The decision to desert their “home,” locale, and “white folks,” however, did not always come easily. Every slave would have to determine his own priorities. Near Milledgeville, Georgia, in the path of Sherman’s march, a staff officer came upon a scene that could have been enacted almost anywhere the Union soldiers appeared. In a hut he found a slave couple, both of them more than sixty years old. Nothing they said to him suggested that they were displeased with their situation; if anything, like many of the elderly slaves he had encountered, they were content to spend their remaining years in the service and care of those who had exploited them for a lifetime of labor. But as the troops prepared to move on, the woman suddenly stood up, and a “fierce, almost devilish” look came across a face that only minutes before had been almost devoid of expression. “What for you sit dar?” she asked, pointing her finger at the old man crouched in the corner of the fireplace. “You s’pose I wait sixty years for nutten? Don’t yer see de door open? I’se follow my child; I not stay. Yes, anudder day I goes ’long wid dese people; yes, sar, I walks till I drop in my tracks.” Only a Rembrandt, the officer later wrote, could have done justice to this scene. “A more terrible sight I never beheld.”64
If the Civil War initially drew some masters and slaves closer together, with both now sharing privations and suffering, the approach of the Union Army underscored the ambiguous nature of that relationship and forced the master to reevaluate not only individual slaves in whom he had placed his confidence but the entire system of racial subordination. Both sides in the war had an obvious stake in how the slaves responded to the Yankees. The faithful black reinforced the conviction that the great mass of slaves (there had always been some “bad niggers”) were perfectly content and had no real wish to alter their status; the fidelity and steadiness demonstrated by the slaves, a North Carolinian argued, “speaks not only well for themselves but well for their training and the system under which they lived.” Union propagandists and abolitionists, on the other hand, viewed the exodus of slaves to and with the Union Army as an oppressed and brutalized population welcoming its release from bondage. In that spirit, a Union reporter wrote of a recent victory:
The moment our forces defeated the enemy at Labadieville, hundreds of negroes, besotted by the most severe system of Slavery, were in a moment left to themselves, and in a delirium of excitement, they first threw themselves in an ecstacy of joy, on their knees, and “bressed God that Massa Linkum had come,” and then, as semi-civilized people would naturally do, they commenced indulging in all sorts of excesses, the first fruits of their unrestricted liberty.65
That captured the public mood in the North perfectly, indicting the enemy (slaveholders) while at the same time explaining black excesses in ways that reinforced prevailing racial beliefs and suggested the need for some form of continued racial control.
Caught between these polar positions were the slaves, themselves, many of whom were sufficiently familiar with the expectations of white people to frame an appropriate response.
5
THE EXPERIENCE of Wilmer Shields, who managed several plantations in Louisiana in the absence of the owner, suggests only the magnitude of the problem that thousands of masters and overseers had to confront when Union soldiers passed through the vicinity. “You can form no idea of my situation and the anxiety of my mind,” he informed his employer on December 11, 1863. “All is anarchy and confusion here—everything going to destruction—and the negroes on the plantation insubordinate—My life has been several times in danger.” Several weeks later, Shields confessed that he felt powerless to deal with “the outrageous conduct of the Negroes who will not work for love or money—but who steal every thing they can lay their hands on.” Although he offered to pay them for their labor, those who continued to work did so at their own pace; they reported to the fields in the late morning, picked a little cotton, and then returned to the quarters to cook the hogs and beef they had killed that day. “You have no idea of the mental agony I endure under this state of affairs,” Shields repeated, in still another dismal report to the absentee owner. “Neither life, liberty, or property is valued a pin here—bands of thieves stroll about the country plundering in every direction—and I have not been allowed a single weapon for self defense—I know not at what moment my time may come.”
When the local Union commander backed Shields’s authority “to make the people work,” conditions improved perceptibly, but the officer’s departure prompted a return to the earlier manifestations of disaffection. “Let me again repeat,” Shields advised the owner, “that but very very few are faithful—Some of those who remain are worse than those who have gone—And I think that all who are able will leave as soon as the warm weather sets in—in no other way can I account for their present course of conduct for they will not even gather food for themselves.” Like the field hands, most of the house servants left when they pleased and did little when they remained. “I do not miss her,” Shields said of a departed servant, “for she had long since ceased to attend to her duties here.… When all leave me, if they do, I will be compelled to hire one or two, and they if possible shall be White servants.”
