Been in the Storm So Long (42 page)

Once the slaves had been assembled for the master’s announcement, most of them stood quietly and anxiously, waiting to hear how he would choose to tell them of their freedom. Some of them remained apprehensive, recalling that the only previous occasion for such a gathering had been to tell them they had been sold. Before his master could say a word, Robert Falls remembered questioning him in a mocking manner, “Old Marster, what you got to tell us?” His mother quickly warned him that he would be
whipped but the slave owner decided instead to use the outburst to make his point. As Falls recalled his words:

In less than ten months, he was dead. “Well, sir,” Falls explained, “it killed him.”
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What the slaves recalled most vividly, “jes like it yestiddy,” was the manner in which the master recognized their freedom, both his words and temperament at that moment. The way he imparted the information revealed much about his state of mind, the kind of relationship he thought he enjoyed with his slaves, and how he viewed the future. He first read to them some official-looking paper setting forth the details of emancipation. It might have been the Emancipation Proclamation itself or a recent Federal circular; in any event, the language was cold, detached, bureaucratic, and often incomprehensible. After the formal reading, Silas Smith of South Carolina remembered, “us still sets, kaise no writing never aggrevated us niggers way back dar.” Since such a moment called for absolute clarity, most masters obliged with their own explanation, and those were the words the slaves had waited to hear. “We didn’t quite understand what it was all about,” a former Missouri field hand recalled, “until he informed us that it meant we were slaves no longer, that we were free to go as we liked, to work for anyone who would hire us and be responsible to no one but ourselves.” As if to underscore the significance of his remarks, and perhaps in some instances to commemorate the slave’s graduation to a different status, some masters ceremonially presented to each of them “de age statement,” which included his or her name, place of birth, and approximate age or date of birth. “I’s 16 year when surrender come,” Sam Jones Washington told an interviewer many years later. “I knows dat, ’cause of massa’s statement. All us niggers gits de statement when surrender come.”
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To free his blacks was not to surrender the convictions with which he had held them as slaves. In explaining to them the circumstances that now made freedom necessary, most masters made it abundantly clear that their actions did not flow from some long-repressed humanitarian urge. “We went to the war and fought,” a Texas planter declared, “but the Yankees done whup us, and they say the niggers is free.” That was the typical explanation, as most ex-slaves recalled it: they were now free “ ’cause de gov’ment say you is free” or “ ’cause the damned Yankees done ’creed you are.” If some slaves had felt that only “massa” could free them, many masters insisted that the Yankees had set them free. That they chose to view emancipation in these terms was perfectly consistent with their own self-image. “I have seen slavery in every Southern State,” a prominent
Virginian concluded in June 1865, “and I am convinced that for the slave it is the best condition in every way that has been devised.” The “tens of thousands” of old men, women, and children he expected would now starve for lack of support only made him that much more certain. “A Farmer now has to pay his hands and he will keep none but such as will work well, women with families and old men are not worth their food and they are being turned adrift by the thousands.” As many masters viewed this moment, then, if they had acted from humanitarian considerations, they would have retained slavery, because of the protection and sustenance it afforded a people incapable of caring for themselves.
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If slaveholders felt morally reprehensible or guilt-ridden, they evinced no indication of it at the moment they declared their blacks to be free. Nothing in the postwar behavior and attitudes of these people suggested that the ownership of slaves had necessarily compromised their values or tortured their consciences. Nor was there any reason to suspect hypocrisy or self-deception in the “strong conviction” of Henry W. Ravenel, for example, “that the old relation of master & slave, had received the divine sanction & was the best condition in which the two races could live together for mutual benefit.” Any detectable twinges of conscience in the slaveholding class largely stemmed from the realization that some had abused the institution. But like any northern employer, the master maintained that the excesses of the few should not be permitted to question or undermine the system itself. Nor were most of them intent on foisting the responsibility for bondage on the New Englanders who had initially supplied them. After all, a New Orleans newspaper observed several years after the war, the transplantation from Africa to North America had “humanized” the Negro, regenerating him in body, mind, and morals. Rather than confess any misgivings about their slaveholding past, most masters at this moment viewed themselves as decent men, good Christians who had performed a useful, necessary, and benevolent task, fulfilling an obligation to an inferior people which more than compensated for the labor they had received in return. There was nothing for which they needed to apologize. As George A. Trenholm proudly told the Chamber of Commerce of Augusta, Georgia, in early 1866, “Sir, we have educated them. We took them barbarians, we returned them Christianized and civilized to those from whom we received them; we paid for them, we return them without compensation. Our consciences are clear, our hands are clean.”
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If any slave owner felt the need to reassure himself, he might use the occasion of emancipation to remind the assembled blacks how well they had fared under his tutelage. After making precisely that point, a Texas planter who had moved his slaves there from Virginia during the war asked them if he had ever treated anyone meanly. Every one of the slaves, Liza Smith recalled, shouted, “No, sir!” and that brought a smile to their master’s face. Equally confident of his image, Isaiah Day, known to his slaves as “Papa Day” because he never liked the title of master, read the official proclamation and then told them, as one of his slaves recalled: “De
gov’ment don’t need to tell you you is free, ’cause you been free all you days. If you wants to stay you can and if you wants to go, you can. But if you go, lots of white folks ain’t gwine treat you like I does.” With slightly less confidence, a Georgia planter, proud of the behavior of his slaves during the Yankee occupation, confessed to them, as he freed them, that he had never realized the extent of their love for him. “He told us he had done tried to be good to us and had done de best he could for us,” one of his former slaves recalled. John Bonner, an Alabama planter, after reminding his slaves how well he had provided for them, simply warned any who now chose to leave that they would “jes’ have to root, pig, or die.”
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To impress his freed slaves with the bounties and security they had enjoyed was less designed to assuage any feelings of guilt than to entice them to remain with him. That prime consideration elicited many a personal note in the master’s announcement of freedom. With tears in his eyes, his head bowed, and his hands clasped behind his back, the Reverend Robert Turner, a preacher, farmer, and storekeeper, told his newly freed slaves how much he admired each of them, appreciated their faithfulness, and hated to lose them. The appeal had no apparent effect, as nearly every one of his blacks left him. To remind their slaves of the “good life” they had provided them, some masters chose to celebrate emancipation with a bountiful feast or party. On a plantation in Harnett County, North Carolina, Taylor Hugh McLean called his slaves out of the fields, met them at the gate, told them they were free, and invited them to eat dinner. It proved to be a feast few of them could forget.

