Read Been in the Storm So Long Online
Authors: Leon F. Litwack
Been in the Storm So Long (32 page)
Once having left the plantation and tasted even a semblance of freedom, the blacks who returned often behaved in a way that caused their owners considerable anxiety. On a Louisiana plantation, Mary C. R. Hardison complained that the servants heaped abusive language on her and did everything but strike her; the “leader” was thought to be a young black who had recently returned to the plantation declaring he had had enough of the Yankees. John H. Bills, the Tennessee planter, came to regret his decision to re-admit “My Woman Emmeline” after her brief stay in a Federal camp where her husband had died. Upon her return, the woman acted “verry Contrary,” refused to obey his commands, and threatened to “jump off the Waggon” if he tried to return her to the Yankees. “I feel that my desire to oblige has gotten me into trouble,” Bills concluded from this
experience. Perceiving the changed demeanor of the returnees, or unwilling to forgive them for having once deserted, some masters simply refused to permit them back on the plantation or else kept them under constant scrutiny. “Jane returned to Arcadia,” a Georgia woman noted, “but as she has been to Savannah and returned before, I fear she may have come to steal.” Even more galling for masters were slaves like James Woodson, who returned to Fluvanna County, Virginia, with a detachment of Union troops, led them to the place where the valuables had been hidden, and then stood by while the Yankees whipped his ex-owner. That display of “insolence” was exceeded only by the former slaves who returned to the old plantation not
with
but
as
Union soldiers.
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After what many planters had experienced, the number of slave defections seemed less important than the behavior of those who remained. More often than most whites wished to believe or to concede publicly, the “demoralization” (as they preferred to call it) of the slave population took a violent and destructive bent. The victims of such depredations took little comfort in the ready explanation that these were exceptional cases. Nor was their anguish necessarily mitigated by the popular view that only the Yankees could have instigated the blacks to behave so outrageously. If only the slaves had been left alone, Henry W. Ravenel kept telling himself, they would have obeyed their natural instincts and remained “a quiet, contented, & happy people.” But Ravenel, a native of South Carolina, should have known better. The sacking of nearby Beaufort, early in the war, illustrated the capacity of the slaves for destructive activity in the days
preceding
the arrival of Union troops. (Local planters had already set an example by trying to burn down the cotton barns before their hasty departure.) If slaves in the Sea Islands region usually refrained from destroying the plantations on which they lived, the many who poured into Beaufort had little compunction about occupying and ransacking the stately town houses of well-to-do planters. When one planter momentarily returned to his home, he found a slave seated at the piano “playing away like the very Devil” and two young black women upstairs “dancing away famously”; he also discovered that many neighboring houses had been “completely turned upside down and inside out” and the local churches had been vandalized. When a Union landing party finally came ashore, they were startled by the extent of the devastation.
We went through spacious houses where only a week ago families were living in luxury, and saw their costly furniture despoiled; books and papers smashed; pianos on the sidewalk, feather beds ripped open, and even the filth of the Negroes left lying in parlors and bedchambers.
Much of the destruction, one reporter suggested, could not be defined as “plunder” but only as a “malicious love of mischief gratified.” When news of the sacking reached the North, Henry M. Turner, an outspoken black clergyman, was equally startled; in fact, he refused to believe the “ridiculous,
outrageous, and cannibalistic reports” of slave excesses. Having been a resident of South Carolina for more than twenty years of his life, he could attest to the fact that “there are no class of colored people south of Mason and Dixon’s line, where more sound sense, morality, religion, and refined taste, prevails, than in Beaufort.” The slaves themselves said little about the fury they had unleashed on some of the more imposing symbols of the slaveholding aristocracy. Nor did they apparently deem an explanation necessary.
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Although the extent of slave “pillaging” in the South was sometimes exaggerated, or confused with Yankee depredations, that any should have occurred aroused consternation. “The Moorfield negroes are crazy quite,” a South Carolinian wrote; “they have been to Pinopolis, helping in the sacking of the houses.” In some areas, the slaves singled out the popular summer retreats for wealthy planters, where the quality of the furnishings provided sufficient temptation. Where white families had abandoned their homes, the slaves in many instances preferred occupation to pillage, moving from their own cramped quarters into the more commodious and comfortable lodgings which they had previously envied from a distance; the slaves who flocked into the towns from the outlying plantations, seeking the protection of Federal authority and a more congenial atmosphere in which to spend their first days of freedom, found an instant answer to their housing problem by occupying the elegant town houses of absent owners. To sleep in the master’s bed and eat at the dining-room table with the family silver and china was a novel and exhilarating experience. “Mamma’s house is occupied by
freedmen
, cooking in every room,” reported a South Carolina woman who had only recently heard from a friend in a nearby town that “all the houses around them are occupied by negroes.” Already in shock over the apparent collapse of the social order, native whites now listened to reports that slaves were using the baronial town houses to give “Negro balls” and dinner parties. “The whites [presumably Yankees] and blacks danced together,” a friend wrote Adele Allston of a recent “ball” in Georgetown, South Carolina.
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Where would it all end? The events of the past several weeks, Henry W. Ravenel confided to his diary, reminded him of the horrors of the French Revolution. “White man is nigger—and nigger is white man” was the way another South Carolinian chose to describe “the state of things.” Whether in the towns or in the countryside, the welcome accorded the Union troops by many slaves had not been confined to prayers and singing but had included as well the expropriation of nearly everything belonging to their masters and mistresses that could be moved. With a feeling of utter helplessness, Amanda Stone’s family, after abandoning the family home in Louisiana, heard how the slaves had quarreled over the division of clothes and how the house had been stripped of furniture, carpets, books, the piano, “and everything else.” Nor did the presence of the white family necessarily restrain the slaves. “The Negroes as soon as they heard the guns,” a rice planter in South Carolina reported, “rushed to my house and pillaged it of
many things and principally wearing apparel”; he felt certain that the entire affair had been “pre-arranged.”
