Been in the Storm So Long (28 page)

If the Yankees’ physical appearance seemed reassuring, the promise of freedom they had come to symbolize overcame for scores of slaves any doubts or suspicions. Without the slightest hesitation, many of them flocked to the roadsides, waved their hats and bonnets, greeted the soldiers with shouts of “God bress you; I is glad to see you,” threw their arms about in jubilation, stretched out their hands to touch them, even tried to hug them. “Massa say dis bery mornin’, ‘De damn Yankees nebber get up to here!’ ” a slave in the Teche country of Louisiana shouted at the passing troops, “but I knowed better; we all knowed better dan dat. We’s been prayin’ too long to de Lord to have him forgit us; and now you’se come, and we all free.” At the sight of Sherman’s army, one slave recalled, the whites fled to the woods and most of the slaves ran to their cabins, “but I’se on top o’ a pine stub, ten feet high, an’ I’se jes’ shoutin’ ‘Glory to God! take me wid ye! Glory to God! Glory Glory!’ ” Eliza Sparks, who had been a slave in Mathews County, Virginia, recalled most vividly the Union officer who wanted to know the name of the baby she was nursing. “Charlie, like his father,” she told him. “Charlie what?” the officer asked. “I tole him Charlie Sparks.” After presenting the baby with a copper coin, the officer rode off, but not before bidding the slave a farewell she would long remember. “Goodbye, Mrs. Sparks,” he yelled. That was what impressed her. “Now what you think of dat? Dey all call me ‘Mrs. Sparks’!”
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When the Yankees entered Charleston, a sixty-nine-year-old slave woman greeted them with a simple, repetitive chant:

That the coming of the Yankees should have been suffused with religious significance for many slaves is hardly surprising. “Us looked for the Yankees on dat place,” a former South Carolina slave recalled, “like us look now for de Savior and de host of angels at de second comin’.” To the elderly, those who had endured nearly a lifetime of bondage, what they were now witnessing appeared to be nothing less than acts of divine intervention, with the Yankees cast as “Jesus’s Aids,” General Sherman as Moses, and Lincoln as “de Messiah.” That was the only way some slaves could explain what was happening to them, the only way they could render comprehensible these remarkable and dramatic events. Seldom had their prayers been answered so concretely. “I’d always thought about this, and wanted this day to come, and prayed for it and knew God meant it should be here sometime,” a Savannah slave declared as she shook her head in disbelief, “but I didn’t believe I should ever see it, and it is so great and good a thing, I cannot believe it has come now; and I don’t believe I ever shall realize it, but I know it has though, and I bless the Lord for it.”
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But the arrival of the Yankees on many plantations and farms came to be viewed, by slaves and their owners alike, as the visitation of God’s wrath. The soldiers would assemble the white family and the slaves, demand to know where the valuables were hidden, threaten them if they refused to divulge the information, and then commence to ransack the entire plantation, venting their anger on whatever or whoever got in the way. “De worst time we ever had,” recalled Fannie Griffin, who had been a slave in South Carolina. “De Yankees ’stroyed ’most everything we had.” On the plantation in Alabama where Walter Calloway worked as a plow hand, Confederate soldiers had already taken off the best livestock, making it “purty hard on bofe whites an’ blacks,” but the Yankees proved to be even more thorough, “smashin’ things comin’ an’ gwine.”
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What the Yankees did not take they might distribute among the slaves, even urging them to join in the pillaging. With their restricted diet having been further reduced by wartime scarcities, some slaves found it impossible to resist the invitation to partake of the food supply created by their own labor or the Big House furnishings accumulated through generations of their unpaid labor. When the soldiers broke open the storeroom on the Pooshee plantation in South Carolina, the slaves seized nearly everything in sight, much to the shock of the owner, who had to witness the scene. Afterwards, his granddaughter informed a friend of what had happened: “It must have been too mortifying to poor Grand Pa for his negroes to behave as they did, taking the bread out of our mouths. I thought better of them than that.” After the Yankees passed through her rice plantations, Adele Allston learned that the blacks had divided among themselves the
furniture and livestock. But even when slaves were afforded these rare opportunities, their behavior defied predictability; many of them refused to have anything to do with such “looting” and were reluctant to accept any of the master’s property. In some instances, the slaves took what the soldiers gave them, so as not to anger them, but subsequently returned the goods to their owners, whether out of loyalty or because they feared the repercussions once the Union Army moved on.
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When Yankee troops looted the Morgan home in Baton Rouge, a faithful servant stood all he could before he exclaimed, “Ain’t you ’shamed to destroy all dis here, that belongs to a poor widow lady who’s got two daughters to support?” No matter how each slave felt inwardly, the sight of Yankees pillaging the plantation and perhaps humiliating the white residents had to be a unique experience. The way the soldiers “jes’ natcherly tore up ol’ Marster’s place,” as though they had a “special vengeance” for their “white folks,” left many slaves quite incredulous. So did the treatment of the women.

