Climbing Up to Glory

by Wilbert L. Jenkins

  Such efforts were futile, however, for slaves continued to abandon their masters in alarming numbers. The sweet taste of freedom proved too alluring. Having convinced themselves that genuine affection was felt for them by most slaves, owners were appalled by these desertions. Many were embittered and felt betrayed when their slaves continued to run away to join the Yankees. In fact, they became so angry at the loss of their property that they sought reprisals. The frequency with which slaves were whipped dramatically increased, and others were brutally murdered. Still, many of the blacks remained undaunted. As more and more Northern troops appeared, slaves became more aggressive in their attitudes toward Southern whites. They organized insurrections, set fire to houses, and beat and murdered their masters.

  FUGITIVE SLAVES COMING INTO UNION LINES AT NEW BERN, NORTH CAROLINA.

  Harper’s Weekly, February 21, 1863

  An uprising was plotted in June 1861 in Monroe County, Arkansas. According to the plan, blacks would murder all white males; and, if they encountered resistance, women and children were also to be killed. Fortunately for the whites, the plot was discovered and several slaves were arrested; two men and one girl were subsequently hanged.6 During the spring and summer of 1863 in Mississippi, where the slave population was particularly dense, there occurred new outbreaks of violence.7 And a New York Times reporter commented on the surge of black unrest in the parishes of southern Louisiana during the summer of 1862: “There is an uneasy feeling among the slaves. They are undoubtedly becoming insubordinate, and I cannot think that another sixty days can pass away without some sort of demonstration.” 8 The same reporter wrote three weeks later that the slaves in two nearby parishes were in a state of “semi-insurrection.”9 The correspondent of the New York Herald, writing from New Orleans, concurred: “There is no doubt that the negroes, for more than fifty miles up the river, are in a state of insubordination.” He concluded that “the country is given to pillage and desolation,” for “the slaves refuse obedience and cannot be compelled to labor.”10

  Indeed, some of the reports of black insubordination may have been baseless, the result of white fear and anxiety. However, black retaliation against whites was often very real. For instance, slaves in Yazoo City, Mississippi, in June 1864 burned a section of town that encompassed fourteen houses and the courthouse. Commenting on the incident, a reporter from the Mississippian remarked that “it was with great difficulty that the negroes were kept from burning it [Yazoo City] when the enemy were there before.”11 Whites in New Orleans were especially disturbed by the frequency with which police arrested blacks for insulting and even assaulting their owners. According to the Picayune, “a savage old nigger named Ben, forgetting all past benefits conferred upon him, was brought into court for insulting his mistress.”12 Slaves on a plantation in Choctaw County, Mississippi, in 1864 inflicted five hundred lashes on their master. Not far from this thrashing, David Pugh, a planter, and his overseer were assaulted by slaves who refused to work. But at least the two men shared a better fate than did General Dillard, a planter in Lynchburg, Virginia, who was murdered by five of his slaves, who were put to death by hanging.13 In another Virginia case, in Alexandria, slaves killed an overseer who had a reputation for abusing young slave girls. Again, Southern whites made certain that those accused paid the ultimate price, as all six of the assailants were put to death. White Alexandria was particularly shocked by the heinous nature of the crime. Stephen Williams, a former slave, vividly described it: “One night they slip out and catch de overseer and kill him and tie a plowshare to the body to weight it down and throw him in the river.”14

  This aggressive behavior toward Southern whites did not emerge out of thin air. Rather, it represented a degree of continuity in slave behavior dating back to the colonial period. Rumors of insurrections were in abundance in the 1600s and 1700s throughout what was then English America. An uprising of serious proportions took place in New York City in 1712, and another near Charleston, South Carolina, in 1739. The 1800s witnessed slave insurrections led by Gabriel Prosser in Richmond in 1800, Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822, and Nat Turner in Southampton, Virginia, in 1831. There were also individual cases of blacks murdering whites. For instance, Lewis Bonner’s father became a legend to a large number of blacks near Palestine, Texas, because he allegedly killed twenty-five whites before he was captured and put to death.15 Once Northern troops began to appear in the South in large numbers, circumstances were much more conducive to black retaliatory action. Thus, the frequency of black violence dramatically increased. Blacks had tasted the sweetness of freedom, and they ultimately would be able to digest it once the Union Army triumphed and their shackles were broken.

