Been in the Storm So Long

by Leon F. Litwack

  Except for those who had already experienced the anguish of wartime “betrayal,” few knew what to expect from their black servants and laborers in the first months of emancipation. “Excitement rules the hour,” Gertrude Thomas observed in May 1865. “No one appears to have a settled plan of action, the Negroes crowd the streets and loaf around the pumps and corners of the street.… I see no evidence of disrespect on the part of the Negroes who are here from the adjoining plantations.” During the war, nearly all the Thomas slaves, both at the Augusta house and plantation (some six miles outside of town) and on the plantation in Burke County, had “proved most faithful.” Only when Union troops entered Augusta, more than three weeks after the end of the war, did Gertrude Thomas resign herself to the inevitability of emancipation. While Yankee soldiers and blacks filled the streets, Jefferson Thomas performed the familiar rites of emancipation, advising the house staff that he would just “as soon pay them wages as any one else.” The servants received the news with little show of emotion, though they evinced “a more cheerful spirit than ever” and Sarah “was really lively while she was sewing on Franks pants.” Still, their apparent “faithfulness” pleased the Thomases, even as the future seemed dim. “Our Negroes will be put on lands confiscated and imagination cannot tell what is in store for us.”

  The news of freedom precipitated no spontaneous celebration or Jubilee among the Thomas blacks. None of them suddenly rushed out to test their new status. When they severed their ties with the Thomases, they did so quietly with a conspicuous absence of fanfare. There was no insubordination, there were no bursts of insolence, and the Thomas property remained undisturbed. Nor were there any tearful farewells. Like many freed slaves elsewhere, the Thomas servants did not betray their emotions, at least not in the presence of their former owners. Within less than a month after the Union occupation, nearly all of them left in much the same manner as they had received the news that they were free.

  Among the most faithful and best liked of the slaves had been Daniel, the first servant Jefferson Thomas had ever owned. “When we were married,” Gertrude Thomas recalled, “his Father gave him to us to go in the Buggy.” Daniel was the first servant to depart, and he did so at night “without saying anything to anyone.” He remained in town but the Thomases had no wish to see him again. “If he returns to the yard he shall not enter it.” The day after Daniel’s unexpected departure, Betsy went out to pick up the newspaper, “as she was in the habit of doing every day.” This time, she never returned. “I suppose that she had been met by her Father in the street and taken away but then I learned that she had taken her clothes out of the Ironing room under the pretense of washing them.” Shortly afterwards, Mrs. Thomas learned that the “disappearance” had been “a concerted plan” between Betsy and her mother, who had once been a servant in the house (“an excellent washer and ironer”) but was found to be “dishonest” and had been transferred to the plantation in Burke County. “She left the Plantation, came up and took Betsy home with her.” While disclaiming “any emotion of interest” in Betsy’s departure, this loss obviously troubled Mrs. Thomas. Nor did the thought that familial ties had superseded those of mistress and slave console her in any way. “I felt interest in Betsy, she was a bright quick child and raised in our family would have become a good servant. As it is she will be under her Mothers influence and run wild in the street.”

  If the Thomases wondered who might leave them next, they did not have long to wait. But this time, at least, they had a premonition. Several days after Betsy’s disappearance, Aunt Sarah seemed more diligent and cheerful than usual. “Sarah has something on her mind,” Gertrude Thomas remarked to her husband. “She has either decided to go or the prospect of being paid if she remains has put her in a very good humor.” That night, she left. By now, the Thomases were making a conscious effort to conceal their disappointment from the remaining servants, apparently in the belief that the others derived some pleasure from their discomfort. Meanwhile, Nancy had become a problem. After the departure of Sarah, she had been instructed to take over the cooking as well as perform her usual duties. Perhaps dismayed by her doubled work load, Nancy claimed that she was not well enough to work. When the “illness” persisted and the unwashed clothes accumulated in the ironing room, the much-annoyed mistress decided to take action. “Nancy,” she asked, “do you expect I can afford to pay you wages in your situation, support your two children and then have you sick as much as you are?” Nancy stood there and made no reply. The next day, she left with her two children, claiming that she would return shortly. That was the last Mrs. Thomas saw of her, and upon entering Nancy’s room she discovered not unexpectedly that “all her things had been removed.” Less than a week later, Willy departed, thereby spurning the Thomases’ offer of clothing and a silver quarter every Saturday night. The next day, Manly left with his two children, apparently without any explanation.

