Been in the Storm So Long
Page 22
The thousands of slaves who flocked to the Union lines were apt to encounter the same prejudices, the same exploitation, the same disparagement, the same capacity for sadistic cruelty which they thought they had left behind them on the plantations and farms. To belittle the slave’s character, dress, language, name, and demeanor, to make him the butt of their humor, to ridicule his aspirations, to mock his religious worship, to exploit his illiteracy were ways of passing the duller moments of camp life and military occupation. Besides, the manipulation of blacks for the amusement of white audiences had a long and accepted tradition behind it. “There were five negroes in our mess room last night,” a New England soldier wrote from Virginia, “we got them to sing and dance! Great times. Negro concerts free of expense here.” Sarah Debro, who had been a slave in North Carolina, recalled the Yankee soldiers who threatened to shoot her toes off unless she danced for them, and other former slaves remembered, too, how the Yankees forced them to sing and dance and called them “funny names.” The soldiers who shared in these diversions did so regardless of their feelings about slavery and emancipation. Henry M. Cross constantly deplored racist sentiment in his regiment; what he had seen of the slaves, he wrote, made him despise even more intensely the bondage “which has brought them to their miserable condition.” But even as he made that comment, Private Cross wrote of a sixteen-year-old black youth attached to the adjutant in his camp:
He is filthy and lazy and seems to know as much as a child of four years, and yet once in a while shows gleams of intelligence beyond his years and condition. He never looks at you when talking, but shifts uneasily from one leg to the other and turns his head from side to side, rolling his eyes and grunting queer laughs. We make all kinds of sport of him.52
To strip the slave of his dignity and self-respect was not enough. Some Yankees exploited his ignorance and trust to defraud him of what little money or worldly goods he possessed. They might, for example, persuade him to exchange his money for certificates that turned out to be soap wrappers, or sell him equally worthless passes that permitted him to travel freely, or offer for a price to reunite him with his family. Some slaves were less gullible than the Yankees thought but were in no position to challenge their authority, while a few slaves managed to turn the tables on their liberators, like the elderly black man who claimed to be the original Uncle Tom and sold a souvenir-hunting Yankee the whip with which he had allegedly been beaten.53
To debauch black women, some Yankees apparently concluded, was to partake of a widely practiced and well-accepted southern pastime. The evidence was to be seen everywhere. Besides, Yankees tended to share the popular racist notion of black women as naturally promiscuous and dissolute. “Singular, but true,” a Massachusetts soldier and amateur phrenologist observed, “the heads of the women indicate great animal passions.” Although some Union officers made no secret of their slave concubines, sharing their quarters with them, a black soldier noted that they usually mingled with “deluded freedwomen” only under the cover of darkness, while they openly consorted with white women during the day. The frequency with which common soldiers mixed with black women prompted some regimental commanders to order the ejection of such women from the camp because their presence had become “demoralizing.” “I won’t be unfaithful to you with a Negro wench,” a Pennsylvania soldier assured his wife, “though it is the case with many soldiers. Yes, men who have wives at home get entangled with these black things.” Marriages between Yankees and blacks were rare, but when they did occur southern whites made the most of them.
Two of the Brownfields former negroes have married Yankees—one, a light colored mustee, had property left her by some white man whose mistress she had been—she says she passed herself off for a Spaniard and Mercier Green violated the sanctity of Grace Church by performing the ceremony—the other, a man, went north and married a Jewess—the idea is too revolting.
Not surprisingly, Union soldiers often shared the outrage of local whites at such liaisons. In November 1865, a black newspaper in Charleston reported that an Illinois soldier had been tarred and feathered by his own comrades for having married a black woman. “He was probably a Southern man by birth and education,” the newspaper said of the victim, “and Hoosiers and Suckers don’t take readily to Southern habits.”54
Whatever the reputation of black women for promiscuity, sexual submission frequently had to be obtained by force. “While on picket guard I witnessed misdeeds that made me ashamed of America,” a soldier wrote from South Carolina; he had recently observed a group of his comrades rape a nine-year-old black girl. Not only did some Union soldiers sexually assault any woman they found in a slave cabin but they had no compunctions about committing the act in the presence of her family. “The father and grandfather dared offer no resistance,” two witnesses reported from Virginia. In some such instances, the husband or children of the intended victim had to be forcibly restrained from coming to her assistance. Beyond the exploitation of sexual assault, black women could be subjected to further brutality and sadism, as was most graphically illustrated in an incident involving some Connecticut soldiers stationed in Virginia. After seizing two “niger wenches,” they “turned them upon their heads, & put tobacco, chips, stocks, lighted cigars & sand into their behinds.” Without explanation, some Union soldiers in Hanover County, Virginia, stopped five young black women and cut their arms, legs, and backs with razors. “Dis was new to us,” one of the victims recalled, “cause Mr. Tinsley [her master] didn’ ever beat or hurt us.” Most Union soldiers would have found these practices reprehensible. But they occurred with sufficient frequency to induce a northern journalist in South Carolina to write that Union troops had engaged in “some of the vilest and meanest exhibitions of human depravity” he had ever witnessed. If such incidents were rare, moreover, the racial ideology that encouraged them had widespread acceptance, even among those who deplored the excesses.55
