Been in the Storm So Long (26 page)

The flight of the white families evoked a variety of responses in their slaves. Some claimed to understand the decision, though it seemed like a strange turnabout to remain on the plantation while the white folks ran. “Funny how they run away like that,” a former North Carolina slave reminisced. “They had to save their selves. I ’member they [the Yankees] took one old boss man and hung him up in a tree across a drain of water.… Those white folks had to run away.” Still other slaves came away with contempt for their masters for having fled and abandoned them, while some thought it highly amusing, even ludicrous, and most certainly an admission of defeat. The scene lent itself, in fact, to one of the most popular wartime songs, “Kingdom Comin’,” in which it was even suggested that some of the fleeing masters tried to pass themselves off as “contrabands.”

Nor did the irony of their masters suddenly becoming fugitives seem to escape the slaves. In the newspaper edited by Frederick Douglass, who had himself once been a fugitive, there appeared an advertisement purportedly written by a slave in Beaufort, South Carolina, offering a reward for the return of his “runaway master.” Whatever the authenticity of the item, the point could not have been made more graphically.

Before a master fled, he might entrust the plantation or town house to some responsible slave, usually the driver or house servants, in the hope that his property could be kept intact until his return. Such confidence in most instances was not betrayed, with the slaves demonstrating what few masters had willingly conceded them—the ability to look after themselves and the plantation without any whites to advise or direct them. If the able-bodied hands had been removed earlier, however, the only remaining slaves were apt to be “the old and sickly,” the very young, and a few house servants. This could result in a precarious existence, particularly in those regions where the dreaded “paterollers” and Confederate guerrillas were active. In the Mississippi River parishes, the frequency with which the slaves left on abandoned plantations were kidnapped, taken to Texas, and sold finally forced the governor to send troops to curtail such activity and, if possible, to recover the slaves.
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When white families abandoning the plantations tried to take slaves with them, they often encountered the same resistance that had greeted earlier attempts to remove slaves to safer areas. The classic example occurred early in the war, when the sudden appearance of Union warships at the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina precipitated a mass exodus of planters and their families. Despite pleading, threats, and violence, however, the slaves stubbornly refused to accompany their owners to the mainland, many of them hiding in the swamps and fields rather than be taken. With freedom perhaps only a few hours or days away, this reluctance was not surprising. After being ordered to row his master to the mainland, Moses Mitchell, a carpenter and hoer, heeded his wife’s suggestion to “go out dat back door and keep a-going.” Equally determined, a slave named Susannah, valued as the family seamstress, refused to leave with her master and mistress despite their dire warnings about what would happen if she remained. Several days later, when her master’s son returned and ordered the slaves to destroy the cotton lest it fall into the hands of the Union Army, they refused to cooperate. “Why for we burn de cotton?” they asked. “Where we get money then for buy clo’ and shoes and salt?” Rather than burn the cotton, the slaves took turns guarding it, “the women keeping watch and the men ready to defend it when the watchers gave the alarm.” In some instances, however, slaves who resisted removal were shot down, even burned to death in the cotton houses. On Edisto
Island, where a Confederate raiding party had tried to remove some blacks, “the women fought so violently when they were taking off the men,” a white Charlestonian wrote, “that they were obliged to shoot some of them.”
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Not only did the areas of comparative safety within the Confederacy shrink with the advance of the Union Army but there were more compelling reasons why most slaveholding families chose not to flee. To stay was to try to save their homes and plantations from destruction and to preserve their slaves from the fearful epidemic whites diagnosed as “demoralization.” By remaining at home, a Mississippi planter decided, he would be in a position to prevent his slaves “from denuding my place.” Henry W. Ravenel of South Carolina entertained more lofty thoughts. Still imbued with the old paternalism, he thought it wrong—morally as well as practically—to desert his slaves at this time. “We know that if left to themselves, they cannot maintain their happy condition. We must reward their fidelity to us by the same care & consideration we exercised when they were more useful.” Apart from economic considerations, slavery had long been defended as a necessary instrument of social control that benefited both races. And now, with the Yankees not far away, some slaveholders deemed it their duty to protect their blacks from vices that would inevitably accompany liberation and freedom.
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Whether the master and mistress chose to stay or flee, they might lecture the slaves on how to behave when the Yankees arrived. Although they were to avoid impertinence, that did not require them to welcome the invaders as they did most guests. Traditional plantation hospitality was to be extended most discriminately. “Dey ain’t our company,” a former North Carolina slave remembered being told. A Virginia master, after reciting the “barbarities” of the Yankees, threatened to punish anyone who suggested to the enemy that they had not been content as slaves. “Dey tol’ us to tell ’em how good dey been to us,” a former Alabama slave recalled, “an’ dat we liked to live wid ’em.” Rivana Boynton, who had been a house slave on a plantation near Savannah, remembered the day her mistress, Mollie Hoover, assembled the slaves and instructed them on what to tell the approaching Yankees. “If they ask you whether I’ve been good to you, you tell ’em
‘yes.’
If they ask you if we give you meat, you say ‘
yes
.’ ” Most of the slaves did not get any meat, the former servant recalled, “but I did, ’cause I worked in the house. So I didn’t tell a lie, for I did git meat.” Most importantly, the white family warned the slaves not to divulge where the valuables had been hidden, no matter what the Yankees told them. “We knowed enough to keep our mouths shut,” a former Georgia slave remarked. But a Tennessee slave, named Jule, who claimed not to fear the Union soldiers, had some different ideas. As the Yankees neared the plantation, the mistress commanded the slaves to remain loyal. “If they find that trunk o’ money or silver plate,” she asked Jule, “you’ll say it’s your’n, won’t you?” The slave stood there, obviously unmoved by her mistress’s plea. “Mistress,” she replied, “I can’t lie over that; you bo’t that silver plate when you sole my three children.”
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When the Union Army was nearby, slaves were quick to discern any changes in the disposition of their owners. In some places, the frequency and the severity of punishments abated, and the masters—perhaps fearing slave retaliation—assumed a more benign attitude, prepared for the eventuality of free labor, and even offered to pay wages. After the Yankees had been sighted less than two miles away, a Tennessee planter who had beaten one of his slaves that morning apologized to him and begged him not to desert. But as slaves had learned so well, usually from bitter personal experience, the moods of their “white folks” were capable of violent fluctuations. If the wartime disruptions, privations, and casualties had earlier provoked fits of anger, the impending disaster they now faced and the knowledge that they were about to lose both the war and their slaves rendered even some usually self-possessed whites unable to contain their emotions. That was how Katie Darling, a nurse and housegirl on a Texas plantation, recalled her mistress. When the Yankees drew near, “missy go off in a rage. One time when a cannon fire, she say to me, ‘You li’l black wench, you niggers ain’t gwine be free. You’s made to work for white folks.’ ” A former Georgia slave recalled a “good master” who broke under the strain and tension that preceded the Union soldiers. “Marse William ain’t eber hit one of us a single lick till de day when we heard dat de Yankees was a’comin’.” When one of the slaves jumped up and shouted “Lawd bless de Yankees” on that day, the master lost his composure. Shouting “God damn de Yankees,” he slapped the slave repeatedly. “Ever’-body got outen dar in a hurry an’ nobody else dasen’t say Yankees ter de marster.”
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Not knowing what to expect of the invading army but fearing the worst, white families, in those final days and hours, often verged on panic and hysteria. At least that was how some of their slaves perceived them. In exasperation, masters were known to have lashed out at men and women who were too quick to celebrate their imminent release from bondage, while others refused to acknowledge either defeat or emancipation. After hearing of a new Confederate setback in the vicinity, Katie Rowe’s master mounted his horse and rode out onto the plantation where the slaves were hoeing the corn. He instructed the overseer to assemble the hands around the lead row man—“dat my own uncle Sandy”—and what he told them on that occasion Katie Rowe could recall vividly many years later:

