Been in the Storm So Long

by Leon F. Litwack

  3. Mary Boykin Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie (ed. Ben Ames Williams; Boston, 1949), 38. For white perceptions of slave reactions to the outbreak of the war, see also Duncan Clinch Heyward, Seed from Madagascar (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1937), 130, and William H. Russell, My Diary North and South (Boston, 1863), 84. For slave recollections of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, see Armstrong, Old Massa’s People, 278.

  4. Armstrong, Old Massa’s People, 276–77; George P. Rawick (ed.), The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (19 vols.; Westport, Conn., 1972), IV: Texas Narr. (Part 2), 174, 227; VI: Ala. Narr., 56; XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 62, 249; XVIII: Unwritten History of Slavery (Fisk Univ.), 3, 198.

  5. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 192. For a nearly identical recollection, see IV: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 122.

  6. Ibid., III: S.C. Narr. (Part 4), 171–72; IV: Texas Narr. (Part 2), 100; XII: Ga. Narr. (Part 2), 277–78; Whitelaw Reid, After the War: A Southern Tour, May 1, 1865, to May 1, 1866 (London, 1866), 52; Weymouth T. Jordan, Hugh Davis and His Alabama Plantation (University, Ala., 1948), 155–56; Laura S. Haviland, A Woman’s Life-Work: Labors and Experiences (Cincinnati, 1881), 264. Unable to provide properly for their own families, some planters bitterly protested the burdens of slave maintenance. See, e.g., Mary Ann Cobb to John B. Lamar, Nov. 11, 1861, in Kenneth Coleman (ed.), Athens, 1861–1865 (Athens, Ga., 1969), 28; Rev. John Jones to Mrs. Mary Jones, Dec. 7, 1863, in Robert M. Myers (ed.), The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven, 1972), 1121–22; and Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 172, 243–44.

  7. Letter from a slave to his mistress, in Robert S. Starobin (ed.), Blacks in Bondage: Letters of American Slaves (New York, 1974), 80–81; Francis B. Simkins and James W. Patton, The Women of the Confederacy (Richmond, 1936), 170–72; T. Conn Bryan, Confederate Georgia (Athens, Ga., 1953), 132.

  8. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV: Texas Narr. (Part 2), 131; XVIII: Unwritten History, 206; XII: Ga. Narr. (Part 2), 277.

  9. Ibid., III: S.C. Narr. (Part 4), 48–50; VII: Okla. Narr., 46, 312. See also V: Texas Narr. (Part 3), 107, (Part 4), 97, 152; and Charles L. Perdue, Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips (eds.), Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves (Charlottesville, 1976), 335.

  10. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IX: Ark. Narr. (Part 3), 169, 174; IV: Texas Narr. (Part 2), 29; XIII: Ga. Narr. (Part 3), 300; II: S.C. Narr. (Part 1), 46. See also VI: Ala. Narr., 97, 226, 404; XII: Ga. Narr. (Part 2), 8; Armstrong, Old Massa’s People, 316.

  11. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VI: Ala. Narr., 129–32; John W. Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge, 1977), 660.

  12. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, XVIII: Unwritten History, 14–15; XV: N.C. Narr. (Part 2), 25.

  13. Ibid., IV: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 187; Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (New York, 1902), 12–13; Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testimony, 539.

  14. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, III: S.C. Narr. (Part 3), 40; IV: Texas Narr. (Part 2), 100, V (Part 3), 260; XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 218–19.

  15. David Macrae, The Americans at Home (Edinburgh, 1870; repr., New York, 1952), 209; J. T. Trowbridge, The South: A Tour of Its Battle-Fields and Ruined Cities, A Journey Through the Desolated States, and Talks with the People (Hartford, 1867), 68.

  16. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 135; VII: Miss. Narr., 115; M. F. Armstrong and Helen W. Ludlow, Hampton and Its Students (New York, 1875), 110–11. See also Rupert S. Holland (ed.), Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne: Written from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, 1862–1884 (Cambridge, 1912), 29.

