Been in the Storm So Long (60 page)

Whether blacks appealed to Johnson or to God, the results were less than reassuring. Not only did the veteran find himself restricted in his access to public facilities, the ballot, and the jury box but his military service
made him an obvious target for the frustrations of whites. “When they commenced mustering out the colored troops,” one veteran recalled, “they told us to go back as close to the old masters as we could get. I didn’t like that much. Then the next hard times that come up was the mobbing and lynching of Negroes.”
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To former slaves who had served in the Union Army, the question of what they should do with themselves after leaving military service defied any easy resolution. “I didn’t want to be under the white folks again,” a former Tennessee slave and soldier remembered as his most vivid thought at that time. Three soldiers on active duty in South Carolina typified the dilemma of others as they prepared in 1866 to return to civilian life. None of them relished the idea of returning to the old plantations where they had worked as slaves, particularly if any of them had fled to join the Army. Having seen too many hired men “turned off without being paid,” Melton R. Lenton wanted to avoid contract labor. “They try to pull us down faster than we can climb up.” He thought his military service entitled him to a plot of land, as did his previous labor for white men. “They have no reason to say that we will not work, for we raised them, and sent them to school, and bought their land, and now it is as little as they can do to give us some of their land—be it little or much.” H. D. Dudley, who had risen to the rank of sergeant, recalled that, in the battles he had fought, racial distinctions had no place. “That was so in battle, but it is not so now. If any man believes that there is no distinction in regard to color now, let him approach the cars, or enter a hotel or a steamboat, and he will be set right upon that matter.” Like Sergeant Dudley, W. W. Sanders wondered if he had reaped any rewards for his years of service. He doubted it. “It seems that all our fighting has done us but little good. Our politicians and leading men seem to be doing but little for us. Our trust is in God and our own good conduct. Let us convince the world that we are worthy to enjoy the rights we ask for.” Whether he would be in any position to prove anything remained a troublesome question.
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If many whites thought the former soldier a potentially dangerous citizen, they were in less agreement about his desirability as a laborer. Despite the proscriptions visited upon allegedly exploitative peddlers at the army camps, no such restrictions were placed on planters and speculators, many of whom inundated the military installations around discharge time with contracts in hand, eager for the services of the blacks. “The negro was king,” a northern traveler wrote after witnessing the ways in which Mississippi and Louisiana planters had descended upon a black regiment being mustered out near Natchez.

Ironically, some planters thought them more desirable laborers because they had been soldiers and might be able to exert restraint and discipline on the other workers. For that reason, the higher the rank, the better offer a black veteran might expect. “I told a nigger officer that I’d give him thirty dollars a month just to stay on my plantation and wear his uniform,” remarked a substantial planter from Jackson, Mississippi. “The fellow did it, and I’m havin’ no trouble with my niggers. They’re afraid of the shoulder-straps.”
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If black soldiers had known what awaited them in civilian life, they might have kept more than their uniforms upon being mustered out of the Army. The rewards of plantation labor would prove disappointing; whites retained economic power and returned political and police power to those who had wielded it before the war; and as black dissatisfaction mounted, so did the white man’s recourse to physical violence, legal repression, and vigilante justice. For many freedmen, self-preservation took precedence over self-employment. “As one of the disfranchised race,” a Louisiana black advised, “I would say to every colored soldier, ‘Bring your gun home.’ ”
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S
EVERAL MONTHS
after the end of the war, two white men overtook an elderly black woman who had insisted on leaving her former master’s plantation near Washington, Georgia. While one of the men shot her, the other broke her ribs and beat her on the head with a stone until she died; they left her body unburied in a secluded spot. Ten days later, the body was discovered and military authorities arrested the two assailants. Whether the brutal murder or the subsequent arrests excited more public indignation and concern is not entirely clear. “She certainly was an old fool,” Eliza Andrews said of the victim, “but I have never yet heard that folly was a capital offense.” Judge Garnett Andrews, Eliza’s father and a former state legislator who had opposed secession, agreed to defend the two men charged with the crime, not because he approved of their deed but because he felt they deserved a fair trial. He said very little about the case, his daughter observed, “because conversation on such subjects nearly always brings on a political row in the family.”

Although Eliza Andrews thought the murder had been “a very ugly affair,” her sympathies almost instinctively went out to the accused. After all, “there is only negro evidence for all these horrors, and nobody can tell how much of it is false.” As for the two defendants, one of them was a family man whose “poor wife is … almost starving herself to death from grief” and whose children were reportedly frightened into convulsions when the
soldiers arrested their father, while the other was a twenty-year-old youth whose “poor old father hangs around the courtroom, putting his head in every time the door is opened, trying to catch something of what is going on.” Judge Andrews thought it unfortunate that the trial should take place at this time, for the Yankees would no doubt “believe everything the negroes say and put the very worst construction on it.” His daughter agreed. “Brutal crimes happen in all countries now and then,” she confided to her journal, “especially in times of disorder and upheaval such as the South is undergoing, but the North, fed on Mrs. Stowe’s lurid pictures, likes to believe that such things are habitual among us, and this horrible occurrence will confirm them in their opinion.”

