Been in the Storm So Long

by Leon F. Litwack

  If the experience of payday exhausted planters and exasperated Bureau officials, it left the freedmen disillusioned, frustrated, and outraged—and in many cases penniless if not in debt. But no matter how hard they tried or to whom they appealed, there was simply no way to make the figures come out differently. “The darkey don’t understand it,” a Mississippi planter remarked, “he has kept no accounts; but he knows he has worked hard and got nothing. He won’t hire to that man again.” The thousands of freedmen who left at the expiration of the contract often cited as the principal reason their dissatisfaction over the final settlement. “I’m willin’ to wu’k, sah, and I want to wu’k, ‘cos I’m mighty ill off,” a Virginia freedman declared, but after his employer had reneged on a promised half of the crop he resolved not to work another year “till I knows I’m gwine to get paid at the end of it.” Wherever they chose to contract for the next year, including the places on which they had worked, freedmen evinced a determination to do so only after some hard bargaining. “We all gits fooled on dat first go-out!” Katie Rowe recalled, but the following year “we all got something left over.” Nor would the freedmen necessarily confine themselves in future confrontations to a refinement of their verbal skills. On Edisto Island, for example, the blacks who worked the Rabbit Point plantation found a different way to make certain that the division of the crops reflected the labor they had expended.

  The moment the Cotton house was opened the people rushed in and a number of them took forcible possession of their cotton and carried it off without division and all refused to allow any division to take place, threatened to knock my brains out and forcibly resisted me. Not having any force at my command I was obliged to close the house and await the arrival of a guard.85

  With the end of each agricultural season, the tenuous peace that had existed on the plantations suddenly seemed more precarious. The wage settlement, the division of the crops, the need to negotiate new contracts, and the persistent expectations of a land division pitted laborers against employers in ways that violated accepted customs and threatened to undermine the prevailing racial code. Both whites and blacks would have to contend with the fear that traditional antagonisms of race, now aggravated by a new kind of class conflict, might at any time assume more violent forms. Each Christmas season somehow occasioned a new alarm.

  7

  ALTHOUGH DISCERNING FEW CHANGES in his laborers, Donald MacRae, a North Carolina merchant, conceded in September 1865 a widespread sense of uneasiness in the white population. He suspected that the source of the anxiety lay in the expectation of blacks that they would ultimately share in if not possess entirely the lands and goods of their former masters. That expectation had become so pervasive, MacRae believed, that the disappointment, when it came, could only produce the most dreaded of consequences—a black uprising. Fortunately, the local military commander had warned the freedmen not to entertain or act upon such foolish notions. “This may quiet it down,” MacRae thought. But if it did not, he anticipated an insurrection that would exceed the worst horrors of the Civil War, “for total annihilation would be the war cry on both sides.” Preparing for such an eventuality, Ethelred Philips, the Florida farmer and physician, decided to teach his wife, “timid as she has always been,” to use a revolver. “She took the first lesson a few days ago with a rifle and was delighted to find shooting so easy, and when she saw the ball had struck in a few inches of the mark she was quite encouraged, tho she had spoiled her sleeve by the powder.… She shall become a sure shot—how many hours of fright may be avoided when a woman feels she holds her safety in her own hand.”86

  The approach of the Christmas holiday in 1865, coinciding as it did with payday, new contract talks, and new land expectations, produced the first major postwar insurrection panic. Now that the blacks were no longer bound by the old restraints, many whites feared they would vent their frustrations and disillusionment over the betrayal of expectations by plunging the South into a racial holocaust. “If they dont massacre the white Race, it is not because the desire dont exist,” a South Carolina Unionist observed as he appealed to President Johnson to provide whites with the means to protect themselves from the fury of a race that had become “worse than Devels.” Newspapers fed the prevailing anxiety by claiming exclusive knowledge of sinister plots. “We speak advisedly,” one of them warned, “we have authentic information of the speeches and conversations of the blacks, sufficient to convince us of their purpose. They make no secret of their movement. Tell us not that we are alarmists.” For many whites, however, the idea of black insurrection had become such a self-fulfilling prophecy that they needed no fire-eating editors to tell them what they had long suspected would flow naturally out of emancipation. “It will begin the work of extermination,” sighed a South Carolina planter, without indicating which race he expected to survive.87

  With imaginations running rampant, whites found no difficulty in conjuring up horrors and demons befitting the expected bloodbath. The slightest change in a freedman’s demeanor, the most trivial incident, the most innocent display of independence could trigger new rumors and fears. The mistress of a plantation near Columbia, South Carolina, had only to listen to the freedmen singing in their quarters—“as only they could sing in these times”—to imagine “a horde pouring into our houses to cut our throats and dance like fiends over our remains.” The sight of his former slaves “talking together, sometimes in whispers and sometimes loudly,” ignoring his orders to retire to their cabins by the curfew hour, prompted a Georgian to suspect “conspiracies” and to fear “an outbreak every moment.” Near Fort Motte, South Carolina, a young planter who had served in the war heard that his blacks planned to attack the barns later in the month; in the meantime, he encountered only their “sour looks” and “uncivil words.” One day, he watched as they carried out his order to slaughter some hogs. He found the scene disturbing, impossible to forget. The next day, he still “shuddered” as he recalled “the fiendish eagerness” the blacks had evinced “to stab & kill, the delight in the suffering of others.”88

