Been in the Storm So Long

by Leon F. Litwack

  Now that the blacks were no longer a financial investment, they suddenly became expendable—but only some of them. While freedmen made decisions about whether to remain on the same plantation, their former masters determined whom they wished to keep with them, based largely on previous records of behavior. “Now that they are all free,” Charles C. Jones, Jr., wrote his mother, “there are several of them not worth the hiring.” She agreed, and named one in particular: “Cato has been to me a most insolent, indolent, and dishonest man; I have not a shadow of confidence in him, and will not wish to retain him on the place.” If any planter felt uneasy about evicting the elderly, he might still eagerly avail himself of the opportunity to purge the work force of the proven troublemakers, the least efficient, and the bad influences, as well as those who were too quick to drop the old deference after emancipation. The sudden discovery that one of his former slaves had deceived him was sufficient provocation to discharge him. On an Alabama plantation, the newly freed workers affixed their marks to a labor contract, except for Arch, who signed his full name. That was too much for his former master, who ordered him off the place. “You done stayed in war wid me four years,” he told him, “and I ain’t known that was in you. Now I ain’t got no confidence in you.” The tribulations that awaited the employers of free black labor would provide still other excuses for discharging their former slaves. Thus did an elderly Virginia freedman find himself on the road to Richmond without a home. His master had become enraged after the able-bodied hands left him rather than work without wages, and he had countered this affront by driving everyone off the plantation, including the sick and the aged, declaring that he had no use “fo’ old wore-out niggers.”

  I knowed I was old and wore-out, but I growed so in his service. I served him and his father befo’e nigh on to sixty year; and he never give me a dollar. He’s had my life, and now I’m old and wore-out I must leave. It’s right hard, mahster!

  Although not knowing what to expect now, he made it clear that he had no desire to return to the old bondage. “I’d sooner be as I is to-day.” And with those words, he placed his bundle on his back and made his way along the road to Richmond.65

  When it came to making practical decisions about the ideal labor force, planters divided sharply over whether to retain their former slaves or seek an entirely new group of blacks. Having known them so intimately as slaves, and accustomed to their deference, some families were disturbed at the idea of living with these same people as free laborers with the same rights as themselves. Perhaps, they reasoned, the former slaves knew them too intimately as well. Without citing any specific reason, Elias Horry Deas, the South Carolina rice planter, informed his daughter that “the general feeling on the river” was to discharge all the hands at the end of the season. “There are a very few of mine that I think I will hire again, & there is many an old one that will have to quit.” At the same time, Edward Lynch, also a rice planter, returned from a meeting in Savannah where the assembled planters concluded that “the worst possible labor for a man to employ was the labor formerly belonging to him.”66

  But the clear preference in most instances was to retain the slaves they had known and supervised in the past. On the same day the master informed them of their freedom, he usually asked them to remain and work for some kind of compensation, with perhaps an added inducement to complete the current crops. How the freed slaves would respond, however, remained questionable. Although the “old ties” binding blacks and their “white folks” persisted long after the war, each freedman and each former owner clearly felt them in different degrees, and many felt nothing at all. It was possible for a freed slave to retain a certain affection for the old master without feeling any obligation to continue to serve him. To place any confidence in him—or perhaps in any white man or woman—was something altogether different. “You jes’ let ’em ’lone, ma’am,” a freed-woman observed of white people. “Yur never know which way a cat is going to jump.”67

  6

  NOT LONG AFTER THE WAR, the wife of a former slave trader watched in horror as a freedman in Petersburg, Virginia, skinned a live catfish. Clearly upset, she asked him how he could be so cruel. “Why, dis is de way dey used to do me,” he replied, “and I’s gwine to get even wid somebody.” Judging by the way many whites talked in the aftermath of emancipation, that was the fate that awaited them at the hands of blacks, who would now wreak a terrible revenge on those who had kept them in bondage. The South Carolina planter who glimpsed in the “looks and language” of the freed slaves “great bitterness toward the whites” gave voice to familiar fears that mounted with every report of a disorder, every act of “insolence,” and every jubilant black chorus promising to hang Jefferson Davis—and presumably the leading “rebels” along with him. Once again, there was no way the blacks could win the debate over whether they intended to avenge bondage by turning emancipation into a racial bloodbath. If they retaliated for the wrongs visited upon them and sought to punish their former masters, they revealed their ingratitude and savage natures. If they refrained from violence and showed compassion for their former owners, they revealed their natural docility, slavish mentality, and inferiority as men.68

  In observing the black regiment he commanded, almost all of them former slaves, Colonel Higginson expressed surprise over the absence of any feelings of affection or revenge toward their former masters and mistresses. On one occasion, during a raid in Florida, a black sergeant had pointed out to him the spot where whites had hanged his brother for leading a band of runaway slaves. What impressed Higginson was the sergeant’s remarkable composure and self-control as he related the story. “He spoke of it as a historic matter,” Higginson recalled, “without any bearing on the present issue.” None of his men, he noticed, ever spoke nostalgically about slavery times but neither did they evince in his presenee any desire to seek a violent revenge on their former owners. Rather, they tended in their conversations to discriminate between various types of slaveholders, with some of them claiming to have had “kind” owners who had bestowed occasional favors upon them. But that in no way lessened their hatred of the institution of slavery. “It was not the individuals,” wrote Higginson, “but the ownership, of which they complained. That they saw to be a wrong which no special kindnesses could right.”69