  “Out of all our old house servants,” Gertrude Thomas noted near the end of May 1865, “not one remains except Patsy and a little boy Frank.” Gradually and unspectacularly, nearly all of the servants had grasped their freedom by completely severing the old ties. The Thomases could only console themselves with the knowledge that many other white families were experiencing similar losses. For Gertrude Thomas, in fact, the departure of Susan from her mother’s household truly marked the end of an era. “I am under too many obligations to Susan to have hard feelings towards her. During six confinements Susan has been with me, the best of servants, rendering the most efficient help. To Ma she has always been invaluable and in cases of sickness there was no one like Susan. Her husband Anthony was one of the first to leave the Cuming Plantation and incited others to do the same. I expect he influenced Susan.” Now that Susan had left, Gertrude Thomas recalled the number of times her father had warned the family about this slave. “I have often heard Pa say that in case of a revolt among Negroes he thought that Susan would serve as ringleader. She was the first servant to leave Ma’s yard and left without one word.”

  By late July 1865, Gertrude Thomas hoped that “the worst of this transition state of the Negroes” had been reached. “If not,” she sighed, “God have mercy upon us.” But her conversations with friends and relatives, as well as the news from the plantation in Burke County, were anything but reassuring; indeed, one close friend speculated that “things would go on so until Christmas” and then she expected real trouble, underscoring her warning with a gesture across the throat. As if to confirm such fears, a delegation of field hands from the plantation came to the Augusta house, entered the yard, and handed Jefferson Thomas a summons from the local Union Army commander, ordering him to appear and answer the demand of these blacks for wages. Incensed by the impertinence of the delegation, Thomas ordered them out of his yard. Before leaving, however, one of them shouted out an insult, hoping—or so the Thomases thought—to provoke him into a confrontation. “And this too we had to endure,” Mrs. Thomas wrote of the incident. “As it could not be resented it was treated with the silence of contempt. And has it come to this?” After reflecting over her experience of the past several months, Gertrude Thomas, who had once confessed her ambivalence about slavery, decided that she would just as soon never have to look at a black man or woman again. “Every thing is entirely reversed, I feel no interest in them whatever and hope I never will.”4

  While every experience had its own unique qualities, the odyssey of Jefferson and Gertrude Thomas through the first months of emancipation revealed a pattern of behavior—white and black—that would be repeated on farms and plantations and in town houses throughout the South. Once emancipation had been acknowledged, what mattered was how many freed slaves would find separation indispensable to their new status. With the wartime experience still vivid in many minds, few whites now thought they knew their former slaves well enough to speculate with much confidence on this troublesome question. “Some folks think free labour will be cheap & that the freedmen will gladly hire out for food
and clothing,” a South Carolinian wrote. “But I think not, they seem so eager to throw off the yoke of bondage they will suffer somewhat, before they will return to the plantations.… It seems like a dream, dear Aunt, we are living in such times.”5

  2

  THE FLAMES from a pitch-pine bonfire illuminated the woods near the Lester plantation in northern Florida. Hundreds of men, women, and children came from every direction to attend this late-night meeting, gathering around a makeshift speaker’s platform—the trunk of a fallen pine tree. Mounting that rostrum, Richard Edwards, a black preacher, looked out at the faces of these people only recently freed from bondage. With their cries of “Dat’s so” and loud “Amens” punctuating his remarks, he told them of the glories of their triumph. He welcomed the new era in which black men and women no longer cringed in the presence of the white man. He urged them to embrace their liberty. He insisted that only they—not the Yankees, not Lincoln, not the northern teachers—could make themselves free.

