We went through spacious houses where only a week ago families were living in luxury, and saw their costly furniture despoiled; books and papers smashed; pianos on the sidewalk, feather beds ripped open, and even the filth of the Negroes left lying in parlors and bedchambers.
Much of the destruction, one reporter suggested, could not be defined as “plunder” but only as a “malicious love of mischief gratified.” When news of the sacking reached the North, Henry M. Turner, an outspoken black clergyman, was equally startled; in fact, he refused to believe the “ridiculous, outrageous, and cannibalistic reports” of slave excesses. Having been a resident of South Carolina for more than twenty years of his life, he could attest to the fact that “there are no class of colored people south of Mason and Dixon’s line, where more sound sense, morality, religion, and refined taste, prevails, than in Beaufort.” The slaves themselves said little about the fury they had unleashed on some of the more imposing symbols of the slaveholding aristocracy. Nor did they apparently deem an explanation necessary.73
Although the extent of slave “pillaging” in the South was sometimes exaggerated, or confused with Yankee depredations, that any should have occurred aroused consternation. “The Moorfield negroes are crazy quite,” a South Carolinian wrote; “they have been to Pinopolis, helping in the sacking of the houses.” In some areas, the slaves singled out the popular summer retreats for wealthy planters, where the quality of the furnishings provided sufficient temptation. Where white families had abandoned their homes, the slaves in many instances preferred occupation to pillage, moving from their own cramped quarters into the more commodious and comfortable lodgings which they had previously envied from a distance; the slaves who flocked into the towns from the outlying plantations, seeking the protection of Federal authority and a more congenial atmosphere in which to spend their first days of freedom, found an instant answer to their housing problem by occupying the elegant town houses of absent owners. To sleep in the master’s bed and eat at the dining-room table with the family silver and china was a novel and exhilarating experience. “Mamma’s house is occupied by freedmen, cooking in every room,” reported a South Carolina woman who had only recently heard from a friend in a nearby town that “all the houses around them are occupied by negroes.” Already in shock over the apparent collapse of the social order, native whites now listened to reports that slaves were using the baronial town houses to give “Negro balls” and dinner parties. “The whites [presumably Yankees] and blacks danced together,” a friend wrote Adele Allston of a recent “ball” in Georgetown, South Carolina.74
Where would it all end? The events of the past several weeks, Henry W. Ravenel confided to his diary, reminded him of the horrors of the French Revolution. “White man is nigger—and nigger is white man” was the way another South Carolinian chose to describe “the state of things.” Whether in the towns or in the countryside, the welcome accorded the Union troops by many slaves had not been confined to prayers and singing but had included as well the expropriation of nearly everything belonging to their masters and mistresses that could be moved. With a feeling of utter helplessness, Amanda Stone’s family, after abandoning the family home in Louisiana, heard how the slaves had quarreled over the division of clothes and how the house had been stripped of furniture, carpets, books, the piano, “and everything else.” Nor did the presence of the white family necessarily restrain the slaves. “The Negroes as soon as they heard the guns,” a rice planter in South Carolina reported, “rushed to my house and pillaged it of many things and principally wearing apparel”; he felt certain that the entire affair had been “pre-arranged.”75
For the masters, what proved most difficult to accept was the gratification some slaves derived from these attacks on property. “Many of them,” John H. Bills thought, “do all they can to have us destroyed & delight in seeing the work of destruction.” Upon returning to their plantation home, the Allston family suddenly understood the overseer’s report that their slaves had “behaved Verry badly.”