After the war, a disillusioned Shields compiled for his employer a list of the ex-slaves who remained on the plantations, and he affixed next to each name a mark denoting his evaluation of their wartime conduct and dependability. Of the 146 adult slaves on four plantations, 16 had been “perfectly faithful,” 30 had “done well comparatively,” and the other 100 had “behaved badly; many of them Outrageously.” Nearly every slave on this list, Shields noted, had absented himself from the plantation at some time and then returned, “some of them half a dozen times.” So grateful was he to those few who had remained “perfectly faithful” that he now urged his employer to present medals to four of them, with some “appropriate” inscription testifying to their loyalty. “The Medals coming from me,” he explained, “would be but little valued, from you greatly.” More than eighteen months after the war, Shields remained obsessed with how the slaves had behaved during that crisis, and he was perfectly willing to use it as a standard by which to judge the blacks under his supervision. When his employer instructed him to give five dollars to one of the freedmen, Shields retorted: “Robin was always one of my favorites, and I have ever thought him honest, but it is a question whether he was faithful to you or me—True he did not betray or rob us, as a great many others did, but he deserted us in two or three weeks after the Federal occupation of Natchez—for gain—instead of remaining here, as Ellen and Frank, and two or three others did, assisting me in protecting and saving the place and property.… This was fidelity.”66
What transpired on the plantations managed by Wilmer Shields would be repeated on countless places lying in the path of the Union Army. Far more than any Federal proclamation, the slaves themselves undermined the authority of the planter class. In Mississippi and Louisiana, for example, the many reports of slave “demoralization” and “defection” came close to suggesting a coordinated withdrawal of labor and efficiency. When a large Union force passed through the Bayou Lafourche region in late 1862, A. Franklin Pugh, the part owner and manager of four sugar plantations, first noted “great excitement” among the slaves; the next day, he found them “in a very bad way”; two days later, they were “completely demoralized,” some of them leaving and more preparing to depart. “I fear we shall lose them all. They go off in carts.” Before the week had ended, one of his plantations had been virtually “cleaned out,” with many of the slaves fleeing at night, and conditions steadily deteriorated at the other places. In what Pugh perceived as “a rebellion,” the slaves on a neighboring plantation overpowered their master and overseer, tied them up, and tried to remove them to a nearby town. Elsewhere in the rich plantation parishes, slaves refused to work without pay (or for worthless Confederate currency) and were generally found to be “demoralized,” “refractory,” and “in a state of mutiny”—that is, if they remained at all. “The negroes
have all left their owners in this parish,” a planter’s son reported from Bayou Plaquemine. “Some planters have not even one servant left. Our wives and daughters have to take the pot and tubs; the men, where there are any, take to the fields with the plough and hoe.”67
When Union forces in 1863 undertook an expedition into central and northern Louisiana, the news of their approach reportedly “turned the negroes crazy.” Not only did the slaves refuse to work, John H. Ransdell informed an absentee owner, but “they became utterly demoralized at once and everything like subordination and restraint was at an end.” The slaves who did not flee with the Yankees, he observed, “remained at home to do much worse.” For nearly a week, Ransdell, like other planter families in Rapides Parish, had to stand by helplessly (usually secluded in their homes) while the blacks engaged in “a perfect jubilee.” Some planters lost “nearly every movable thing,” as the slaves destroyed property, killed much of the livestock, and emptied the storerooms. “Confound them,” Ransdell wrote the governor of Louisiana, who owned the neighboring plantation, “they deserve to be half starved and to be worked nearly to death for the way they have acted.… The recent trying scenes through which we have passed have convinced me that no dependence is to be placed on the negro—and that they are the greatest hypocrites and liars that God ever made.” After enumerating his “considerable” losses, however, he thought them “nothing in comparison to those of the planters below us—and we really have great cause of thankfulness that we came off so well.”68
The heavy concentrations of slaves in parts of Louisiana and Mississippi help to account for the extent of the “demoralization”—that popular term used by whites to describe the disaffection of enslaved black workers. Even some ardent defenders of the “peculiar institution” might have agreed that slavery worked its greatest excesses in these regions and made the most impossible demands on black laborers. Not surprisingly, then, the brutalizing nature of the labor system in the Deep South supposedly made for a more volatile situation than elsewhere, and slaveholders were now reaping the consequences of years of abuse. Perhaps, too, the recalcitrant slaves who had been sold here from the more “benign” slaveholding states provided leadership or in some way influenced those who had known no other kind of bondage.
The problem with such explanations is that the excesses of bondage in the Deep South might have conceivably yielded some different results. As a number of fugitive slaves argued, the labor system in the Louisiana sugar parishes was calculated to produce the most docile, abject, obsequious, and degraded bondsmen, totally lacking in hope. If any system might have been expected to produce a crop of model Sambos, it should have been this one. But the reaction of these slaves at the approach of the Union Army, and the testimony of Louisiana and Mississippi planters, suggest that a people apparently broken in body and spirit had even more reason to contemplate the benefits of freedom and to hasten their liberation.
