Been in the Storm So Long (78 page)

Never once did Emma Holmes or any of the other women who described their admittedly difficult experiences with housework think to question how their black help had for so many years performed these same duties, day after day, while also caring for a husband and children. Perhaps the question never even entered their minds. This was, as they had discovered, labor suited only for black hands—or, as Eliza Andrews suggested, for “negroes that are fit for nothing else.” Mary Chesnut, who never suffered these ordeals, seemed to understand better than most what housework entailed. “Ellen is a poor maid, but if I do a little work, it is quite enough to show me how dreadful it would be if I should have to do it all.” Only many years later, when she reflected over the black folks who had served her, did Kate Stone begin to realize the monstrous demands she had made on them.

Nor, as she now realized, had the domestics escaped arduous labor. The seamstress always had “piles of work ahead,” while the washerwoman labored all week to keep the family in clean clothes. And the cook needed to prepare three abundant meals a day for the thirteen to twenty whites who were almost always present, not to mention the more lavish dinners and entertainments. “Thinking it over by the light of later experience, I know our cook was a hardworked creature. Then, we never thought about it.”
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To the women who had been accustomed to domestic help, self-reliance never came easily, if at all. The early exuberance and self-congratulation turned into deep resentment and cries of despair, reflecting both physical exhaustion and psychic humiliation. “I am tired—tired tonight, will all the days of the year be like this one?” the young mistress on a Florida plantation asked. “What are we going to do without the negroes?” Many years later, she could still recall “the wearisome hours, when only pride kept us up! … oh, the trials of those days to the housekeepers who had always been accustomed to first-class service!” The women who had derived such satisfaction from “trying to do things I never did before” turned before long to more somber reflections and more realistic appraisals. That brave talk about Anglo-Saxon adaptability and how it had been “a great relief to get rid of the horrid negroes” turned increasingly to nostalgic recollections of how much easier and simpler life had been before the disruption of the labor system and the loss of their servants.
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“Slavery was bad economy, I know,” a Tennessee woman conceded. “But oh,” she added, “it was glorious! I’d give a mint of money right now for servants like I once had,—to have one all my own! Ladies at the North, if they lose their servants, can do their own work; but we can’t, we can’t!” The housegirl who had once served her so faithfully had now taken up dressmaking in St. Louis. “She could read and write as well as I could. There was no kind of work that girl couldn’t do. And so faithful!—I trusted everything to her, and was never deceived.” Although revealing how dependent she had been on black labor, this woman thought emancipation had been a cruel blow to the slaves who had served their white folks so well. “Emancipation is a worse thing for our servants than for us. They can’t take care of themselves.”
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R
ATHER THAN RENDERING THEM INDEPENDENT
of their former slaves, the attempts of white families to hire white replacements or to work themselves only underscored their dependency. The incessant talk about ridding
themselves of the ex-slaves may have impressed certain northern reporters but it never fooled the blacks. “Dey was glad to have a heap of colored people bout dem, cause white folks couldn’ work den no more den dey can work dese days like de colored people can,” recalled Josephine Bacchus, a former South Carolina slave. With equal cogency, a plantation mistress, in expressing gratitude for the blacks who had remained with her, acknowledged that
“they
can’t spare
me
, and
I
can’t spare
them
.”
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The sense of responsibility, obligation, and duty, invoked so often by the slaveholding class to justify keeping an “inferior, helpless and childlike” race in bondage, could obviously work both ways. The dependency of white families helps to explain the outrage and cries of ingratitude that greeted defecting and troublesome blacks, as it does the immense comfort those same families derived from some of their former slaves who chose to remain. Concerned for the welfare of her mother, Eliza Huger Smith of South Carolina went to considerable lengths to persuade a valuable servant to stay in the household after emancipation. “Hennie’s decision to remain with me,” she said afterwards, “is a great relief on Mamma’s account as she is as dependent on her as a baby—more so.” In a Georgia household, where all the servants had left, Hope L. Jones thought it a sad blow to her Aunt Bella, “since she is old and needs them more than ever.”
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Even as whites acknowledged, at least to themselves, the urgent need to retain their black laborers and servants, they recognized the continued importance of controlling that labor. With emancipation, the pecuniary loss had been difficult enough to absorb. But to lose control over their former slaves, to be deprived of the necessary disciplinary powers, to be subject to their “insolence,” to be forced to endure their work slowdowns and other manifestations of independence, to be compelled to deal with them as equals was to demand too much, even as the price of military defeat. “We can’t feel towards them as you do,” a young South Carolina planter tried to explain to a northern visitor. “I suppose we ought to, but ’t is n’t possible for us. They’ve always been our owned servants, and we’ve been used to having them mind us without a word of objection, and we can’t bear anything else from them now. If that’s wrong, we’re to be pitied sooner than blamed, for it’s something we can’t help.” Although discouraged by the postwar conduct of his former slaves, he could not conceive of doing without them. “I never did a day’s work in my life, and don’t know how to begin.”
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Realizing how dependent they remained on black labor, those who had once held slaves concluded that the freed blacks needed them more urgently now than ever before. To make this absolutely clear, the planter class devised a rationale as familiar and elaborate as the argument they had used to justify slavery. What they wished to demonstrate, however, seemed so obvious to them as to require little proof—that the Negro as a free person could neither survive nor be a serviceable worker unless he remained under their care and protection. “The Negro stands as much in need of a master to guide him as a child does,” a Virginia planter explained. “When I look at my servants, I feel weighing upon me all the responsibilities
of a parent.… The Negro will always need the care of someone superior to him, and unless in one form or another it is extended to him, the race will first become pauper and then disappear.” Along similar lines, the provisional governor of South Carolina, no doubt with his conquerors in mind, asked the obvious question: “If all the children in New York City were turned loose to provide for themselves, how many would live, prosper, and do well? The negroes are as improvident as children, and require the guardian protection of some one almost as much as they do.”
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To retain the laborers he needed so badly, “old massa” once again cast himself in the familiar role of the beneficent protector, exercising a parental and providential vigilance over a helpless, childlike, and easily misled race. He could do no less for those who had been accustomed to look to him for direction and sustenance. “They are the descendants in a great degree of the woman who nursed me,” a Maryland congressman declared. “They … look upon me as their protector. I am in truth their only friend. Am I to turn them off as outcasts on the world? I have been my whole life engaged in their protection. I have an affection for them, and have a duty to perform for them.… They have labored for me, it is true, but they have in turn received from me quite as much as they have given me.” Consistent with their view that slavery had been the best possible condition for a people unable to look after themselves, the former masters viewed emancipation as an unfortunate if not tragic consequence of the war. But the Negro, they emphasized, should not be held responsible. “It is not their fault they are free,” the new governor of Florida asserted; “they had nothing to do with it; that was brought about by ‘the results and operations of the war.’ ”
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Although revealing an abysmal ignorance of black attitudes and actions, the argument that Negroes had nothing to do with their freedom would be repeated in many different forms, the principle itself would be written into several of the new state constitutions, and it reflected an abiding faith in the black laborer if only left in the hands of those who knew him best. “The negro isn’t to blame for his freedom,” a Georgia planter told a northern reporter. “He served us faithfully all through the war, and I sincerely believe very few planters have any desire to see him injured. We know his ways; and if you give us time, I think we shall be able to get him back into his place again,—not as a slave, but as a good producer.” Freedom had been forced upon the slave, an Alabama judge told a grand jury in Pike County, and it behooved the South to show compassion for the “faithful old negro” who was now an involuntary freedman without the experience, the self-reliance, or the ability to understand and appreciate his new status. “He may have been the companion of your boyhood,” he reminded them; “he may be older than you, and perhaps carried you in his arms when an infant. You may be bound to him by a thousand ties which only a southern man knows, and which he alone can feel in all their force.” Nor could the freedman be blamed for the “excesses” that had characterized the transition in his status. “He has always been a child in intellect,” Charles C.
Jones, Jr., explained to his mother, while sympathizing with “severe trials” she had experienced, “improvident, incapable of appreciating the obligations of a contract, ignorant of the operation of any law other than the will of his master, careless of the future, and without the most distant conception of the duties of life and labor now devolved upon him.”
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Even if whites chose to view the old ties with varying degrees of sympathy, they could readily appreciate the forcefulness and timeliness of the argument. Now that the slaves had been freed, through no fault of their own, the burden of emancipation demanded of the old slaveholding class the same exercise of paternal solicitude and authority; indeed, the need had never been greater. If anything, the very suddenness of freedom, thrust upon an unprepared people, had increased the master’s obligations and duty to a race possessing neither the physical nor the mental resources to care for themselves. “They are like grown up children turned adrift in the world,” Eliza Andrews observed. “The negro is something like the Irishman in his blundering good nature, his impulsiveness and improvidence, and he is like a child in having always had someone to think and act for him.” What had characterized slavery, many whites continued to argue, had been a kind of benevolent patriarchy. Even if slavery had been sometimes oppressive, even if it had not been free of excesses and defects, even if it had brutalized some bondsmen, this much-maligned institution, according to its practitioners, had given the bulk of the race a necessary protection which freedom now threatened to remove. “How much better off they were when slaves!” a Mississippi planter affirmed. “A man would see to his own niggers, like he would to his own stock. But the niggers now don’t belong to anybody, and it’s no man’s business whether they live or die.”
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If dependency on the master had protected and sustained the Negro as a slave, what would happen to him as a freedman? How would he manage to survive in a hostile and competitive environment, exposed now to unfriendly whites, his own innate vices, and a free-market economy? Such questions grew out of a tradition of proslavery argument, and the answer seemed no less obvious after emancipation. Without the patriarchal guidance and support of the former master, the African race would surely exterminate itself. “The child is already born who will behold the last negro in the State of Mississippi,” a Natchez newspaper affirmed in early 1866. Whatever agreement existed among whites about the future of the Negro as a free man invariably revolved around the conviction that he would sink lower and lower in the social scale, that he would dissipate the civilizing influences he had acquired from contact with his master, and that he could never survive the competitive struggle for life with a superior race. The antislavery movement, in other words, would soon discover that in abolishing slavery it had abolished the race itself.
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