Been in the Storm So Long Read online

  When plantation whites became more guarded in their discussions, lest they be overheard, the slaves simply became more resourceful. “[T]he greater the precaution,” a former South Carolina slave recalled, “the alerter became the slaves, the wider they opened their ears and the more eager they became for outside information.” Many slaves would take considerable pride in how they had surreptitiously acquired the war news. “My father and the other boys,” one recalled, “used to crawl under the house an’ lie on the ground to hear massa read the newspaper to missis when they first began to talk about the war.” On the occasion of festivities in the Big House like a dinner party, another slave recalled, he would climb into an oak tree, hide under the long moss, and wait until the master and his guests came out on the veranda for an after-dinner smoke. He would then invariably be treated to a full discussion of the latest war news and a frank appraisal of the military and political situation. An illiterate waiting maid experienced the frustration of hearing her master and mistress spell out certain words they did not want her to hear. This resourceful woman managed to memorize the letters, “an’ as soon as I got away I ran to uncle an’ spelled them over to him, an’ he told me what they meant.” No doubt some masters suspected the diligence with which slaves obtained news of the war but very few of them were able to adopt the tactic used by William Henry Trescot, a prominent South Carolinian. He had taken to sprinkling his conversation with French expressions. “We are using French against Africa,” he explained to a perplexed friend. “We know the black waiters are all ears now, and we want to keep what we have to say dark. We can’t afford to take them in our confidence, you know.” Mary Chesnut, for one, found his explanation, also given in French, to be “exasperating.”45

  The local courthouse and post office, favorite meeting places for whites, were obvious and much-exploited sources of information and rumor. Like the body servants and conscripted laborers who brought home news from the front lines, slaves in town on errands for the master found it relatively easy to acquire information and form impressions about the progress of the war. The slaves who picked up the mail for their masters became in some instances couriers to the larger slave community. The post office, Booker T. Washington recalled, was located about three miles from the plantation, and the slave who was sent there lingered about long enough to catch the drift of the conversation of the many whites who gathered there and who invariably exchanged views about recent developments. On his way home, the mail carrier would share what he had heard with other slaves, and in this way, Washington claimed, blacks often heard the news before it reached the Big House. In Forsyth County, Georgia, young Edward Glenn fetched the newspaper for his mistress, and each day Walter Raleigh, the local black preacher, waited for him by the road and read the paper before the slave took it to the house. On the day Glenn would never forget, the preacher threw the newspaper on the ground after reading it, hollered “I’m free as a frog!” and ran away. The slave dutifully took the paper to his mistress, who read it and began to cry. “I didn’t say no more,” Glenn recalled.46

  Although most slaves were illiterate, nearly every neighborhood contained at least one or more who had acquired reading and writing skills. Immediately after the war, when freed blacks no longer felt the need to conceal such matters, many a master would learn to his astonishment (often during contract negotiations) that a slave he had assumed to be illiterate had known for some time how to read. While in bondage, however, some slaves thought it impolitic to reveal such skills. Squires Jackson, a Florida slave who had kept his literacy from the whites, recalled how the master walked in upon him unexpectedly while he was reading the newspaper and demanded to know what he was doing. Equal to the moment, Jackson immediately turned the newspaper upside down and declared, “Confederates done won the war.” The master laughed and left the room, and once again a slave had used the “darky act” to extricate himself from a precarious situation.47

  Few plantation whites were fully aware of the inventiveness with which their slaves transmitted information to other blacks. Extensive black communication networks, feeding on a variety of sources, sped information from plantation to plantation, county to county, often with remarkable secrecy and accuracy. What slaves called the “grapevine telegraph” frequently employed code words that enabled them to carry on conversations about forbidden subjects in the very presence of their masters and mistresses. Although whites often failed to grasp the mechanics or vocabulary of slave communication, they did come to suspect that their slaves knew more than they revealed. With the outbreak of the war, slaveholders tried to curtail interplantation contacts between blacks, lest such fraternization—which had been generally tolerated—encourage a wide dissemination of news and permit concerted plans for flight to the Union lines. “When I first heard talk about the War,” Mary Grayson recalled, “the slaves were allowed to go and see one another sometimes and often they were sent on errands several miles with a wagon or on a horse, but pretty soon we were all kept at home, and nobody was allowed to come around and talk to us.” Despite these restrictions, she added, “we heard what was going on.”48

  Under wartime conditions, suspicions were more easily aroused and previously tolerated slave practices came under much closer scrutiny. Not long after the outbreak of war, for example, a black congregation in Savannah sang with particular fervor a traditional hymn,

  Yes, we all shall be free,

  Yes, we all shall be free,

  Yes, we all shall be free,

  When the Lord shall appear.

