Been in the Storm So Long (33 page)

T
HE TERMS
with which slave-owning families described the conduct of their blacks—“insolence,” “impertinence,” “impudence,” and “ingratitude”—had been used often and indiscriminately to denote slave transgressions or departures from expected behavior. Once the Yankees arrived, masters and mistresses detected examples of such behavior almost everywhere—in the defection of the favorites, in the demeanor and language of the slaves who remained, in their refusal to submit to punishment, in their failure to obey orders promptly (or at all), and, most frequently, in their unwillingness to work “as usual.” To a Louisiana planter, traveling from Ascension Parish to New Orleans in mid-1863, the slaves he observed along the way were nearly all “insolent & idle,” which he defined as “working not more than half a day, yet demanding full rations of every thing.” To the wife of a prominent Alabama planter, the slaves behaved in “an insolent manner” by taking off whenever there was work to be done. “The negroes are worse than free,” she informed her son. “They say they
are
free. We cannot exert any authority. I beg ours to do what little is to be done.” To a Virginia white woman, the blacks were acting “very independent and impudent,” and like most whites she equated the two traits. To slave owners everywhere, the defections were difficult enough to understand but the ways in which some slaves chose to depart invariably provoked the most grievous charge of all—“ingratitude.” Few stated it more succinctly than Emily C. Douglas, a resident of Natchez who had earlier extolled the loyalty of her slaves: “They left without even a good-bye.”
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The “delirium of excitement” set off by the arrival of the Yankees gave scores of slaves a much-welcomed respite from their usual labors and momentarily paralyzed agricultural operations. That was the day, a former Florida slave remembered, when they dropped their plows and hoes, rushed to their cabins, put on their best clothes, and went into town to join with other slaves in a “joyous and un-forgettable occasion.” If the slaves did not stop work altogether, they often slowed down the pace and made only sporadic appearances in the fields, “going, coming, and working when they please and as they please,” sometimes spending the day in their cabins, sometimes venturing into town for a week at a time. The attempts
to make a crop under these conditions were futile. On the Magnolia plantation in Louisiana, the overseer first complained that the slaves were “very slow getting out”; three weeks later, “the ring of the Bell no longer a delightful sound,” and the slaves were “moving very slowly”; more than a month later, in utter exasperation, he could only
“wish every negro would leave the place
as they will do only what pleases them, go out in the morning when it suits them, come in when they please, etc.” The erratic performance of the slaves even dismayed some northern observers, who wondered if this augured trouble for a free labor system. The Negroes’ idea of freedom, an alarmed Union reporter observed, “is that of unrestrained license to do as they please, and go where they choose.” The slaves might well have agreed, after having watched their masters and other whites for so many years interpret freedom in precisely that manner.
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To mark their release from bondage, blacks not only withheld their labor but in some instances vented their frustrations and bitterness on the most glaring and accessible symbols of their past labor—the Big House, which they might pillage; the cotton gin, which they might deliberately destroy; the slave pens and cotton houses, which in some cases were converted into freedmen schools and churches; and the overseer, who often represented the sole authority left on a plantation and who had come to personify the excesses of bondage. Many overseers clearly deserved their reputation for cruelty; nevertheless, the discipline they enforced, the punishments they meted out, and the labor they exacted from the slaves almost always reflected their need to meet the expectations of their employers. Rather than share the responsibility for any excesses that might result from his often inordinate demands, the planter all too readily permitted his overseer to assume the blame; indeed, the owner might even intercede at times to soften the overseer’s punishments, thereby enhancing his own sense of paternalism and “humanity” while reinforcing the image of the overseer as an uncaring brute.
