But the arrival of the Yankees on many plantations and farms came to be viewed, by slaves and their owners alike, as the visitation of God’s wrath. The soldiers would assemble the white family and the slaves, demand to know where the valuables were hidden, threaten them if they refused to divulge the information, and then commence to ransack the entire plantation, venting their anger on whatever or whoever got in the way. “De worst time we ever had,” recalled Fannie Griffin, who had been a slave in South Carolina. “De Yankees ’stroyed ’most everything we had.” On the plantation in Alabama where Walter Calloway worked as a plow hand, Confederate soldiers had already taken off the best livestock, making it “purty hard on bofe whites an’ blacks,” but the Yankees proved to be even more thorough, “smashin’ things comin’ an’ gwine.”38
What the Yankees did not take they might distribute among the slaves, even urging them to join in the pillaging. With their restricted diet having been further reduced by wartime scarcities, some slaves found it impossible to resist the invitation to partake of the food supply created by their own labor or the Big House furnishings accumulated through generations of their unpaid labor. When the soldiers broke open the storeroom on the Pooshee plantation in South Carolina, the slaves seized nearly everything in sight, much to the shock of the owner, who had to witness the scene. Afterwards, his granddaughter informed a friend of what had happened: “It must have been too mortifying to poor Grand Pa for his negroes to behave as they did, taking the bread out of our mouths. I thought better of them than that.” After the Yankees passed through her rice plantations, Adele Allston learned that the blacks had divided among themselves the furniture and livestock. But even when slaves were afforded these rare opportunities, their behavior defied predictability; many of them refused to have anything to do with such “looting” and were reluctant to accept any of the master’s property. In some instances, the slaves took what the soldiers gave them, so as not to anger them, but subsequently returned the goods to their owners, whether out of loyalty or because they feared the repercussions once the Union Army moved on.39
When Yankee troops looted the Morgan home in Baton Rouge, a faithful servant stood all he could before he exclaimed, “Ain’t you ’shamed to destroy all dis here, that belongs to a poor widow lady who’s got two daughters to support?” No matter how each slave felt inwardly, the sight of Yankees pillaging the plantation and perhaps humiliating the white residents had to be a unique experience. The way the soldiers “jes’ natcherly tore up ol’ Marster’s place,” as though they had a “special vengeance” for their “white folks,” left many slaves quite incredulous. So did the treatment of the women.
Upstairs dey didn’t even have de manners to knock at Mist’ess’ door. Dey just walked right on in whar my sister, Lucy, wuz combin’ Mist’ess’ long pretty hair. They told Lucy she wuz free now and not to do no more work for Mist’ess. Den all of’em grabbed dey big old rough hands into Mist’ess’ hair, and dey made her walk down stairs and out in de yard, and all de time dey wuz a-pullin’ and jerkin’ at her long hair …
With equal “impertinence,” the soldiers might force the white women to prepare meals and serve both them and the slaves. That was a sight Mary Ella Grandberry, a former Alabama slave, would never forget. “De Yankees made ’em do for us lak we done for dem. Dey showed de white folks what it was to work for somebody else.”40
Upon observing “the gloomy ebony scowl” on the faces of the slaves, a Union officer thought it arose from “jealousy at the liberties, taken by us, with what they consider their own plantations and possessions.” He was no doubt correct in his assumption. The slaves might have marveled at the audacity of the Yankees, and some perhaps derived pleasure from the discomfiture of their owners, but the indiscriminate and wasteful destruction of the food supply and what many regarded as their home struck them as excessive and unnecessary. The Yankees called it “a holy war,” a former South Carolina slave observed, “but they and Wheeler’s men was a holy terror to dis part of de world, as naked and hungry as they left it.” It was the pillaging, a former Mississippi slave recalled, that turned him against the Yankees, and he shared, too, the resentment of numerous blacks that the soldiers destroyed what they had worked so hard to produce. “We helped raise that meat they stole. They left us to starve and fed their fat selves on what was our living.” No less disturbing had been those planters and Confederate soldiers who had ordered the destruction of crops rather than leave them to the Yankees. “It made my innards hurt,” Charlie Davenport recalled, “to see fire ‘tached to somethin’ dat had cost us Niggers so much labor an’ hones’ sweat.”41
