Been in the Storm So Long Read online

  Whatever the degree of empathy slaves could muster for the bereavement of their “white folks,” the uncertainty it introduced into their own lives could hardly be ignored. With the death of her master, Anna Johnson recalled, the mistress went to live with her parents and the plantation was sold “and us wid it.” Pauline Grice remembered that her mistress eventually recovered from the death of her son “but she am de diff’rent woman.” If only as a matter of self-interest, then, slaves were likely to view each new casualty list with considerable trepidation. Rather than unite blacks and whites in a common grief, news of the death of a master or a son might unsettle the remaining family members to the point of violent hysteria, with the slaves as the most accessible and logical targets upon whom they could turn their wrath. No sooner had the two sons of Annie Row’s master enlisted than his behavior became even more volatile. “Marster Charley cuss everything and every body and us watch out and keep out of his way.” The day he received news of the death of one of his sons proved to be particularly memorable:

  Missy starts cryin’ and de Marster jumps up and starts cussin’ de War and him picks up de hot poker and say, “Free de nigger, will dey? I free dem.” And he hit my mammy on de neck and she starts moanin’ and cryin’ and draps to de floor. Dere ’twas, de Missy a-mournin’, my mammy a-moanin’ and de Marster a-cussin’ loud as him can. Him takes de gun offen de rack and starts for de field whar de niggers am a-workin’. My sister and I sees that and we’uns starts runnin’ and screamin’, ’cause we’uns has brothers and sisters in de field.

  Before the war, Mattie Curtis recalled, her mistress had been “purty good” but the war turned her into “a debil iffen dar eber wus one,” and after hearing of the death of her son she whipped the slaves “till she shore nuff wore out.”14

  The temperaments of white slaveholding families fluctuated even more violently than usual, reflecting not only the casualty lists but news of military setbacks, the wartime privations, the reports of slave disaffection, and the familiar problems associated with running a plantation. Every slave was subject to the day-to-day whims of those who owned him, and even the kindest masters and mistresses had their bad days. “Dere was good white folks, sah, as well as bad,” an elderly freedman remarked, after being asked his opinion of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “but when they was bad, Lord-a-mercy, you never saw a book, sah, that come up to what slavery was.” If the Civil War could in some instances drive the plantation whites and blacks closer together, revealing a mutual dependency and sympathy, the shocks of war and invasion, coupled with the fears of emancipation, were as likely to bring out the very worst in the human character. “You see,” a Virginia freedman explained, “the masters, soon as they found out they couldn’t keep their slaves, began to treat them about as bad as could be. Then, because I made use of this remark, that I didn’t think we colored folks ought to be blamed for what wasn’t our fault, for we didn’t make the war, and neither did we declare ourselves free,—just because I said that, not in a saucy way, but as I say it to you now, one man put a pistol to my head, and was going to shoot me. I got away from him, and left.”15

  The specter of emancipation, along with the increased demands of the war, had a way of dissolving the posture of beneficence on the plantation. Fearful of losing his slaves, a master might work them incessantly, determined to drain everything he could from his suddenly precarious investment. “Massa Jeems cussed and ’bused us niggers more’n ever,” Wes Brady recalled, “but he took sick and died and stepped off to Hell ’bout six months ’fore we got free.” It had been bad enough before the war, Harry Jarvis said of the plantation on which he worked, “but arter de war come, it war wus nor eber. Fin’ly, he [the master] shot at me one day, ’n I reckoned I’d stood it ’bout’s long’s I could, so I tuk to der woods. I lay out dere for three weeks.” Charlie Moses, who had been a slave in Mississippi, remembered only that his master, after spending a year in the Army, returned home “even meaner than before.”16