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Neither the slaves nor the overseers were necessarily oblivious to this kind of deception, but the flight of the masters often left the overseer by himself to absorb the slaves’ wrath. Regardless of what whites remained on the plantation, the coming of the Yankees encouraged slaves to act as though there were alternatives in their lives: if they chose not to desert, they might simply refuse to submit to the usual discipline and punishments. On the C. C. Clay plantation in Alabama, the slaves had become “so bold,” the mistress informed her son, that they threatened to kill the overseer if he tried to punish them for disobedience. That these were not empty threats is borne out by what took place on the Millaudon plantation in Louisiana, where “bad feelings” between the overseer and the slaves had prompted the absentee owner to pay a visit to his place. When Millaudon tried to reprimand the “ringleader,” the slave responded “with insolence.” Unaccustomed to such conduct, the planter then struck him with a whip. This time the slave responded by furiously charging Millaudon, who finally felled him with a stick. “This seemed to bring the negro to his senses, and
he took refuge in his cabin; but he presently came out with a hatchet …” One of the other slaves interceded at this point and grabbed the hatchet, the rebellious slave fled into the cane field, and Millaudon departed from the plantation, thinking he had suppressed “the affair.” He had not gone far, however, before the report reached him that his slaves were now “in full revolt” and had killed the overseer. Returning once again to the plantation, this time with Union soldiers, Millaudon beheld an extraordinary scene: a large number of his blacks, with their possessions and quantities of plantation goods, were walking alongside a cart on which lay the body of the murdered overseer, wrapped in a flag. “It appears that he had been attacked by five of them while he was at dinner, his head being split open by blows with a hatchet, and penetrated by shots at his face.” The “assassins” reportedly “rejoiced” over their success, and “the whole gang” of some 150 slaves had left the plantation.
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Anticipating acts of vengeance, some overseers fled shortly before the Yankees reached their plantations. Those who remained were apt to find themselves in an uncertain and often perilous situation. If the slaves did not drive the overseer forcibly off the plantation, they conducted themselves in ways that undermined his authority and left him powerless. On the Nightingale Hall plantation, one of several rice plantations in South Carolina owned by Adele Allston, the slaves imprisoned the overseer in his own house. “Mr. Sweat, was a very good, quiet man, and had been liked by all the negroes,” Adele Allston’s daughter wrote of him, “but in the intoxication of freedom their first exercise of it was to tell Mr. Sweat if he left the house they would kill him, and they put a negro armed with a shotgun to guard the house and see that he did not leave alive.” Watching from his window, the conscientious overseer kept a journal of the activities of the blacks, hoping someday to hold them to account.
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Conditions were no different on the Allstons’ Chicora Wood plantation, where Jesse Belflowers, reputedly one of the most efficient overseers in the South Carolina low country, had been in charge since 1842. Having been compelled to surrender the barn keys to the slaves, he confessed to his employer that the workers had become unmanageable. “I am not allowed to say any [thing] a bout Work and have not been to the Barn for the last five days. Jacob is the worst man on the Place, then comes in Scipio Jackey Sawney & Paul.” And in a “P.S.” he added: “Most all of them have arms.” Although Adele Allston continued to support him, she wondered in the aftermath of the war if Belflowers had not outlived his usefulness to the plantation now that the blacks considered themselves to be free. “Belflowers is cowed by the violence of the negroes against him,” she wrote to her son, “and is
afraid
to speak openly. He is trying to curry favour. His own morals are impaired by the revolution, and he always required
backing
as your father expressed it.
You
must tell him what to
do
and
support
him in carrying it out.” This proved to be an accurate assessment. Belflowers never really recovered from his wartime experience and he found it impossible to adapt himself to the post-emancipation changes. “[I]t Looks Verry
hard to Pull ones hat to a Negro,” he conceded in April 1865. Within a year, he was dead—by natural causes. “He is one of our
true
friends,” Adele Allston wrote when she learned he was seriously ill, “and a link connecting us with the past.”
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Not surprisingly, the war and emancipation played upon and exacerbated white fears and fantasies that were as old as slavery itself. Despite the apprehensions they voiced, far fewer masters and mistresses were murdered and assaulted than expected to be. While hiding from the Yankees, Joseph LeConte encountered a fellow South Carolinian who lived from day to day in a state of terror, convinced that a neighbor’s slave he had once flogged would now murder him. “We tried to reason with him and show him the absurdity of his fears,” LeConte recalled, “but all in vain. He looked upon himself as a ‘doomed man.’ ” Although the planter escaped the anticipated vengeance, the fears he had felt were neither unique nor groundless. Always eager for news from her beloved Charleston, Emma Holmes recoiled at the reported murder of “my old friend” William Allen, “who was chopped to pieces in his barn.” Still other reports and rumors of murder and assault dominated the conversations of whites, including the ominous story of a planter who “narrowly escaped being murdered by two of his most trusty negroes.” In a South Carolina community, the Union commander reported that whites were imploring him for protection from the blacks, “who were arming themselves and threatening the lives of their masters,” and one slaveholder had requested protective custody “to save his life.” In nearly all instances of slave violence against their owners, whites tended to blame the Yankees, as did Emma Holmes, for having aroused “the foulest demoniac passions of the negro, hitherto so peaceful and happy.” At least, such explanations preserved whites from what would have otherwise been a most excruciating self-examination.
