Been in the Storm So Long (38 page)

To the black soldiers, many of them recently slaves, this was the dramatic, the almost unbelievable climax to four years of war that had promised at the outset to be nothing more than a skirmish to preserve the Union. Now they were marching into Richmond as free men, amidst throngs of cheering blacks lining the streets. Within hours, a large crowd of black soldiers and residents assembled on Broad Street, near “Lumpkin Alley,” where the slave jails, the auction rooms, and the offices of the slave traders were concentrated. Among the soldiers gathered here was Garland H. White, a former Virginia slave who had escaped to Ohio before the war and now returned as chaplain of the 28th United States Colored Troops.

From behind the barred windows of Lumpkin’s Jail, the imprisoned slaves began to chant:

The crowd outside took up the chant, the soldiers opened the slave cells, and the prisoners came pouring out, most of them shouting, some praising God and “master Abe” for their deliverance. Chaplain White found himself unable to continue with his speech. “I became so overcome with tears, that I could not stand up under the pressure of such fulness of joy in my own heart. I retired to gain strength.” Several hours later, he located his mother, whom he had not seen for some twenty years.
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The white residents bolted their doors, remained inside, and gained their first impressions of Yankee occupation from behind the safety of their shutters. “For us it was a requiem for buried hopes,” Sallie P. Putnam conceded. The sudden and ignominious Confederate evacuation had been equaled only by the humiliating sight of black soldiers patrolling the city streets. For native whites, it was as though the victorious North had conspired
to make the occupation as distasteful as possible. Few of them could ever forget the long lines of black cavalry sweeping by the Exchange Hotel, brandishing their swords and exchanging “savage cheers” with black residents who were “exulting” over this dramatic moment in their lives. After viewing such spectacles from her window, a young white woman wondered, “Was it to this end we had fought and starved and gone naked and cold? To this end that the wives and children of many dear and gallant friends were husbandless and fatherless? To this end that our homes were in ruins, our state devastated?” Understandably, then, local whites boycotted the military band concerts on the Capitol grounds, even after Federal authorities, in a conciliatory gesture, had barred blacks from attendance.
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Four days after the entry of Union troops, Richmond blacks assembled at the First African Church on Broad Street for a Jubilee Meeting. The church, built in the form of a cross and scantily furnished, impressed a northern visitor as “about the last place one would think of selecting for getting up any particular enthusiasm on any other subject than religion.” On this day, some 1,500 blacks, including a large number of soldiers, packed the frail structure. With the singing of a hymn, beginning “Jesus my all to heaven is gone,” the congregation gave expression to their newly won freedom. After each line, they repeated with added emphasis, “I’m going to join in this army; I’m going to join in this army of my Lord.” But when they came to the verse commencing, “This is the way I long have sought,” the voices reached even higher peaks and few of the blacks could suppress the smiles that came across their faces. Meanwhile, in the Hall of Delegates, where the Confederate Congress had only recently deliberated and where black soldiers now took turns swiveling in the Speaker’s chair, T. Morris Chester, a black war correspondent, tried to assess the impact of these first days of liberation: the rejoicing of the slaves and free blacks, the tumultuous reception accorded President Lincoln when he visited the city, the opening of the slave pens, and the mood of the black population. “They declare that they cannot realize the change; though they have long prayed for it, yet it seems impossible that it has come.”
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It took little time for the “grapevine” to spread the news that Babylon (as some blacks called it) had fallen. When black children attending a freedmen’s school in Norfolk heard the news, they responded with a resounding chorus of “Glory Hallelujah.” Reaching the line “We’ll hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree,” one of the pupils inquired if Davis had, indeed, met that fate. The teacher told her that Davis was still very much alive. At this news, the pupil expressed her dismay “by a decided pout of her lips, such a pout as these children only are able to give.” Still, the news about Richmond excited them. Most of the children revealed that they had relatives there whom they now hoped to see, several looked forward to reunions with fathers and mothers “dat dem dere Secesh carried off,” and those who had neither friends nor relatives in the city were “mighty glad” anyway because they understood the news to mean that “cullud people free now.”
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When the news reached a plantation near Yorktown, the white family broke into tears, not only over the fall of Richmond but over the rumor that the Yankees had captured Jefferson Davis. Overhearing the conversation, a black servant rushed through the preparation of the supper, asked another servant to wait on the table for her, and explained to the family that she had to fetch water from the “bush-spring.” She walked slowly until no one could see her and then ran the rest of the way. Upon reaching the spring, she made certain she was alone and then gave full vent to her feelings.

Several years before, her husband and four children had been sold to a slave dealer. Her thoughts now turned to the possibility of a reunion.
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Only a few miles from the Appomattox Courthouse, Fannie Berry, a house servant, stood in the yard with her mistress, Sarah Ann, and watched the white flag being hoisted in the Pamplin village square. “Oh, Lordy,” her mistress exclaimed, “Lee done surrendered!” Richmond had fallen the previous week, but for Fannie Berry this was the day she would remember the rest of her life.