  But if Higginson detected no mood of vengeance, other whites were less certain. While the North engaged in a furious debate over what to do with the South and the Confederate leaders, more than one curious northern visitor thought to ask the freedmen they encountered what kind of punishment should be meted out to their former masters. The question itself made many blacks visibly uncomfortable, as though torn between what they really felt and what they thought the white reporters wanted to hear. Not being certain, many chose obfuscation. Although a few openly declared that hanging would be “too good” for their masters, the general response was that the Yankees should settle this question. If any slaveholders were to be punished, few if any of their former slaves wished to be around for the event, either to carry it out or to witness it. The same ex-slave who thought hanging was “too good” for his master rejected the invitation (no doubt made in jest) of a Union officer to inflict the punishment himself. “Oh, no, can’t do it,” he replied, “can’t do it—can’t see massa suffer. Don’t want to see him suffer.” With similar expressions of horror, a group of South Carolina blacks responded to a Yankee soldier who had promised to return their master to them for any action they deemed appropriate.

  “Oh! don’t massa, don’t bring him here; we no want to see him nebber more,” shouted a chorus of women.

  “But what shall we do with him?”

  “Do what you please,” said the chorus.

  “Shall we hang him?”

  “If you want, massa”—somewhat thoughtfully.

  “But shall we bring him here and hang him?”

  Chorus—much excited and shriller than ever—“no, no, don’t fetch him here, we no want to see him neb
ber more again.”

  Since these freedmen were also occupying and working the land of their absent master, their reaction made considerable sense.70

  As for punishing Confederate leaders, blacks may have sung about hanging Jeff Davis to a crab-apple tree but a black preacher came closer to capturing popular feelings: “O Lord, shake Jeff Davis ober de mouf ob Hell, but O Lord, doan’ drap him in!” Except for the confiscation of land, most freedmen saw little to gain by the punishment of ex-Confederate leaders; on the contrary, some feared that an aroused white populace would surely visit its rage on the most vulnerable targets—the newly freed slaves. Gertrude Thomas, a white resident of Augusta, Georgia, had only to watch the cheering blacks running down the street, all of them eager for a glimpse of Jefferson Davis as a prisoner, to wish at that moment she could have destroyed the whole motley group with a volley of gunfire. Recognizing how intensely whites felt about this issue, blacks who thought about it at all tended to view such matters in personal and pragmatic terms, calculating the effect it might have on their own lives and destinies. Few expressed that more pointedly than the freedmen of Claiborne County, Mississippi, when they petitioned the governor in 1865 to relieve them of oppressive laws and dishonest employers. “All we ask is justice and to be treated like human beings,” they pleaded, while making it clear they extended those principles to all people and bore no animosity toward their former masters.

  We have good white friends and we depend on them by the help of god to see us righted and we not want our rights by Murdering. We owe to[o] much to many of our white friends that has shown us Mercy in bygone dayes To harm thaim.… Some of us wish Mr. Jeff Davis to be Set at liberty for we [k]no[w] worse Masters than he was. Altho he tried hard to keep us all slaves we forgive him.

  Elizabeth Keckley, who had worked as a maid for Davis, thought singling him out for punishment was simply irrelevant to the noble cause that had prompted her to leave his service. “The years have brought many changes,” she reflected; “and in view of these terrible changes even I, who was once a slave, who have been punished with the cruel lash, who have experienced the heart and soul tortures of a slave’s life, can say to Mr. Jefferson Davis, ‘Peace! you have suffered! Go in peace.’ ” Regardless of how blacks had viewed the war, most of them could concur with the idea of amnesty for Jefferson Davis, if only because they intended to remain in a society made up largely of people of his color and outlook.71

  The ambivalence that had always characterized the relations between slaves and their white families, along with the pragmatic need to placate an angry and bitter white South, was bound to affect how freedmen perceived their beaten and discouraged former masters and mistresses. The way in which Samuel Boulware, a former South Carolina slave, recalled the day the Yankees pillaged his master’s plantation typified a widely felt reaction. “Us slaves was sorry dat day for marster and mistress. They was gittin’ old, and now they had lost all they had, and more than dat, they knowed their slaves was set free.” Even so, many white families were left to question the depth of such feelings, particularly after what some of them had endured at the hands of their blacks, and came away with altogether different impressions. While a South Carolina planter saw hatred of whites in the faces of the freedmen, a North Carolinian expressed the certainty that they “felt for their masters and secretly sympathized with their ruin,” and she appreciatively noted what local blacks had written on a huge banner they unfurled at a recent celebration: “Respect for Former Owners.”72