With equal “impertinence,” the soldiers might force the white women to prepare meals and serve both them and the slaves. That was a sight Mary Ella Grandberry, a former Alabama slave, would never forget. “De Yankees made ’em do for us lak we done for dem. Dey showed de white folks what it was to work for somebody else.”
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Upon observing “the gloomy ebony scowl” on the faces of the slaves, a Union officer thought it arose from “jealousy at the liberties, taken by us, with what they consider their own plantations and possessions.” He was no doubt correct in his assumption. The slaves might have marveled at the audacity of the Yankees, and some perhaps derived pleasure from the discomfiture of their owners, but the indiscriminate and wasteful destruction of the food supply and what many regarded as their home struck them as excessive and unnecessary. The Yankees called it “a holy war,” a former South Carolina slave observed, “but they and Wheeler’s men was a holy terror to dis part of de world, as naked and hungry as they left it.” It was the pillaging, a former Mississippi slave recalled, that turned him against the Yankees, and he shared, too, the resentment of numerous blacks that the soldiers destroyed what they had worked so hard to produce. “We helped raise that meat they stole. They left us to starve and fed their fat selves on what was our living.” No less disturbing had been those planters and Confederate soldiers who had ordered the destruction of crops rather than leave them to the Yankees. “It made my innards hurt,” Charlie
Davenport recalled, “to see fire ‘tached to somethin’ dat had cost us Niggers so much labor an’ hones’ sweat.”
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What compounded the bitterness was that the Yankees pillaged both whites and blacks, the Big House and the slave cabins alike. “The negroes all share the same fate as ourselves,” Emma Holmes noted after the Yankees had passed through Camden, South Carolina, “everything ransacked and whatever was wanted stolen, though the Yankees told them they had come to free them and called them ‘sis,’ talking most familiarly.” That they should be robbed and defrauded by those who claimed to be their liberators, that their cabins should be searched and ransacked, their wives and daughters insulted and abused, came as a shocking revelation to many slaves, leaving them both angry and confused. “I always bin hear dat de Yankees was gwine help de nigger!” one of the Allston servants exclaimed to her mistress after the Yankees had seized her few possessions. “W’a’ kynd a help yu call dis! Tek ebery ting I got in de wurld.” The depth of black disillusionment with the Yankees is suggested by the number of slaves who compared them to the much-despised and degraded poor whites. “By instinct,” Andy Brice of South Carolina observed, “a nigger can make up his mind pretty quick ’bout de creed of white folks, whether they am buckra or whether they am not. Every Yankee I see had de stamp of poor white trash on them.” Perhaps that was what a Mississippi slave had in mind after a Union soldier had addressed her as “Auntie.” “Don’t you call me ‘Auntie,’ ” she retorted, “I ain’t none o’ yo’ kin.”
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With considerable ingenuity, based on years of experience with their own “white folks,” some slaves managed to preserve their few possessions from the clutches of the Yankees. In Camden, South Carolina, for example, the soldiers seized the blankets belonging to an elderly black shoemaker. But he proved more than equal to the crisis. Feigning “a tone of terror,” he warned them not to mix his blankets with theirs, “as all the house girls had some catching disease.” On hearing this, the alarmed Yankees not only returned the blankets but presented the black with the mule on which they had placed the loot. Equally artful were the servants in the Mary S. Mallard household in Montevideo, Georgia, who sought both to avoid conscription into the Union Army and to save their belongings.

Although the vast majority of slaves welcomed the Union soldiers, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm, experience would reveal that
their “liberators,” like their previous owners, might display moments of kindness, tenderness, generosity, and paternal benevolence but their racial beliefs and temperaments made them at the same time unpredictable and capable of a wide range of conduct. When an Arkansas slave confronted a Yankee who had stolen her quilts, she voiced the frustration of many of her brethren who had experienced a similar betrayal of expectations: “Why, you nasty, stinkin’ rascal. You say you come down here to fight for the niggers, and now you’re stealin’ from ’em.” But the soldier had the final word, aptly summing up his conception of the war and that of thousands of his comrades: “You’re a God Damn liar, I’m fightin’ for $14 a month and the Union.”
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B
EFORE ENTERING THE
S
OUTH
, few Yankee soldiers had ever seen so many blacks, such concentrations of them, appearing almost everywhere they marched. The tens of thousands who greeted them along the roadsides, the “contrabands” who flocked to their camps, the refugees who followed their columns, the sullen-looking figures who gazed at them from a distance provided most Union soldiers with their initial view of the “peculiar institution.” It was as if Harriet Beecher Stowe’s characters had suddenly materialized before their very eyes. “I never saw a bunch of them together,” a Wisconsin youth wrote, “but I could pick out an Uncle Tom, a Quimbo, a Sambo, a Chloe, an Eliza or any other character in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
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Although curious about what he would find in the South, the average Union soldier brought with him certain notions about black people, based largely on the racial beliefs and exaggerated caricatures with which he had been inculcated since childhood. His first impressions of the slaves he encountered invariably confirmed and reinforced those caricatures, and the descriptions he provided the folks at home dwelled upon them. If anything, their physical “peculiarities” struck him as even more pronounced than he had imagined; they were “so black that ‘charcoal would make a white mark on them,’ ” their mouths were excessively large, their lips excessively thick, and their noses excessively broad and flat. “They are the genuine Negro here,” a Pennsylvania soldier wrote from South Carolina, “as black as tar and their heels stick out a feet behind.” A New England soldier in Louisiana wrote his brother with a mixture of revulsion and attraction: “If I marry any one at all I believe I’ll marry one of these nigger wenches down here. One that grease runs right off of, one that shines and one that stinks so you can smell her a mile, and then you can have time to get out of the way.” Such disparagements were neither uncommon nor limited to Negrophobes. Even those Yankee soldiers who claimed to be antislavery expressed their amusement at the physical appearance and
demeanor of the enslaved blacks, revealing more about their own backgrounds and biases than about the objects of their sympathy. “There is something irresistibly comical in their appearance,” wrote one such soldier, “they are so black, and their teeth are of such dazzling whiteness, their eyes so laughing and rolling, their clothes so fantastic, and their whole appearance so peculiar.”
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