  Slaves freed by the Emancipation Proclamation and Union victory did not all rejoice and leave their homes spontaneously. Most slaveowning families in rural areas determined when and whether to announce the news of emancipation to their slaves. Thus, many of them remained unaware of their new status long after they were legally free. “Massa didn’t tell us we’s free till a whole year after we was,” remarked one former slave.16 Union troops passing through rural areas or stationed in the cities and towns confirmed and helped to enforce black freedom. “We’s diggin’ potatoes,” a former slave from Louisiana and Texas recalled, “when de Yankees come up with two big wagons and make us come out of de fields and free us. Dere wasn’t no cel’bration ‘bout it. Massa say us can stay couple days till us ‘cide what to do.”17 Some rural slaves learned of their freedom when they accompanied their master to town on some errand and carried the news back to the plantation. Often body servants of Confederates returning from the war would spread the news. One such servant recalled, “All de slaves crowded ‘roun me an’ wanted to know if dey wus gonna be freed or not an’ when I tol’ ‘em dat de war wus over an’ dat dey wus free dey wus all very glad.”18

  Most rural slaves, though excited by the news, did not hastily leave the plantations. Instead, they waited until they could make concrete plans and then either left or remained on their own terms. With emancipation, they themselves now had the right to choose what they wanted to do with their lives. On the Elmore Plantation near Columbia, South Carolina, six days after the initial announcement of freedom, slaves made plans to depart. “Philis, Jane and Nelly volunteered to finish Albert’s shirts before they left,” Grace Elmore recalled. “Jack, the driver, will stay till the crops are done.”19 On David Harris’s plantation in the Spartanburg district, only one man left immediately, on August 15. The others decided to remain until New Year’s Day.20 Some rural slaves may have moved cautiously out of fear. Once Union soldiers left an area, Confederate troops would often return, bringing masters and overseers with them. Thus, slaves learned not to rejoice too quickly or too openly. “Everytime a bunch of No‘thern sojers would come through,” recalled one slave, “they would tell us we was free and we’d begin celebratin’. Before we would get through somebody else would tell us to go back to work, and we would go.”21 Another slave recalled celebrating emancipation “about twelve times” in one North Carolina county.22 Before long, the uncertainty of when to claim freedom evaporated.

  SLAVES ESCAPING TO FREEDOM BY BOAT.

  Harper’s Weekly, April 19, 1864

  Although their timing varied, most rural blacks ultimately chose to leave the farms and plantations of their former owners. These places were constant reminders that they had had no freedom of mobility. As slaves, blacks could not travel without a written pass and were restricted to a nine-o‘clock curfew. If they were caught in violation, they were usually sent to the workhouse and whipped. With emancipation, blacks now possessed the ability to come and go as they pleased, and one of their first actions was to test this new freedom by traveling around the South. “I’s want to be free man, cum when I please, and nobody say nuffin to me, nor order me roun’,” one Alabama black told a Northern journalist after Appomattox.23 “Right off colored folks started on the move,” a Texas freedman recalled, 24 and Mississippian Charle
s Moses declared, “I didn’t spec’ nothin’ outten freedom ‘septin’ peace an’ happiness, an’ the right to go my way as I please.”25

  Former slaves were so adamant in their determination to test their new freedom that even those with supposedly kind owners left the plantations. For example, a Virginia planter reported that some of his former slaves “came up with tears in their eyes to shake hands with me and say good-bye.” When he reminded them that he had always treated them well and asked why they wanted to leave, they replied politely, “we bleege to go, sah—, we bleege to go, Massa.” Of his 115 slaves, all but four or five departed when they heard that they were free. Only those who were either old or sick remained.26 When a family in South Carolina with a reputation for kindness offered their cook higher wages than she would earn at her new job, she still decided to leave. “I must go,” she said. “If I stays here I’ll never know I’m free.”27 In Florida a black preacher advised all the slaves of a kind owner to leave: “So long as the shadow of the great house fall across you, you ain’t going to feel like no free man and no free woman.” Furthermore, he added, “you must all move to new places that you don’t know, where you can raise up your head without no fear of master this and master the other.” They all chose to go.28

  Sometimes former slaves, against the determined efforts of owners to prevent them from leaving, left nonetheless and scoffed at predictions that they would return. One man, determined to keep his slave against his will, whipped him “till de blood come.” He then said, “Now you change yo’ mind and give up?” But the slave said no and left with his family.29 One woman, realizing that her freed slaves were all going, predicted, “Ten years from today, I’ll have you all back ’gain.” But sixty years later, one of her former slaves noted happily, “Dat ten years been over a mighty long time, an’ she ain’ got us back yet, an’ she is dead an’ gone.”30

  Compared to field hands, rural domestics or house servants were said to have had easy chores and to have enjoyed congenial relations with their masters. But they, too, departed at an astonishing rate, a fact that puts to rest the myth of the faithful old family servant who remained loyal throughout the Reconstruction years. The myth is based on only a few recorded incidents. Patty’s story is one. A black woman who served the John Berkeley Grimball family for thirty-six years before emancipation, Patty stayed with them after the war for several months, sometimes feeding the now-impoverished family with her own food. To do so, she often went hungry herself. When she eventually decided to leave, she made sure that all the clothes were washed, gave presents to the young ladies of the house, and left two of her younger children to wait on the family.31