With similar generosity, John Thomas Boykin, a substantial Georgia planter, turned emancipation into “a big day,” killed several hogs for the occasion, rolled out barrels of whiskey, and invited his freed slaves to enjoy themselves and consider his proposal to stay with him and work for pay.
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Whether or not a master consciously used such festivities to seduce his newly freed work force, none of those ex-slaves who recalled them claimed it influenced their decision to stay on or leave.

Few slave owners, in any case, thought it necessary or desirable to accompany the announcement of freedom with a lavish entertainment. Maintaining the posture of the protective father, addressing his “children” who might soon experience the cruel and inhospitable world outside the plantation, many masters preferred to use this solemn occasion to offer advice and moral instruction. This was “no time for happiness,” a Mississippi planter told his former slaves, for they had no experience with freedom.
Albert Hill, who had been a slave in Georgia, recalled how his master tried to explain to them on this day the difference between freedom (“hustlin’ for ourselves”) and slavery (“dependin’ on someone else”). Even as the master stressed the problems his slaves were liable to confront as freedmen and freedwomen, he seldom suggested, at least not in their presence, that he may have been negligent in preparing them to assume the responsibilities of freedom. Rather, he reminded his blacks how he had raised them to be honest, to work diligently, and to lead moral and Christian lives. But at the same time, and without perceiving any contradiction, he usually urged them to remain on the plantation until, as one former slave recalled, “dey git de foothold and larn how to do”—that is, until they learned how to take care of themselves.
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The least any gentleman planter could do at this time was to invite his “people” to stay with him and continue to share in the comforts, sustenance, and protection the old “home” supposedly afforded them. He acted, in other words, to preserve his source of labor in the guise of protecting his former slaves from the inevitable hardships and snares of freedom. Claiming a responsibility toward them as dependents, which emancipation should in no way compromise, some masters tried to ease the “burden” of freedom on the older slaves and the children. “Old Amelia & her two grandchildren,” Henry W. Ravenel wrote, “I will spare the mockery of offering freedom to. I must support them as long as I have any thing to give.” Whether from a sense of paternal obligation or to exploit their labor, some masters insisted that the children remain with them until they reached the age of twenty-one, and the apprenticeship laws usually permitted them to do so if the parents were missing or unable to support the children. Silas Dothrum, a former Arkansas slave who could not recall ever seeing his parents, was about ten years old when freedom came: “They kept me in bondage and a girl that used to be with them. We were bound to them that we would have to stay with them. They kept me just the same as under bondage. I wasn’t allowed no kind of say-so.” In some instances, the attempt to retain the children amounted to little less than kidnapping, with the masters resisting the efforts of parents to claim them. Millie Randall, a former Louisiana slave, recalled how her master “takes me and my brother, Benny, in de wagon and druv us round and round so dey couldn’t find us.” Finally, their mother induced the justice of the peace to intervene on her behalf.
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Although a confusion of values often marked their efforts, many slaveholders perceived the need to accommodate their old views and moral justifications to the reality of freed blacks. Few planters embodied the paternal ideal more faithfully in this moment of transition than Myrta Lockett Avary’s father, a Virginia slaveholder. His daughter’s recollection of the day freedom came to the plantation testified quite vividly to what the South wanted so desperately to believe—the enduring strength and viability of the traditional ties that had bound the white family and their blacks. Although the Yankees had already told the slaves they were free,
they waited to hear the master make it so. On the night of the announcement, Myrta Avary recalled, the slaves assembled in the back yard, many of them holding pine torches. On the porch of the Big House stood her father, next to a table on which a candle had been placed. Looking out at a “sea of uplifted black faces,” all of them now fastened on him, the planter first read from a formal document, presumably the Emancipation Proclamation, after which he spoke to them in a trembling voice.