Been in the Storm So Long

by Leon F. Litwack

  In view of the experiences of some women, Gertrude Thomas might have considered herself fortunate. After hiring new servants, several Florida women found it necessary to count their spoons and forks every night before locking them up in their bedrooms; Julia LeGrand of New Orleans wondered if there was any alternative to “locking up and watching,” and a South Carolina woman complained that her servants “don’t work very hard, but I do.” Emma Holmes would have little to do with her newly hired washer after the woman complained of arduous labor; “we have a constant ebb and flow of servants,” she noted, “some staying only a few days, others a few hours—some thoroughly incompetent, others though satisfactory to us, preferring plantation life.” Not surprisingly, the new servants simply reinforced for many white families the prevailing belief about the incapacity of free blacks for any kind of labor and even provoked some of the old wartime laments. “Three have run away during the last few months that we had clothed up to be decent,” the wife of a North Carolina planter wrote her mother. “They came to us all but naked. They are an ungrateful race. They drive me to be tight and stingy with them.” This woman, until recently a resident of New York, needed little time to learn that the frustrations of the employer class easily cross sectional lines.30

  None of this came as any surprise to Grace Elmore. “The negro as a hireling will never answer,” she confided to her diary in May 1865. “They have not principle enough, nor character enough to stand temptation. So long as master and servant were one you could find honesty among the race and even so it was a rarity.” But the times had clearly changed, the old ties had been irrevocably severed, the blacks entertained strange, crude, and false notions about work and freedom, and she doubted if they could really survive the curse of emancipation. “[N]ow that he has power to change his place, and to escape punishment when detected, now that his and the master’s interest are separate and there is no bond but dollars and cents between them, I think the house servants will be chosen from the whites, and that immediately.” Although she had not yet yielded to such logic, she thought it only a matter of time before blacks were forced out of domestic service altogether. After all, she asked, “Who would employ the negro, unless his slave, in any work that could be done by a white? … Who would choose the black in any capacity except to be held as slave and so bound to her obedient and faithful?”31

  3

  THE TROUBLESOME QUALITY of black labor, both in the houses and in the fields, encouraged experiments in the employment of whites for positions traditionally held by blacks. After hiring two white girls, both of whom had been seeking employment at a nearby factory, Donald MacRae, a North Carolina merchant and planter, exulted in that novel feeling of independence from his former slaves. His new servants were not at all disdainful about performing the daily chores, they willingly did the kind of work reserved for blacks, and they claimed competence in spinning, weaving, cooking, washing, housework, tending children, and even plowing. While they remained with him, MacRae felt no need to make any concessions to retain his increasingly restless black help.32

  If nothing else, the absence of blacks in a household might soothe otherwise shattered nerves and be a much-welcomed relief from daily irritations. To Ethelred Philips, the Florida farmer and physician, emancipation had resulted in “worthless servants,” and he feared their continued presence in his household. Now that he had hired a white girl, however, “we find it so quiet and so comfortable to be rid of the negro.” He rested much easier about the safety of his family, and he gloated over his pioneering success: “The white women are taking the place of the negroes in our village,” he informed his cousin, “and I take some credit for being the first to make the experiment in the face of every body—not a man but declared it would never do, yet I took a girl about 18 as ignorant and poor as any cornfield negro, but respectable and willing to do any work to support herself and mother and 6 children.” To transform a piney-woods girl into an efficient domestic servant had been no inconsiderable task, but MacRae boasted that his wife, “one of the most industrious and skillful housewives I ever saw, has made her serve her purpose much better than a negro and no darky dares enter my lot for fear of my dog.”33

  Within the first year of emancipation, and periodically thereafter, the introduction of whites, especially immigrants, into the fields and households of former slaveholders came to be viewed as a panacea that would surely strengthen the labor system, force the ex-slave to make a realistic accommodation to freedom, and provide white planters with an alternative to the increasingly humiliating and degrading dependency on black labor. That is, the employment of whites, or perhaps only the threat to do so, was a way to control the labor of the freedmen. “If white labor is generally introduced into the upper District,” a South Carolina rice planter vowed, “it will drive the Negro down, and then the competition for labor will oblige them to work for very little.” White labor, moreover, would provide the permanent and stable working force the South so desperately required for the successful cultivation of its crops. Compared to the freedmen, who “love change, and a month’s work at a place,” white people “love home, take interest in making it pleasant, comfortable—as the spot from which issue all their money and comforts.”34

