Been in the Storm So Long Page 6
But that was more than enough to force the white South to consider the most expeditious means by which to maintain its internal security and calm the growing apprehension of its people.
5
NEVER HAD the slaveholding class permitted verbal expressions of faith in their blacks to blind them to the need for the utmost vigilance in controlling their movements and behavior. In the face of wartime disruptions, such vigilance became all the more imperative, if only to make certain that the loudly voiced self-assurances were neither misplaced nor betrayed. Although the Confederate Congress, like many states, initially exempted from military service one white man for every twenty slaves he supervised, the protest of less favored planters and farmers forced a sharp reduction in such exemptions, thereby shifting much of the burden of wartime surveillance to the citizens’ patrols. Based on their previous experience with these patrols, few if any blacks had any reason to welcome this development.
Made up largely of nonslaveholding whites, many of them eager to vent their own grievances and frustrations on the blacks, the patrols had traditionally undertaken the responsibility for slave control outside the plantations. Aside from checking out rumors of insurrectionary plots, they seized runaways, broke up clandestine slave gatherings, and meted out punishment to blacks found off the plantations without a proper pass. Wherever the patrols operated, even if on an irregular basis, the slaves had come to fear them as legal terrorists who went out of their way to inflict brutalities and humiliation on any black people they encountered. With the outbreak of the war, state and local governments, recognizing the need to maximize police surveillance, moved to strengthen the patrols and to expand their operations. But these attempts came at precisely the moment army service depleted the number of eligible males, including many who had previously performed patrol duty. And as the prospect of controlling blacks sensing liberation diminished, the alarm of local white residents mounted. “I am afraid we will have troublesome times down here,” a Louisiana woman wrote her husband. “[T]he men are patroleing [sic] all the time but the men are so few in the county that they can not do much good.”59
Confronted with the actuality of a Yankee invasion and anxieties about the black response, white Southerners found themselves in an impossible situation. When the governor of Mississippi, for example, ordered the enlistment of still more men to resist the Yankees, he encountered a storm of protest from whites who gave every indication of fearing the slaves as much as the Union Army. An officer in the state militia privately warned the governor of the concern voiced by many of his soldiers: “the question is constantly asked ‘what is to become of my wife & children when left in a land swarming with negroes without a single white man on many plantations to restrain their licentiousness by a little wholesome fear?’ ” The answer came soon enough, as letters poured in on the governor describing the virtual collapse of slave discipline and subordination in several counties. “If there is any more men taken out of this county,” one resident warned, “we may as well give it to the negroes … now we have to patrole every night to keep them down.” Such expressions of concern, coupled with demands that Confederate troops be placed in positions where they might most effectively combat epidemics of slave insubordination, multiplied as the Union Army (and the prospect of slave liberation) drew closer.60
Apprehension mounted, too, over the behavior and loyalty of slaves in the cities and towns. The objects of particular suspicion were those blacks permitted to hire out their time (with the owner receiving a specified rental payment), many of whom lived away from the premises of both the owner and the immediate supervisor and thereby acquired a degree of autonomy denied the rural slave. That autonomy, to believe the complaints of numerous white residents, had produced a dangerous class of people capable of undermining the entire system of racial control and discipline. After the outbreak of war, many planters heeded admonitions to withdraw their slaves from the contaminating influences of urban life; at the same time, newly strengthened state laws and local ordinances were designed to restrict the movement of black residents. Nevertheless, urban slaves capitalized on the shortage of policemen. Reports of theft, arson, and assault periodically revived fears of servile insurrection, and white residents were forced to alter old notions about the security of their homes. “There was a time,” a Florida newspaper reminded its white readers, “when a man might go to sleep and leave his house open with impunity in this city, but we fear that time has passed away.” Although still boasting that he never locked the apartment in which he slept, Edmund Ruffin confided to his diary that he had begun “to use means for defence which I never did before, in keeping loaded guns by my bedside.”61