  While the service was still in progress, local police entered the church, arrested those in attendance, and charged that the blacks were plotting freedom, singing “the Lord” instead of “the Yankees” in order to deceive any white observers in the audience. Even earlier, at the time of Lincoln’s election, slaves in Georgetown, South Carolina, were whipped for singing the same song. The black youth who related this incident explained: “Dey tink de Lord mean for say de Yankees.” Whether the police overreacted is less important than the suspicions upon which their actions were based. Since long before the days of Nat Turner, blacks had been suspected of using their religious observances to communicate subversive sentiments. The most innocuous-sounding sermon, the most solemn, traditional hymns, might conceivably contain double meanings that were obvious only to the black parishioners. When they spoke and sang of delivery from bondage and oppression, with Old Testament allusions to Moses and the Hebrew children, the hope clearly lay in this world—“And the God dat lived in Moses’ time is jus’ de same today.” The whites suspected as much, and wartime security demanded greater vigilance, including a more rigid enforcement of the statutes that required a white man’s presence at a religious service conducted by a black.49

  Whatever the potential risks, whites persisted in seeking comfort and reassurance in the religious enthusiasm of their slaves and in making it serve their own ends. During the war, participation of house slaves in the white family’s devotion and in prayers for the safe return of the master or his sons helped to reinforce the notion of an extended family bound by affection, faithfulness, and loyalty. Similarly, white clergymen undertook the task of admonishing the slaves to be deferential and loyal to their owners in this time of crisis. Upon visiting the James Davis plantation in Texas, a white preacher explained the issues to the slaves with unmistakable clarity. “Do you wan’ to keep you homes whar you git all to eat, and raise your chillen, or do you wan’ to be free to roam roun’ without a home, like de wil’ animals? If you wan’ to keep you homes you better pray for de South to win.” At least, that was how William Adams, one of his slave parishioners, recalled the sermon. When the preacher then asked those slaves who were willing to pray for the South to raise their hands, everyone did so. “We was skeered not to,” Adams recalled, “but we sho’ didn’ wan’ de South to win.”50

  Nearly every white preacher faced a problem of credibility when he addressed the slaves. Not only did they perceive him as an i
nstrument of the white master, capable of twisting the word of God to make it serve the white man’s ends, but what he told them, particularly during the war, had little relevance for their own lives and hopes. With the prospect of emancipation looming larger, many slaves seized every opportunity to address God in their own ways. Charlotte Brooks, a Louisiana slave, bent down between the rows of sugarcane to pray for her liberation. “I knowed God had promised to hear his children when they cry, and he heard us way down here in Egypt.” In Athens, Georgia, Minnie Davis and her mother dutifully attended the services in the First Presbyterian Church, where the slaves sat in the gallery and listened to the white preacher implore the Lord to drive the Yankees back to the North. “My mother said that all the time he was praying out loud like that, she was praying to herself: ‘Oh, Lord, please send the Yankees on and let them set us free.’ ”51

  Occupying a delicate position in the slave world, the black preacher and the black plantation exhorter might find themselves forced into compromises and duplicity in order to survive. If whites were present at the services, as the law so often commanded, the preacher or exhorter would have to be doubly cautious about what he told the blacks. The Civil War placed him in a particular dilemma, caught between increased white vigilance and the urge to articulate the uppermost thoughts of his parishioners. His attempts to resolve that conflict severely tested his powers of obfuscation. On the day of fasting and prayer ordered by President Jefferson Davis after a series of Confederate military reverses, whites and slaves gathered at the old Guinea Church in Cumberland County, Virginia. After the whites had said their prayers, seeking to turn the tide of battle, the time came for the blacks to make known their sentiments. The first black speaker, an old deacon, avoided the issue altogether with the simple prayer that “the Lord’s will be done,” which the parishioners could obviously interpret as they wished. But Armstead Berkeley, the pastor of the black Baptist church, when called upon to lead a prayer, pleaded with the Lord to “point the bullets of the old Confederate guns right straight at the hearts of the Yankees; make our men victorious on the battlefield and send them home in health and strength to join their people in peace and prosperity.” That seemed clear enough; the black church deacons, in fact, were said to have reproached the pastor after the meeting for this apparent betrayal of the slaves’ cause. “Don’t worry, children,” the pastor explained, “the Lord knew what I was talking about.” The deacons were reportedly satisfied with the pastor’s explanation. With a far clearer sense of purpose, an old plantation preacher in South Carolina complied with a request to pray for the Confederacy: “Bress, we do pray Thee, our enemies, de wicked Sesech. Gib dem time to ’pent, we do pray Thee, and den we will excuse Thee if Thou takes dem all to glory.”52

  Although forced at times to play a dual role, the black preacher usually commanded a leading place in the black community. Many former slaves recalled him as a man who had offered them hope for redemption and freedom in this world, even when the prospects seemed most dim. L. J. Coppin, who would later become a prominent cleric in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, remembered with particular admiration Christopher Jones, a Maryland black upon whom the slaves had come to rely not only for religious guidance and inspiration but for his knowledge of wartime developments. “He was not so much for resorting to the prophecies of Daniel for information,” Coppin remarked, “as he was to the newspaper that secretly came weekly to him.” Many of the whites with whom William Russell spoke, in his tour of the South in 1861, understood the power of the black preacher as well as his capacity for mischief. “They ‘do the niggers no good,’ ” he was told, “ ‘they talk about things that are going on elsewhere, and get their minds unsettled.’ ” Some whites in the Ogeechee District of Georgia were themselves so unsettled by a slave preacher who proclaimed the inevitability of a Yankee victory that they covered him with tar and set him afire.53