Every plantation, every farm, every town no doubt had its own version of how the slaves behaved. Until the Union Army made its presence felt, plantation life tended to remain relatively stable, crops were made, and most slaves went about their daily tasks. The Emancipation Proclamation by itself did little to alter this situation, with most slaves preferring to wait for a more propitious moment. But news that Yankee soldiers were somewhere within reach precipitated the rapid depopulation of the slave quarters, often without the slightest warning. “They have shown no signs of insubordination,” one observer noted. “Down to the last moment they cut their maize and eat their corn-cake with their old docility—then they suddenly disappear.” The experience of John H. Bills, the Tennessee planter, resembled that of his Mississippi neighbors and illustrated a pattern of slave response that crippled the labor system in substantial portions of the occupied South. With the appearance of the Yankees, the restlessness and reluctance to work he had observed during the past several months suddenly flared into “wild confusion” and “a general stampede.” In less than six weeks, more than twenty slaves left him (he estimated his loss at nearly $22,000), and those who remained might as well have gone, “they being totally demoralized & ungovernable.” Like the field hands, the servants worked erratically if at all: “the females have quit entirely or nearly so, four of the men come & go when & where they please.… I talk to them Earnestly but fear it will do no good.” Some six months later, “a wretched state of idleness” prevailed, and Bills found himself unable to exert any control. After still another six months, he conceded that slavery on his plantations was “about played out.”69
The epidemic of “demoralization” and “desertion” varied little from state to state (except for those regions untouched by the Union Army), nor did it make any perceptible distinctions between reputedly “cruel” and “benign” masters. When the Yankees approached her Georgia residence, Mary Jones might have wondered whether the many years of solicitude and concern with which the family had treated the slaves would now be sufficient to meet the test. Before his death in 1863, her husband—the Reverend C. C. Jones—had devoted much of his life to the spiritual uplift of the slaves. Upon the arrival of the troops, however, the slaves belonging to Mary Jones, and those in the immediate vicinity, exhibited a range of behavior that left her bewildered, hurt, and angry. “The people are all idle on the plantations, most of them seeking their own pleasure.” Although relatively few of her slaves had yet defected, Mary Jones was sufficiently dismayed by the behavior of some of those who remained to wonder if she would not be better off if they left. “Their condition is one of perfect anarchy and rebellion. They have placed themselves in perfect antagonism to their owners and to all government and control. We dare not predict the end of all this, if the Lord in mercy does not restrain the hearts and wills of this deluded people. They are certainly prepared for any measures.”70
6
AFTER ONLY A BRIEF FLIRTATION with “freedom,” some slaves drifted back to the plantations and farms from which they had fled. On a number of places, nearly every slave left at some point during the war, not necessarily together, but most of them returned within several weeks or months. “Father had eighty five negroes gone for a while,” the son of a Louisiana planter reported, “but about twenty have returned since.” Nor was it uncommon for slaves to return only to leave again. Homesickness, the families they had left behind, and disillusionment with the empty content of their freedom, compounded still further by near starvation and exhaustion, drove many back to the relative security of the plantation. The Yankees “didn’t show no respec’ for his feelin’s,” a Georgia slave explained, and he voiced the discouragement of many who had sought refuge in the Federal camps only to be subjected to hard work and personal abuse.71
Once having left the plantation and tasted even a semblance of freedom, the blacks who returned often behaved in a way that caused their owners considerable anxiety. On a Louisiana plantation, Mary C. R. Hardison complained that the servants heaped abusive language on her and did everything but strike her; the “leader” was thought to be a young black who had recently returned to the plantation declaring he had had enough of the Yankees. John H. Bills, the Tennessee planter, came to regret his decision to re-admit “My Woman Emmeline” after her brief stay in a Federal camp where her husband had died. Upon her return, the woman acted “verry Contrary,” refused to obey his commands, and threatened to “jump off the Waggon” if he tried to return her to the Yankees. “I feel that my desire to oblige has gotten me into trouble,” Bills concluded from this experience. Perceiving the changed demeanor of the returnees, or unwilling to forgive them for having once deserted, some masters simply refused to permit them back on the plantation or else kept them under constant scrutiny. “Jane returned to Arcadia,” a Georgia woman noted, “but as she has been to Savannah and returned before, I fear she may have come to steal.” Even more galling for masters were slaves like James Woodson, who returned to Fluvanna County, Virginia, with a detachment of Union troops, led them to the place where t
he valuables had been hidden, and then stood by while the Yankees whipped his ex-owner. That display of “insolence” was exceeded only by the former slaves who returned to the old plantation not with but as Union soldiers.72
After what many planters had experienced, the number of slave defections seemed less important than the behavior of those who remained. More often than most whites wished to believe or to concede publicly, the “demoralization” (as they preferred to call it) of the slave population took a violent and destructive bent. The victims of such depredations took little comfort in the ready explanation that these were exceptional cases. Nor was their anguish necessarily mitigated by the popular view that only the Yankees could have instigated the blacks to behave so outrageously. If only the slaves had been left alone, Henry W. Ravenel kept telling himself, they would have obeyed their natural instincts and remained “a quiet, contented, & happy people.” But Ravenel, a native of South Carolina, should have known better. The sacking of nearby Beaufort, early in the war, illustrated the capacity of the slaves for destructive activity in the days preceding the arrival of Union troops. (Local planters had already set an example by trying to burn down the cotton barns before their hasty departure.) If slaves in the Sea Islands region usually refrained from destroying the plantations on which they lived, the many who poured into Beaufort had little compunction about occupying and ransacking the stately town houses of well-to-do planters. When one planter momentarily returned to his home, he found a slave seated at the piano “playing away like the very Devil” and two young black women upstairs “dancing away famously”; he also discovered that many neighboring houses had been “completely turned upside down and inside out” and the local churches had been vandalized. When a Union landing party finally came ashore, they were startled by the extent of the devastation.
Been in the Storm So Long Page 23
