Been in the Storm So Long (37 page)

To place the blame for slave disaffection on lax discipline or outside influences, as so many slaveholders chose to do, was to make the same false assumptions about blacks. If the war taught slaveholders anything, it should have revealed how little they actually knew their blacks, how they had mistaken the slave’s outward demeanor for his inner feelings, his docility for contentment and acquiescence, and how in numerous instances they had been deliberately deceived so that they might later be the more easily betrayed. The conduct of slaves during the recent crisis, a South Carolina planter conceded, should have impressed upon every slaveholding family that “we were all laboring under a delusion.”

Whatever happened in the future, no matter what kind of South emerged from the ruins, it seemed certain that the relations which masters and slaves alike had enjoyed or tolerated in the past would never be quite the same again.

W
HEN THE
U
NION
A
RMY
neared his Savannah River plantations, Louis Manigault fled. That was December 1864. More than two years later, having leased the plantations to a former Confederate officer, Manigault decided to visit the place for the first time since his hasty departure and assess the impact of the war. Traveling along the familiar roads between Savannah and his plantations, he noted traces of previous army encampments, the twisted ruins of the Charleston and Savannah Railroad, and the remains of what had once been a magnificent neighboring mansion. Upon entering the plantations, he was greeted enthusiastically by his former slave cooper, George, who still called him “Maussa.” Standing next to the ruins of his country house, Manigault recalled how he had spent here “the most happy period” of his childhood. All that remained of the house was a tall chimney and some scattered bricks which the slaves had not stolen and sold in Savannah. Except for the “Negro Houses,” which he had constructed just before the war, the entire settlement had “a most abandoned and forlorn appearance.”

As he approached the old slave quarters, some of the blacks came out of their cabins, hesitant in their greetings, “not knowing whether under the new regime it would be proper to meet me politely or not.” Manigault shook hands with them, called each by his name (“which seemed to please them highly”), and joked with them about his present plight. “Lord! a Massy!” he mocked when asked why he had not returned earlier. “You tink I can lib in de Chimney.” Near the center of the plantation, twelve of his former slaves greeted him. “They all seemed pleased to see me, calling me ‘Maussa’ & the Men still showing respect by taking off their caps.” He spotted “Captain” Hector, “as cunning as Negroes can be,” his “constant companion” until the war transformed him into “a great Rascal” and troublemaker. Hector was now a foreman.

Much to Manigault’s surprise, Jack Savage, the slave he had sold in Savannah, had returned. “Tall, black, lousy, in rags, & uncombed, kinky, knotty-hair,” this man had been “the most notoriously bad character & worst Negro of the place,” the one slave he had thought capable of murder and arson, and yet acknowledged to be intelligent and an able carpenter. The two men now shook hands and exchanged “a few friendly remarks.” To Manigault, it seemed highly ironic that Jack Savage, “the last one I should have dreamt of,” greeted him, “whilst sitting idly upon the Negro-House steps dirty & sluggish, I behold young Women to whom I had most frequently presented Earrings, Shoes, Calicos, Kerchiefs &c, &c,—formerly pleased to meet me, but now not even lifting the head as I passed.”

Unlike many slaveholders, Louis Manigault had never pretended to understand his blacks. Before the war, he reflected, fear had largely shaped the behavior of the slaves, and “we Planters could never get at the truth.”
Those who claimed to know the Negro were simply deceiving themselves. “Our ‘Northern Brethren’ inform us that we Southerners knew nothing of the Negro Character. This I have always considered
perfectly true
, but they further state that They (the Yankees) have always known the true Character of the Negro which I consider
entirely false
in the extreme. So deceitful is the Negro that as far as my own experience extends I could never in a single instance decipher his character.” Conversing now with his former slaves, Manigault was suddenly overcome by a strange feeling. “I almost imagined myself with Chinese, Malays or even the Indians in the interior of the Philippine Islands.” It was as though he were on alien turf and had never really known these people who had once been his slaves.
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Before setting out to make a new life for himself, William Colbert, a former Alabama slave, looked back for a last time at the old plantation on which he had spent more than twenty years. He had no reason to regret his decision to leave. The bondage he had endured had been harsh, reflecting the temperament of a master who had never hesitated to whip his slaves severely. “All de niggers ’roun’ hated to be bought by him kaze he wuz so mean,” Colbert recalled. “When he wuz too tired to whup us he had de overseer do it; and de overseer wuz meaner dan de massa.” The arrival of the Yankees had not materially affected their lives. After a few days of looting, the soldiers had suddenly left “an’ we neber seed ’em since.” After the war, the blacks only gradually left and the plantation slowly deteriorated. Many years later, reflecting on his experience, Colbert captured with particular vividness the ambivalence that had necessarily characterized a slave’s attachment to his master. His recollections were tinged neither with romantic nostalgia nor with abject hatred. Whatever bitterness he still felt may have been dissipated both by the passage of time and by the knowledge that Jim Hodison, his former master, had come to learn in his own way the dimensions of human tragedy. And that was an experience William Colbert could easily share with him.