Meanwhile, she recalled, some “smart alec boys” sneaked up under her mistress’s window and shouted, “Ain’t got to slave no mo’. We’s free! We’s free!” The day after the celebration, however, Fannie Berry went about her usual duties, as if she hadn’t understood the full implications of what had transpired. And as before, she permitted her mistress to hire her out. Finally, the woman for whom she was working told her she was now free, there was no need to return to her mistress, and she could stay and work for room and board. “I didn’t say nothin’ when she wuz tellin’ me, but done ’cided to leave her an’ go back to the white folks dat furst own me.”
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Unlike many of their rural brethren, who evinced a certain confusion about the implications of freedom and when to claim it, the blacks in Richmond had little difficulty in appreciating the significance of this event. And they could test it almost instantly. They promenaded on the hitherto forbidden grounds of Capitol Square. They assembled in groups of five or more without the presence or authorization of a white man. They sought out new employers at better terms. They moved about as they pleased without having to show a pass upon the demand of any white person. “We-uns kin go jist anywhar,” one local black exulted, “don’t keer for no pass—go when yer want’er. Golly! de kingdom hab kim dis time for sure—dat ar what am promised in de generations to dem dat goes up tru great tribulations.” And they immediately seized upon the opportunity to educate themselves and their children, to separate their church from white domination, and to form their own community institutions.
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Less than two years after the fall of Richmond, a Massachusetts clergyman arrived in the city with the intention of establishing a school to train black ministers. But when he sought a building for his school, he encountered considerable resistance, until he met Mary Ann Lumpkin, the black wife of the former slave dealer. She offered to lease him Lumpkin’s Jail. With unconcealed enthusiasm, black workers knocked out the cells, removed the iron bars from the windows, and refashioned the old jail as a school for ministers and freedmen alike. Before long, children and adults entered the doors of the new school, some of them recalling that this was not their first visit to the familiar brick building.
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D
ESPITE THE IMMEDIATE GRATIFICATION
experienced by the black residents of Richmond, the death of slavery proved to be agonizingly slow. That precise moment when a slave could think of himself or herself as a free
person was not always clear. From the very outset of the war, many slaves assumed they were free the day the Yankees came into their vicinity. But with the military situation subject to constant change, any freedom that ultimately depended on the presence of Union troops was apt to be quite precarious, and in some regions the slaves found themselves uncertain as to whose authority prevailed. The Emancipation Proclamation, moreover, excluded numbers of slaves from its provisions, some masters claimed to be unaware of the emancipation order, and still others refused to acknowledge it while the war raged and doubted its constitutionality after the end of hostilities. “I guess we musta celebrated ’Mancipation about twelve times in Harnett County,” recalled Ambrose Douglass, a former North Carolina slave. “Every time a bunch of No’thern sojers would come through they would tell us we was free and we’d begin celebratin’. Before we would get through somebody else would tell us to go back to work, and we would go. Some of us wanted to jine up with the army, but didn’t know who was goin’ to win and didn’t take no chances.”
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Outside of a few urban centers, Union soldiers rarely remained long enough in any one place to enforce the slave’s new status. Of the slaves in her region “who supposed they were free,” a South Carolina white woman noted how they were “gradually discovering a Yankee army passing through the country and telling them they are free is not sufficient to make it a fact.” Nor was the protection of the freedman’s status the first priority of an army engaged in a life-and-death struggle. When the troops needed to move on, many of the blacks were understandably dismayed, confused, and frightened. “Christ A’mighty!” one slave exclaimed in late 1861 when told the troops were about to depart. “If Massa Elliott Garrard catch me, might as well be dead—he kill me, certain.” Even if Union officers assured him of his safety, the slave had little reason to place any confidence in the word of someone who would not be around on that inevitable day of reckoning. While encamped in the North Carolina countryside, the black regiment to which Henry M. Turner was attached had attracted nearly 700 slaves from the immediate vicinity. “To describe the scene produced by our departure,” he wrote, “would be too solemn, if time and space permitted. Suffice it to say, many were the tears shed, many sorrowful hearts bled.… God alone knows, I was compelled to evade their sight as much as possible, to be relieved of such words as these, ‘Chaplain, what shall I do? where can we go? will you come back?’ ”
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Widespread dismay at the impending departure of the Yankees reflected not only the prevailing uncertainty about freedom but the very real fear that their masters or the entire white community might wreak vengeance on them for any irregular behavior during the brief period of occupation. In a Mississippi town near Vicksburg, a number of slaves had joined with the Yankees to plunder stores and homes, apparently assuming that the soldiers would be around to protect them. But now the troops were moving on, leaving the looters with their newly acquired possessions and all the slaves, regardless of what role they had played in the pillaging, at
the mercy of whites who felt betrayed and robbed. With “undisguised amazement,” the blacks watched the soldiers leave, and within hours one of them caught up with the Yankee columns and reported that a number of his people had already been killed. On a plantation near Columbia, South Carolina, the master and mistress waited until the Yankees departed and then vented their anger on a young slave girl who had helped the soldiers to locate the hidden silverware, money, and jewelry. “She’d done wrong I know,” a former slave recalled, “but I hated to see her suffer so awful for it. After de Yankees had gone, de missus and massa had de poor gal hung ’till she die. It was something awful to see.” With similar swiftness, a slaveholder who was reputedly “very good to his Negroes” became so enraged over the behavior of a black that the moment the Yankees left the area he strung him up to the beams of a shed.
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