Been in the Storm So Long

by Leon F. Litwack

  If many whites thought the former soldier a potentially dangerous citizen, they were in less agreement about his desirability as a laborer. Despite the proscriptions visited upon allegedly exploitative peddlers at the army camps, no such restrictions were placed on planters and speculators, many of whom inundated the military installations around discharge time with contracts in hand, eager for the services of the blacks. “The negro was king,” a northern traveler wrote after witnessing the ways in which Mississippi and Louisiana planters had descended upon a black regiment being mustered out near Natchez.

  Men fawned upon him; took him to the sutler’s shop and treated him; carried pockets full of tobacco to bestow upon him; carefully explained to him the varied delights of their respective plantations. Women came too—with coach and coachmen—drove into the camp, went out among the negroes, and with sweet smiles and honeyed words sought to persuade them that such and such plantations would be the very home they were looking for.

  Ironically, some planters thought them more desirable laborers because they had been soldiers and might be able to exert restraint and discipline on the other workers. For that reason, the higher the rank, the better offer a black veteran might expect. “I told a nigger officer that I’d give him thirty dollars a month just to stay on my plantation and wear his uniform,” remarked a substantial planter from Jackson, Mississippi. “The fellow did it, and I’m havin’ no trouble with my niggers. They’re afraid of the shoulder-straps.”113

  If black soldiers had known what awaited them in civilian life, they might have kept more than their uniforms upon being mustered out of the Army. The rewards of plantation labor would prove disappointing; whites retained economic power and returned political and police power to those who had wielded it before the war; and as black dissatisfaction mounted, so did the white man’s recourse to physical violence, legal repression, and vigilante justice. For many freedmen, self-preservation took precedence over self-employment. “As one of the disfranchised race,” a Louisiana black advised, “I would say to every colored soldier, ‘Bring your gun home.’ ”114

  9

  SEVERAL MONTHS after the end of the war, two white men overtook an elderly black woman who had insisted on leaving her former master’s plantation near Washington, Georgia. While one of the men shot her, the other broke her ribs and beat her on the head with a stone until she died; they left her body unburied in a secluded spot. Ten days later, the body was discovered and military authorities arrested the two assailants. Whether the brutal murder or the subsequent arrests excited more public indignation and concern is not entirely clear. “She certainly was an old fool,” Eliza Andrews said of the victim, “but I have never yet heard that folly was a capital offense.” Judge Garnett Andrews, Eliza’s father and a former state legislator who had opposed secession, agreed to defend the two men charged with the crime, not because he approved of their deed but because he felt they deserved a fair trial. He said very little about the case, his daughter observed, “because conversation on such subjects nearly always brings on a political row in the family.”

  Although Eliza Andrews thought the murder had been “a very ugly affair,” her sympathies almost instinctively went out to the accused. After all, “there is only negro evidence for all these horrors, and nobody can tell how much of it is false.” As for the two defendants, one of them was a family man whose “poor wife is … almost starving herself to death from grief” and whose children were reportedly frightened into convulsions when the soldiers arrested their father, while the other was a twenty-year-old youth whose “poor old father hangs around the courtroom, putting his head in every time the door is opened, trying to catch something of what is going on.” Judge Andrews thought it unfortunate that the trial should take place at this time, for the Yankees would no doubt “believe everything the negroes say and put the very worst construction on it.” His daughter agreed. “Brutal crimes happen in all countries now and then,” she confided to her journal, “especially in times of disorder and upheaval such as the South is undergoing, but the North, fed on Mrs. Stowe’s lurid pictures, likes to believe that such things are habitual among us, and this horrible occurrence will confirm them in their opinion.”