After the war, Savilla Burrell left the plantation near Jackson’s Creek, South Carolina, on which she had been raised as a slave. Not until many
years later did she return to visit her old master, Tom Still, in his final days. Sitting there by his side, trying to keep the flies off him, she could clearly see the lines of sorrow “plowed on dat old face” and she recalled that time when he had looked so impressive as a captain in the Confederate cavalry. “It come into my ’membrance de song of Moses: ‘de Lord had triumphed glorily and de hoss and his rider have been throwed into de sea.’ ”
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O
N THE NIGHT
of April 2, 1865, Confederate troops abandoned Richmond. The sudden decision caught Robert Lumpkin, the well-known dealer in slaves, with a recently acquired shipment which he had not yet managed to sell. Desperately, he tried to remove them by the same train that would carry Jefferson Davis out of the Confederate capital. When Lumpkin reached the railway station, however, he found a panic-stricken crowd held back by a line of Confederate soldiers with drawn bayonets.
Upon learning that he could not remove his blacks, the dealer marched them back to Lumpkin’s Jail, a two-story brick house with barred windows, located in the heart of Richmond’s famous slave market—an area known to local blacks as “the Devil’s Half Acre.” After their return, the slaves settled down in their cells for still another night, apparently unaware that this would be their last night of bondage. For Lumpkin, the night would mark the loss of a considerable investment and the end of a profession. Not long after the collapse of the Confederacy, however, he took as his legal wife the black woman he had purchased a decade before and who had already borne him two children.
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With Union soldiers nearing the city, a Confederate official thought the black residents looked as stunned and confused as the whites. “The negroes stand about mostly silent,” he wrote, “as if wondering what will be their fate. They make no demonstrations of joy.” Obviously he had not seen them earlier that day emerging from a church meeting with particular exuberance, “shaking hands and exchanging congratulations upon all sides.” Nor had he heard, probably, that familiar refrain with which local blacks occasionally regaled themselves: “Richmond town is burning down, High diddle diddle inctum inctum ah.” Whatever the origins of the song, the night of the evacuation must have seemed like a prophetic fulfillment. Explosions set off by the retreating Confederates left portions of the city in flames and precipitated a night of unrestrained looting and rioting, in which army deserters and the impoverished residents of Richmond’s white slum shared the work of expropriation and destruction with local slaves and free blacks. Black and white women together raided the Confederate Commissary, while the men rolled wheelbarrows filled with bags of flour, meal, coffee, and sugar toward their respective shanties. Along the row of retail stores, a large black man wearing
a
bright red sash around his waist directed the looting. After breaking down the doors with the crowbar he carried on his shoulder, he stood aside while his followers rushed into the shops and emptied them of their contents. He took nothing for himself, apparently satisfied to watch the others partake of commodities long denied them. If only for this night, racial distinctions and customs suddenly became irrelevant.
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Determined to reap the honors of this long-awaited triumph, white and black Yankees vied with each other to make the initial entry into the Confederate capital. The decision to halt the black advance until the white troops marched into the city would elicit some bitter comments in the northern black press. “History will show,” one editor proclaimed, “that they [the black troops] were in the suburbs of Richmond long before the white soldiers, and but for the untimely and unfair order to halt, would have triumphantly planted their banner first upon the battlements of the capital of
‘ye greate confederaci.’
” Many years later, a former Virginia slave still brooded over this issue. “Gawdammit, ’twas de nigguhs tuk Richmond,” he kept insisting. “Ah ain’t nevuh knowed nigguhs—even all uh dem nigguhs—could mek such uh ruckus. One huge sea uh black faces filt de streets fum wall tuh wall, an’ dey wan’t nothin’ but nigguhs in sight.”
Regardless of who entered Richmond first, black newspapers and clergymen perceived the hand of God in this ironic triumph. The moment the government reversed its policy on black recruitment it had doomed the Confederacy. And now, “as a finishing touch, as though He would speak audible words of approval to the nation,” God had delivered Richmond—“that stronghold of treason and wickedness”—into the hands of black soldiers. “This is an admonition to which men, who make war on God would do well to take heed.”
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