What compounded the bitterness was that the Yankees pillaged both whites and blacks, the Big House and the slave cabins alike. “The negroes all share the same fate as ourselves,” Emma Holmes noted after the Yankees had passed through Camden, South Carolina, “everything ransacked and whatever was wanted stolen, though the Yankees told them they had come to free them and called them ‘sis,’ talking most familiarly.” That they should be robbed and defrauded by those who claimed to be their liberators, that their cabins should be searched and ransacked, their wives and daughters insulted and abused, came as a shocking revelation to many slaves, leaving them both angry and confused. “I always bin hear dat de Yankees was gwine help de nigger!” one of the Allston servants exclaimed to her mistress after the Yankees had seized her few possessions. “W’a’ kynd a help yu call dis! Tek ebery ting I got in de wurld.” The depth of black disillusionment with the Yankees is suggested by the number of slaves who compared them to the much-despised and degraded poor whites. “By instinct,” Andy Brice of South Carolina observed, “a nigger can make up his mind pretty quick ’bout de creed of white folks, whether they am buckra or whether they am not. Every Yankee I see had de stamp of poor white trash on them.” Perhaps that was what a Mississippi slave had in mind after a Union soldier had addressed her as “Auntie.” “Don’t you call me ‘Auntie,’ ” she retorted, “I ain’t none o’ yo’ kin.”42
With considerable ingenuity, based on years of experience with their own “white folks,” some slaves managed to preserve their few possessions from the clutches of the Yankees. In Camden, South Carolina, for example, the soldiers seized the blankets belonging to an elderly black shoemaker. But he proved more than equal to the crisis. Feigning “a tone of terror,” he warned them not to mix his blankets with theirs, “as all the house girls had some catching disease.” On hearing this, the alarmed Yankees not only returned the blankets but presented the black with the mule on which they had placed the loot. Equally artful were the servants in the Mary S. Mallard household in Montevideo, Georgia, who sought both to avoid conscription into the Union Army and to save their belongings.
From being a young girl she [the cook] had assumed the attitude and appearance of a sick old woman, with a blanket thrown over her head and shoulders, and scarcely able to move. Their devices are various and amusing. Gilbert keeps a sling under his coat and slips his arm into it as soon as they appear; Charles walks with a stick and limps dreadfully; Niger a few days since kept them from stealing everything they wanted in his house by covering up in bed and saying he had “yellow fever”; Mary Ann kept them from taking the wardrobe of her deceased daughter by calling out: “Them dead people clothes!”43
Although the vast majority of slaves welcomed the Union soldiers, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm, experience would reveal that their “liberators,” like their previous owners, might display moments of kindness, tenderness, generosity, and paternal benevolence but their racial beliefs and temperaments made them at the same time unpredictable and capable of a wide range of conduct. When an Arkansas slave confronted a Yankee who had stolen her quilts, she voiced the frustration of many of her brethren who had experienced a similar betrayal of expectations: “Why, you nasty, stinkin’ rascal. You say you come down here to fight for the niggers, and now you’re stealin’ from ’em.” But the soldier had the final word, aptl
y summing up his conception of the war and that of thousands of his comrades: “You’re a God Damn liar, I’m fightin’ for $14 a month and the Union.”44
4
BEFORE ENTERING THE SOUTH, few Yankee soldiers had ever seen so many blacks, such concentrations of them, appearing almost everywhere they marched. The tens of thousands who greeted them along the roadsides, the “contrabands” who flocked to their camps, the refugees who followed their columns, the sullen-looking figures who gazed at them from a distance provided most Union soldiers with their initial view of the “peculiar institution.” It was as if Harriet Beecher Stowe’s characters had suddenly materialized before their very eyes. “I never saw a bunch of them together,” a Wisconsin youth wrote, “but I could pick out an Uncle Tom, a Quimbo, a Sambo, a Chloe, an Eliza or any other character in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”45
Although curious about what he would find in the South, the average Union soldier brought with him certain notions about black people, based largely on the racial beliefs and exaggerated caricatures with which he had been inculcated since childhood. His first impressions of the slaves he encountered invariably confirmed and reinforced those caricatures, and the descriptions he provided the folks at home dwelled upon them. If anything, their physical “peculiarities” struck him as even more pronounced than he had imagined; they were “so black that ‘charcoal would make a white mark on them,’ ” their mouths were excessively large, their lips excessively thick, and their noses excessively broad and flat. “They are the genuine Negro here,” a Pennsylvania soldier wrote from South Carolina, “as black as tar and their heels stick out a feet behind.” A New England soldier in Louisiana wrote his brother with a mixture of revulsion and attraction: “If I marry any one at all I believe I’ll marry one of these nigger wenches down here. One that grease runs right off of, one that shines and one that stinks so you can smell her a mile, and then you can have time to get out of the way.” Such disparagements were neither uncommon nor limited to Negrophobes. Even those Yankee soldiers who claimed to be antislavery expressed their amusement at the physical appearance and demeanor of the enslaved blacks, revealing more about their own backgrounds and biases than about the objects of their sympathy. “There is something irresistibly comical in their appearance,” wrote one such soldier, “they are so black, and their teeth are of such dazzling whiteness, their eyes so laughing and rolling, their clothes so fantastic, and their whole appearance so peculiar.”46