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For the masters, what proved most difficult to accept was the gratification some slaves derived from these attacks on property. “Many of them,” John H. Bills thought, “do all they can to have us destroyed & delight in seeing the work of destruction.” Upon returning to their plantation home, the Allston family suddenly understood the overseer’s report that their slaves had “behaved Verry badly.”
We looked at the house; it was a wreck,—the front steps gone, not a door nor shutter left, and not a sash. They had torn out all the mahogany framework around the doors and windows—there were mahogany panels below the windows and above the doors there were panels painted—the mahogany banisters to the staircase going upstairs; everything that could be torn away was gone.… It was a scene of destruction, and papa’s study, where he kept all his accounts and papers, as he had done from the time he began planting as a young man, was almost waistdeep in torn letters and papers.
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The systematic nature of much of the black pillaging suggests that it was frequently neither indiscriminate nor simply a matter of gratified revenge but rather an opportunity to supplement their meager diets and wardrobes and improve their standard of living. Why they killed the livestock, emptied the meat houses and storerooms, and expropriated the liquors and wines would seem sufficiently obvious. The furniture and materials removed from the Big House were often used to make their own cabins more habitable. One South Carolina slave explained that after the master departed, they stripped boards from his house in order to floor their own cabins and put in lofts. Similarly, when the slaves broke into closets, bureaus, trunks, and desks, ripped open the bedding, or scattered the master’s private papers, they were frequently seeking money, jewelry, or silverware that might be traded for needed commodities. When the slaves seized the mules, horses, and wagons, it was often with the idea of making their escape from the plantation, taking with them whatever the carts could carry. On A. F. Pugh’s plantation, an enterprising former slave accumulated a cartload of articles from several neighboring plantations and bartered them with other blacks in the vicinity; the overseer was powerless to stop this apparently flourishing business based on loot.
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What the whites defined as theft might be viewed by the slaves as long-overdue payments for past services. Adele Allston conceded almost as much when she wrote her son about the destruction visited upon their Chicora Wood plantation. “The conduct of the negroes in robbing our house, store room meat house etc and refusing to restore anything shows you they think it right to steal from us, to spoil us, as the Israelites did the Egyptians.” The slaves simply suggested that the question of theft be placed in its proper perspective, like the old Gullah preacher who asked his
congregation, “Ef buckra neber tief, how come nigger yer?” That the constraints of slave life had made “thieves” of them some slaves readily conceded, though always stressing the conditions that had made this necessary. “We work so hard and get nothing for our labor but jes our ’lowance, we ’bleege to steal,” a South Carolina slave explained in 1863, “and den we must keep from dem ebery ting or dey suffer us too much. But dey take all our labor, and steal our chil’ren, and we only take dare chicken.” To attempt to reason with a slave on this sensitive matter could be an exasperating, if sometimes illuminating experience for a white. In Tennessee, a slave rode into a Union camp on a horse he had taken from his owner. Upon being questioned, presumably by a Union soldier or reporter, the slave insisted only that the usual notions of morality had little relevance to his action.
“Don’t you think you did very wrong, Dick, to take your mistress’ horse?”
“Well, I do’ know, sah; I didn’t take the bes’ one. She had three; two of ’em fuss-rate hosses, but the one I took is ole, an’ not berry fast, an’ I offe’d to sell him fo’ eight dolla’s, sah.”
“But, Dick, you took at least a thousand dollars from your mistress, besides the horse.”
“How, sah?”
“Why,
you
were worth a thousand dollars, and you should have been satisfied with that much, without taking the poor woman’s horse,” said I, gravely.
The contraband scratched his woolly head, rolled up his eyes at me, and replied with emphasis.
“I don’t look at it jis dat way, massa
. I wo’ked ha’d fo’ missus mor’n thirty yea’s, an’ I reckon in dat time I ’bout pay fo’ meself. An’ dis yea’ missus guv me leave to raise a patch o’ ’baccy fo’ my own. Well, I wo’ked nights, an’ Sabbaths, an’ spar’ times, an’ raised a big patch (way prices is, wuff two hun’red dolla’s, I reckon) o’ ’baccy; an’ when I got it tooken car’ of dis fall, ole missus took it ’way from me; give some to de neighbors; keep some fo’ he’ own use; an’ sell some, an’ keep de money, an’ I reckon dat pay fo’ de ole hoss!”
Failing to find any conscience in the darkey, I gave up the argument.
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Even where slaves refrained from expropriating and destroying property, they often behaved in ways that troubled and infuriated their masters and mistresses. The decision of a slave to remain on the plantation was no guarantee of his fidelity or steady labor. The Reverend Samuel A. Agnew, a Mississippi slaveholder, understood that all too well. “Some of our negroes will not go to the Yankees,” he thought, “but they may all prove faithless.” For many slave owners, as for Agnew, the ability to retain the bulk of their blacks proved to be no cause for self-congratulation. Despite the concern voiced over the “stampede” of the slaves, some white families
might have found reasons to be grateful, if only because they avoided the anguish experienced by so many of their neighbors.
Oh! deliver me from the “citizens of African descent.” I am disgusted forever with the whole race. I have not faith in one single dark individual. They are all alike ungrateful and treacherous—every servant is a spy upon us, & everything we do or say is reported to the Yankees. They know everything.
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