Despite the conspicuous efforts made by some free Negroes to allay white suspicions, the tensions created by the war eroded their legal position and subjected their daily lives to even closer scrutiny. To minimize the danger posed by this population, local and state authorities prepared to enforce the laws barring their entry into the state and prohibiting manumission by last will and testament; they also ordered free black residents to register and be properly licensed by county officials and threatened to remove any who exercised an “improper or mischievous influence upon slaves.” The ultimate solution, adopted by several states, was to encourage free blacks to select a master and voluntarily enter into slavery. After all, a Savannah newspaper observed, “every day we hear our slaves pronounced the happiest people in the world. Why then this lamentation over putting the free negro in his only proper … condition?” Enforcement of the newly strengthened restrictions on free blacks varied considerably; nevertheless, the control machinery was readily available for those who wished to use it, whether for purposes of harassment or expulsion. And free blacks who might have entertained other notions had now been forcibly reminded that their position in southern society was analogous to that of the slave rather than the white man.62
Although legislation and patrol vigilance might check certain abuses, the swift punishment of troublesome blacks had always been thought to have a more immediate and enduring impact. The exigencies of war made it all the more urgent to maintain that “subjection through fear” long sanctioned by white public opinion and courts. If loyalty and subjugation could be exacted in no other way, plantation whites freely wielded the whip. Any violent altercation between a white person and a slave required no investigation of cause before meting out the appropriate punishment. “Jacob has had to fight with one of Mrs. Pickets Negroes,” a Louisiana woman reported in May 1862, “and the Negro cut him seven times on the head and face. Jake gave him one hundred lashes for evry cut an fifty for the ballance of his misconduct.” If only to preserve the prerogatives of the master class, some whites cautioned against summary justice meted out by a mob, but the overriding concern for internal security took its inevitable toll. Angry mobs did not hesitate to hang blacks accused of collaborating with the enemy, nor did they scruple about employing more brutal forms of punishment.63
Neither extraordinary legislative measures nor increased vigilance proved adequate to the impossible task of wartime slave control, and even the swift and summary punishment of recalcitrant workers hardly allayed growing apprehension over the behavior of the blacks. In some instances, the subjugation achieved by the use of the whip must have seemed less than satisfying to those inflicting the beating. In Nansemond County, Virginia, a slave known as Uncle Toliver had been indiscreet enough to pray aloud for the Yankees. The master’s two sons ordered him to kneel in the barnyard and pray for the Confederacy. But this stubborn old man prayed even louder for a Yankee triumph. With growing exasperation, perhaps even bewilderment, the two sons took turns in whipping him until finally the slave, still murmuring something about the Yankees, collapsed and died. The “triumph” achieved by these two young white men sounded more like the death knell of the system they sought so desperately to maintain.64
Deprived of what they deemed essential protection, often frustrated in their attempts to anticipate bl
ack behavior, many anguished whites forgot all that talk about contented and loyal slaves and described a situation fraught with the most terrifying implications. Having heard that the home guard might soon be recalled to combat the Yankee invaders, the mistress of a plantation in the Abbeville district of South Carolina wondered how the remaining whites could possibly survive the internal enemy. “If the men are going, then awful things are coming, and I don’t want to stay. My God, the women and children, it will be murder and ruin. There are many among the black people and they only want a chance.”65 If any additional evidence were needed, the obsession with internal security and, perhaps most ominous, the deployment in some regions of Confederate troops to resist both Yankee invaders and rebellious blacks suggested a white South desperately clinging to the fiction of the docile slave without in any way believing it.
