Been in the Storm So Long (27 page)

The appearance of the first Yankee soldier symbolized far more than the humiliation of military defeat. No matter how certain they were of their own slaves, nearly every master and mistress sensed that the old loyalties and mutual dependencies were about to become irrelevant. “Negro slavery is about played out,” John H. Bills, the Tennessee planter, observed, “we being deprived of that Control needful to make them happy
and prosperous.” And Sarah Morgan, the daughter of a slaveholding family, could find solace only in recalling the past. “No more cotton, sugarcane, or rice!” she lamented. “No more old black aunties or uncles! No more rides in mule teams, no more songs in the cane-field, no more steaming kettles, no more black faces and shining teeth around the furnace fires!” The previous night, she had sat around the fire with a crowd of family slaves, singing with them, enjoying their company. “Poor oppressed devils!” she thought. “Why did you not chunk us with the burning logs instead of looking happy, and laughing like fools?”
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Preparing to abandon the family plantation, as the Yankees approached, Eliza Andrews took time to note in her journal: “There is no telling what may happen before we come back; the Yankees may have put an end to our glorious old plantation life forever.” That night, she paid a final visit to the slave quarters to bid her blacks farewell. “Poor things, I may never see any of them again, and even if I do, everything will be different. We all went to bed crying …” Four months later, returning to her home, she confided to her journal: “It is necessary to have some nickname to use when we talk before the servants, and to speak very carefully, even then, for every black man is a possible spy. Father says we must not even trust mammy too far.”
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T
HE LONG
, often excruciating wait was nearly over. On plantations and farms in the path of the Union Army, the tension and uneasiness, albeit in different degrees, pervaded both the Big House and the slave quarters. Mary Brodie, a thirteen-year-old slave in Wake County, North Carolina, could easily sense the change that had come over the plantation on which she resided. “Missus and marster began to walk around and act queer. The grown slaves were whisperin’ to each other. Sometimes they gathered in little gangs in the grove.” In the next several days, the noise of distant gunfire grew louder, everybody “seemed to be disturbed,” the slaves walked about aimlessly, nobody was working, “and marster and missus were crying.” Finally, the word went out for every slave to assemble in front of “the great house.” Sam and Evaline Brodie came out on the porch and stood side
by side facing their more than 150 slaves. “You could hear a pin drop,” Mary recalled, “everything was so quiet.” After greeting them, the master explained why he had called them together. “Men, women and children, you are free. You are no longer my slaves. The Yankees will soon be here.” There was no more to be said. The master and mistress went back into the house, picked up two large armchairs, placed them on the porch facing the road, and sat down to wait. “In about an hour,” Mary recalled, “there was one of the blackest clouds coming up the avenue from the main road. It was the Yankee soldiers.”
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When Union gunboats were sighted coming up the Combahee River in South Carolina, the overseer frantically assembled the slaves. “The Yankees are coming!” he told them. “You must all keep out of sight. Don’t let them see you. If they land near here, cut and run and hide where nobody can find you. I tell you them Yanks are the very devil! If they catch you they will sell you to New Orleans or Cuba!” The slaves assured the overseer that they would run so fast “de Debil hisself” would be unable to catch them. “Don’t you worry, Massa Jim,” the old slave cook added. “We all hear ’bout dem Yankees. Folks tell we they has horns an’ a tail. I is mighty skeery myself, an’ I has all my t’ings pick up, an’ w’en I see dem coming I shall run like all possess.” Reassured, the overseer announced that he was going to the mainland and would leave everything in their care. The slaves gathered to watch him ride off. “Good-by, ole man, good-by,” they shouted as he disappeared down the road. “That’s right. Skedaddle as fas’ as you kin. When you cotch we ag’in, I ’specs you’ll know it. We’s gwine to run sure enough; but we knows the Yankees, an’ we runs that way.” And so they did, directly toward the Union gunboats.
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When former slaves recalled the war years, what remained most vivid in their memories—“just as good as it had been dis day right here”—was that moment when freedom from bondage suddenly became a distinct possibility in their own lifetimes. The first slaves who experienced that sensation were usually those whose homes lay in the path of the Union Army. “We hear’d ’bout de Yankees fightin’ to free us,” remembered Berry Smith of Mississippi, “but we didn’ b’lieve it ’til we hear’d ’bout de fightin’ at Vicksburg.” When the “freedom gun” was fired, and Sherman’s troops came through the plantation, Susan Hamilton was scrubbing the floors. “Dey tell me I wus free but I didn’t b’lieve it.” While driving the cows to pasture, Rilla Pool, a North Carolina slave, glanced down the railroad tracks and “everything was blue”; she ran home to tell the others, and heard her grandmother exclaim, “Well I has been prayin’ long enough for ’em [and] now dey is here.” Hester Hunter, a South Carolina slave, recalled the day her grandmother ran into the house with news that the Yankees were on their way, after which the mistress screamed, fetched her valuables, and told the slave to sew them up in the feather bed. Still another South Carolina slave was about to be whipped by his master for misconduct when they heard the shout that Union gunboats were coming up the river; both fled, but in opposite directions.
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Uncertainty, skepticism, and fear marked the initial reaction of many slaves to the Yankee invaders. The first impulse was often to hide. “I done what all of de rest o’ de slaves done,” recalled a former slave who had fled to the nearby woods. Young Margaret Lavine remembered how her mother grabbed her in her arms; indeed, some slave women ordered their children to bed, told them to feign illness, and warned the Union soldiers not to enter the cabin because “dere’s de fever in heah!” Neither ignorance nor devotion to their “white folks” necessarily explains the caution with which many slaves greeted their liberators. The activities of the much-feared “paterollers,” who roamed the countryside to keep the blacks in check, had already made the slaves exceedingly wary of approaching strangers, even those claiming to be Yankees; the citizens’ patrols, as well as Confederate guerrillas (sometimes wearing Yankee uniforms), were known to have beaten and murdered slaves who mistook them for Union soldiers and prematurely rejoiced over their liberation, and some slaves had been tricked into giving information to alleged Yankees, only to find themselves strung up as spies and informers. Many a slave suffered, too, at the hands of white stragglers and deserters, and General Joe Wheeler’s Confederate cavalry had become notorious for the ways in which it pillaged and terrorized the countryside, leaving in some areas of South Carolina and North Carolina little for the Yankees to plunder. “Dey was ’Federates but dey was mean as de Yankees,” Sarah Debro recalled. “Dey ax de niggahs if dey wanted to be free. If dey say yes, den dey shot dem down, but if dey say no, dey let dem alone. Dey took three of my uncles out in de woods an’ shot dey faces off.”
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If the approaching soldiers were, in fact, Yankees, there remained compelling reasons why the slaves might act cautiously. Although freedom appeared to be at hand, uncertainty about what forms that freedom would take, how their “liberators” would treat them, and what would happen to them once the soldiers departed suggested the need to adopt that noncommittal stance that had served them so well in relations with the “white folks.” Realizing that their master would most likely regain control after the soldiers moved on, slaves had good reason to fear that a terrible revenge might be visited upon those who behaved contrary to expectations. Despite reassurances by General Sherman himself that the Yankees came as friends, an elderly Georgia slave remained skeptical. “I spose dat you’se true,” he told the General; “but, massa, you’se ’ll go way to-morrow, and anudder white man ’ll come.” Experience with both Yankees and Confederates led one former slave to conclude, “Dem ‘Blue-coats’ wuz devils, but de ‘gray-coats’ wuz wusser,” and it prompted many slaves to maintain a safe distance between themselves and either army.