  For those who accepted these assumptions, the proposition made good sense, both racially and economically, and white Southerners certainly enjoyed talking about it. In northern Florida, planters eager for white laborers prepared to apply to New York City for help; a group of Tennessee planters welcomed immigrants from the “industrious Germanic race” to replace “the now indolent negro”; and the Virginia legislature resolved in March 1866 that “the recent radical change in the labor system of the South has rendered the introduction of a new class of laborers necessary.” Principal attention focused for a time on the bold efforts of Mississippi and Alabama planters to import Chinese laborers to work their fields. If racial peculiarities had made black slaves ideal workers, similar characteristics would enable the Chinese to answer the southern need for a docile, tractable, adaptable labor force, with superior enduring powers and less propensity than blacks to fraternize with or intermarry with whites. “We’ve got to change our whole system of labor,” an Alabama planter declared. “Why, I was talking, down to Selma, the other day, with Jim Branson, up from Haynesville. We figured up, I don’t know how many millions of coolies there are in China, that you can bring over for a song. It will take three of’em to do the work of two niggers; but they’ll live on next to nothing and clothe themselves, and you’ve only got to pay ’em four dollars a month. That’s our game now. And if it comes to voting, I reckon we can manage that pretty well!”35

  This was bold talk, indeed, and it proved to be mostly talk. How to rid themselves of the presence of the Negro was always a favorite topic of conversation, permitting planters to share their frustrations, anger, and fantasies with others, but few took it seriously. To talk about it perhaps served a therapeutic need, if nothing else. “To get the privilege of governing him [the Negro] as they pleased,” a Freedmen’s Bureau official in Mississippi observed of the local planters, “they will express their anxiety to get rid of him and many other foolish things; but come to the point—they want and must have the negro to work the plantation.” Actually, some Chinese laborers were imported, and small numbers of Swedes, Germans, Dutchmen, and Irishmen were also induced to come to the South. But the results of these experiments were less than gratifying and more often than not failed to meet the expectations or needs of the planters. The new immigrants were no more tractable than many of the freedmen, and replacing troublesome blacks with troublesome immigrants not only made little sense but the cost was apt to be higher. “They cost me $35 each to bring them to Charleston from New York,” a South Carolina planter said of the Dutchmen he had hired. “I fed them far better than ever I thought of feeding my hands, even gave them coffee and sourkrout, when, what should they do but demand butter for their bread and milk for their coffee, and the next thing th
e whole crowd left me.” The Freedmen’s Bureau in Virginia concluded that recent efforts to recruit foreign immigrants to replace blacks had been unsuccessful, and an English traveler in that state thought he knew why: “Swedes, Germans, and Irishmen had been imported; but the Swedes refused to eat cornbread, the Germans sloped away north-west-ward, in the hope of obtaining homesteads, and the Irishmen preferred a city career. It seems that the South will have need of Sambo yet awhile …” Nor did the attempts to recruit native whites for domestic service successfully overcome the stigma that still attached itself to that kind of labor. “I tried to hire some white women to live with & assist my family with their work,” a South Carolina planter testified. “They do not like the idea of becoming ‘Help.’ ”36

  The more the white South experimented with white labor, the more the employer class came to appreciate the relative advantages of black labor, free or slave. Such admissions did not always come easily, and whites hastened to add that in “the professions, in the counting house, in the workshops of the artisan, in the factory, and on the wave,” the white man had no superior. But in the fields, as the cultivator of the great southern staples, the Negro remained “unequalled,” both for his skills and his enduring powers. The experience of a Louisiana sugar planter prompted him to estimate that “one able-bodied American negro of ordinary intelligence is worth at least two white emigrants. He understands the business, and he has the advantage of being acclimated.” Appreciative of this fact, he was willing to pay even higher wages for blacks than for whites. “You may think this extravagant; but during the unsettled state of affairs for the last two years, I have had to try both, and I base my opinion not on my prejudices, but on my experience.” With equal candor, the president of the Virginia Agricultural Society reminded the delegates to a State Farmers’ Convention in 1866 that “we have in the labor of the freedmen a decided advantage over other portions of the world.” After employing both foreign and native white workers, he concluded that “the world cannot produce a more skillful and efficient farm laborer than a well-trained Virginia negro who is willing and able to work.” And for all the difficulties he had encountered with his freedmen, Edward Barnwell Heyward, the South Carolina rice planter, remained convinced that he could turn them into a productive labor force. “The negroes themselves begin to see our superiority and recognise in us their true Master. We are the only people who can ever get them to do any thing, and I confess I do not look with much pleasure to the time when their places will be supplied by these still more savage Germans as white labourers.”37

  Despite the experiments with white workers, despite all the talk about replacing blacks, despite the calumnies heaped on the freedmen, the conclusion reached by most practical-minded ex-slaveholders was that the Negro remained ideally suited for their purposes. He had already proven himself “peculiarly adapted by nature” to the cultivation of cotton, rice, and sugar, working under temperatures and conditions that would wilt any white man. “The African don’t mind it,” an Alabama planter noted, “the white man won’t stand it.” And so it came down to familiar discussions of racial traits. When a Virginia planter and manufacturer affirmed that the African race made ideal agricultural laborers, he enumerated their principal virtues as “docility, tractability and affectionate disposition”—that is, “just the material desirable and necessary.” Nor were blacks any less valuable, some insisted, as domestics: the black nurse was “more affectionate, more attached, and more devoted than the white,” while the black servant was “more faithful and has less thought of self in his devotion to his master and employer.”38