  Eliza Andrews made no mention of the verdict handed down in the murder case, except to note that her father believed one of the defendants would surely hang and entertained little hope of saving the other. But she did record still another “unfortunate affair” that occurred at the same time in adjoining Lincoln County. Having learned that freedmen were holding a secret meeting, “which was suspected of boding no good to the whites,” a group of local youths resolved to break up the gathering; one of them, in his attempt to frighten the blacks, “accidentally” shot and killed a woman. “He didn’t mean to hurt anybody,” Miss Andrews had heard, “but the Yankees vow they will hang the whole batch if they can find them. Fortunately he has made his escape, and they don’t know the names of the others.”

  Corrie Calhoun says that where she lives, about thirty miles from here, over in Carolina, the men have a recipe for putting troublesome negroes out of the way that the Yankees can’t get the key to. No two go out together, no one lets another know what he is going to do, and so, when mischievous negroes are found dead in the woods, nobody knows who killed them.115

  Many freedmen quickly discovered in the aftermath of emancipation how much more vulnerable and expendable their lives had suddenly become. “Nigger life’s cheap now,” a white Tennessean observed. “Nobody likes ’em enough to have any affair of the sort [murder] investigated; and when a white man feels aggrieved at anything a nigger’s done, he just shoots him and puts an end to it.”116 Whether previously expressed in martial displays, bellicose oratory, battlefield valor, family feuds, personal vengeance, or in the whipping of slaves, violence lay close to the surface of southern life and culture. Neither whites nor blacks had been exempt from its influence, whether as perpetrators or victims, and the prevalence of frontier conditions, the remoteness of many regions from local government and military occupation, the memories of the Lost Cause, and the felt need to control and discipline freed blacks militated against any decline of violence in the postwar years.

  The question of how a highly volatile white population might respond to emancipation had been an immediate concern of nearly every freedman and freedwoman. During slavery, they had been exposed to violence on the plantations and farms where they worked and from the dreaded patrollers if they ventured off those plantations. But the financial investment each of them represented had operated to some degree as a protective shield. Before the war, a Tennessee farmer explained, the slave “was so much property. It was as if you should kill or maim my horse. But now the nigger has no protection.” With black men and women no longer commanding a market price, the value placed on black life declined precipitately, and the slaves freed by the war found themselves living among a people who had suffered the worst possible ignominy—military defeat and “alien” occupation. Many whites, moreover, thought the abolition of slavery had doomed the African race in the South to extinction, and all too many of them seemed eager to expedite that prophecy. “If I could get up tomorrow morning and hear that every nigger in the country was dead, I’d just jump up and down,” the wife of a South Carolina planter exclaimed after hearing that Yankee soldiers had recently shot several blacks who were “getting very impudent.”117

  The apparent indifference with which some whites regarded the fate of the ex-slave dismayed many visitors to the postwar South. “He is actually to many of them nothing but a troublesome animal,” Sidney Andrews wrote from South Carolina; “not a human being, with hopes and longings and feelings … ‘I would shoot one just as soon as I would a dog,’ said a man to me yesterday on the cars. And I saw one shot at in Columbia as if he had been only a dog,—shot at from the door of a store, and at midday!” Nor did visitors find this behavior confined, as they had expected, to the lower classes of whites; in many instances, it reached int
o the highest circles of southern society. In Alabama, for example, a planter found himself embroiled in a controversy with one of his former slaves over ownership of a horse left behind by the Yankees; the evidence clearly favored the freedman’s claim, the local Freedmen’s Bureau agent agreed and awarded him the horse, but the former master thought otherwise and for him the issue obviously went beyond rightful ownership of the animal. “A nigger has no use for a horse like that,” he explained. “I just put my Spencer to Sip’s head, and told him if he pestered me any more about that horse, I’d kill him. He knew I was a man of my word, and he never pestered me any more.” The planter enjoyed a reputation in the community as a just, upright, and honorable man, and that fact disturbed the visitor more than anything else. “No doubt if I had had dealings with him I should have found him so. He meant to give the freedmen their rights, but he was only beginning dimly to perceive that they had any rights; and when it came to treating a black man with absolute justice, he did not know the meaning of the word.” If a “just and upright” man could have so little regard for the rights of the freedmen, their fate in the hands of less paternalistic whites suggested a difficult and violent period ahead.118