We looked at the house; it was a wreck,—the front steps gone, not a door nor shutter left, and not a sash. They had torn out all the mahogany framework around the doors and windows—there were mahogany panels below the windows and above the doors there were panels painted—the mahogany banisters to the staircase going upstairs; everything that could be torn away was gone.… It was a scene of destruction, and papa’s study, where he kept all his accounts and papers, as he had done from the time he began planting as a young man, was almost waistdeep in torn letters and papers.76
The systematic nature of much of the black pillaging suggests that it was frequently neither indiscriminate nor simply a matter of gratified revenge but rather an opportunity to supplement their meager diets and wardrobes and improve their standard of living. Why they killed the livestock, emptied the meat houses and storerooms, and expropriated the liquors and wines would seem sufficiently obvious. The furniture and materials removed from the Big House were often used to make their own cabins more habitable. One South Carolina slave explained that after the master departed, they stripped boards from his house in order to floor their own cabins and put in lofts. Similarly, when the slaves broke into closets, bureaus, trunks, and desks, ripped open the bedding, or scattered the master’s private papers, they were frequently seeking money, jewelry, or silverware that might be traded for needed commodities. When the slaves seized the mules, horses, and wagons, it was often with the idea of making their escape from the plantation, taking with them whatever the carts could carry. On A. F. Pugh’s plantation, an enterprising former slave accumulated a cartload of articles from several neighboring plantations and bartered them with other blacks in the vicinity; the overseer was powerless to stop this apparently flourishing business based on loot.77
What the whites defined as theft might be viewed by the slaves as long-overdue payments for past services. Adele Allston conceded almost as much when she wrote her son about the destruction visited upon their Chicora Wood plantation. “The conduct of the negroes in robbing our house, store room meat house etc and refusing to restore anything shows you they think it right to steal from us, to spoil us, as the Israelites did the Egyptians.” The slaves simply suggested that the question of theft be placed in its proper perspective, like the old Gullah preacher who asked his congregation, “Ef buckra neber tief, how come nigger yer?” That the constraints of slave life had made “thieves” of them some slaves readily conceded, though always stressing the conditions that had made this necessary. “We work so hard and get nothing for our labor but jes our ’lowance, we ’bleege to steal,” a South Carolina slave explained in 1863, “and den we must keep from dem ebery ting or dey suffer us too much. But dey take all our labor, and steal our chil’ren, and we only take dare chicken.” To attempt to reason with a slave on this sensitive matter could be an exasperating, if sometimes illuminating experience for a white. In Tennessee, a slave rode into a Union camp on a horse he had taken from his owner. Upon being questioned, presumably by a Union soldier or reporter, the slave insisted only that the usual notions of morality had little relevance to his action.
“Don’t you think you did very wrong, Dick, to take your mistress’ horse?”
“Well, I do’ know, sah; I didn’t take the bes’ one. She had three; two of ’em fuss-rate hosses, but the one I took is ole, an’ not berry fast, an’ I offe’d to sell him fo’ eight dolla’s, sah.”
“But, Dick, you took at least a thousand dollars from your mistress, besides the horse.”
“How, sah?”
“Why, you were worth a thousand dollars, and you should have been satisfied with that much, without taking the poor woman’s horse,” said I, gravely.
The contraband scratched his woolly head, rolled up his eyes at me, and replied with emphasis.
“I don’t look at it jis dat way, massa. I wo’ked ha’d fo’ missus mor’n thirty yea’s, an’ I reckon in dat time I ’bout pay fo’ meself. An’ dis yea’ missus guv
me leave to raise a patch o’ ’baccy fo’ my own. Well, I wo’ked nights, an’ Sabbaths, an’ spar’ times, an’ raised a big patch (way prices is, wuff two hun’red dolla’s, I reckon) o’ ’baccy; an’ when I got it tooken car’ of dis fall, ole missus took it ’way from me; give some to de neighbors; keep some fo’ he’ own use; an’ sell some, an’ keep de money, an’ I reckon dat pay fo’ de ole hoss!”
Failing to find any conscience in the darkey, I gave up the argument.78
Even where slaves refrained from expropriating and destroying property, they often behaved in ways that troubled and infuriated their masters and mistresses. The decision of a slave to remain on the plantation was no guarantee of his fidelity or steady labor. The Reverend Samuel A. Agnew, a Mississippi slaveholder, understood that all too well. “Some of our negroes will not go to the Yankees,” he thought, “but they may all prove faithless.” For many slave owners, as for Agnew, the ability to retain the bulk of their blacks proved to be no cause for self-congratulation. Despite the concern voiced over the “stampede” of the slaves, some white families might have found reasons to be grateful, if only because they avoided the anguish experienced by so many of their neighbors.