  That “respect” might assume more tangible forms than commiserations and banners. Much as the wartime distress had sometimes brought masters and slaves closer together, the hard times that followed the war taxed the charitable instincts of both races. Although some freedmen returned to the old place seeking help to tide them over a difficult period, the need for assistance worked both ways. Numerous white families, reduced to economic privation by the war and the loss of their property, felt no compunctions (at least, none they admitted) about calling on their former bondsmen for help. Whether out of affection, pity, or that old sense of mutual obligations, ex-slaves invariably responded with generosity to the plight of their old masters and mistresses, at least to the extent they could afford to be generous. Had it not been for a former slave who shared his earnings with her, a North Carolina woman confessed, the family could hardly have survived the loss of their property. Two years after the war, her black benefactor died. “But even at the last,” the grateful woman recalled, “he had not forgotten us. He left $600 to me, and $400 to one of my family.”73

  No doubt many freedmen derived a certain satisfaction from extending a helping hand to those who had once held them in bondage. On the Sea Islands, for example, the success of blacks in working the abandoned plantations made them “objects of attention” to the dispossessed planters, who paid occasional visits to the old places, often to seek material assistance while they waited to reclaim their lands. Some women even went from cabin to cabin among their former slaves, pleading the family’s poverty and eagerly collecting food, silverware, dishes, and a little money. Such donations, a Federal official observed, were made partly out of pity but also to impress upon the owners how well they were managing themselves as free people—“an intense satisfaction if a little boastful.” On one plantation, Jim Cashman welcomed his former master back, offering him the same courtesies and warm hospitality any southern gentleman might extend to a visitor and proudly reciting his achievements.

  “The Lord has blessed us since you have been gone. It used to be Mr. Fuller No. 1, now it is Jim Cashman No. 1. Would you like to take a drive through the island Sir? I have a horse and buggy of my own now Sir, and I would like to take you to see my own little lot of land and my new house on it, and I have as fine a crop of cotton Sir, as ever you did see, if you please—and Jim can let you have ten dollars if you want them, Sir.”

  The former owner graciously accepted both his hospitality and his assistance. In still another instance, a Georgia freedman amassed some savings from working in a sawmill while at the same time planting cotton in a small lot he had purchased. Upon the death of his former master, he came to the aid of the mistress, who had been left without any land and apparently penniless. He supported her until the woman’s death some two years later. Only when it came to paying the cost of her funeral did local residents balk, saying, “He done his share already,” but her own kind would bury her.74

  While serving the Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina, John William De Forest, a white agent, recalled a former slave who appeared at his office, not to pick up rations for himself, but to make a personal appeal on behalf of the Jacksons, a local white family in dire need of help. Except for the sudden plunge in the fortunes of this family, their plight and incapacity for steady labor, as described by this freedman, resembled the pessimistic white accounts of postwar blacks.

  “They’s mighty bad off. He’s in bed, sick—ha’n’t been able to git about this six weeks—and his chil’n’s begging food of my chil’n. They used to own three or four thous’n acres; they was great folks befo’ the war. It’s no use tellin’ them kind to work; they don’t know how to work, and can’t work; somebody’s got to help ’em, Sir. I used to belong to one branch of that family, and so I takes an interest in ’em. I can’t bear to see such folks come down so. It hurts my feelings, Sir.”75

  Even compassion had its limits. If some freed slaves manifested sympathy for their broken and impoverished or dead masters and mistresses, there remained those who saw no reason to feel remorse of any kind. “I never had no whitefolks that was good to me,” Annie Hawkins recalled of her bondage in Georgia and Texas. “Old Mistress died soon after the War and we didn’t care either. She didn’t never do nothing to make us love her. We was jest as glad as when old Master died.” On the Sea Islands, the generosity displayed by freedmen and freedwomen went only so far, and they made clear the distinction between serving their former masters and helping them. When a former reside
nt sent word that “she thought some of her Ma’s niggers might come to wait upon her,” none volunteered; instead, some of them went to see her and offered some food, money, and clothes, and the woman in return swallowed her pride and position and agreed to become a dressmaker for the blacks. After the initial gestures of goodwill, moreover, freedmen became concerned lest their generosity be misunderstood and abused. “They say that two come for every one they send away relieved,” a Freedmen’s Bureau agent reported from the Sea Islands, “and that it is a new way ‘maussa’ has of making them work for him.”

  Although the “masters” weep with joy at the sight of their humble friends, and though one of them said he “should go away and cut his throat if they looked coldly upon him,” yet the people are only transiently touched by this manifestation of affection. They look very jealously and uneasily upon all who return, often ask why Government lets them come back to trouble the freedman.

  Near Beaufort, a former owner visited the old place, shook the hands of his former slaves, pleaded his poverty, and asked for sympathy and spare change. After all, he told them, they should realize that he and his wife knew nothing of work and had never done any. The ex-slaves needed no reminder, nor did they respond favorably to his plight when it became clear that he coveted the return of his lands upon which they were now working.76