  If a Grace Elmore still insisted that the “separate” interests of blacks and whites doomed the Negro as the principal laborer of the post-emancipation South, the argument made little sense to planters who chose to view the entire matter in businesslike terms. “There is now nothing between me and the nigger but the dollar—the almighty dollar,” a Florida planter declared, “and I shall make out of him the most I can at the least expense.” That was a principle to which any nineteenth-century American employer could have readily subscribed.39

  4

  TO DISCOVER ONE DAY, as did so many white women, that “I have not one human being in the wide world to whom I can say ‘do this for me’ ” had to be a most disheartening realization. “We have truly said good bye to being ladies of leisure,” Grace Elmore lamented, as she sought to adjust to her new daily routine. “My time seems fully occupied and often I do not have time to sleep even. My hour for rising is 5 o’clock.” Embittered by the continuing defection of their servants, exasperated by the behavior of those who remained, and unable to find satisfactory replacements, many families found themselves forced into the unfamiliar role of doing the housework themselves. No matter how they rationalized this change in their lives, and whatever the orgy of self-congratulation that often accompanied the assumption of household responsibilities, the unprecedented nature of their predicament provoked considerable dismay and disbelief.40

  To assume responsibility for the daily chores—to cook a meal, to dust and sweep, to wash the clothes, to feed the horses and milk the cows—was to undertake tasks they had previously watched their black folk perform. “I always had thirty or forty niggers,” the wife of a Louisiana planter declared. “I never even so much as washed out a pocket handkerchief with my own hands, and now I have to do all my work.” With considerable anguish, a Virginia woman admitted to her cousins in the North that it would require “some time for us to get fixed to do our own house work or to do with a few servants”; if nothing else, she noted, the distances separating the kitchen, the spring, and the dining room seemed all too formidable. Like so many “ladies” she knew, Gertrude Thomas found herself sharing the household chores with the few remaining servants. The sheer novelty of the experience struck her with wonderment. Not only did she assist in washing the breakfast dishes—“a thing I never remember to have done except once or twice in my life”—but she startled one of the servants by announcing that she intended to do the ironing. “It was amusing to see his look of astonishment but indeed the necessity for it appeared qu[i]te im[m]inent.” That night, she described the experience in her journal, concluding, “I am tired and sleepy.”41

  To hear white families relate their experiences, the initiation into domestic labor had its moments of self-satisfaction and even triumph. The spectacle of “fragile women,” left without any servants, “cooking and washing without a murmur,” moved Emma Holmes to extol the “heroism and spirit” of southern womanhood. With less flourish, a Virginia woman described how she missed “the familiar black faces” she had grown to love. “Domestic cares are making me gray! But I get some fun trying to do things I never did before.” Eva Jones had to tell her mother-in-law how she expected “to become a very efficient chambermaid and seamstress,” though she confessed that the sewing came “very hard to my poor unused fingers.”42

  The first days of performing domestic chores could even be an exhilarating experience. Charlotte S. J. Ravenel took pride in “how nicely” she had prepared a meal, while another South Carolina woman, after scrubbing the wash “until my poor hands are skinned,” took some consolation in how “white and clean” the clothes looked. None of these women, however, matched in exuberance the triumph felt by William Heyward, the elderly rice planter who had taken up residence in Charleston. Disgusted with the familiarity, deficiencies, and insolence of the black waiters, he gave up boarding at a local hotel and resolved to cook his own meals. Although he kept an old Irish chambermaid to tidy his room, Heyward learned to do his own shopping, washing, and cooking. After a month, he claimed “perfect success” and hailed his achievement as a personal victory. “A part of the satisfaction,” he confessed, “is, that I am perfectly independent of having Negroes about me; if I cannot have them as they used to be, I have no desire to see them except in the field.”43

  Few took up the challenge more diligently than the Andrews family in Washington, Georgia. Of the
twenty-five servants who had formerly been their slaves, only five remained, and two of these were too ill to work. Young Eliza Andrews found herself cleaning the downstairs with her sister, while her mother washed the dishes. At first, it all seemed quite strange. “It is very different from having a servant always at hand to attend to your smallest need,” Miss Andrews confided to her journal, “but I can’t say that I altogether regret the change; in fact, I had a very merry time over my work.” To this proud young Georgia woman, the menial tasks she now performed were nothing less than a challenge to her race and sex.

  I don’t think I shall mind working at all when I get used to it. Everybody else is doing housework, and it is so funny to compare our experiences. Father says this is what has made the Anglo-Saxon race great; they are not afraid of work, and when put to the test, never shirk anything that they know has got to be done, no matter how disagreeable.44

  Whatever the enthusiasm that marked these work experiences, few white men or women who had once owned slaves could overcome the feeling that they were demeaning themselves in performing the tasks thought to be fit only for black hands. Having reassured herself that southern white womanhood had more than met the test, Eliza Andrews wondered why young ladies like herself should be placed in the predicament of performing labor that was clearly unworthy of them.