  If a master chose to serve in the war, his absence from the plantation for extended periods of time created a critical vacuum in authority. Although slaves might seek to exploit such a situation to their own advantage, the alteration of power relationships on the plantation did not always redound to their benefit. Unaccustomed to her new responsibilities, the plantation mistress was apt to be even more easily moved to ill temper than the master, possessing neither the patience nor the experience of her husband in dealing on a day-to-day basis with field slaves and work routines. “I tell [you] candidly,” a South Carolina woman wrote her husband in the Confederate Congress, “this attention to farming is up hill work with me. I can give orders first-rate, but when I am not obeyed, I can’t keep my temper.… I am ever ready to give you a helping hand, but I must say I am heartily tired of trying to manage free negroes.” Equally dismayed at the “follies & sins” committed by black servants, a South Carolina widow thought the day might come when they would have to be eliminated “as rats & cockroaches are by all sorts of means whenever they become unbearable.”17

  If close contact had led some slaves to identify with the master or mistress, it had afforded others an education in the devious ways of their “white folks” and how even the best-intentioned and kindest of them could be transformed and degraded by the power they wielded. This was no less true of the mistress than the master. The gracious and maternal lady of southern legend, who reputedly tempered the harshness of slavery, was not entirely the figment of chivalrous white imaginations, but from the perspective of many black slaves, abnormal wartime conditions in some instances only exacerbated previously unstable personalities. It seemed to Lulu Wilson that her mistress “studied ’bout meanness” more than her master, and she blamed the blindness in her later life on the snuff her mistress had occasionally rubbed in her eyes as a punishment. With the master away during the war, the mistress’s disposition only worsened. “Wash Hodges was gone away four years and Missus Hodges was meaner’n the devil all the time. Seems like she jus’ hated us worser than ever. She said blabber-mouth niggers done cause a war.”18

  Confronted with a mistress who was “a demon, just like her husband,” Esther Easter may not have been unique in the satisfaction she derived from playing one “demon” against the other. Taking advantage of the wartime disruptions and her access to the Big House, she finally found a way to even the score.

  While Master Jim is out fighting the Yanks, the Mistress is fiddling round with a neighbor man, Mister Headsmith. I is young then, but I knows enough that Master Jim’s going be mighty mad when he hears about it.

  The Mistress didn’t know I knows her secret, and I’m fixing to even up for some of them whippings she put off on me. That’s why I tell Master Jim next time he come home.

  “See that crack in the wall?” Master Jim say yes, and I say, “It’s just like the open door when the eyes are close to the wall.” He peek and see into the bedroom.

  “That’s how I find out about the Mistress and Mister Headsmith,” I tells him, and I see he’s getting mad.

  “What you mean?” And Master Jim grabs me hard by the arm like I was trying to get away.

  “I see them in the bed.”

  That’s all I say. The Demon’s got him and Master Jim tears out of the room looking for the Mistress. Then I hears loud talking and pretty soon the Mistress is screaming and calling for help …19

  To maintain discipline and productivity among an enslaved work force under wartime conditions often required extraordinary efforts, for in the relative absence of white males with horses and firearms, slave restlessness, disaffection, and covert resistance might grow markedly. To a Virginia woman, it seemed like her slaves were trying “to see what amount of thieving they can commit”; to a North Carolina woman, the slaves had become, in her husband’s absence, “awkward, inefficient, and even lazy”; to a Mississippi woman, pleading with the governor to release her overseer from militia duty, the slaves were not even performing half the usual amount of work
. The women of the Pettigrew family of South Carolina, finding themselves suddenly in charge of the plantation, fought a losing battle to assert their authority among the slaves. As early as 1862, they confessed their doubts that “things will ever be or seem quite the same again.” Later in the year, Caroline Pettigrew wrote her husband that she could feel no confidence in any of the slaves. “You will find that they have all changed in their manner, not offensive but slack.”20

