every valuable and take pleasure in insulting and molesting them when they meet them."26 That was the experience of slave girl Violet Guntharpe. "The Yankees sho' throwed us in the briar batch, but we weren't bred and born there like the rabbit." Violet went on to describe her home built of logs. Slaves had cows to give them milk, horses and mules to help them work the crops. They had hogs "fattenin' on hickory nuts, acorns, and shucked corn to give us meat and grease; the sheep with their wool, and the cotton in the gin house was there to give us clothes ... but when them Yankees come and take all that away, all we had to thank them for was a hungry belly, and freedom." She remembered black babies "suckin' their thumbs for want of sumpin' to eat; mind you 'twas winter time too. Lots of children died, as did old folks, while the rest of us scour the woods for hickory nuts, acorns, cane roots, and artichokes, and seine the river for fish." Violet could not help but note that "the worst" of the liberated slaves left to follow the invading army27-a decision most of them would soon come to regret.

  Sophie Sosnowski, headmistress of a school for girls near South Carolina's capital city, was shocked when one party of Yankee soldiers decided to harangue them. "One among them, made a regular stump speech, in which he endeavored to demonstrate that this country was destined only for the white man, and that the Indian, as well as the Negro had to be, or in the course of events would be, exterminated.""

  Madame Sosnowski was appalled, too, by the treatment black women received from the invading troops at the home she had taken refuge in during the Federal occupation of Columbia. "The scenes enacted at that dwelling in connection with the Negro servants are not fit for female pen to dwell upon.... At last the [black men] themselves became thoroughly disgusted, and ... vowed vengeance for the base treatment their women had been subjected to."29

  One black woman, a servant of Columbia minister Peter Shand, was raped by seven soldiers of the United States Army. She then had her face forced down into a shallow ditch and was held there until she drowned. William Gilmore Simms reported how "regiments, in successive relays," committed gang rape in Columbia on scores of slave women."'

  "What does this mean, boys?" asked Sherman, coming upon a young African-American man dead on a Columbia street.

  Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman

  "The damned black rascal gave us his impudence, and we shot him," calmly replied a soldier.

  "Well, bury him at once!" ordered Sherman. "Get him out of sight!"

  When asked about the matter, Sherman said that "we have no time for courts-martial and things of that sort !1131

  One Union army officer described the train of black refugees that followed Sherman's army in South Carolina.

  It was a curious sight to see some fifty vehicles of every description from the fancy carriage ... to the heavy farm cart loaded with Negroes of every description, sex, age and hue, carrying with them household fixtures, etc., living by foraging as our army does, and having to take what is left after the army is served and of course suffering the most painful privation. I have seen them dying on the road in wagons, carts, etc.... I am grieved to see many of our soldiery treat them with the greatest unkindness."

  Mary Chesnut recorded in her diary the horrific news that the bodies of eighteen black women had been discovered on the Sumter District plantation of her niece Minnie Frierson and husband, James. Each had been stabbed in the chest with a bayonet. "The Yankees were done with them!" wrote Mrs. Chesnut. "These are not rumours but tales told me by the people who see it all.""

  North Carolina slaves suffered at the hands of the invaders as well. "They came from ever'where but outen the ground and down outen the sky," remembered Martha Graham. "They took all the corn outen the crib and the things we'd stored. When they left, we didn't have nothin'." Her mother was in the house straining milk when a Yankee barged in, helped himself to it, and just as quickly left. Seconds later a shot rang out. "They was killing our turkey," said Martha. "Darn your black skin," a soldier shouted at another North Carolina home, "give me the watch in your pocket!" A blind slave woman had her new dress stolen.'"

  "Them Yankees done a lot of mischief," said former slave and North Carolinian Tiney Shaw. "I know because I was there." Besides their "robbin', plunderin', and burnin' up everything," Tiney remembered that "a whole lot of darkies what ain't never been whipped by the master got a whuppin' from the Yankee soldiers."35

  North Carolina plantation mistress Cornelia Phillips Spencer remarked how "unfortunate Negroes were the severest sufferers, they being stripped of their all, and beginning a new life of freedom, began it without even the little savings and personal property accumulated in slavery. "`

  Four-year-old Charles Dickens remembered that his mother had a shoulder of meat that she hid under a mattress in their slave cabin. "When the Yankees left, she looked for it; they had stole the meat and gone.""