  In their fevered minds that fall and winter, whites fanned the flames of the conflagration they had largely created themselves. The black man moving through the woods hunting squirrels suddenly became thousands of armed blacks hunting their old masters. The Mississippi planter missing for several days was presumably a victim of murderous blacks, several of whom were arrested and threatened with a lynching until the “martyr” returned home after an extended stay “with some prostitutes.” The Yankee soldier who answered the summons of a planter distraught over suspicious black movements was himself mistaken for one of the rebels and shot and killed. The gatherings of blacks to plan for the forthcoming Emancipation Day celebration on January 1 found their way into the conversations and newspapers of whites as meetings to complete the plans for an uprising. The rusty army musket discovered in a freedman’s cabin became overnight a vast arsenal to supply the arms for the revolt. Even blacks at work in the fields could be projected into guerrilla armies wielding their spades, pitchforks, and scythes to kill their masters and seize the lands they had been denied. The most persistent rumors stemmed from reports of armed blacks drilling for the coming showdown, but Federal investigators found in one instance a group of young freedmen playing soldier with sticks and unserviceable army rifles, while in another the blacks had, indeed, armed themselves—in fear of a white insurrection.89

  Much as they had at the outbreak of the war, native whites tried to project a feeling of confidence. Even as Eliza Andrews prepared for a race war, with the tales of the Sepoys, Lucknow, and Cawnpore still quite vivid in her mind, she claimed in June 1865 to have conquered much of the anxiety she had once felt. “Now, when I know that I am standing on a volcano that may burst forth any day, I somehow, do not feel frightened. It seems as if nothing worse could happen than the South has already been through, and I am ready for anything, no matter what comes.” Despite the fears of imminent insurrection, Pierce Butler left hi
s daughter and her maid alone on St. Simon’s Island with no white person within eight miles, as if to demonstrate the confidence he still reposed in his former slaves. At least, that was how his daughter, Frances, interpreted his action, and she shared his equanimity. “Neither then nor afterwards,” she wrote, “when I was alone on the plantation with the negroes for weeks at a time, had I the slightest feeling of fear, except one night, when I had a fright which made me quite ill for two days.” The momentary panic had been triggered by a noise emanating from a raft loaded down with mules. Even after discovering the source of the clamor, she recalled, “I had been too terrified to laugh.” But if Frances Leigh still enjoyed a feeling of relative security, the many letters and conversations that passed between whites in this period revealed considerable anguish and a growing fear that “no plantation will be a safe residence this Winter.”90

  Fear of insurrection had a long tradition in the South. The new hysteria fed largely on emancipation, black disenchantment with the meager economic rewards of freedom, and the knowledge that tens of thousands of ex-slaves had come into possession of firearms. “Our negroes certainly have guns and are frequently shooting about,” the Reverend Samuel A. Agnew of Mississippi observed in November 1865. “Brice had some women go to Corinth recently and they have returned bringing, it is said, ammunition. A good many look for trouble about Christmas.” When local whites disarmed the blacks later that month, Agnew noted that some of the freedmen were “in high dudgeon” over this action, claiming they now had “equal rights with a white man to bear arms.” The reports of armed blacks were not necessarily exaggerated. With emancipation, large numbers of freedmen had acquired the weapons denied to them as slaves. “These guns they prize as their most valued possessions next to their land,” a Bureau agent reported from the Sea Islands, “and to take them away would leave a lasting and bitter resentment, and sense of injustice.”91 But that was precisely what the whites intended to do, refusing to believe that when laborers carried weapons into the fields with them they wished only to shoot at stray rabbits and squirrels. Heeding the popular outcry, state governors ordered the militias to patrol the countryside and disarm blacks, legislatures rewrote and strengthened patrol laws, towns authorized the employment of additional police, and planters urged the white citizenry to fill the ranks of the militia. Although some Union Army officers and Bureau agents tried to calm the populace, perhaps as many shared the prevailing fears and cooperated with civil authorities and volunteer patrols to search the homes of blacks for guns. The occasional discovery of a cache of arms confirmed the worst fears and intensified the campaign to disarm the black population. In the Wilmington district of North Carolina, the Union commander went so far as to urge white citizens to form voluntary military companies as a precaution against the feared black uprising, and he promised them arms and ammunition as well as “the entire power at his command.”92

