Been in the Storm So Long

by Leon F. Litwack

  No plantation slave exercised greater authority than did the driver or foreman. The position he occupied as the director of labor and as an intermediary between the Big House and the quarters made him a crucial figure in the wartime crisis and in the subsequent transition to free labor. The driver dispatched the slaves to the fields, set the work pace and supervised performance of the daily tasks, maintained order in the quarters, settled disputes among slaves, and shared supervisory duties with the overseer or, quite commonly, combined the functions of driver and overseer. In a conflict between the overseer and the driver, the driver’s judgment might in many instances prevail; the very maintenance of discipline often demanded that his authority be sustained. “I constantly endeavored to do nothing which would cause them [the slaves] to lose their respect for him [the driver],” the manager of a plantation in South Carolina noted. With that same objective in mind, many planters provided the driver with better clothing, granted certain privileges to his wife, and always made a point of reprimanding him in private rather than in the presence of other slaves.114

  In the literature and folklore of slavery, the driver enjoyed at best a mixed reputation, usually reflecting the ways in which he exerted his power to exact labor and mete out punishments. If the “Uncle Toms” came to dominate the legend of the house slave, the black “Simon Legrees” seemed to prevail in the characterization of the driver. Henry Cheatam, a former Mississippi slave, recalled the driver as “de meanest debil dat eber libbed on de Lawd’s green earth. I promise myself when I growed up dat I was agoin’ to kill dat nigger iffen it was de las’ thing I eber done.” To make matters worse, that driver along with the mistress ran the plantation after the death of the master in the war. In a song overheard by Colonel Thomas Higginson, some of his black troops improvised verses that reflected the prevailing image of the driver. And as with the house slave, sufficient examples abounded to make it quite plausible.

  O, de ole nigger-driver!

  O, gwine away!

  Fust ting my mammy tell me,

  O, gwine away!

  Tell me ’bout de nigger-driver,

  O, gwine away!

  Nigger-driver second devil,

  O, gwine away!

  Best ting for do he driver,

  O, gwine away!

  Knock he down and spoil he labor,

  O, gwine away!

  After the war, on those plantations where the driver had a reputation for cruelty, the freedmen demanded his removal before they would consent to work.115

  If a master maintained confidence in any of his slaves, outside of a few of the venerable “uncles” and “aunties,” he most likely trusted the driver. He had personally chosen this man for his loyalty, competence, and dependability, believing him capable of managing the plantation in his absence. But the master also selected a driver who commanded the respect and obedience of the slaves, and this leadership role was apt to create conflicting loyalties. When the Yankees arrived, numerous drivers exercised leadership and influence in ways few masters had dared to contemplate. On one of the Allston plantations, Jesse Belflowers, the much-harassed overseer, traced the prevailing disorder and the misconduct of the slaves to the driver. He “is not behaveing write,” Belflowers reported, “he doant talk write before the People.” Not far from this scene, Confederate scouts captured and hanged a driver for his “treachery.” When a number of slaves fled a Georgia plantation to join General Sherman’s army, “the leading spirit” as well as the youngest of the group was the driver, described by one Union officer as a “very quick and manly fellow, a model, physically.” Not only did some drivers desert to the Yankees, but they were likely as well to take other slaves with them, and in several instances the driver directed the seizure of deserted plantations and helped to wreak vengeance on masters and overseers. A South Carolina planter and his son were shot and seriously wounded while riding in their carriage near the plantation; the band of blacks who ambushed them had been “led on by his Driver.” After blacks had seized one of his plantations, Charles Manigault accused the driver of aspiring to be “lord & master of everything there.”

  Frederick (the Driver) was ringleader, & at the head of all the iniquity committed there. He encouraged all the Negroes to believe that the Farm, and everything on it, now since Emancipation, belonged solely to him, & that their former owners had now no rights, or control there whatever.

  No less dismayed, Edmund Ruffin described the exodus of blacks from his son’s plantation, Marlbourne, along with the decision of those who remained to refuse to work. “My former black overseer, Jem Sykes,” he added, “who for the last seven years of my proprietorship, kept my keys, & was trusted with everything, even when I & every other white was absent from 4 to 6 weeks at a time, acted precisely with all his fellows.” If the driver remained on the plantation, as he usually did, he might also assume the responsibility for informing the slaves of their freedom and initiating negotiations with the master for a labor contract.116

  When some planters came to assess the wartime disaster that deprived them of an enslaved work force, they did not hesitate to project much of their anger and frustration on the trusted drivers. “The drivers everywhere have proved the worst negroes,” a Louisiana planter concluded. Actually, the record varied considerably, and as many planters voiced satisfaction and admiration for the ways in which their drivers managed to sustain agricultural operations and control the labor force during the war and in some instances run the entire plantation in their absence. With a number of slaves manifesting their discontent, Louis Manigault was much relieved to learn that Driver John “is still the same”; and since he deemed John “a Man of great importance” to the plantation, Manigault advised his father to furnish him with all the items the driver had requested—boots, a coat, a hat, a watch, and ample clothing. On the South Carolina Sea Islands, particularly on the smaller plantations, the drivers remained after the masters fled and succeeded in supervising and planting food crops and in maintaining a semblance of order and discipline. Impressed with the leadership and knowledge of plantation operations exhibited by these drivers, Union officers viewed them as a crucial stabilizing factor in the transition to free labor and tried to bolster their authority, particularly on the larger plantations where it had been seriously undermined by the absence of whites.117