  17. Bell I. Wiley (ed.), Letters of Warren Akin: Confederate Congressman (Athens, Ga., 1959), 5; Mrs. William Mason Smith to her family [Feb. 23, 1864], in Daniel E. Huger Smith et al. (eds.), Mason Smith Family Letters, 1860–1868 (Columbia, S.C., 1950), 83.

  18. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, V: Texas Narr. (Part 4), 192, 193–94.

  19. Ibid., VII: Okla. Narr., 88–90.

  20. Simkins and Patton, Women of the Confederacy, 162; Bell I. Wiley, Southern Negroes: 1861–1865 (New Haven, 1938), 51n.

  21. Wiley, Southern Negroes, 52n.

  22. E. C. Ball to W. J. Ball, July 23, 1863, Ball Family Papers, South Caroliniana Library, Univ. of South Carolina, Columbia; Simkins and Patton, Women of the Confederacy, 174.

  23. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 14–16. See also Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testimony, 537.

  24. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VII: Okla. Narr., 135; New York Times, quoting the Louisville correspondent of the Cincinnati Commercial See also John K. Betters-worth, Confederate Mississippi (Baton Rouge, 1943), 163–64.

  25. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV: Texas Narr. (Part 2), 77–78; VI: Ala. Narr., 224; Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testimony, 535. See also Douglass’ Monthly (Rochester, N.Y.), IV (March 1862), 617; Perdue et al. (eds.), Weevils in the Wheat, 167; Starobin (ed.), Blacks in Bondage, 77–83; and Charles S. Sydnor, A Gentleman of the Old Natchez Region: Benjamin L. C. Wailes (Durham, N.C., 1938), 302–03.

  26. Bryan, Confederate Georgia, 125; Wiley, Southern Negroes, 75–76.

  27. Mrs. Mary Jones to Col. Charles C. Jones, Jr., June 5, 1863, in Myers (ed.), Children of Pride, 1068; Simkins and Patton, Women of the Confederacy, 164; Russell, My Diary North and South, 208–09.

  28. Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 158–59; Kate Stone, Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861–1868 (ed. John Q. Anderson; Baton Rouge, 1972), 298.

  29. Simkins and Patton, Women of the Confederacy, 164; Edmund Ruffin, The Diary of Edmund Ruffin (ed. William K. Scarborough; 2 vols.; Baton Rouge, 1972, 1976), I, 556–57. See also Russell, My Diary North and South, 131–32.

  30. Robert F. Durden, The Gray and the Black: The Confederate Debate on Emancipation (Baton Rouge, 1972), 7–8; Russell, My Diary North and South, 188.

  31. Durden, The Gray and the Black, 14, 168; John K. Bettersworth (ed.), Mississippi in the Confederacy: As They Saw It (Baton Rouge, 1961), 249. See also Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (Boston, 1953), 37, 49–50; John E. Johns, Florida During the Civil War (Gainesville, 1963), 174; E. Merton Coulter, “Slavery and Freedom in Athens, Georgia, 1860–66,” in Elinor Miller and Eugene D. Genovese (eds.), Plantation, Town, and County: Essays on the Local History of American Slave Society (Urbana, Ill., 1974), 352; Coulter, The Confederate States of America (Baton Rouge, 1950), 256.

  32. Memorial of Free Negroes, Jan. 10, 1861, quoted in George D. Terry, “From Free Men to Freedmen: Free Negroes in South Carolina, 1860–1866,” seminar paper, Univ. of South Carolina, Columbia. For examples of free black support of the war, see also Emma E. Holmes, Ms. Diary, entry for Sept. 3, 1861, Univ. of South Carolina; Henry William Ravenel, The Private Journal of Henry William Ravenel, 1859–1887 (ed. Arney R. Childs; Columbia, S.C., 1947), 50; Betters-worth (ed.), Mississippi in the Confederacy, 249; and Bryan, Confederate Georgia, 131. For the history of free blacks in the antebellum South, consult Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters (New York, 1974).

  33. Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testimony, 174; James B. Sellers, Slavery in Alabama (University, Ala., 1950), 397–98.