  Although whites verged on panic, some moving their families to safer areas, many others volunteering for local patrols, none looked upon the rumors of impending insurrection with greater apprehension than the freedmen themselves. Previous experience had revealed all too vividly that whites had a way of exorcising imagined black demons by exterminating those within reach who most closely resembled them. And the purgation—with the inevitable floggings, beatings, and assassinations—would most likely exceed in brutality the terrors which whites had concocted in anticipation of a black uprising. Unaware of conspiracies in their midst, realizing the false basis of white fears, drawing upon their own intimate knowledge of the white man, some blacks concluded—logically enough—that the fear of insurrection served only the purposes of their former masters, providing them with the opportunity to invade their homes, to seize their weapons, to make examples of their leaders, and to otherwise terrorize and harass them until they revised their notions about the perquisites of freedom.93 When the white citizens of two Louisiana parishes appealed to the governor for arms, ammunition, and the authority to organize for “self preservation,” they cited the urgent need “to overawe the colored population, and thereby avoid the effusion of blood and all the horrors of a cruel insurrection.” To force blacks to stand in awe of the white man had of course been a vital ingredient of racial control under slavery. With that memory of bondage still vivid in their minds, blacks in some areas began to drill and accumulate arms in preparation for any eventuality. “We’ns smart nuff t’ hold ’r own,” a South Carolina freedman remarked, and the reporter who heard him thought the optimism justified. “Moreover,” the reporter observed, “the whites of all these low-country districts know that fact, too.”94

  On the night of December 27, 1865, the widowed mistress of a plantation in the interior of Georgia sat up until after midnight, “fearing that something sad must occur with so many freedmen about me.” But the night passed “and with it all my fears.” Throughout the South, Christmas passed without the slightest hint of a contemplated black uprising. Only a few sporadic incidents, almost all of them provoked by overzealous whites, disturbed an otherwise quiet and orderly holiday season. Federal authorities who took the time to investigate the many rumors of black military preparations found no justification for white fears, only a few organizations that blacks had formed for self-defense and with which they hoped to advance their prospects in the forthcoming negotiation of contracts. Perhaps the vigilance of the white community, the vigorous patrolling of the countryside, and the presence of reinforced police, militias, and volunteer patrols had saved the white South from a certain conflagration. Some whites began to suspect that was not the case, that the victory had been something of a sham. “It appears that there has been a great alarm without any cause,” the Reverend Samuel A. Agnew of Mississippi confided to his diary; the many reports of imminent insurrection, he now concluded, “were only the creations of the imaginations of timid people.” The white hysteria and the extraordinary measures it had provoked, he thought, might in their own way have constituted a tactical victory for the blacks. “As affairs have turned out the negroes must think that the white people are afraid of them.”95

  Although the fears of insurrection proved to be unfounded, whites could never quite surmount them. The circumstances which had fed the rumors would persist. During the next several years, any new epidemic of restlessness, any new manifestation of discontent, any new report of black organization would precipitate still another crisis. If anything, the fears would take on even more lurid dimensions, no doubt reflecting growing apprehension over black political power. As the Christmas season of 1866 approached, James R. Sparkman, a plantation proprietor in South Carolina, shared his apprehensions with a long-time friend. While in town recently, he had attended “a secret conference” at which three “respectable citizens” described “an insurrectionary movement, wide spread, and terrible in its plot.” Within the next two months, the blacks planned to rise on a certain night and massacre the male adults and children, while retaining many of the females “for servile and licentious purposes.” By 1868, even Frances Leigh’s confidence and equanimity had ebbed considerably. If in 1865 she had felt “not the slightest” fear of the blacks on the Butler plantations, three years later she refused to sleep without a loaded pistol by her bed.

  Their whole manner was changed; they took to calling their former owners by their last name without any title before it, constantly spoke of my agent as old R—, dropped the pleasant term of “Mistress,” took to calling me “Miss Fanny,” walked about with guns upon their shoulders, worked just as much and when they pleased, and tried speaking to me with their hats on, or not touching them to me when they passed me on the banks. This last rudeness I never permitted for a moment.

  Frances Leigh thought that if she relaxed her vigilance for even a moment, she would lose control over the blacks altogether. For the next two years, she recalled, “I felt the whole time that it was touch-and-go whether I or the negroes got the upper hand.”96

  It was not as though the blacks had no re
ason to revolt. Even as they persisted in testing their freedom, they had not succeeded in breaking the bonds that tied them to the farms and plantations as agricultural laborers. That had to be the uppermost thought in their minds after each settlement, about the same time whites were fashioning new notions of conspiracy and rebellion. On New Year’s Day 1866, black people commemorated emancipation, not by overturning their masters in a violent upheaval, but by attending appropriate ceremonies and listening to appropriate speeches. In Charleston, more than ten thousand assembled at the racecourse to hear their “best friends” advise them on future prospects. General Rufus Saxton implored them to be honest, industrious, and sober; if they wanted land, they would have to work for it, filling their pockets with greenbacks until they had enough to purchase a lot. Colonel Ketchum counseled them to emulate their brethren on Edisto Island who had met the loss of their lands with “remarkable dignity.” But easily the most stirring moments that day belonged to Colonel Trowbridge, the commander of a black regiment, who took the stand to bid an emotional farewell to his soldiers, most of whom were about to be discharged. When he finished, the large crowd sat “hushed and silent” for several minutes until a voice rang out: