Been in the Storm So Long (40 page)

If she found any consolation in her readings, it was only to know how often “these same sorrows and unmerited punishments that we are now undergoing [have] been visited upon the brave, the deserving, the heroic, and the patient of all ages and in all climes!” Returning to the history that was being acted out in her own household, she bemoaned the abolition of slavery as “a most unprecedented robbery,” intended only for the “greater humiliation” of the southern people. “However, it
is
done,” she sighed; “and we, the
chained witnesses
, can only look on.”
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With such thoughts preying upon them, slave-owning families prepared to surrender their human property but not the ideology that had made such possessions possible and necessary.

W
HATEVER DOUBTS
persisted in the minds of slave owners about the status of their blacks were largely resolved in the aftermath of the Confederate collapse. On the day he heard of General Lee’s surrender, Thomas Dabney, a prominent Mississippi planter, rode out into his fields and informed the slaves that they were free; at the same time, his daughter recalled, he advised them “to work the crop as they had been doing” and he promised to compensate them “as he thought just.” Not all masters acted with such decisiveness, even after Appomattox. Only gradually, often belatedly, did many of them concede freedom to their slaves, but not without considerable self-torment, bitterness, and anxiety about the future. After Union troops occupied Augusta, Georgia, some three weeks after Lee’s surrender, Jefferson Thomas read the edict from the commanding officer and only then did he feel compelled to call his slaves together to talk to them about the
probability
of freedom. When David G. Harris, a South Carolina planter, first heard about the emancipation edict in early June 1865, he said nothing to his slaves; not until mid-August, four months after the end of the war, and only after Union troops stationed nearby ordered the planters to inform their slaves, did most of them in his vicinity do so.
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Although they had anticipated it for some time, many slaveholding families still expressed incredulity when emancipation became a reality. “If they don’t belong to me, whose are they?” one woman asked, clinging to the certainty that black people had to belong to someone. To be deprived of property some of them had worked hard to accumulate struck them with particular dismay. “I tell you it is mighty hard,” a dispossessed slave owner averred, “for my pa paid his own money for our niggers; and that’s not all they’ve robbed us of. They have taken our horses and cattle and sheep
and every thing
.” Even when they faced up to the inevitable, some had no way
of knowing how to go about freeing their slaves. “This is more than I anticipated,” the widowed mistress of a Georgia plantation wrote on May 17, 1865, “yet I trust it will be a gradual thing & not done all at once.” Twelve days later, she remained undecided on how to proceed. “What I shall do with mine is a question that troubles day & night. It is my last thought at night & the first in the morning.” After finally telling them they were free and promising to look after them, she wondered how she could possibly survive without them.
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The way to retain their slaves, some families determined, was to make freedom a vague and frightening prospect. Not until nearly two months after Union occupation and the end of the war did the Elmore family of Columbia, South Carolina, “talk very freely” to their servants about “the probability of freedom,” and then only to make clear to them that they would find freedom “much harder than slavery.” Even as some of their blacks were taking the initiative to claim their freedom, the Elmores waited until the end of May to inform the remaining servants that they were no longer slaves. In nearby Camden, Emma Holmes heard that an emancipation edict had been issued in Columbia, “but we have not yet seen it, nor have any Yankees been here”; in the meantime, Emma and her mother warned the servants that in the event of freedom they would have to pay their own expenses. The uncertainty about emancipation did not deter them from dismissing two servants for insubordination, nor did it inhibit several of their slaves from leaving in mid-June without saying a word to anyone. To retain Chloe, a valued servant and cook, they told her that freedom for the blacks remained uncertain until Congress acted and most likely “negroes [would] still [be] obliged to remain with their masters.” They also pleaded with Chloe “not to sneak away at night as the others had done, disgracing themselves by running away.” When the Yankees finally arrived, the commanding officer, as Emma Holmes understood him, declared that the slaves were not yet free but “shall work and behave properly, though on a different footing with their former masters.” Nevertheless, Chloe left in late August, after giving two days’ notice, and Ann, the laundress and a “poor deluded fool,” departed without even finishing her ironing.
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Henry W. Ravenel, the prominent South Carolinian who thought of himself as a benevolent master, was typical of those who refused to rush headlong into an acknowledgment of emancipation. “Many negroes in Aiken,” he wrote in early May 1865, “hearing they were free in Augusta have gone over to hear from the Yankees the truth. Some are returning disappointed.… Most that we hear is mere rumor.” The Union officers stationed nearby claimed to have received no instructions regarding emancipation. Thinking the issue still in doubt, Ravenel opted for delay. “My negroes have made no change in their behaviour, & are going on as they have always hitherto done. Until I know that they are legally free, I shall let them continue.” After the local Union Army commander ordered that the slaves be set free, Ravenel took the required oath of allegiance to the
United States Constitution in late May and only then did he resolve his doubts about emancipation. “It is the settled policy of the country,” he concluded. “I have today formally announced to my negroes the fact, & made such arrangements with each as the new relation rendered necessary.”
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While slave-owning families determined how and whether to break the news, the blacks themselves were not necessarily passive spectators. Most often, they first heard about their freedom when the Yankee soldiers passed through the vicinity. “We’s diggin’ potatoes,” a former Louisiana and Texas slave recalled, “when de Yankees come up with two big wagons and make us come out of de fields and free us. Dere wasn’t no cel’bration ’bout it. Massa say us can stay couple days till us ’cide what to do.” In the cities and towns, the presence of Union troops both confirmed and helped to enforce black freedom; many rural slaves, in fact, learned of their freedom by accompanying their master to town on some errand. “No Negro is improved by a visit to Columbia, & a visit to Charleston is his certain destruction,” an up-country South Carolinian concluded, after he had observed the demoralizing effects of such a visit on a neighbor’s slave who now talked wildly about making a “bargain” before working any more.
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The same network of communications developed by slaves to keep themselves informed of the war also helped to spread the news about freedom to plantations and farms bypassed by the Yankees. The conversations of the “white folks” remained a prime source of information, and many body servants returning with their masters from the war front were feted by their fellow slaves not only for their heroism but for the valuable information they brought. “All de slaves crowded ’roun me an’ wanted to know if dey wus gonna be freed or not an’ when I tol’ ’em dat de war wus over an’ dat dey wus free dey wus all very glad.” Charlotte Brooks had been sold at the age of seventeen to a hard-driving Texas planter. Working in the house as a cook, she overheard a conversation about freedom, immediately ran into the field to inform the other slaves, and they all quit work together. Still another source of information was employers seeking to hire black laborers. Taking advantage of the momentary absence of a master, who had refused to tell his slaves they were free, two white men representing a nearby mill informed Lizzie Hughes’s mother she was a free woman, handed her “a piece of paper” to prove it, and offered to pay her twelve dollars a month if she would cook for the mill hands.
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Whatever the source, the news reached some slaves at a most opportune time. During an altercation with her mistress, Annie Gregg, a Tennessee slave, watched as she picked up a handful of switches with the intention of meting out the usual punishment for insolence. “I picked up the pan of boiling water to scald the chickens in. She got scared of me, told me to put the pan down. I didn’t do it.” Quickly called to the scene, the master scolded his wife rather than the slave, reminding her that the slaves were now “as free as you are or I am.” To Annie Gregg, the intervention of her master, whom she had always considered “cruel,” was only slightly less startling
than the news itself. “That is the first I ever heard about freedom,” she recalled. The news of freedom had immediate significance, too, for the Louisiana slaves hiding out in the cane brakes along the Mississippi River, for the Texas mother who dreaded having to send her small child out into the fields to work, for the North Carolina slave still wearing a ball and chain after trying to run away (a Yankee officer had to take him to town to cut it off), and for the many slaves who suddenly found themselves released from slave pens and jails—among them, “Uncle Tom,” an Arkansas slave, “the best reader, white or black, for miles,” who had made the mistake of reading a newspaper with the latest war news to a gathering of blacks. And for a Tennessee slave who had been purchasing her freedom, the news relieved her of the need to pay any more. “De rest ain’t paid yet,” she said with a smile. “No, sah! leave dat to de judgment-day.”
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While their “white folks” refused to confirm their freedom, numbers of slaves continued to strike out on their own. The many blacks who flocked to the Union camps or left with the Yankee soldiers had acted to determine their own status, as did the slaves in Kentucky and Missouri and other states and regions unaffected by the Emancipation Proclamation. Yet despite examples of slave initiative, the habits and dependency learned as slaves, as well as the need to survive, prompted many blacks to refrain from any premature or hasty assertion of their freedom. If doubts persisted, both reason and fear sustained those doubts. Even when the Yankees informed them of freedom, they often accompanied the announcement with admonitions that left some blacks understandably confused. In explaining their new status to them, a Union officer in Liberty County, Georgia, reportedly warned the blacks “to stay at home and work harder than they had ever done in their lives.” The soldiers, he added, were there to make certain “that they behaved themselves.” A white resident who overheard the talk observed, “They (the Nigs) were quite disgusted.”
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The example of blacks who were beaten for claiming their freedom prematurely tended to make the others cautious about how they acted and what they said. Again, the temperaments of individual masters and mistresses varied considerably, particularly when they had to face still further losses from a war that had already cost them dearly. While some tried to deny or distort the news of freedom, others backed their denials with a show of force. The master on a Tennessee plantation interpreted a slave’s assertion of freedom as a display of insolence and slapped the woman across the face—the first time he had ever laid hands on her. Only after a visit to the nearby town did he reluctantly accept the fact of emancipation. “Seemed like he couldn’t understand how freedom was to be,” one of his former slaves recalled. No matter what they heard, however, some slave-owning families resisted the advent of freedom and used every wile and device to postpone or deny it. “Ed,” a Georgia mistress inquired of a young slave, “you suppose them Yankees would spill their blood to come down here to free you niggers?” That question he could not answer, but “I’se free anyhow,” he insisted. At that, the mistress dropped any further attempt
to reason with him. “Shut up,” she ordered, or “I’ll mash your mouth.” Not until midsummer 1865, and only after the arrival of Union troops, did she acknowledge his freedom.
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With the end of the war, Federal officials attempted in various ways to impress upon slaves and masters that emancipation was now the law of the land. That ran contrary, however, to the persistent belief in some regions that slavery remained a legal institution until the new state legislatures and perhaps eventually the Supreme Court of the United States resolved the question. By offering inducements to their blacks to remain with them, some planters evidently hoped not only to complete the current crops but to reap the benefits of court decisions which might invalidate the Emancipation Proclamation. The only real question to be decided, according to the leading newspapers of Jackson, Mississippi, was whether or not the state should adopt a system of gradual and compensated emancipation. After visiting three counties in that state, a Union officer thought such opinions “to be the views of the people generally” and that the prospects for an early recognition of emancipation were quite dim. “Nowhere that I have been do the people generally realize the fact that the negro is Free.”
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