  34. Hope Summerell Chamberlain, Old Days in Chapel Hill: Being the Life and Letters of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1926), 131; Mrs. Nicholas Ware Eppes [Susan Bradford Eppes], The Negro of the Old South (Chicago, 1925), 110; [Sallie A. Putnam], In Richmond During the Confederacy (New York, 1867; repr. 1961), 179–80; Emily Caroline Douglas, Ms. Autobiography, c. 1904, Emily Caroline Douglas Papers, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. See also Susan Dabney Smedes, Memorials of a Southern Planter (ed. Fletcher M. Green; New York, 1965), 184. For a description of an unusual statue erected in Fort Hill, South Carolina, dedicated to the faithfulness of the slaves during the Civil War, see Mason Crum, Gullah: Negro Life in the Carolina Sea Islands (Durham, N.C., 1940), 82.

  35. Russell, My Diary North
and South, 119, 131–32, 233, 257–58.

  36. Mrs. Anna Andrews to Mrs. Courtney Jones, April 27, 1862, Andrews Papers, Duke University, Durham, N.C.

  37. “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,” reprinted in Gilbert Osofsky (ed.), Puttin’ On Ole Massa (New York, 1969), 66; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, XVIII: Unwritten History, 134.

  38. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 56; James Freeman Clarke, Autobiography, Diary and Correspondence (ed. Edward Everett Hale; Boston, 1891), 286.

  39. New York Times, Dec. 30, 1861, Oct. 2, 1863; Henry Hitchcock, Marching with Sherman: Passages from the Letters and Campaign Diaries of Henry Hitchcock (ed. M. A. DeWolfe Howe; New Haven, 1927), 71.

  40. Cincinnati Daily Commercial, reprinted in Frank Moore (ed.), Rebellion Record (11 vols.; New York, 1861–68), IV (Part IV), 10. For comparable slave responses, see New York Times, Nov. 20, 1861, Dec. 1, 1862.

  41. George W. Nichols, The Story of the Great March from the Diary of a Staff Officer (New York, 1865), 60; Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 158; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 291. See also John Richard Dennett, The South As It Is: 1865–1866 (ed. Henry M. Christman; New York, 1965), 174, and Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testimony, 383, 576.

  42. Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 159.

  43. Douglass’ Monthly, IV (Dec. 1861), 566. See also Bishop L. J. Coppin, Unwritten History (Philadelphia, 1919), 64; Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testimony, 616; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, III: S.C. Narr. (Part 4), 52–53; VIII: Ark. Narr. (Part 1), 281; XV: N.C. Narr. (Part 2), 199.

  44. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VII: Miss. Narr., 52; VIII: Ark. Narr. (Part 2), 122; XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 64, 334; XV: N.C. Narr. (Part 2), 229; XVIII: Unwritten History, 113. See also VII: Okla. Narr., 2; VII: Miss. Narr., 12; VIII: Ark. Narr. (Part 2), 105.

  45. Ibid., III: S.C. Narr. (Part 4), 52–53; Elizabeth H. Botume, First Days Amongst the Contrabands (Boston, 1893), 6–7; Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 28. For a different account of the “spelling-out” story, see Work Projects Adm. (WPA), The Negro in Virginia (New York, 1940), 44.

  46. Washington, Up from Slavery, 8–9; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, XIII: Ga. Narr. (Part 4), 348. See also III: S.C. Narr. (Part 4), 116; VI: Ala. Narr., 52; and Wiley, Southern Negroes, 18n.

  47. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, V: Texas Narr. (Part 4), 42–43; XVII: Fla. Narr., 178.

  48. Ibid., VII: Okla. Narr., 117. See also Wiley, Southern Negroes, 17.

  49. Susie King Taylor, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp: With the 33d United States Colored Troops Late 1st S.C. Volunteers (Boston, 1904), 8; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment (Boston, 1869), 34, 217. For a discussion of “The Sacred World of Black Slaves,” see Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1977), 3–80.

  50. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 11. See also XVIII: Unwritten History, 76.

  51. Mrs. Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert, The House of Bondage, or Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves (New York, 1891), 55–56; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, XII: Ga. Narr. (Part 1), 258.