  No matter how closely the master regulated the religious observances of his slaves, he could neither control every aspect of their lives nor filter the information and rumors that eventually reached the slave quarters. When asked if the masters knew anything of “the secret life of the colored people,” Robert Smalls, a former South Carolina slave, would later testify: “No, sir; one life they show their masters and another life they don’t show.” On the larger farms and plantations, where more than half the slaves lived, the social life of the quarters brought together house servants and field hands, artisans and carriage drivers, stableboys and cooks. The news gathered in the Big House that day or in the nearby town or from slaves on a neighboring plantation would be divulged and discussed, often with asides and stories at the expense of the master and mistress. Dilly Yellady’s parents, who had been slaves in North Carolina, told her how “de niggers would git in de slave quarters at night an’ pray fer freedom an’ laf ’bout what de Yankees wus doin’, ’bout Lincoln an’ Grant foolin’ deir marsters so.”54

  To attain a greater degree of privacy, the slaves might assemble “down in the hollow” or in the “hush-harbors,” secluded meeting spots away from the Big House where the slaves would employ various devices to absorb the sounds. What transpired at such gatherings appears to have been a mixture of prayer, singing, and candid discussions (often whispered) about subjects that had to be repressed in the presence of the whites. On some plantations, it provided slaves with an opportunity to relieve themselves of the tensions and physical exhaustion that had accumulated over a long day and evening of hard labor. During the war, these gatherings took on even greater importance, serving not only to allow personal release and expression but also to convey and discuss the most recent news about the military situation, the proximity of Union troops, the prospect of emancipation, and the master’s intentions. Traveling in the interior of Virginia, an “unobserved spectator” who happened upon such a gathering heard them pray for the success of the North, and one old woman wept for joy when told that the Yankees were soon coming to set them free. “Oh! good massa Jesus,” she shouted, “let the time be short.” After the white preacher on the Davis plantation in Texas led the slaves in prayers for the Confederacy, he left apparently confident of their faithfulness. That night, however, the slaves met secretly “down in de hollow” and Uncle Mack entertained them with a story.

  One time over in Virginny dere was two ole niggers, Uncle Bob and Uncle Tom. Dey was mad at one ’nuther and one day dey decided to have a dinner and bury de hatchet. So dey sat down, and when Uncle Bob wasn’t lookin’ Uncle Tom put some poison in Uncle Bob’s food, but he saw it and when Uncle Tom wasn’t lookin’, Uncle Bob he turned de tray roun’ on Uncle Tom, and he gits de poison food.

  Looking out at the assembled group, Uncle Mack concluded: “Dat’s what we slaves is gwine do, jus’ turn de tray roun’ and pray for de North to win.”55

  When the wartime experience began to reveal a diversity of slave response and behavior, whites were sometimes too incredulous to concede that they might have overextended themselves in the praise and confidence they had earlier lavished upon “the faithful slave.” Victims of their own self-assurances, they seemed incapable of dealing with reality, refusing to believe that their slaves understood the implications of the war. “The truth is,” Henry W. Ravenel of South Carolina insisted to the very end, “the negroes know but little of the cause & issues of the war.” That assumption would enable Ravenel to blame the Yankee invaders for turning the heads of the blacks, leading them into acts of mischief and betrayal. But the impact of the war was simply too pervasive, and the sources of information too plentiful, to have kept the slaves in total ignorance of its meaning. As early as the election of 1860, in fact, several white observers had noted how slaves were “the most interested and eager listeners” at political gatherings, and numerous blacks recalled how their own masters had voiced fears that the election of Abraham Lincoln would doom slavery.56

  Although slaves were reticent about openly revealing their feelings, they found it increasingly difficult to mas
k them. Even as their muscles remained faithful to the master, raising the crops that were both indispensable for the war effort and necessary for survival in the quarters, their faces and sometimes their words and actions threatened to betray their inner thoughts, particularly when the prospect of emancipation became clearer and the outcome of the war more predictable. The slaves appeared to sense when that turning point had been reached. “Damn the niggers,” a Louisiana planter exclaimed, “they know more about politics than most of the white men. They know everything that happens.” To a newspaper editor in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the progress of the war could be discerned by simply watching the faces of the local blacks: “The spirits of the colored citizens rise and fall with the ebb and flow of this tide of blue devils, and when they are glad as larks, the whites are depressed and go about the streets like mourners.”57

  Based upon the information they had pieced together from various sources, slaves not only kept themselves informed of the progress of the war but, more critically, they began to appreciate its implications for their own lives and future. By 1863, at least, the assumption prevailed among vast numbers of slaves (including even those who did not entirely welcome the prospect) that if the Union Army prevailed on the battlefields, the Confederacy and slavery would expire together. They appeared to understand, a Union officer reported, “that it was a war for their liberation; that the cause of the war was their being in slavery, and that the aim and result would be their freedom. Further than that they did not seem to have any idea of it.”58