Been in the Storm So Long (15 page)

Even before the Emancipation Proclamation, slaves perceived on the faces of their “white folks” a growing uneasiness and resignation. The certainty of Confederate victory seemed far less pronounced, the patriotic oratory less believable, and there crept into the conversations of white men and women the apprehension that life as they had known it might never survive this war. No matter how desperately slaveholding families wanted to believe in the faithfulness of their blacks, and despite the patriotic and loyal models they could display and would forever venerate, there persisted an undercurrent of suspicion and fear that could never be successfully repressed and that surfaced with every rumor of an uprising, every case of insubordination, and every report of an escape. “The runaways are numerous and bold,” Kate Stone confided to her diary. “We live on a mine that the Negroes are suspected of an intention to spring on the fourth of next month. The information may be true or false, but they are being well watched in every section where there are any suspects. Our faith is in God.”
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Nor were the fears of white men and women entirely illusory; they could on occasion assume a terrible reality. The war was not even a year old when Mary Chesnut heard that her cousin—Betsey Witherspoon of Society Hill—had been found dead in her bed, although she had been “quite well” the previous night. Two days later, the frightening news reached Mary Chesnut that her cousin had met a violent death. “I broke down; horror and amazement was too much for me. Poor cousin Betsey Witherspoon was murdered! She did not die peacefully in her bed, as we supposed, but was murdered by her own people, her Negroes.” With the arrest of two house servants, the details began to emerge. On the day of the murder, Mrs. Witherspoon’s son (who resided nearby) had charged several of his mother’s slaves with misusing and breaking some of the household china while giving a party in their mistress’s absence, and he promised to return the next day to give them a severe thrashing. Although Mrs. Witherspoon had interceded on their behalf, thinking it “too late to begin discipline now,” that news had not reached the slaves, one of whom allegedly told the others: “Mars’ John more than apt to do what he say he will do, but you all follow what I say and he’ll have something else to think of beside stealing and breaking glass and china. If ole Marster was alive now, what would he say to talk of whipping us!” That night, the slaves methodically carried out the murder, smothering Betsey Witherspoon so as to make it appear like a natural death.

News of the murder forced Mary Chesnut to reexamine many of her previous assumptions about the “placid, docile, kind and obedient” slaves she had known. “Hitherto I have never thought of being afraid of Negroes. I had never injured any of them; why should they want to hurt me? Two thirds of my religion consists in trying to be good to Negroes, because they are so in our power, and it would be so easy to be the other thing.” But as
of this day, she confessed, “I feel that the ground is cut away from under my feet. Why should they treat me any better than they have done Cousin Betsey Witherspoon?” While Mary Chesnut and her sister, Kate Williams, sat up late that night and discussed the murder, Kate’s maid (“a strong-built, mulatto woman … so clever she can do anything”) dragged a mattress into the room and insisted that she spend the night with her mistress. “You ought not to stay in a room by yourself these times,” she told her. “Missis, as I have a soul to be saved, I will keep you safe. I will guard you.” When the maid left for more bedding, Kate turned to her sister and exclaimed, “For the life of me, I cannot make up my mind. Does she mean to take care of me, or to murder me?” Unable to sleep, whether because of the murder or the maid’s presence, or both, Kate went into her sister’s bedroom, and the two women tried to comfort each other, both of them haunted by “the thought of those black hands strangling and smothering Mrs. Witherspoon’s grey head under the counterpane.” One month later, the details of the murder remained as vivid in Mary Chesnut’s mind as if it had occurred the day before. “That innocent old lady and her grey hair moved them not a jot. Fancy how we feel. I am sure I will never sleep again without this nightmare of horror haunting me.… If they want to kill us, they can do it when they please, they are noiseless as panthers.” And yet, she confided to her diary, although “we ought to be grateful that anyone of us is alive, … nobody is afraid of their own Negroes, I find everyone, like myself, ready to trust their own yard. I would go down on the plantation tomorrow and stay there even if there were no white person in twenty miles. My Molly and all the rest I believe would keep me as safe as I should be in the Tower of London.”

But as she had feared, the specter of Mrs. Witherspoon’s death remained with them, manifesting itself in different ways at different times. There was the day, for example, when Mary Chesnut’s mother-in-law had “bored” her with incessant talk about “the transcendant virtues of her colored household”; that night, the woman suddenly warned everyone at the dinner table not to touch their soup: “It is bitter. There is something wrong about it!” The family tried to calm her and continued with their meal, while the black waiters “looked on without change of face.” Kate whispered to her sister, “It is cousin Betsey’s fate. She is watching every trifle, and is terrified.” Afterwards, Kate told Mary of a Dr. Keith, “one of the kindest of men and masters,” who had discovered one day that his slaves were slowly trying to poison him and had thrown a cup of tainted tea in the face of a suspected servant; the next morning, the doctor was found with his throat cut. “Mrs. Witherspoon’s death,” Mary Chesnut noted, “has clearly driven us all wild.” On Christmas Day 1861, she duly recorded that the slaves charged with the murder of her cousin had been hanged. That same day, the servants rushed in with cries of “Merry Christmas” and “Christmas Gift.” “I covered my face and wept.”