  52. Wiley, Southern Negroes, 106–07; Macrae, Americans at Home, 367.

  53. Coppin, Unwritten History, 64–66; Russell, My Diary North and South, 147; Esther W. Douglass to Rev. Samuel Hunt, Feb. 1, 1866, American Missionary Assn. Archives, Amistad Research Center, Dillard University, New Orleans.

  54. Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testimony, 377; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, XV: N.C. Narr. (Part 2), 426.

  55. New York Times, May 16, 1861, also reprinted in Douglass’ Monthly, IV (June 1861), 477; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 11. For slave recollections of clandestine gatherings, see also Albert, House of Bondage, 12; H. C. Bruce, The New Man: Twenty-nine Years a Slave, Twenty-nine Years a Free Man (York, Pa., 1895; repr. New York, 1969), 99; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV and V: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 199, (Part 3), 240–41, (Part 4), 43, 154; VI: Ala. Narr., 68; VIII: Ark. Narr. (Part 1), 9; XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 419.

  56. Ravenel, Private Journal, 269; Douglass’ Monthly, IV (July, Dec. 1861), 487, 564; New York Times, May 16, June 2, 7, Dec. 8, 1861. After confirming the rumor of a slave conspiracy nearby, Edmund Ruffin confided to his diary on May 26, 1861, that many slaves, “as in this case, have learned that Lincoln’s election was to produce general emancipation—& of course, many hoped for that, & since for northern military carrying out of that measure.” Diary, II, 35.

  57. Douglass’ Monthly, IV (June 1861), 477; Wiley, Southern Negroes, 19. See also Bruce, New Man, 99–100; Washington, Up from Slavery, 8; and Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testimony, 616.

  58. 39 Cong., 1 Sess., Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction (Washington, D.C., 1866), Part II, 177. For examples of how ex-slaves recalled the causes and issues of the war, see Armstrong, Old Massa’s People, 265; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VII: Miss. Narr., 40; XIII: Ga. Narr. (Part 3), 101; XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 317; XVII: Fla. Narr., 292–93; Perdue et al. (eds.), Weevils in the Wheat, 216; Blassingame (ed.), Slave Testimony, 640.

  59. L. G. C. [Causey] to husband [R. J. Causey], Nov. 19, 1863, R. J. Causey Papers, Louisiana State Univ. For the strengthening of patrol laws, see Wiley, Southern Negroes, 33–34. For the operation of the patrol system during slavery, see Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York, 1956), 214–15, and Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974), 617–19.

  60. Brig. Gen. Richard Winter to Gov. John J. Pettus, June 6, 1862, in Betters-worth (ed.), Mississippi in the Confederacy, 77; Wiley, Southern Negroes, 36, 38; Ravenel, Private Journal, 130; George C. Rogers, Jr., The History of Georgetown County, South Carolina (Columbia, S.C., 1970), 406.

  61. Johns, Florida During the Civil War, 152; Ruffin, Diary, II, 35–36. See also Putnam, Richmond During the Confederacy, 264–66; Richmond Dispatch, Nov. 13, 1862, quoted in New York Times, Nov. 23, 1862; Myers (ed.), Children of Pride, 1152–53; Jackson Daily Mississippian, April 15, 1863, in Bettersworth (ed.), Mississippi in the Confederacy, 238–39; Bryan, Confederate Georgia, 126. For efforts to restrict urban blacks, see, e.g., E. Merton Coulter, “Slavery and Freedom in Athens, Georgia, 1860–66,” in Miller and Genovese (eds.), Plantation, Town, and County, 344–50.

  62. Bernard H. Nelson, “Legislative Control of the Southern Free Negro, 1861–1865,” Catholic Historical Review, XXXII (April 1946), 28–46; Vernon L. Wharton, The Negro in Mississippi, 1866–1890 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1947), 18; Bryan, Confederate Georgia, 131; Louis H. Manarin (ed.), Richmond at War: The Minutes of the City Council, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1966), 346, 349; Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, 376.