The Yankees expected to find a degraded, inferior, primitive people, who were at the same time picturesque, comical, indolent, and carefree, always wearing “a happy and contented expression,” displaying their broad grins, touching their hats to the white folks, answering questions politely and humbly. That was the kind of Negro they had seen cavorting across the minstrel stages of the North and pictured in the popular literature, and now they were simply viewing Sambo and Dinah in their natural habitat. “Until I saw and conversed with the greater number of these persons,” a northern reporter wrote from South Carolina, “I believed that the appearance and intelligence of Southern field hands were greatly libeled by the delineators of negro character at the concert saloons. Now I cannot but acknowledge that instead of gross exaggerations the ‘minstrels’ give representations which are faithful to nature. There were the same grotesque dresses, awkward figures, and immense brogans which are to be seen every night at Bryant’s or Christy’s.” Nor did the Yankees obviously expect to find any particular intelligence exhibited by these minstrel-like characters, quite apart from the laws that barred them from learning to read or write. Thus did a Union soldier, who was himself barely literate, inform his parents that the “niggers” he had encountered “dont no as much as a dumb bruit.”47
Unlike many southern whites, the Yankees had little awareness of the complexity of the slave’s demeanor and personality. They still had some hard lessons to learn in the kind of dissembling and deception that enslaved blacks often practiced on whites. That would come with time and experience. “One of these blacks, fresh from slavery, will most adroitly tell you precisely what you want to hear,” a northern journalist discovered in South Carolina. “To cross-examine such a creature is a task of the most delicate nature; if you chance to put a leading question he will answer to its spirit as closely as the compass needle answers to the magnetic pole.” Still other revelations would emerge with additional exposure to the variety of black folk. Although Union soldiers were quick to note the blackness of the slaves, the gradations in color did not escape them, and the abundant evidence of miscegenation would evoke considerable comment and curiosity. “Many of the mongrels are very beautiful,” a Massachusetts soldier conceded, “with their fine hair, straight or wavy, and their blue or dark eyes, always soft and lustrous and half concealed by the long lashes. They look more like voluptuous Italians than negroes.” He had been told by one “Southern gentleman” that the mulattoes were “more docile and affectionate” than “the unmixed negro,” although “less hardy” and “generally unchaste.” Whatever “handsome” qualities the mulattoes and quadroons possessed, the Yankees naturally attributed them to their white ancestry. How else could they explain the startling incongruity in the appearance of a mulatto child with his mother? “Judging by the extreme hideousness of some of these mothers,” a soldier wrote, “I was led to conclude that Southern passion was superior to Southern taste.”48
Although the prevailing image pictured blacks as a happy-go-lucky and carefree race, at best a source of amusement, some Yankee soldiers came away with altogether different impressions. The slaves they saw did not resemble “the rollicking, joyous, devil-may-care African” they had anticipated, nor did they hear any of the laughter and jubilant songs that were said to radiate from the slave cabins. When he had come to the South, Private Henry T. Johns of Massachusetts, like most of his comrades, had believed that the blacks, “if not a happy race, were at least careless and light-hearted.” But the longer he remained in the South, the more skeptical he became of that stereotype. “I have been with them a great deal,” he wrote from Louisiana, “and never before saw so much of gloom, despondency, and listlessness. I saw no banjo, heard none but solemn songs. In church or on the street they impress me with a great sadness. They are a sombre, not a happy, race.” Several weeks later, when his regiment was encamped near Baton Rouge, he attended a black religious service and described the “mingled excitement and devotion,” the shouting, the clapping of hands, the jumping, the often wild and excited singing. It all impressed him, however, as “a mournful joy,” and the hymns seemed “more a loud wail than a burst of joyous melody.”