Despite the confidence she still reposed in her own servants, Mary Chesnut began to entertain doubts about what she might expect of them
in the future. Nearly a year after Mrs. Witherspoon’s death, with all the terror that had generated, she found herself reading a book about the Sepoy Mutiny in India, in which the Bengal Army had turned upon its British officers.

It was precisely an incident like the Witherspoon murder, no matter how isolated, no matter how exceptional within the full record of slave behavior, that prompted white men and women, while publicly praising the exemplary behavior of their blacks, to reflect upon the combustible and unpredictable nature of a society in which the most devoted, the most pampered, the most humble slaves could strike terror and fear into a family whose confidence they commanded. Despite the accumulating evidence of betrayal, most slaveholders might have readily agreed that the faithful slave still constituted the vast majority of the black population; they could, as one Virginian did, dismiss any other thought from their minds.

But how could anyone be certain that the exception was not on his own plantation or in his own household? That was the essential problem, and it had plagued the white South for generations. Far more terrifying than Nat Turner and his “deluded and drunken handful of followers,” a Virginia legislator declared in 1832, was “the suspicion eternally attached to the slave himself, the suspicion that a Nat Turner might be in every family, that the same bloody deed could be acted over at any time and in any place, that the materials for it were spread through the land and always ready for a like explosion.” That was no less true in 1861 than it had been thirty years before.
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And there appeared to be no way to resolve this dilemma. Many a master was driven to sleepless nights in his attempt to penetrate behind the masks of his blacks, attaching significance to nearly every movement or word, and perhaps even more significance to their silence or apparent
indifference. The meekest, the most passive, the most submissive slaves could unsettle a household. The very appearance of fidelity was sometimes suspect. “They carry it too far,” Mary Chesnut had written of her servants on the first day of the war. Not until nearly two years later did she begin to discern changes in them, and even then only in her father’s butler. Although he remained “inscrutably silent” about the war, she sensed a difference. “I taught him to read as soon as I could read myself, perched on his knife board; but he won’t look at me now. He looks over my head, he scents freedom in the air.… He is the first Negro that I have felt a change in.”
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The approach of the Union Army would raise new concerns for white families but the traditional fears remained paramount. “I am afraid of the lawless Yankee soldiers,” a Virginia woman confessed, “but that is nothing to my fear of the negroes if they should rise against us.”
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Slaves were no less apprehensive, and their concern was by no means limited to what they might expect from an invading army made up largely of whites. The Civil War would not last forever, a Texas slave advised his son, but “our forever was going to be spent living among the Southerners, after they got licked.”
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O
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12, 1864, George W. Hatton found cause for celebration and reflection. Three years had passed since Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter, and he could only marvel at the changes which had taken place in his own life and in the lives of his people. “Though the Government openly declared that it did not want the negroes in this conflict,” he noted, “I look around me and see hundreds of colored men armed and ready to defend the Government at any moment; and such are my feelings, that I can only say, the fetters have fallen—our bondage is over.” Hatton was a sergeant in Company C of the 1st Regiment, United States Colored Troops. The regimental chaplain—among the first black men ever so designated—was Henry McNeal Turner, a native of South Carolina but most recently pastor of the Israel Bethel Church in Washington, D.C.
Encamped near New Bern, North Carolina, the regiment awaited the orders that would take them into Virginia for what promised to be the final assault on the Confederacy. To many of the soldiers in this regiment, it all seemed incredible. “Who would not celebrate this day?” Sergeant Hatton asked. “What has the colored man done for himself in the past three years? Why, sir, he has proved … that he is a man.”

Less than a month later, Hatton’s regiment reached Wilson’s Landing, only a few miles from Jamestown, where (as the sergeant duly noted) some 264 years earlier “the first sons of Africa” had been landed on American soil. The region took on a special meaning, too, for several of the soldiers in the regiment who had labored as slaves there. The memories they retained of those years were no doubt revived when several black women entered the camp, still bearing the marks of a severe whipping recently administered to them. While out on a foraging mission the next day, the soldiers captured the man who had meted out that punishment—“a Mr. Clayton, a noted reb in this part of the country, and from his appearance, one of the F.F.V.’s [First Families of Virginia].” Before an obviously appreciative audience, which included the black women he had whipped, the slaveholder was tied to a tree and stripped of his clothes; William Harris, one of his former slaves before fleeing to enlist in the Union Army, took up a whip and lashed him some twenty times, “bringing the blood from his loins at every stroke, and not forgetting to remind the gentleman of days gone by.” The whip was then handed over to the black women, who “one after another,” as Sergeant Hatton afterward wrote, “came up and gave him a like number, to remind him that they were no longer his, but safely housed in Abraham’s bosom, and under the protection of the Star Spangled Banner, and guarded by their own patriotic, though once down-trodden race.”