  Not surprisingly, in the master’s absence, the slaves were quick to test the mistress’s authority, seeking to ascertain if she could be more easily outmaneuvered or manipulated than her husband. To those women forced to undergo such trials, the motivation of the slaves seemed perfectly obvious, with some of them relishing every moment of discomfiture evinced by their owners. After being left in charge of a plantation in Texas, Mrs. W. H. Neblett kept her husband informed of the steady deterioration of discipline and the heavy price she was paying in mental anguish. “[T]he black wretches [are] trying all they can, it seems to me, to agrivate me, taking no interest, having no care about the future, neglecting their duty.” Neither her presence nor the harsh treatment meted out by the overseer had produced the desired results. The blacks refused to work, they abused and neglected the stock, they tore down fences and broke plows, and it did little good to give them any orders. “With the prospect of another 4 years war,” she wrote her husband in the spring of 1864, “you may give your negroes away if you wont hire them, and I’ll move into a white settlement and work with my hands.… The negroes care no more for me than if I was an old free darkey and I get so mad sometimes that I think I don’t care sometimes if Myers beats the last one of them to death. I cant stay with them another year alone.”21

  Not all the women left in charge of plantations capitulated that easily. When unable to control their slaves, some mistresses called upon the assistance of local authorities or a neighboring planter to mete out punishment. After ordering local police to apprehend and jail a rebellious slave, a South Carolina woman derived considerable personal satisfaction from the way she had handled the matter. “What do you think,” she wrote to her son, “I at last made up my mind to have Caesar punished, after daily provoking & impertinent conduct, … & it was all done so quietly, that the household did not know of it, though I let him stay 2 days in Confinement.” Some women, on the other hand, needed little assistance or instruction in managing their enslaved labor but demonstrated a shrewdness and strength that compared favorably to that of their absent husbands. Refusing to panic or leave matters to the overseer, Ida Dulany, the mistress of a Virginia plantation, quelled a work stoppage by selling some of the slaves, hiring others out, removing a third group to a separate area, and whipping one of the leaders. To make certain that those who remained did their work properly, she visited the fields herself.22

  Where overseers were employed, the absence of the master also disrupted the prevailing structure of authority. No longer able to play the overseer against the master, deriving what advantages they could from that division of power, slaves found themselves at the mercy of men who could finally rule them with an unrestrained hand. Andy Anderson, for example, recalled his experience on a cotton plantation in Texas, working for a master, Jack Haley, who was so “kind to his cullud folks” that neighbors referred to them as “de petted niggers.” When the war broke out, Haley enlisted in the Army and hired a man named Delbridge to oversee the plantation.

  After dat, de hell start to pop, ’cause de first thing Delbridge do is cut de rations.… He half starve us niggers and he want mo’ work and he start de whippin’s. I guesses he starts to educate ’em. I guess dat Delbridge go to hell when he died, but I don’t see how de debbil could stand him.

  Unsuccessful in an escape attempt, Anderson was severely whipped and then sold, but when his old master returned from military service, he promptly admonished and fired the overseer.23

  The enhanced authority of the overseer was as likely to disrupt as to secure a plantation. While the master remained away, slaves were even more sensitive to any action by an overseer that appeared to breach the normal limits of his authority. No longer able to appeal their differences with him to the master, the slaves on some plantations took matters into their own hands. After her master left for the war, Ida Henry recalled, the overseer tried to impress the slaves with his new importance and power. He worked them overtime and meted out harsh punishment to anyone who failed to meet his expectations, until “one day de slaves caught him and one held him whilst another knocked him in de head and killed him.” On three large Louisiana plantations, near the mouth of the Red River, the slaves responded to the food shortage and a newly ordered reduction in rations by dividing up among themselves the hogs and poultry. When advised by the absent owner to punish these slaves, the overseers wisely refused on the grounds of personal safety.24