Eliza Andrews made no mention of the verdict handed down in the murder case, except to note that her father believed one of the defendants would surely hang and entertained little hope of saving the other. But she did record still another “unfortunate affair” that occurred at the same time in adjoining Lincoln County. Having learned that freedmen were holding a secret meeting, “which was suspected of boding no good to the whites,” a group of local youths resolved to break up the gathering; one of them, in his attempt to frighten the blacks, “accidentally” shot and killed a woman. “He didn’t mean to hurt anybody,” Miss Andrews had heard, “but the Yankees vow they will hang the whole batch if they can find them. Fortunately he has made his escape, and they don’t know the names of the others.”

Many freedmen quickly discovered in the aftermath of emancipation how much more vulnerable and expendable their lives had suddenly become. “Nigger life’s cheap now,” a white Tennessean observed. “Nobody likes ’em enough to have any affair of the sort [murder] investigated; and when a white man feels aggrieved at anything a nigger’s done, he just shoots him and puts an end to it.”
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Whether previously expressed in martial displays, bellicose oratory, battlefield valor, family feuds, personal vengeance, or in the whipping of slaves, violence lay close to the surface of southern life and culture. Neither whites nor blacks had been exempt from its influence, whether as perpetrators or victims, and the prevalence of frontier conditions, the remoteness of many regions from local government and military occupation, the memories of the Lost Cause, and the felt need to control and discipline freed blacks militated against any decline of violence in the postwar years.

The question of how a highly volatile white population might respond
to emancipation had been an immediate concern of nearly every freedman and freedwoman. During slavery, they had been exposed to violence on the plantations and farms where they worked and from the dreaded patrollers if they ventured off those plantations. But the financial investment each of them represented had operated to some degree as a protective shield. Before the war, a Tennessee farmer explained, the slave “was so much property. It was as if you should kill or maim my horse. But now the nigger has no protection.” With black men and women no longer commanding a market price, the value placed on black life declined precipitately, and the slaves freed by the war found themselves living among a people who had suffered the worst possible ignominy—military defeat and “alien” occupation. Many whites, moreover, thought the abolition of slavery had doomed the African race in the South to extinction, and all too many of them seemed eager to expedite that prophecy. “If I could get up tomorrow morning and hear that every nigger in the country was dead, I’d just jump up and down,” the wife of a South Carolina planter exclaimed after hearing that Yankee soldiers had recently shot several blacks who were “getting very impudent.”
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The apparent indifference with which some whites regarded the fate of the ex-slave dismayed many visitors to the postwar South. “He is actually to many of them nothing but a troublesome animal,” Sidney Andrews wrote from South Carolina; “not a human being, with hopes and longings and feelings … ‘I would shoot one just as soon as I would a dog,’ said a man to me yesterday on the cars. And I saw one shot at in Columbia as if he had been only a dog,—shot at from the door of a store, and at midday!” Nor did visitors find this behavior confined, as they had expected, to the lower classes of whites; in many instances, it reached into the highest circles of southern society. In Alabama, for example, a planter found himself embroiled in a controversy with one of his former slaves over ownership of a horse left behind by the Yankees; the evidence clearly favored the freedman’s claim, the local Freedmen’s Bureau agent agreed and awarded him the horse, but the former master thought otherwise and for him the issue obviously went beyond rightful ownership of the animal. “A nigger has no use for a horse like that,” he explained. “I just put my Spencer to Sip’s head, and told him if he pestered me any more about that horse, I’d kill him. He knew I was a man of my word, and he never pestered me any more.” The planter enjoyed a reputation in the community as a just, upright, and honorable man, and that fact disturbed the visitor more than anything else. “No doubt if I had had dealings with him I should have found him so. He meant to give the freedmen their rights, but he was only beginning dimly to perceive that they had any rights; and when it came to treating a black man with absolute justice, he did not know the meaning of the word.” If a “just and upright” man could have so little regard for the rights of the freedmen, their fate in the hands of less paternalistic whites suggested a difficult and violent period ahead.
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How many black men and women were beaten, flogged, mutilated, and
murdered in the first years of emancipation will never be known. Nor could any accurate body count or statistical breakdown reveal the barbaric savagery and depravity that so frequently characterized the assaults made on freedmen in the name of restraining their savagery and depravity—the severed ears and entrails, the mutilated sex organs, the burnings at the stake, the forced drownings, the open display of skulls and severed limbs as trophies. “The negro was murdered, beheaded, skinned, and his skin nailed to the barn,” a Freedmen’s Bureau officer wrote of a case in Mississippi, as he supplied the names of the murderers and asked for an investigation. Reporting on “outrages” committed in Kentucky, a Bureau officer confined himself to several counties and only to those cases in which he had sworn testimony, the names of the injured, the names of the alleged offenders, and the dates and localities.