  Another small slave boy, Blount Baker, recounted that the Yankees "talked mean to us an' one of them said that we niggers were the cause of the war. `Sir,' I said, `folks that are wanting a war can always find a cause.' He kicked me in the seat of the pants for that, so I hushed."'%

  The Yankees would regret their run-in with eight-year-old Ida Lee Adkins. Ida lived on the plantation of her master, Frank Jeffries, and his wife, Mary Jane, near Louisburg, North Carolina. Mr. Jeffries was too old to serve in the Confederate army but met the invading Yankees with characteristic defiance and as a result was tied up on his porch.

  "I was scared near 'bout to death," said Ida, "but I ran to the kitchen an' got a butcher knife, an' when the Yankees wasn't lookin', I tried to cut the rope an' set Marse Frank free. But one of them blue devils seed me an' come running."

  "What are you doin', you black brat!" shouted the Federal. "You stinkin' little alligator bait!"

  "He snatched the knife from my hand," continued Ida, "an' told me to stick out my tongue, that he was going to cut it off. I let out a yell an' run behind the house."

  As the Yankees continued to pillage her master's home, Ida had an idea.

  'Bout that time I seed the bee gums [hives] in the side yard.... I run an' got me a long stick an' turned over every one of them gums. Then I stirred them bees up with that stick till they was so mad I could smell the poison. An' bees! You ain't never seed the like of bees. They was swarmin' all over the place. They sai
led into them Yankees like bullets, each one madder than the other. They lit on them horses till they looked like they was alive with varmints. The horses broke their bridles an' tore down the palings an' lit out down the road. But that running was nothin' to what them Yankees done. They bust out cussin', but what did a bee care about cuss words! ... The Yankees forgot all about the meat an' things they done stole; they took off down the road on a run, passin' the horses. The bees was right after them in a long line.

  With the invaders gone, Master Jeffries was quickly freed and most of the plunder recovered. "Ida Lee," said Mrs. Jeffries, "We want to give you something you can keep so you'll always remember this day, and how you run the Yankees away."

  "Then Miss Mary Jane took a plain gold ring off her finger an' put it on mine," a seventy-eight-year-old Ida Lee Adkins told a newspaper reporter in 1936. "An' I been wearin' it ever since."'

  By 1936, eighty-seven-year-old Henry D. Jenkins of Fairfield County, South Carolina, had become a substantial landowner and a respected citizen. He grew up a slave on the Sumter District plantation of Joseph Howell. He told an interviewer what he remembered of the Federal invasion.

  When the Yankees come, what they do? They did things they ought not to have done and left undone the things they ought to have done. Yes, that 'bout tells it. One thing you might like to hear. Mistress [Sara Howell, wife of plantation owner Joseph Howell] got all the money, the silver, the gold and the jewels, and got the well digger to hide them in the bottom of the well. Them Yankees smart. When they got there, they asked for the very things at the bottom of the well. Mistress wouldn't tell. They held a "court of enquiry" in the yard; called slaves up, one by one, good many. Must have been a Judas 'mongst us. Soon a Yankee was let down in the well, and all that money, silver, gold, jewelry, watches, rings, brooches, knives and forks, butter-dishes, waiters, goblets, and cups was took and carried 'way by an army that seemed more concerned 'bout stealin', than they was 'bout the Holy War for the liberation of the poor African slave people. They took off all the horses, sheep, cows, chickens, and geese; took the seine and the fishes they caught, corn in crib, meat in smoke-house, and everything. Marse General Sherman said war was hell. It sho' was. Maybe it was hell for some of them Yankees when they come to die and give account of the deeds they done in Sumter and Richland Counties."'