  How many black men and women were beaten, flogged, mutilated, and murdered in the first years of emancipation will never be known. Nor could any accurate body count or statistical breakdown reveal the barbaric savagery and depravity that so frequently characterized the assaults made on freedmen in the name of restraining their savagery and depravity—the severed ears and entrails, the mutilated sex organs, the burnings at the stake, the forced drownings, the open display of skulls and severed limbs as trophies. “The negro was murdered, beheaded, skinned, and his skin nailed to the barn,” a Freedmen’s Bureau officer wrote of a case in Mississippi, as he supplied the names of the murderers and asked for an investigation. Reporting on “outrages” committed in Kentucky, a Bureau officer confined himself to several counties and only to those cases in which he had sworn testimony, the names of the injured, the names of the alleged offenders, and the dates and localities.

  I have classified these outrages as follows: Twenty-three cases of severe and inhuman beating and whipping of men; four of beating and shooting; two of robbing and shooting; three of robbing; five men shot and killed; two shot and wounded; four beaten to death; one beaten and roasted; three women assaulted and ravished; four women beaten; two women tied up and whipped until insensible; two men and their families beaten and driven from their homes, and their property destroyed; two instances of burning of dwellings, and one of the inmates shot.

  Because of the difficulty in obtaining evidence and testimony, the officer stressed that his report included only a portion of the crimes against freedmen. “White men, however friendly to the freedmen, dislike to make depositions in these cases, for fear of personal violence. The same reason influences the black—he is fearful, timid, and trembling. He knows that since he has been a freedman he has not, up to this time, had the protection of either the federal or State authorities; that there is no way to enforce his rights or redress his wrongs.”119

  Neither a freedman’s industriousness nor his deference necessarily protected him from whites if they suspected he harbored dangerous tendencies or if they looked upon him as a “smart-assed nigger” who needed chastisement. “The fact is,” a Freedmen’s Bureau officer in North Carolina reported, “it’s the first notion with a great many of these people, if a Negro says anything or does anything that they don’t like, to take a gun and put a bullet into him, or a charge of shot.” In those instances where the reasons for an assault on blacks could be determined, the provocations ranged from disagreements over wages, working conditions, and the quality of work performed to the presence of black troops, black political and religious meetings, resistance to punishment, and suspicion of theft, murder, and rape. What proved even more alarming were the numerous instances of violence in which no reason could be easily ascertained, except perhaps the frustration of military defeat and emotional and recreational deprivation. The ferocity of the attacks on freedmen and the ecstasy with which the mobs meted out their punishment reached a point where it dismayed as many native whites as northern visitors and Freedmen’s Bureau officers. “The American Indian,” wrote a white public official in Georgia, “is not more delighted at the writhings and shrieks of his victim at the stake, than many Georgians are at the agonizing cries of the African negro at the whipping post.”120

  The violence inflicted upon freedmen seldom bore any relationship to the gravity of the alleged provocation. Of the countless cases of postwar violence, in fact, the largest proportion related in some way to that broad and vaguely defined charge of conduct unbecoming black people—that is, “putting on airs,” “sassiness,” “impudence,” “insolence,” “disrespect,” “insubordination,” contradicting whites, and violating racial customs. Behavior which many blacks and outside observers deemed relatively inoffensive might be regarded by certain native whites as deserving of a violent censure. “The truth is,” a Tennessee farmer explained, “a white man can’t take impudence from ’em. It may be a long ways removed from what you or I would think impudence, but these passionate men call it that, and pitch in.” Near Corinth, Tennessee, for example, “an old nigger” working in a sawmill “got his head split open with an axe” for having “sassed” a white man. Near Fredericksburg, Virginia, a white man shot and wounded a former black soldier after overhearing him “boast” of his service in the Union Army. In South Carolina, a former slave was shot for requesting that a Federal officer examine the contract he had negotiated with his employer, and still other blacks were beaten for no greater offense than refusing to sign a contract. “You must expect such things to happen when the niggers are impudent,” a South Carolinian said of reports of violence in his state, but a white farmer who overheard the remark thought otherwise. “The niggers a’n’t to blame,” he explained. “They’re never impudent, unless they’re trifled with or imposed on. Only two days ago a nigger was walking along this road, as peaceably as any man you ever saw. He met a white man right here, who asked him who he belonged to. ‘I don’t belong to anybody now,’ he says; ‘I’m a free man.’ ‘Sass me? you black devil!’ says the white fellow; and he pitched into him, and cut him in four or five places with his knife. I heard and saw the whole of it, and I say the nigger was respectful, and that the white fellow was the only one to blame.”121