  You ain’t, none o’ you, gwinter feel rale free till you shakes de dus’ ob de Ole Plantashun offen yore feet an’ goes ter a new place whey you kin live out o’ sight o’ de gret house. So long ez de shadder ob de gret house falls acrost you, you ain’t gwine ter feel lak no free man, an’ you ain’t gwine ter feel lak no free ‘oman. You mus’ all move—you mus’ move clar away from de ole places what you knows, ter de new places what you don’t know, whey you kin raise up yore head douten no fear o’ Marse Dis ur Marse Tudder. Take yore freedum, my brudders an’ my sisters. You-all is jis’ ez good ez ennybody, an’ you-all is jis’ ez free! Go whey you please—do what you please—furgit erbout de white folks—an’ now stan’ up on yore feet—lif’ up yore eyes—an’ shout wid me Glory, halleluyer! AMEN!6

  Within the first year of freedom, thousands of blacks exercised that option in precisely that spirit. If they were truly free, they could walk off the plantation on which they had labored as slaves and never return. Whatever else they did, that remained the surest, the quickest way to demonstrate to themselves that their old masters and mistresses no longer owned or controlled them, that they were now free to make their own decisions. Although the black preacher in Florida had talked about “new places what you don’t know,” most of those who left preferred the localities they knew, where they could still retain their familial ties and friendships; they might simply move to the next plantation or to the nearest town. In separating themselves from their previous owners, not from the region itself, they had begun to feel like free men and women.

  Explaining the movement of blacks in his region, a Florida planter and physician made the essential point. “The negroes don’t seem to feel free unless they leave their old homes,” he informed his cousin in North Carolina, “just to make it sure they can go when and where they choose.” Elsewhere in the South, white families and Federal officials observed the same phenomenon: many freedmen were acting on the assumption that to stay with their former masters was to remain slaves. Once a black man or woman made the critical decision to leave, not even the most handsome of offers from the former master was likely to keep them on the old place. In South Carolina, a white family proposed to pay their valuable cook nearly twice the amount she had been offered in the nearby village. But this woman, who had served the family faithfully for many years, could not be persuaded to stay. “No, Miss, I must go,” she insisted. When pressed to give some reason for spurning such a generous offer, the woman had little difficulty in making her motives absolutely clear: “If I stay here I’ll never know I am free.” Without even pretending to understand the deeply felt yearnings that prompted such behavior, some whites chose to dismiss the departures as foolish or even amusing, much as they previously had belittled the humanity of their slaves. “In almost every yard servants are leaving,” Emma Holmes observed in Camden, South Carolina, “but going to wait on other people for food merely, sometimes with the promise of clothing, passing themselves off as free, much to our amusement.”7

  To leave the plantation or farm, his worldly possessions stuffed into a small bundle slung over his shoulder, came easily to some, not so easily to most. On numerous places, the entire black population decamped at the same time, as if prearranged, leaving the owners to wallow in self-pity and to utter those familiar cries of betrayal. “Every Negro has left us,” the wife of a South Carolina planter exclaimed in July 1865. “I have never in my life met with such ingratitude, every Negro deserted.”8 But the postwar “exodus” usually reflected individual and family decisions and often sharply divided the ex-slaves on the same plantation. Typically, as a former Mississippi slave recalled, “they didn’t go off right at first. They was several years getting broke up. Some went, some stayed, some actually moved back. Like bees trying to find a setting place.”9 For white families to make sense out of those who left and those who stayed proved no less frustrating after emancipation than during the Yankee invasion. Again, previous records of behavior were misleading, verbal expressions of loyalty counted for little, and familial ties could induce various responses. No archetypal “deserter” emerged: the faithful and the troublesome left, the most and the least trusted, those who had endured a harsh bondage and those who counted themselves among the relatively well treated.

