Been in the Storm So Long (68 page)

I
T MIGHT HAVE BEEN
any southern town in 1865. Walking through the outskirts of Macon, Georgia, where the half-built Confederate arsenal aptly memorialized the recent past, a northern reporter came upon a small hut in which eleven freedmen resided—an elderly man, a middle-aged man, three women, and six children. Bundles of old rags provided the only bedding; several stools, one chair, and half a dozen cooking utensils comprised the furnishings, and a bag of meal and a few pounds of bacon were on hand to sustain them. That was the extent of their worldly possessions. The reporter seemed astonished that anyone would have given up the security of the old plantation for this kind of precarious existence. And being a reporter, he searched for a plausible explanation.

Not satisfied with the old man’s explanation, the reporter discussed with other members of the family the comparative comfort and security afforded by the old plantation and the town. No matter how he phrased the question, their responses never varied: they had come to Macon to experience freedom. Near Milledgeville, the reporter encountered still more rural blacks, living in overcrowded cabins, trying to make a new life for themselves, and he asked the same question of them. Although conceding that they lived in “hard times,” none of them regretted having left the countryside for the city. “Wa’l now ye see, sah,” a father of seven children tried to explain, “das a Scriptur’ what says if de man hab a little to eat, an’ he eat with a ’tented mind, he be better off dan de man what hab de fat ox an’ isn’t ’tented.”
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The size of the city or town to which many blacks flocked after emancipation mattered less than the freedom, the opportunities, the protection, and the camaraderie they expected to find there. “Nobody took our homes away, but right off colored folks started on the move,” Felix Haywood recalled. “They seemed to want to get closer to freedom, so they’d know what it was—like it was a place or a city.”
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Even the smallest village had a certain attractive quality about it, particularly for the ex-slaves whose previous world had been restricted to the boundaries of the plantation. But most of the migrants to the towns appear to have come from the nearby plantations; some of them had been hired out before the war as slaves to city employers, they were largely familiar with the offerings of the city, and they knew from their own observations that some free blacks had fared comparatively well there.

Regardless of where they came from, or their degree of familiarity with urban life, the compulsions that had driven them to the nearest town or village varied but slightly. When Henry Bobbitt, who had spent his bondage in Warren County, North Carolina, walked all the way to Raleigh, he recalled the need “ter find out if I wuz really free.” Jordon Smith, who had been sent from Georgia to Texas during the war, headed straight for Shreveport, Louisiana, because he knew Yankee soldiers were stationed there. Several freedmen who left Dinwiddie County, Virginia, were determined to reach Richmond, if only because it had to be better than what they had left behind them. “I thought I couldn’t be no wus off than whar I was,” one of them explained; “and I hadn’t no place to go. You see, mahster, thar a’n’t no chance fo’ people o’ my color in the country I come from.” An Alabama planter, distraught over his losses, looked on helplessly as the blacks in his region headed for Selma “to be free” and “to embrace the
nigger lovers
.” Equally concerned, a former Confederate officer found the roads to Vicksburg clogged with blacks anxious “to get their freedom,” and a Freedmen’s Bureau officer in Coahoma County, Mississippi, encountered four field hands on the road who had little idea of what they would do when they reached the city but assumed that “once in Memphis and they are all right.” He ordered them all to return to the plantation.
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The popular idea that “freedom was free-er” in the towns and that they could live “much easier” there helped to sustain the migrants, even as native whites, Federal officials, and northern reporters dismissed their
assumptions as “absurd.” The blacks clearly had reason to think otherwise. After describing the brutal treatment accorded freed slaves in Warren County, Georgia, the black newspaper in Augusta found it hardly surprising that so many freedmen would prefer to take their chances in the city rather than on the more remote and exposed plantations and farms. With violence and confusion rampant in some regions, the mere presence of a small detachment of Federal troops in the nearest town might turn it into a freedmen’s refuge; they “seek the safe shelter of the cities,” a traveler wrote from Charleston, “solely from the blind instinct that where there is force there must be protection.” The nearest town also often housed the local Freedmen’s Bureau office, to which blacks could bring their problems, settle conflicts over wages, and obtain some measure of relief in the form of government food rations. “Beaufort was their Mecca,” an observer wrote of black refugees in the Sea Islands region, “and their shrine the office of the General Superintendent of Freedmen, who at this period worked eight days a week, besides Sundays.”
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No doubt many blacks simply wanted the comfort of numbers, the chance to live with large groups of their own race away from the constant scrutiny of the master or overseer. Outside of the largest plantations, the city afforded freedmen expanded opportunities to think and act as part of a black community; moreover, they felt free to exercise their newly won liberties in ways that would invite trouble in the countryside. To be in the city gave them readier access to the black churches and the black benevolent societies; they could partake more freely of the growing interest in political questions, and, most important of all, they were able to send their children to the newly established freedmen’s schools. In describing black life in postwar Macon, a northern reporter may have inadvertently hit upon precisely the combination of attractions that lured so many plantation freedmen to the city: four “prosperous” churches (one Methodist, one Presbyterian, and two Baptist); several benevolent societies (which contributed monthly support to the “parentless and indigent”); and five schools, four of which were taught by blacks. In addition, a Freedmen’s Bureau officer willingly listened to their grievances.
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Whether they had worked for “kind” or “mean” masters, significant numbers of freed slaves resolved to abandon plantation labor altogether. Heading for the urban centers, they hoped to secure positions that afforded more pay, personal independence, and a welcome relief from the plantation routines. Those who had labored on the plantations as blacksmiths, millers, mechanics, carpenters, and wheelwrights hoped to capitalize on the same skills in the cities, where they would join black artisans who had long dominated several of the skilled urban occupations. Former house servants, on the other hand, tended to seek similar positions in the cities or worked as waiters, hackmen, and seamstresses, while field hands might become stevedores, porters, laundresses, or menial laborers.
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In Richmond, blacks still comprised nearly half the work force of the Tredegar Iron Works, and the manager showed no inclination to reduce that proportion,
despite the reluctance of newly imported white workers from Philadelphia to labor alongside blacks. “We dont want any men to come here who object to working with a colored man,” the manager insisted. “We Southern men regard Negroes as an inferior race, but we make no distinction of color in employing men and pay all the same wages as all have to live.”
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Although coming to the city hardly made any of the freedmen rich, and despite the many betrayed expectations, some nevertheless managed to achieve for themselves and their families a more meaningful and satisfying way of life than they would have enjoyed on the plantations. When Charles Crawley accompanied his family to Petersburg, two weeks after Lee’s surrender, he left behind a master and mistress who “wus good to me as well as all us slaves,” but the Crawleys were determined “to make a home fo’ ourselves.” After working “here an’ dar, wid dis here man an’ dat man,” they purchased a home and remained there for the rest of their lives. As slaves, Mary Jane Wilson’s parents were owned by different masters and hence lived separately; after the war, her father reunited the family in Portsmouth, Virginia, went to work in the Norfolk navy yard as a teamster, purchased a lot and built his own house. “He was one of the first Negro land owners in Portsmouth after emancipation,” she proudly recalled. After attending the local school, Mary Jane Wilson graduated from Hampton Institute and then returned to Portsmouth as one of the first black teachers in that town. “I opened a school in my home, and I had lots of students. After two years my class grew so fast and large that my father built a school for me in our back yard.… Those were my happiest days.”
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Frequently, success in the city consisted more of personal satisfaction than significant material gain. But the examples of blacks who achieved both goals encouraged still others to take their chances. Between 1860 and 1870, census statistics confirmed what the white South had already strongly suspected—a striking increase in the black urban population. In Mississippi, for example, the black population of Vicksburg, to which so many slaves had fled during the war, tripled while that of Natchez more than doubled; the four largest cities in Alabama—Mobile, Montgomery, Selma, and Huntsville—showed an increase of more than 57 percent in black residents; three of Virginia’s principal cities—Richmond, Norfolk, and Lynchburg—now had nearly as many blacks as whites, and Petersburg found itself with a black majority; in Charleston, too, blacks moved into a majority position, while the black population of Memphis increased with a rapidity that made it a likely candidate for a race riot.
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In the smaller towns and villages, comparable and more keenly felt increases in black residents took place. Even if the actual number of blacks moving into a town remained relatively small, it might be sufficient to change the character of the community. The Black Belt town of Demopolis, Alabama, where the slaves were observed in a “state of excitement and jubilee” after being told of their freedom, had but one black resident officially listed in 1860; within the next decade, however, nearly a thousand blacks settled in
Demopolis, perhaps in part because of the decision of the Freedmen’s Bureau to locate a regional office there.
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If whites had exercised some perspective in viewing these increases, they might have been less alarmist in their reactions. Despite the number of new black urbanites, the overwhelming majority of black people remained in the rural areas. To have heard the whites talk, however, any observer might have thought that the fields were being literally emptied of laborers. “They all want to go to the cities, either Charleston or Augusta,” Henry Ravenel complained. “The fields have no attractions.” The very language employed by Freedmen’s Bureau officials and native whites to describe the black migration to the cities suggested something akin to an invasion. The freed slaves were reported to be “crowding every road” in Alabama leading to the principal towns, and Montgomery had become “crowded, crammed, packed with multitudes of lazy, worthless negroes”; they were also sighted “flocking” to Savannah, Atlanta, and Houston; “an exodus” threatened to flood Albany, Georgia; Charleston had been “overrun” by blacks of “all sorts and conditions,” while Mobile reeled under waves of immigrants. “Mobile is thronged to a fearful excess,” a Freedmen’s Bureau official reported, “their manner of living there is destructive to their morals and life. These noisome tenements are overcrowded with these miserable people.”
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Even an insignificant number of black migrants aroused cries of inundation, partly out of the expectation that many more would follow. What they were viewing seemed clear enough to the white South: a once productive labor force, released from proper supervision, filled the cities and towns as vagrants, thieves, and indigents, threatening to place an intolerable burden on taxpayers and charitable services. “Before the war,” a newspaper in Baton Rouge observed, “there were but six hundred Negroes in this place. Now there are as many thousand.… We have to support them, nurse them, and bury them.” With increasing reports of petty crimes committed by the newcomers, the outrage mounted, and the ways in which blacks allegedly comported themselves in the cities fired the indignation in places like Memphis until it reached explosive dimensions.