The actions of white men could not surprise some blacks. Many of those who hailed the Yankees as their champions and liberators nevertheless were to experience a rude awakening. In Norfolk, Virginia, the slaves had rejoiced at the coming of the Yankees. “There was nothing we would not do for them,” one black resident remarked; “and they knew it, too. We were humble, grateful and respectful.” But the soldiers destroyed their property, shot at them, and abused them “in every possible way,” and it now appeared to him “as if we had no one to protect us, and there’s nothing left us but to protect ourselves.” Such experiences were more than unsettling; they raised real questions about the quality of the newly acquired freedom. What were the blacks to think when “those individuals whom we all regarded as our friends, and hailed as our deliverers,” broke up their celebrations, heaped physical and mental abuse on them, shoved them off sidewalks, cursed them as “niggers” and “mokes,” robbed them of their few belongings, and ravished their women? It was as if one set of masters had been replaced by another, and that was precisely how a Norfolk black woman viewed the change in her status: “I reckon I’m Massa Lincoln’s slave now.”56
Reflecting the wide range and diversity of northern opinion, the Union Army also contained in its ranks men who were imbued with abolitionist ideals, who were anxious to wage an antislavery war, and who would have resented any implication that they harbored racist attitudes. “I tell the boys right to their face I am in the war for the freedom of the slave,” a Wisconsin soldier boasted. Initially indifferent or hostile to emancipation, some Union soldiers were won over by military considerations, while others resolved their doubts when they came face to face with the victims of the “peculiar institution.” After hearing from slave runaways the stories of their escape and the bondage they had left behind them, a Union soldier in North Carolina wrote his parents that “every man in our army is now an abolitionist.” Even more convincing than the familiar tales of whippings and the separation of families was the direct physical evidence of how slaves had been treated. Upon visiting several plantations
near New Orleans, where he released slave prisoners from heavy chains and weights, one Union soldier said he had seen “enough of the horrors of slavery to make one an Abolitionist forever.” When several new black recruits stripped for a physical examination in Louisiana, prior to their induction, a Union soldier afterwards described in detail the marks which bondage had left on the bodies of these men. It was a depressing sight.
Some of them were scarred from head to foot where they had been whipped. One man’s back was nearly all one scar, as if the skin had been chopped up and left to heal in ridges. Another had scars on the back of his neck, and from that all the way to his heels every little ways; but that was not such a sight as the one with the great solid mass of ridges from his shoulders to his hips. That beat all the antislavery sermons ever yet preached.57
The more sympathetic Union soldiers tried to alleviate the condition of the slave refugees who flocked in ever greater numbers to their camps. Anticipating the movement of teachers and missionaries into the South, they volunteered their time to establish informal classes for the slaves in reading and writing, and some insisted on giving them religious instruction. The life of an abolitionist in the Union Army, however, much like that of his counterpart in the North, was never very comfortable, particularly if he sought to proselytize his fellow soldiers, and he almost always sensed that he was in a small minority. “Most of the boys have their laugh at me for helping the ‘Niggers,’ ” a Wisconsin soldier confessed. The hostility toward abolitionism and blacks that so many Northerners carried with them into the war was sometimes vented on those who tried to agitate the subject in the Army. “If some of the niger lovers want to know what the most of the Solgers think of them,” an Ohioan informed his father, “they think about as much as they do a reble. They think they are Shit asses.”58
The abolitionist Yankee found himself troubled by more than the hostility of his fellow soldiers. Mirroring the ambivalence of the antislavery movement itself, he often found it easier to preach abolitionism than to accept the black man as an equal or to mix with him socially. Henry T. Johns, the well-meaning and sympathetic Massachusetts soldier, frankly confessed near the end of the war, “I know I always revolt at shaking hands with a darkey or sitting by him, but it is a prejudice that should shame me.” To free the slaves, he recognized approvingly, was to grant them equality. “There is no help for it, and the sooner we get rid of our foolish prejudices the better for us. In me those prejudices are very strong. I can fight for this race more easily than I can eat with them.” As they moved through the South and ultimately became an army of occupation, Union soldiers, like the North itself, failed to agree on the proper place of black people—both freed slaves and free blacks—in American society. If there was anything approaching a typical attitude, a Union Army physician stationed in Virginia may have come close to capturing it. He did not regard himself as proslavery. He wanted to see the institution of slavery abolished. But he found it difficult to view blacks as people possessing emotions, sensitivities, and aspirations like everyone else: “He thinks they are nobody and ought never to be anybody.”59