  As an incentive to maintain order and maximize production, some masters chose to delegate authority in their absence to the slaves themselves. Andrew Goodman, who had worked on a Texas plantation, recalled not knowing “what the war was ’bout.” But he readily appreciated its impact the day his master assembled the sixty-six slaves and told them of his plans to enlist in the Army, discharge the overseer, and leave the place in Goodman’s hands. The master remained away for four years. Appreciating the confidence placed in them, the slaves left in charge of a plantation—often the same slaves who had been drivers or foremen—generally fulfilled the master’s expectations, and in some instances even exceeded them. “I done the bes’ I could,” a former Alabama slave recalled, “but they was troublous times. We was afraid to talk of the war, ’cose they hung three men for talkin’ of it, jest below here.” With both the master and overseer absent, some slaves exulted in the greater degree of independence they enjoyed. The fact of a black “master,” however, could prove to be a mixed blessing, with some drivers fulfilling their owner’s expectations by maintaining a severe regime. When a former coachman took charge of a plantation in Alabama, one of the slaves recalled, “he made de niggers wuk harder dan Ole Marster did.”25

  Neither the expedient of a black driver nor an overseer necessarily resolved the dilemma posed by the absence of the master. To judge by the lamentations that abounded in the journals, diaries, and letters of women left in charge of plantations, many of them simply resigned themselves to an increasingly untenable situation over which they could exert a minimum of influence and authority. “We are doing as best we know,” a Georgia woman sighed, “or as good as we can get the Servants to do; they learn to feel very independent as no white man comes to direct them.” When slaves on a plantation in Texas openly resisted the overseer’s authority, refusing to submit to any whippings, the mistress thought it best to avoid a showdown. Nothing would be gained by whipping the slaves, she wrote her husband, who was absent in the Army, “so I shall say nothing and if they stop work entirely I will try to feel thankful if they let me alone.”26

  Nor did the presence of the master necessarily help. The difficulties in maintaining control and discipline pointed up ambiguities that had always suffused plantation relationships. But the apprehensions now voiced by beleaguered owners had even larger implications. The spectacle of a master and his family tormented and rendered helpless in the face of wartime stresses and demands could not help but make a deep impression on the slaves. To what extent they would seek to exploit that vulnerability to their own advantage came increasingly to dominate the conversations of whites.

  3

  WITH TENS OF THOUSANDS of white men joining the Confederate Army, leaving their families behind them on isolated plantations and farms, the quality of black response to the Civil War assumed a critical and urgent importance. Few whites could be insensitive to the exposed position in which the presence of so many enslaved blacks placed them. “Last night,” a Georgia woman wrote her son, “I felt the loneliness and isolation of my situation in an unusual degree. Not a white female of my acquaintance nearer than eight or ten m
iles, and not a white person nearer than the depot!” Amidst several hundred slaves, the mistress of a North Carolina plantation compared herself to “a kind of Anglo-Saxon Robinson Crusoe with Ethiopians only for companions—think of it!” Demonstrating a rare candor, a Confederate soldier from Mississippi, who had left his wife and children “to the care of the niggers,” thought it unlikely that his twenty-five slaves would turn upon them. “They’re ignorant poor creatures, to be sure, but as yet they’re faithful. Any way, I put my trust in God, and I know he’ll watch over the house while I’m away fighting for this good cause.”27

  This was hardly the time for self-doubt. Whatever previous experience might have suggested about the fragile nature of the master-slave relationship, an embattled Confederacy, struggling for the very survival of that relationship, preferred to think differently and employed a rhetorical overkill to attain the necessary peace of mind. “A genuine slave owner, born and bred, will not be afraid of Negroes,” Mary Chesnut confided to her diary in November 1861. “Here we are mild as the moonbeams, and as serene; nothing but Negroes around us, white men all gone to the army.” That was the proper spirit of confidence, voiced by a woman who had already confessed failure in her attempts to understand what the slaves thought of the war. Most whites, like Mary Chesnut, no matter what suspicions and forebodings they harbored, chose to put on the best possible face, to demonstrate their own serenity and composure. The alternatives were simply too horrible to contemplate. “We would be practically helpless should the Negroes rise,” the daughter of a prominent Louisiana planter conceded, “since there are so few men left at home. It is only because the Negroes do not want to kill us that we are still alive.”28