Oh! deliver me from the “citizens of African descent.” I am disgusted forever with the whole race. I have not faith in one single dark individual. They are all alike ungrateful and treacherous—every servant is a spy upon us, & everything we do or say is reported to the Yankees. They know everything.79
7
THE TERMS with which slave-owning families described the conduct of their blacks—“insolence,” “impertinence,” “impudence,” and “ingratitude”—had been used often and indiscriminately to denote slave transgressions or departures from expected behavior. Once the Yankees arrived, masters and mistresses detected examples of such behavior almost everywhere—in the defection of the favorites, in the demeanor and language of the slaves who remained, in their refusal to submit to punishment, in their failure to obey orders promptly (or at all), and, most frequently, in their unwillingness to work “as usual.” To a Louisiana planter, traveling from Ascension Parish to New Orleans in mid-1863, the slaves he observed along the way were nearly all “insolent & idle,” which he defined as “working not more than half a day, yet demanding full rations of every thing.” To the wife of a prominent Alabama planter, the slaves behaved in “an insolent manner” by taking off whenever there was work to be done. “The negroes are worse than free,” she informed her son. “They say they are free. We cannot exert any authority. I beg ours to do what little is to be done.” To a Virginia white woman, the blacks were acting “very independent and impudent,” and like most whites she equated the two traits. To slave owners everywhere, the defections were difficult enough to understand but the ways in which some slaves chose to depart invariably provoked the most grievous charge of all—“ingratitude.” Few stated it more succinctly than Emily C. Douglas, a resident of Natchez who had earlier extolled the loyalty of her slaves: “They left without even a good-bye.”80
The “delirium of excitement” set off by the arrival of the Yankees gave scores of slaves a much-welcomed respite from their usual labors and momentarily paralyzed agricultural operations. That was the day, a former Florida slave remembered, when they dropped their plows and hoes, rushed to their cabins, put on their best clothes, and went into town to join with other slaves in a “joyous and un-forgettable occasion.” If the slaves did not stop work altogether, they often slowed down the pace and made only sporadic appearances in the fields, “going, coming, and working when they please and as they please,” sometimes spending the day in their cabins, sometimes venturing into town for a week at a time. The attempts to make a crop under these conditions were futile. On the Magnolia plantation in Louisiana, the overseer first complained that the slaves were “very slow getting out”; three weeks later, “the ring of the Bell no longer a delightful sound,” and the slaves were “moving very slowly”; more than a month later, in utter exasperation, he could only “wish every negro would leave the place as they will do only what pleases them, go out in the morning when it suits them, come in when they please, etc.” The erratic performance of the slaves even dismayed some northern observers, who wondered if this augured trouble for a free labor system. The Negroes’ idea of freedom, an alarmed Union reporter observed, “is that of unrestrained license to do as they please, and go where they choose.” The slaves might well have agreed, after having watched their masters and other whites for so many years interpret freedom in precisely that manner.81
To mark their release from bondage, blacks not only withheld their labor but in some instances vented their frustrations and bitterness on the most glaring and accessible symbols of their past labor—the Big House, which they might pillage; the cotton gin, which they might deliberately destroy; the slave pens and cotton houses, which in some cases were converted into freedmen schools and churches; and the overseer, who often represented the sole authority left on a plantation and who had come to personify the excesses of bondage. Many overseers clearly deserved their reputation for cruelty; nevertheless, the discipline they enforced, the punishments they meted out, and the labor they exacted from the slaves almost always reflected their need to meet the expectations of their employers. Rather than share the responsibility for any excesses that might result from his often inordinate demands, the planter all too readily permitted his overseer to assume the blame; indeed, the owner might even intercede at times to soften the overseer’s punishments, thereby enhancing his own sense of paternalism and “humanity” while reinforcing the image of the overseer as an uncaring brute.82