The attitudes and behavior of the Union soldiers varied considerably, ranging from condescension to outright brutality. That made the Yankees no different in the eyes of many slaves than their own masters and mistresses. Despite the uncertainties that awaited them, the movement of slaves toward the Union lines that had begun in the early months of the war continued unabated, with growing numbers now running away with Yankee raiding parties, or following Union troops when they passed through the vicinity, or seeking out the Union gunboats plying the southern rivers. The exodus reached such proportions in some regions that it took on all the drama and tragedy of the most classic wartime refugee scenes. When Sherman’s army moved through Georgia and the Carolinas, tens of thousands of slaves tried desperately to keep up with the marching columns, many of them carrying their household goods and children, fighting off hunger, exhaustion, exposure, harassment, and the efforts of Union officers to drive them off. “[W]e only wanted the able-bodied men (and to tell you the truth the youngest and best looking women),” one officer wrote. “Sometimes we took off whole families and plantations of niggers, by way of repaying some influential secessionist. But the useless part of these we soon manage to lose—sometimes in crossing rivers—sometimes in other ways.” This letter, allegedly found in the streets of Camden after the Yankees departed, may have been fabricated by Confederate propagandists but other evidence suggests little distortion of what took place on Sherman’s march. Numbers of slaves were left behind on the roads and at the river crossings, where they subsequently fell prey to General Wheeler’s Confederate raiders, and some drowned while attempting to cross the rivers. “The waters of the Ogeechee and Ebenezer Creek,” one of Sherman’s officers wrote, “can account for hundreds who were blocking up our columns, and there abandoned.… Many of them died in the bayous and lagoons of Georgia.” The terrible plight of the Georgia refugees moved a young Boston teacher to observe that “freedom means death to many.”60
Exulting over the mass desertion of slaves to the Union Army, a black newspaper in New Orleans proclaimed, “History furnishes no such intensity of determination, on the part of any race, as that exhibited by these people to be free.” But historical comparisons immediately came to mind, and abolitionist-minded northern whites and black leaders made the most of them. This “vast hegira” of slaves, they agreed, resembled the movement of the Israelites out of Egypt and to the Promised Land. The differences, however, seemed almost as striking. “There was no plan in this exodus, no Moses to lead it,” observed a Union officer who had been entrusted with the supervision of over 20,000 black refugees in the Mississippi Valley. Nor did it appear to have a Promised Land. By the time they reached the Union camps, the refugees were exhausted, half starved, frightened, and sick. It was not uncommon for malnutrition and pulmonary disease to claim the lives of three or four blacks every day in the hastily constructed and congested contraband villages. “The poor Negroes die as fast as ever,” a missionary teacher reported. “The children are all emaciated to the last degree and have such violent coughs and dysenteries that few survive.”61
The number of slaves entering the Union lines provoked considerable dismay among commanding officers who found their camps overrun and the movement of their troops impeded. “What shall I do with my niggers?” asked one beleaguered commander, while another complained that he had more blacks in his camp than whites and no rations to feed them. What to do with these slaves proved to be a formidable problem that would never be satisfactorily resolved. The most immediate solution took the form of the contraband camps in which slaves were put to work as government laborers, paid wages, fed on army rations, and clothed by philanthropic agencies. The camps soon became overcrowded, disease took a heavy toll, the promised wages were often not paid, and many slaves came to feel they had been defrauded.
Dey said that we, de able-body men, was to get $8 a month, an’ de women, $4 and de ration; only we was to allow $1 de month to help de poor an’ de old—which we don’t ’gret—an’ one dollar for de sick ones, an’ den anudder dollar for Gen’l Purposes. We don’t zactly know who dat Gen’l is, but ’pears like dar was a heap o’ dem Gen’ls, an’ it takes all dar is to pay ’em, ’cause we don’t get nuffins.
That was only a precursor of the problems that would beset Federal policy toward the “contrabands.” By the end of the war, with more than a million ex-slaves under some form of Federal custody, the initial confusion regarding their status, disposition, and future remained unresolved, thereby frustrating anything approaching a genuine social reconstruction.62
What might have induced so many slaves to leave the relative security of the farm and plantation for the uncertainty of the Union Army and the contraband camps deeply troubled some slaveholding families. The most convenient explanation was that the Yankees forcibly removed them, and there were sufficient examples to warrant such a charge; some sl
aves, on the other hand, were thrown off the plantations by their owners, particularly the women and children of men who had run off or had enlisted in the Union Army. After the way the Yankees had stripped the plantations bare, some masters also pleaded poverty, claiming they simply could not feed or support the blacks. Recognizing this, numerous slaves had already left, deciding they might fare better on army rations. But most whites suspected that the prospect of immediate freedom, and the fear of losing it if they remained, induced many of their slaves to follow the Yankees. “Generally when told to run away from the soldiers, they go right to them,” Kate Stone observed in Louisiana, “and I cannot say I blame them.” More ominously, a Louisiana planter, after watching the slaves in his neighborhood for a week, thought many of them decided to leave with the Yankees because they feared retaliation for the outrages they had committed and they had heard that “the ‘rebel’ soldiers were coming on down and killing negroes as they came.” That may also help to explain why some slaves balked at Yankee questions about the names of their owners.63