  Recognizing the influence many of the drivers retained over the freed slaves, planters went to considerable lengths after the war to maintain their services. Once again, the driver found himself caught between conflicting loyalties. Through the driver, the planter hoped to retain the bulk of his labor force on the most favorable terms, though in a few instances he would have to dismiss an unpopular driver to keep any of his former slaves. Through the driver, on the other hand, many former slaves hoped to present a united front to the employer and exact concessions from him that would make their labor sufficiently remunerative and less arduous. In many of these postwar arrangements, the planter and the driver, both leaders in their own ways, seemed to have reached a tacit understanding about the division of power. On a plantation near Lexington, Tennessee, the driver—Jordan Pyles—had fled with the Yankees and had served in the Union Army. When he returned to the plantation after the war, he “was a changed nigger and all de whites and a lot of de niggers hated him,” his stepson recalled. “All ’cepting old Master, and he never said a word out of de way to him. Jest tol him to come on and work on de place as long as he wanted to.” Whatever the hostility that initially greeted him, Jordan Pyles must have retained much of the leadership quality and influence he had previously exercised, for in 1867 he would be elected a delegate to the Radical state convention.118

  Among the field hands, the house servants, the skilled black artisans, and the slave drivers, the Civil War provoked a wide range of behavior. Contrary to the legends of “docility” and “militancy,” the slaves did not sort themselves out into Uncle Toms and Nat Turners any more than masters divided neatly into the “mean” and the “go
od.” Rebelliousness, resistance, and accommodation might manifest themselves at different times in the same slave, depending on his own perception of reality. Rare was that slave, no matter how degraded, no matter how effusively he professed his fidelity, who did not contain within him a capacity for outrage. Whether or not that outrage ever surfaced, how much longer it would remain muted was the terrible reality every white man and woman had to live with and could never really escape. The tensions this uncertainty generated could at times prove to be unbearable. “The loom room had caught from some hot ashes,” Kate Stone confided to her diary, “but we at once thought Jane [the slave cook] was wreaking vengeance on us all by trying to burn us out. We would not have been surprised to have her slip up and stick any of us in the back.” If the vast majority of slaves refrained from aggressive acts and remained on the plantations, most of them were neither “rebellious” nor “faithful” in the fullest sense of those terms, but rather ambivalent and observant, some of them frankly opportunistic, many of them anxious to preserve their anonymity, biding their time, searching for opportunities to break the dependency that bound them to their white families. “There is quite a difference of manner among the negroes,” a South Carolina white woman noted in March 1865, “but I think it proceeds from an uncertainty as to what their condition will be, they do not know if they are free or not, and their manner is a sort of feeler by which they will find out how far they can go.”119

  The war revealed, often in ways that defied description, the sheer complexity of the master-slave relationship, and the conflicts, contradictions, and ambivalence that relationship generated in each individual. The slave’s emotions and behavior invariably rested on a precarious balance between the habit of obedience and the intense desire for freedom. The same humble, self-effacing slave who touched his hat to his “white folks” was capable of touching off the fire that gutted his master’s house. The loyal body servant who risked his life to carry his wounded master to safety remounted his master’s horse and fled to the Yankees. The black boatman lionized by the Richmond press for his denunciation of the Yankees and enlistment as a Confederate recruit deserted to the Union lines with valuable information and “twenty new rebel uniforms.” The house slave who nursed her mistress through a terrible illness, always evincing love and affection, even weeping over her condition, deserted her when the moment seemed right—“when I was scarce able to walk without assistance—she left me without provocation or reason—left me in the night, and that too without the slightest noise.” On the Jones plantation, near Herndon, Georgia, the house servant had given no warm welcome to the Union soldiers. She dutifully looked after the white children entrusted to her care. “I suckled that child, Hattie,” she boasted, “all these children suckled by colored women.” And yet, when the Yankees threatened to burn down her master’s house, Louisa made no protest. “It ought to be burned,” she told a Union officer. “Why?” the astonished officer asked her, for he had been rather moved by her fidelity to the family and her apparent devotion to the children. “Cause there has been so much devilment here,” she replied, “whipping niggers most to death to make ’em work to pay for it.”120

  To place the blame for slave disaffection on lax discipline or outside influences, as so many slaveholders chose to do, was to make the same false assumptions about blacks. If the war taught slaveholders anything, it should have revealed how little they actually knew their blacks, how they had mistaken the slave’s outward demeanor for his inner feelings, his docility for contentment and acquiescence, and how in numerous instances they had been deliberately deceived so that they might later be the more easily betrayed. The conduct of slaves during the recent crisis, a South Carolina planter conceded, should have impressed upon every slaveholding family that “we were all laboring under a delusion.”