Neither the slaves nor the overseers were necessarily oblivious to this kind of deception, but the flight of the masters often left the overseer by himself to absorb the slaves’ wrath. Regardless of what whites remained on the plantation, the coming of the Yankees encouraged slaves to act as though there were alternatives in their lives: if they chose not to desert, they might simply refuse to submit to the usual discipline and punishments. On the C. C. Clay plantation in Alabama, the slaves had become “so bold,” the mistress informed her son, that they threatened to kill the overseer if he tried to punish them for disobedience. That these were not empty threats is borne out by what took place on the Millaudon plantation in Louisiana, where “bad feelings” between the overseer and the slaves had prompted the absentee owner to pay a visit to his place. When Millaudon tried to reprimand the “ringleader,” the slave responded “with insolence.” Unaccustomed to such conduct, the planter then struck him with a whip. This time the slave responded by furiously charging Millaudon, who finally felled him with a stick. “This seemed to bring the negro to his senses, and he took refuge in his cabin; but he presently came out with a hatchet …” One of the other slaves interceded at this point and grabbed the hatchet, the rebellious slave fled into the cane field, and Millaudon departed from the plantation, thinking he had suppressed “the affair.” He had not gone far, however, before the report reached him that his slaves were now “in full revolt” and had killed the overseer. Returning once again to the plantation, this time with Union soldiers, Millaudon beheld an extraordinary scene: a large number of his blacks, with their possessions and quantities of plantation goods, were walking alongside a cart on which lay the body of the murdered overseer, wrapped in a flag. “It appears that he had been attacked by five of them while he was at dinner, his head being split open by blows with a hatchet, and penetrated by shots at his face.” The “assassins” reportedly “rejoiced” over their success, and “the whole gang” of some 150 slaves had left the plantation.83
Anticipating acts of vengeance, some overseers fled shortly before the Yankees reached their plantations. Those who remained were apt to find themselves in an uncertain and often perilous situation. If the slaves did not drive the overseer forcibly off the plantation, they conducted themselves in ways that undermined his authority and left him powerless. On the Nightingale Hall plantation,
one of several rice plantations in South Carolina owned by Adele Allston, the slaves imprisoned the overseer in his own house. “Mr. Sweat, was a very good, quiet man, and had been liked by all the negroes,” Adele Allston’s daughter wrote of him, “but in the intoxication of freedom their first exercise of it was to tell Mr. Sweat if he left the house they would kill him, and they put a negro armed with a shotgun to guard the house and see that he did not leave alive.” Watching from his window, the conscientious overseer kept a journal of the activities of the blacks, hoping someday to hold them to account.84
Conditions were no different on the Allstons’ Chicora Wood plantation, where Jesse Belflowers, reputedly one of the most efficient overseers in the South Carolina low country, had been in charge since 1842. Having been compelled to surrender the barn keys to the slaves, he confessed to his employer that the workers had become unmanageable. “I am not allowed to say any [thing] a bout Work and have not been to the Barn for the last five days. Jacob is the worst man on the Place, then comes in Scipio Jackey Sawney & Paul.” And in a “P.S.” he added: “Most all of them have arms.” Although Adele Allston continued to support him, she wondered in the aftermath of the war if Belflowers had not outlived his usefulness to the plantation now that the blacks considered themselves to be free. “Belflowers is cowed by the violence of the negroes against him,” she wrote to her son, “and is afraid to speak openly. He is trying to curry favour. His own morals are impaired by the revolution, and he always required backing as your father expressed it. You must tell him what to do and support him in carrying it out.” This proved to be an accurate assessment. Belflowers never really recovered from his wartime experience and he found it impossible to adapt himself to the post-emancipation changes. “[I]t Looks Verry hard to Pull ones hat to a Negro,” he conceded in April 1865. Within a year, he was dead—by natural causes. “He is one of our true friends,” Adele Allston wrote when she learned he was seriously ill, “and a link connecting us with the past.”85
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