If a slave chose to believe only half of what he had been told about the approaching Union soldiers, there was every reason to be apprehensive. On the day the Yankees were expected, Betty Roach, a housegirl and nurse for the children on a small plantation in Tennessee, asked how she might be able to tell them apart from other whites. That would be easy, her mistress explained. “They got long horns on their heads, and tushes in their mouths, and eyes sticking out like a cow! They’re mean old things. And Betty—if they come to the house, don’t dare tell them the babies’ names—you hear? [The children had been named after two prominent Confederate generals.] If you do, they will kill the babies—and you too!” This same woman had previously assured Betty that if she worked hard and behaved herself, she would eventually turn white. Not at all uncommon, then, was the experience of a Union officer near Opelousas, Louisiana, when he wandered off the road to a shed in search of a cup of water. Seeing him, the slave women and children fled, leaving behind a small child who was trying desperately to join the others. The officer patted the child on the head and tried to assure him that he was perfectly safe. Emerging from their hiding places, the slaves who had run away explained that their master and mistress had told them that Union soldiers killed black children, sometimes even roasted and ate them.
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Since the outbreak of the war, white families had tried to frighten their slaves about the consequences of Yankee occupation, warning them to expect atrocities, forced labor, and military conscription. Since some slaves had come to expect anything of white men and women, the terrifying images of Yankee white devils might have seemed entirely plausible. But the slave’s perception of his master and mistress, based on years of close observation, and the information he gathered from a variety of alternative sources provided ample grounds for skepticism if not outright disbelief. Even with a limited access to the news, many slaves dismissed the atrocity stories because they simply made no sense. “Massa can’t come dat over we,” a Georgia slave told a Union officer; “we know’d a heap better. What for de Yankees want to hurt black men? Massa hates de Yankees, and he’s no fren’ ter we; so we am de Yankee bi’s fren’s.” After hearing those direful predictions of a Yankee hell, Aunt Sally, a Virginia slave, assumed a “darky” countenance and assured her mistress that there was nothing to fear from the enemy soldiers. “I done tell her what’d dey go to do to an ol’ good-for-nuffin nigger like me. Dey wouldn’t hab no use for me, I’se thinkin’. I’ll stay by de stuff.” The same master who warned his slaves about the Yankees, moreover, might have also boasted of the invincibility of Confederate arms, assuring them that the war would be brief and victorious. Why should they place any more confidence in their master’s word now than they had before? “They told her a heap more’n she believed,” a Louisiana freedwoman remarked after the war.
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And if the Yankees brought with them a promise of freedom, as everyone seemed to concede, why should the slaves fear them?

The first glimpse usually convinced even the more skeptical slaves, if
not their masters, that the Yankees, in physical appearance at least, were less than the monsters they had been warned to expect. “Why dey’s folks,” one slave shouted with delight, as she ran down the road to greet them. Not knowing what he might see, Abram Harris, a former South Carolina slave, remembered his surprise at discovering that the Yankees were “jes lak my white folks.” Still not entirely convinced, Mittie Freeman, who had been a slave in Mississippi, recalled how she refused to come down from a tree until the Union soldier had removed his hat to show her he had no horns. Lingering suspicions of white men, whether Yankees or Confederates, were not always so easily set aside. Although anxious to celebrate their freedom, Gus Askew and his friends preferred not to do so in the presence of the Yankees. “We went on away from the so’jers and had a good time ’mongst ourselves, like we always done when there wasn’t any cotton pickin’.” The slaves were sometimes more restrained in their welcomes if their master or mistress happened to be present, and that may also account for the indifference with which some disappointed Yankees thought they had been received. “On our way up from Carrollton,” a Massachusetts soldier wrote, “one [slave] got the woodpile between him and the whites, and then vigorously waved his hat in welcome. It was our only welcome.”
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