  Some whites were deeply hurt when slaves who they thought were faithful or for whom they felt great affection suddenly departed. “I have never in my life met with such ingratitude,” a South Carolina mistress exclaimed when a former slave ran off.32 “Something dreadful has happened dear Diary,” a Florida woman wrote in May 1865. “My dear black mammy has left us.... I feel lost, I feel as if someone is dead in the house. Whatever will I do without my Mammy?”33 The mass defection of rural domestics threw many white households into disarray. Eliza Andrews, a Georgia woman, complained that it seemed to her “a waste of time for people who are capable of doing something better to spend their time sweeping and dusting while scores of lazy negroes that are fit for nothing else are lying around idle.”34 Even more disturbing, as a North Carolina woman put it, was their “impudent and presumin’ ” new manners.35 Did this rude behavior mean that blacks wanted social equality? Former slaves perceived the situation differently. Their newfound freedom gave them the right to come and go as they pleased—and also the right to act disrespectfully toward whites. It was a new day.

  For many blacks, particularly women, clothing took on a larger social significance during the Reconstruction period. Black women, even those who had never attended school, gave up their old plain and drab dresses and wore more colorful and stylish garments. A perceptive statement on the role of women’s clothes during the transition from slavery to freedom is offered by Rossa Cooley, a New England white woman who taught on the Sea Islands in the early twentieth century. According to Cooley,

  Slavery to our Islanders meant field work, with no opportunity for the women and girls to dress as they chose and when they chose. Field workers were given their clothes as they were given their rations, only the clothes were given usually as a part of the Christmas celebration, “two clothes a year,” explained one of them as she remembered the old days. With the hunger for books very naturally came the hunger for clothes, pretty clothes, and more of them! And so with school and freedom best clothes came out and ragged clothes were kept for the fields. Work and old “raggedy” clothes were ... closely associated in the minds of the large group of middle-aged Island folk.36

  When freedom arrived, black husbands took pride in buying fashionable dresses and silk ribbons, pretty hats, and delicate parasols for their womenfolk. When a white landowner in Louisiana scolded one of his tenants for spending the proceeds of his cotton crop on clothing, which the landowner regarded as “the greatest lot of trash you ever saw,” the black man stood his ground. He told his employer that “he and his wife and children were satisfied and happy. What’s the use of living if a man can’t have the good of his labor?”37

  Since “insolent” behavior and stylish clothing defied the traditional code of Southern race relations, many whites were deeply concerned about the freedwomen’s more expressive dress. For example, a Freedmen’s Bureau officer stationed in Wilmington, North Carolina, in the fall of 1865 remarked to a Northern journalist that “the wearing of black veils by the young negro women had given great offense to the young white women, ”who consequently gave up this form of apparel altogether.“38 The connection between insolent behavior and elaborate dress was often made, particularly by white city dwellers. Henry W. Ravenel, a white Charlestonian, described a typical street scene in the mid-1860s. In his opinion, it was “so unlike anything we could imagine.” He went on to imply that there was more than a casual connection between the two: ”Negroes shoving white persons off the walk—Negro women dressed in the most outré style, all with bells and parasols for which they have an especial fancy—riding on horseback with Negro soldiers and in carriages.“39 The forsaking of deference plus the presence of black troops signaled an imminent struggle over “social equality” in the minds of apprehensive whites. This was a battle that could prove costly to fight and devastating to lose.

  BLACK EFFORTS TO ALLEVIATE THE SUFFERINGS OF FREED PEOPLE

  With emancipation, many rural blacks headed for Southern towns and cities in the belief that freedom was “free-er” there. They were drawn to numerous schools, churches, fraternal societies, and other black social institutions. Also in the cities were the Freedmen’s Bureau and occupying Union soldiers, offering blacks a measure of protection from the violence of whites that pervaded much of the rural South. Moreover, some blacks migrated to cities and towns in search of relatives from whom they had been separated during slavery as well as in search of jobs that they believed would be plentiful. Not all these black migrants, however, experienced a significant improvement in their economic and social life but instead were witness to disease, starvation, poverty, and death.40 And, not surprisingly, they were often subjected to white racism and racial discrimination. Still fervently believing in black inferiority, whites throughout the South were incensed over the black migration. One young white asserted in 1865 that he would leave the country before he would “live in a city where I have got to mix with free niggers.” A white woman declared: “My old Mama who nursed me is just like a mother to me; but there is one thing that I will never submit to, that the Negro is our equal. He belongs to an inferior race.”41 As expected, black migration also heightened racial tensions and increased the economic problems facing both blacks and whites since there already existed an overabundance of labor. Blacks arriving barefoot, with ragged clothes on their
backs, congregated in sections of cities that were rife with unsanitary conditions and disease. As a result, thousands of freedmen perished, and the death rate among them was staggering. A Freedmen’s Bureau agent in Charleston vividly described a neighborhood occupied by poverty-stricken blacks: “Much suffering prevails among the old and infirm Freedmen. They have been suffered in some circumstances to congregate in abandoned buildings, where they are dragging out a miserable existence, suffering extremely from lack of food, clothing, fuel, proper quarters and medical attention.”42