  63. Nancy and D. Willard to Micajah Wilkinson, May 15, 1862, Micajah Wilkinson Papers, Louisiana State Univ.; Bryan, Confederate Georgia, 126–27; Robert L. Kerby, Kirby Smith’s Confederacy: The Trans-Mississippi South, 1863–1865 (New York, 1972), 257. For the way in which College Hill, a Presbyterian community in Mississippi, dealt with a church member who had killed a “defiant” slave, see Maud M. Brown, “The War Comes to College Hill,” Journal of Mississippi History, XVI (Jan. 1954), 28–30.

  64. WPA, Negro in Virginia, 188.

  65. Simkins and Patton, Women of the Confederacy, 162.

  66. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VII: Okla. Narr., 217–18, 220–22.

  67. Albert V. House, Jr. (ed.), “Deterioration of a Georgia Rice Plantation During Four Years of Civil War,” Journal of Southern History, IX (1943), 101–02; Louis Manigault to “Mon Cher Pere” [Charles Manigault], Nov. 24, Dec. 5, 1861, South Carolina Dept. of Archives and History, Columbia; Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 216; D. E. Huger Smith to Mrs. William Mason Smith, July 28, 1863, in Smith et al. (eds.), Mason Smith Family Letters, 57.

  68. Wiley, Southern Negroes, 6–7; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 108; V (Part 3), 129; Simkins and Patton, Women of the Confederacy, 174.

 
69. Albert, House of Bondage, 114–15; Charles Nordhoff, The Freedmen of South Carolina: Some Account of Their Appearance, Character, Condition, and Peculiar Customs [New York, 1863], 11–12; Mary Williams Pugh to Richard L. Pugh, Nov. 9, 1862, in Katharine M. Jones (ed.), Heroines of Dixie: Confederate Women Tell Their Story of the War (Indianapolis, 1955), 184; “Diary of John Berkley Grimball, 1858–1865,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, LVI (1955), 166–67. See also Douglass’ Monthly, IV (March 1862), 617; Henry L. Swint (ed.), Dear Ones at Home: Letters from Contraband Camps (Nashville, 1966), 42; Walter Clark, The Papers of Walter Clark (eds. Aubrey Lee Brooks and Hugh Talmage Lefler; 2 vols.; Chapel Hill, N.C., 1948), I, 94; Hitchcock, Marching with Sherman, 70.

  70. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, VII: Okla. Narr., 221, 338; IV and V: Texas Narr. (Part 3), 150, (Part 2), 154–55. The Texas (TV-V) and Arkansas (VIII-XI) Narratives contain numerous recollections of the wartime migration. For a graphic description by a young white woman, see Stone, Brokenburn, 186–225. Still other accounts may be found in Sir Arthur James Lyon Fremantle, Three Months in the Southern States: April-June, 1863 (New York, 1864), 82, 86, 87; Kerby, Kirby Smith’s Confederacy, 255, 392–93; Jefferson D. Bragg, Louisiana in the Confederacy (Baton Rouge, 1941), 216–17; Wiley, Southern Negroes, 4–6.

  71. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV and V: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 108, (Part 3), 30, 79–80; VIII: Ark. Narr. (Part 2), 247.

  72. Mary Williams Pugh to Richard L. Pugh, Nov. 9, 1862, in Jones (ed.), Heroines of Dixie, 184. See also Bragg, Louisiana in the Confederacy, 217.

  73. Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 181–82; Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV and V: Texas Narr. (Part 3), 129, (Part 2), 155.

  74. Bayside Plantation Record, Louisiana, Part II, 1862–66, Southern Historical Collection, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; J. Carlyle Sitterson, Sugar Country: The Cane Sugar Industry in the South, 1753–1950 (Lexington, Ky., 1953), 214–15.

  75. “Diary of John Berkley Grimball,” 166–67, 213–14; House (ed.), “Deterioration of a Georgia Rice Plantation,” 107; Henry Yates Thompson, An Englishman in the American Civil War: The Diaries of Henry Yates Thompson, 1863 (ed. Christopher Chancellor; New York, 1971), 113; Johns, Florida During the Civil War, 152.