Not long after that warning, the master was “blowed all to pieces” in a boiler explosion, “and dey jest find little bitsy chunks of his clothes and parts of him to bury.” And when the Yankees finally arrived, the overseer who had previously terrorized them “git sweet as honey in de comb! Nobody git a whipping all de time de Yankees dar!”
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Looking on with a growing sense of incredulity, slaves observed the desperation, the anguish, the helplessness that marked the faces and actions of their “white folks.” A Tennessee slave recalled how her mistress, at the sight of Union gunboats, suddenly “got wild-like” and “was cryin’ an’ wringin’ her han’s,” while at the same time she kept repeating to her slaves, “Now, ’member I brought you up!” Although the slaves shared much of the uncertainty that pervaded the Big House, the quality of their fears and the anticipation they felt were quite different. When Margaret Hughes, who had been a young slave in South Carolina, heard that the Union soldiers were coming, she ran to her aunt for comfort. Much to Margaret’s surprise, she found her in the best of spirits and not at all dismayed by the news. “Child,” she reassured her, “we going to have such a good time a settin’ at de white folks’ table, a eating off de white folks’ table, and a rocking in de big rocking chair.”
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With Union soldiers already in the vicinity, Emma Holmes, a twenty-six-year-old white woman of “aristocratic” tastes and breeding, calmly attended the Methodist services in Camden, South Carolina. On that day, the Reverend Pritchard delivered a “thoroughly practical sermon” to the slaves in the audience, drawing his illustrations from “daily life,” warning them about lying, stealing, cursing, and quarreling, and telling them that the Yankees had been “sent by the devil.” But, like Job, they were all to bear their losses. Overhearing her servants discuss the sermon afterwards, Emma Holmes was both “amused” and “interested,” and concluded “that good seed had been sowed and was bearing fruit.” The attire worn by many of the black women at the service, however, deeply distressed her. Rather than wear “the respectable and becoming handkerchief turban,” they had appeared “in the most ludicrous and disgustingly tawdry mixture of old finery, aping their betters most nauseatingly—round hats, gloves and even lace veils.” They would do best to adopt “a plain, neat dress for the working classes, as in other countries, and indeed among our country negroes formerly.” Even as the death of slavery appeared imminent, the thoughts uppermost in this woman’s mind after attending church that day hardly conceded as much. “If I ever own negroes, I shall carry out my father’s plan and never allow them to indulge in dress—it is ruin body and soul to them.”
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