  Much of the violence inflicted on the freedmen had been well organized, with bands of white men meting out extralegal “justice” and anticipating the Klan-type groups that would operate so effectively during Radical Reconstruction. The names by which these paramilitary self-styled vigilantes were known varied from place to place—“reformers,” “regulators,” “moderators,” “rangers”—but the tactics of random terrorism and assassination they employed barely differed and they tended to attract men of all social classes. The “justice” they enforced resembled that of the hastily formed mobs who lynched blacks suspected of more serious offenses like rape, murder, and arson. With increasing regularity, however, white terrorists focused their violence on blacks in leadership positions who symbolized to them the excesses of the present and the dangers of the future—teachers, clergymen, soldiers, and political activists. In Opelika, Alabama, four local whites repeatedly beat and stabbed Robert Alexander, a twenty-six-year-old black minister, leaving him close to death. No black schools would be allowed in the community, they warned him, nor would they tolerate the presence of a black preacher who stirred up the people. When Henry M. Turner, an organizer for the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Georgia, met him several days later, the Reverend Alexander resembled “a lump of curdled blood,” and the local Freedmen’s Bureau agent had refused to intervene in the case. “The picture is too sad for me to draw,” Turner wrote. “O God! where is our civilization? Is this Christendom, or is it hell? Pray for us.” If black teachers and clergymen were not themselves mobbed or threatened, their scho
olhouses and churches were often burned to the ground, and black pupils were apt to be assaulted or intimidated even when attending separate schools. Some years after the New Orleans race riot of 1866, Douglass Wilson, a former black soldier, could still vividly recall the anxiety with which parents had sent their children to school, not knowing what they might encounter.

  We had no idea that we should see them return home alive in the evening. Big white boys and half-grown men used to pelt them with stones and run them down with open knives, both to and from school. Sometimes they came home bruised, stabbed, beaten half to death, and sometimes quite dead. My own son himself was often thus beaten. He has on his forehead to-day a scar over his right eye which sadly tells the story of his trying experience in those days in his efforts to get an education. I was wounded in the war, trying to get my freedom, and he over the eye, trying to get an education.122

  Charging that northern propagandists distorted or even fabricated stories of “outrages” in the South, some whites chose not to believe any of them, while others ascribed them to lower-class whites or defended them as a proper response to black impudence and lawlessness. “Don’t you believe your ‘eye-witnesses and ear-witnesses’ of our cruelty,” a prominent North Carolina woman advised her friend in Connecticut. “Exceptional cases there are no doubt, as in everything, but believe me, nine hundred and ninety in every thousand of our people are kindly disposed to them, and if they behave themselves will befriend them.” It was grossly unfair to the South, an irate planter observed, for newspaper reporters to view “solitary instances” of brutality as typical of “the condition of the niggers and the disposition of the whites.” After all, he added, if “some impudent darkey, who deserves it, gets a knock on the head,” that did not mean “that every nigger in the South is in danger of being killed.” With absolute confidence, a magistrate in South Carolina insisted that blacks faced no danger to their lives unless they themselves provoked it.123