  The “exodus” affected every kind of master. Those who had acquired notorious reputations, however, usually sustained the earliest and the largest losses. Austin Grant, who had worked as a field hand in Mississippi and Texas, recalled that his master had been “a pretty good boss” because he had fed them well. But he had also made frequent use of the “black snake” (a bullwhip) to maintain discipline and production, and he worked them hard.

  We got up early, you betcha. You would be out there by time you could see and you quit when it was dark. They tasked us. They would give us 200 or 300 pounds of cotton to bring in and you would git it, and if you didn’ git it, you better, or you would git it tomorrow, or your back would git it. Or you’d git it from someone else, maybe steal it from their sacks.

  When the master informed them of their freedom, he made himself quite clear: “Now, you can jes’ work on if you want to, and I’ll treat you jes’ like I always did.” That was all they needed to hear. “I guess when he said that they knew what he meant. The’ wasn’t but one family left with ’im. They stayed about two years. But the rest was just like birds, they jes’ flew.” On an Alabama plantation, Aunt Nellie, a “nurse girl” who had alternated between tending a temperamental mistress and her equally obnoxious children, left as soon as she learned of her freedom but not before giving the children a long-overdue thrashing.10

  Whatever the pathos and nostalgia conveyed by the popular minstrel ballad “I Lost My Massa When Dey Set Me Free,” newly freed slaves, as the ballad itself suggested, might have felt and acknowledged a certain affection for their “white folks” but still left them. “It ain’t that I didn’t love my Marster,” Melvin Smith recalled, “but I jest likes to be free,” and when told that he “didn’t b’long to nobody no more” he immediately left his home plantation in South Carolina and headed for Tallahassee, Florida. Reputedly humane and generous masters who had expected to retain their former slaves were thus in numerous instances doomed to a bitter disappointment. “As a general rule,” a white woman in Virginia wrote of the “defections” in her region, “they are all anxious to leave home and many that seemed perfectly contented in slavery are now dissatisfied, and many humane kind masters, who owned large numbers of servants, have been left without a single one.” Having always thought of himself as a good master, a planter in Amelia County, Virginia, tried to understand why he had lost all but six of his 115 slaves. “My people were always well treated, and never were worked hard. A number of them had been with my father, and there were a good many that I had grown up with from boyhood. I loved some of them.” Although many of his slaves seemed to share this affection, they were no less adamant in their decision to leave, even as they came to him with tears in their eyes to shake his hand
and bid him farewell.11

  The good reputation of a former slaveholder was not necessarily irrelevant when blacks formulated their post-emancipation plans. It simply was not always enough. The decisions made by black people were not always in reaction to the abuse, kindness, or indifference of white men; their behavior in the aftermath of freedom reflected a diversity of considerations, not the least of which were familial ties, attachment to particular locales, and the perfectly natural urge to explore the forbidden and the unknown and to grasp new and hopefully more remunerative opportunities. Again, Mary Chesnut seemed more perceptive than most whites when she observed in June 1865, “In their furious, emotional way they swore devotion to us to their dying day. All the same, the moment they see an opening to better themselves, they will move on.” Moreover, as the freed blacks perceived the situation, the previous good works and present good intentions of a former master counted for less than their confidence in his ability and willingness to compensate them properly for any future labor. If freed slaves suspected that their old master might be on the verge of bankruptcy (and the blacks usually surmised correctly), they saw little reason to stay with him. Sarah Ann Smith, for example, acknowledged that her master had been a decent man but he was simply “too busted ter hire us ter stay on, so we moved over ter Mr. Womble’s place.” Despite the “good white folkses” Anna Parkes had served, she realized that most of the master’s money “wuz gone,” he could obviously not afford to pay most of his laborers, and she and her mother therefore moved to the nearby gun factory and began to take in washing.12