When praying about their enslaved condition, or for the dying, or for the salvation of poor sinners, they unitedly break out into the most plaintive chorus imaginable. I can’t describe it, but to my dying hour I shall remember it. It seemed like the incarnation of sadness. I could think of nothing but a mother in heaven wailing for her lost son.… Almost like a nightmare it clings to me, ever presenting depths of sadness and resignation beyond my conception.49
The degree of enthusiasm with which slaves greeted their “liberators” created something of a paradox. If they acted indifferently or hostilely, as some did, the Yankees concluded they were too ignorant to appreciate or recognize freedom. But if they were effusive in their response, the Union soldiers often mocked their behavior. The typical Yankee was at best a reluctant liberator, and the attitudes and behavior he evinced did not always encourage the slaves to think of themselves as free men and women. Although Union propagandists and abolitionists might exult in how a war for the Union had been transformed into a crusade for freedom, many northern soldiers donned the crusader’s armor with strong misgivings or outright disgust. “I dont think enough of the Niggar to go and fight for them,” an Ohio private wrote. “I would rather fight them.” Few Northerners, after all, had chosen to wage this kind of war. “Our government has broken faith with us,” a Union deserter told his captors. “We enlisted to fight for
the Union, and not to liberate the G-d d—d niggers.” Rather than view emancipation as a way to end the war, some Yankee soldiers thought it would only prolong the conflict. Now that the very survival of the southern labor system was at stake, not to mention the proper subordination of black people, the prospect of a negotiated peace seemed even more remote, and southern whites could be expected to fight with even greater intensity and conviction.50
That most Union soldiers should have failed to share the abolitionist commitment is hardly surprising. What mattered was how they manifested their feelings when they came into direct contact with the slaves. The evidence suggests one of the more tragic chapters in the history of this generally brutalizing and demoralizing war. The normal frustrations of military life and the usually sordid record of invading armies, when combined with long-held and deeply felt attitudes toward black people, were more than sufficient to turn some Union soldiers into the very “debils” the slaves had been warned by their masters to expect. Not only did the invaders tend to view the Negro as a primary cause of the war but even more importantly as an inferior being with few if any legitimate human emotions—at least none that had to be considered with any degree of sensitivity. Here, then, was a logical and convenient object on which disgruntled and war-weary Yankees could vent their frustrations and hatreds. “As I was going along this afternoon,” a young Massachusetts officer wrote from New Orleans, “a little black baby that could just walk got under my feet and it look so much like a big worm that I wanted to step on it and crush it, the nasty, greasy little vermin was the best that could be said of it.” And if anything, additional exposure to blacks appeared to strengthen rather than allay racial antipathies. “My repugnance to them increases with the acquaintance,” a New England officer remarked. “Republican as I am, keep me clear of the darkey in any relation.” Praying for an early end to the war, a Union soldier stationed in Missouri declared that he had had his fill of colored people. “I never want to see one of the animals after I leave here.”51
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