  Good masters and bad masters all alike, shared the same fate—the sea of the Revolution confounded good and evil; and, in the chaotic turbulence, all suffer in degree. Born and raised amid the institution, like a great many others, I believed it was necessary, to our welfare, if not to our very existence. I believed that these people were content, happy, and attached to their masters. But events and reflection have caused me to change these opinions.… If they were content, happy and attached to their masters, why did they desert him in the moment of his need and flock to an enemy, whom they did not know; and thus left their, perhaps really good masters whom they did know from infancy?121

  Whatever happened in the future, no matter what kind of South emerged from the ruins, it seemed certain that the relations which masters and slaves alike had enjoyed or tolerated in the past would never be quite the same again.

  9

  WHEN THE UNION ARMY neared his Savannah River plantations, Louis Manigault fled. That was December 1864. More than two years later, having leased the plantations to a former Confederate officer, Manigault decided to visit the place for the first time since his hasty departure and assess the impact of the war. Traveling along the familiar roads between Savannah and his plantations, he noted traces of previous army encampments, the twisted ruins of the Charleston and Savannah Railroad, and the remains of what had once been a magnificent neighboring mansion. Upon entering the plantations, he was greeted enthusiastically by his former slave cooper, George, who still called him “Maussa.” Standing next to the ruins of his country house, Manigault recalled how he had spent here “the most happy period” of his childhood. All that remained of the house was a tall chimney and some scattered bricks which the slaves had not stolen and sold in Savannah. Except for the “Negro Houses,” which he had constructed just before the war, the entire settlement had “a most abandoned and forlorn appearance.”

  As he approached the old slave quarters, some of the blacks came out of their cabins, hesitant in their greetings, “not knowing whether under the new regime it would be proper to meet me politely or not.” Manigault shook hands with them, called each by his name (“which seemed to please them highly”), and joked with them about his present plight. “Lord! a Massy!” he mocked when asked why he had not returned earlier. “You tink I can lib in de Chimney.” Near the center of the plantation, twelve of his former slaves greeted him. “They all seemed pleased to see me, calling me ‘Maussa’ & the Men still showing respect by taking off their caps.” He spotted “Captain” Hector, “as cunning as Negroes can be,” his “constant companion” until the war transformed him into “a great Rascal” and troublemaker. Hector was now a foreman.

  Much to Manigault’s surprise, Jack Savage, the slave he had sold in Savannah, had returned. “Tall, black, lousy, in rags, & uncombed, kinky, knotty-hair,” this man had been “the most notoriously bad character & worst Negro of the place,” the one slave he had thought capable of murder and arson, and yet acknowledged to be intelligent and an able carpenter. The two men now shook hands and exchanged “a few friendly remarks.” To Manigault, it seemed highly ironic that Jack Savage, “the last one I should have dreamt of,” greeted him, “whilst sitting idly upon the Negro-House steps dirty & sluggish, I behold young Women to whom I had most frequently presented Earrings, Shoes, Calicos, Kerchiefs &c, &c,—formerly pleased to meet me, but now not even lifting the head as I passed.”

  Unlike many slaveholders, Louis Manigault had never pretended to understand his blacks. Before the war, he reflected, fear had largely shaped the behavior of the slaves, and “we Planters could never get at the truth.” Those who claimed to know the Negro were simply deceiving themselves. “Our ‘Northern Brethren’ inform us that we Southerners knew nothing of the Negro Character. This I have always considered perfectly true, but they further state that They (the Yankees) have always known the true Character of the Negro which I consider entirely false in the extreme. So deceitful is the Negro that as far as my own experience extends I could never in a single instance decipher his character.” Conversing now with his former slaves, Manigault was suddenly overcome by a strange feeling. “I almost imagined myself with Chinese, Malays or
even the Indians in the interior of the Philippine Islands.” It was as though he were on alien turf and had never really known these people who had once been his slaves.122

  Before setting out to make a new life for himself, William Colbert, a former Alabama slave, looked back for a last time at the old plantation on which he had spent more than twenty years. He had no reason to regret his decision to leave. The bondage he had endured had been harsh, reflecting the temperament of a master who had never hesitated to whip his slaves severely. “All de niggers ’roun’ hated to be bought by him kaze he wuz so mean,” Colbert recalled. “When he wuz too tired to whup us he had de overseer do it; and de overseer wuz meaner dan de massa.” The arrival of the Yankees had not materially affected their lives. After a few days of looting, the soldiers had suddenly left “an’ we neber seed ’em since.” After the war, the blacks only gradually left and the plantation slowly deteriorated. Many years later, reflecting on his experience, Colbert captured with particular vividness the ambivalence that had necessarily characterized a slave’s attachment to his master. His recollections were tinged neither with romantic nostalgia nor with abject hatred. Whatever bitterness he still felt may have been dissipated both by the passage of time and by the knowledge that Jim Hodison, his former master, had come to learn in his own way the dimensions of human tragedy. And that was an experience William Colbert could easily share with him.