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Rather than murder their masters, some slaves preferred to expose them to the humiliations they had once meted out so freely. In Choctaw County, Mississippi, slaves administered several hundred lashes to Nat Best, a local planter; in nearby Madison County, two slaves, one of them disguised as a Union soldier, were reported to have “mercillesly whipped” an elderly white woman; and in Virginia, near Jamestown, the former slaves of a reputedly cruel master whipped him some twenty times to remind him of past punishments. When the Yankees arrived, a former Virginia slave recalled, the mistress on a neighboring plantation was whipping a housegirl. “The soldiers made the house girl strip the mistress, whip her, then dress in her clothes. She left with the soldiers.” Young Sarah Morgan reacted with horror rather than skepticism to the reports from Baton Rouge, her home town, that blacks were stopping ladies on the street, cutting the necklaces from their necks, stripping the rings from their fingers, and subsequently bragging of these feats.
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That these proved to be exceptional and isolated examples made them no less sensational and ominous. Although most slave owners did not meet personal violence at the hands of their slaves, the persistent reports and
rumors of murder, insubordination, insolence, and plunder sustained the threat and the genuine fear that black freedom might degenerate into insurrectionary violence. “We are afraid now to walk outside of the gate,” a South Carolina woman confessed, after hearing that field hands in the immediate vicinity were “in a dreadful state.” To listen to jubilant slaves welcome the Yankees by singing (to the tune of a Methodist hymn) “We’ll hang Jeff Davis on the sour apple tree” may have been more of an irritation than an overt threat, but on the Magnolia plantation in Louisiana the slaves erected a gallows intended for their master. To achieve their freedom, the slaves on this plantation had come to believe, according to their master, that they must first hang him and expel the overseer. “[N]o one now can tell what a Day may bring Forth,” the threatened master wrote, “we are all in a State of Great uneasiness.” The gallows was never used, but that became less important than the vivid impression the sight made on the local populace, both whites and blacks.
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The activities of armed groups of slaves operating out of outlaw settlements helped to sustain the fears of insurrection. In some areas they concealed themselves in the swamps, cane brakes, and woods, periodically raiding nearby plantations and farms for provisions. Where planters had abandoned their homes, the slaves belonging to these and adjoining plantations would sometimes congregate to test their newly won freedom and to organize themselves into bands of marauders that roamed the countryside, seizing plantations and parceling out the land and terrorizing the white populace. Even after Union occupation, the threat posed by these outlaw gangs and communities persisted. Early in September 1865, a low-country planter in South Carolina informed the absentee owner of a neighboring plantation that it was “being rapidly filled up by vagabond negroes from all parts of the country who go there when they please and are fast destroying what you left of a settlement. They are thus become a perfect nuisance to the neighborhood and harbor for all the thieves and scamps who wont work.”
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The point at which “insubordination” or “insolence” became “insurrection” was always somewhat obscure. Perhaps no real distinction existed in the white man’s mind, except for the number of blacks involved. When the slaves on the David Pugh plantation in Louisiana took their master and overseer prisoners, that was called “a rebellion.” When slaves on the nearby Woodland sugar estate refused to work without pay, that was termed “a state of munity
[sic].”
When a large group of slaves in low-country South Carolina indulged themselves in the wines and liquors obtained from the homes of former masters, they were perceived as laying the groundwork for “open insurrection at any time.” And when a group of Louisiana slaves, “armed with clubs and cane knives,” poured into New Orleans, a frightened white citizen wrote in his diary of “servile war” in parts of the city.
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