6
REFUSING TO RESIGN THEMSELVES to the grim prospects of occupation and emancipation, numerous white families chose to remove their slaves to safer grounds. That was an abrupt change in his life that Allen V. Manning would never forget. Leaving the old plantation in Clarke County, Mississippi, Manning and his fellow slaves found themselves heading westward into a country they knew but little about. Several times the caravan halted in some place, while the master hired them out to planters trying to make a crop. Every time the Yankees came closer, he would move them out again until finally they crossed the Sabine River into Texas. That was where Manning’s sister gave birth, and the master promptly named the new girl Texana. When they reached Coryell County, the master decided to settle and plant a crop, satisfied that the Yankees no longer posed an immediate threat to his slave property. And it was here, more than 600 miles from the plantation where he had spent most of his bondage, that Allen Manning would learn one day of his freedom. He never returned to Mississippi.66
The decision made by Allen Manning’s master to run his slaves into Texas reflected the desperation with which numbers of planters sought to avoid the panic that often preceded the arrival of the Yankees and to find a place where they might keep their slave force intact and postpone for as long as possible the need to emancipate them. From the very outset of the war, some planter families anticipated the need for such a refuge and rented or purchased places to which they could move themselves and their slave property at the appropriate time. The first slaves to be relocated were often the most troublesome, those who were thought to have a demoralizing influence on the others and in whom the least amount of confidence could be placed. Louis Manigault, a Georgia rice planter, acting on the advice of his overseer, selected ten slaves he deemed “most likely would cause trouble” and dispatched them to an area “sufficiently remote from all excitement.” A planter friend of Mary Chesnut searched for “a place of safety” to send 200 of his blacks who “had grown to be a nuisance,” while still another South Carolinian, supervising the removal of his mother’s slaves, chose “the primest hands & the most uncertain.”67
Whether because of the threatened disruption of local and family ties or the proximity to freedom, few slaves relished the idea of being removed from the home farm or plantation. Sensing that reluctance, a Tennessee planter tried to ease the pain by sharing the remaining whiskey with his slaves before ordering their departure. Perhaps he had only intended to numb their senses; nevertheless, the act revealed a certain compassion, when compared to the owners who employed various deceptions to prepare their slaves for the arduous trek, telling them about the murderous Yankees and, as one slave recalled, “dat where dey is goin’ de lakes full of syrup and covered with batter cakes, and dey won’t have to work so hard.” Rather than resort to such ruses, the proprietress of a plantation in central Georgia appealed to the faithfulness of her slaves and made removal a virtual test of their loyalty. “I reminded them of their master’s absence; how he had committed his wife and children to their care; how desirous was I to be able to tell him on his return that they deserved his confidence to the last.” All but two of the slaves left with her the next morning.68
Whatever their owners told them, the slaves seemed to know instinctively (if not from the “grapevine”) why they were being sent away, and for some that proved to be sufficient reason to take immediate action to determine their own destinations. Stephen Jordon, who had been a slave in Louisiana, regarded his master as “a good man” but with a highly volatile temper. When slaves in the neighborhood ran off to Union-occupied New Orleans, however, he assured his master that he had no such intention. “I shall never leave you. Those Yankees are too bad, I hear.” But when his master announced plans to remove all the slaves to Texas, Jordon had to reconcile his sense of obligation with his deep yearning for freedom.
Of course I liked Mr. Valsin well enough, but I rather be free than be with him, or be the slave of any body else. So his word about going to Texas rather sunk deep into me, because I was praying for the Yankees to come up our way just as soon as possible. I dreaded going to Texas, because I feared that I would never get free. The same thought was in the mind of every one of the slaves on our place. So two nights before we were to leave for Texas all the slaves on our place had a secret meeting at midnight, when we decided to leave to meet the Yankees. Sure enough, about one o’clock that night every one of us took through the woods to make for the Union line.
In low-country South Carolina, a planter made the mistake of telling his slaves that he intended to move them into the interior after the crop had been completed; seventy-six of them left the night of his announcement and reached the Union lines. The steady movement of Louisiana planters into Texas and Arkansas was to have included the slaves belonging to John Williams of Assumption Parish; the morning of his intended departure, however, he awakened to discover that twenty-seven of them, including several of the family favorites, were nowhere to be found. “Will you ever have faith in one again?” his daughter thought to ask him. No matter how hard the planter tried to conceal his intentions, the information managed to reach the slave quarters. Only two days after making some discreet inquiries in town about a plantation to rent, John Berkley Grimball, a prominent South Carolina planter, learned that nearly every one of his slaves, including “the best of them,” had disappeared during the previous night—“about 80 of them … men women and children.” He quickly confined most of the remaining slaves to the workhouse in the nearby town until he found another place in the up-country. “This is a terrible blow and has probably ruined me,” he sighed after adding up his losses.69
The wagon trains carrying the planter families and household goods, with the slaves, cattle, and horses trailing behind them, would become a familiar sight in parts of the wartime South. The fall of New Orleans and exposure to Federal raiding parties precipitated the largest exodus, with more than 150,000 slaves sent out of Louisiana and Mississippi, choking the roads and towns leading into Texas. “It look like everybody in the world was going to Texas,” Allen Manning recalled. “When we would be going down the road we would have to walk along the side all the time to let the wagons go past, all loaded with folks going to Texas.” The slaves who made these treks would long recall the crowded roads, the inhospitable towns, the mothers toting the children on their backs, the fathers tending the wagons and livestock, and the many difficult detours that were ordered to avoid Yankee raiding parties. “Dat was de awfullest trip any man ever make!” Charley Williams, a former Louisiana slave, recalled. “We had to hide from everybody until we find out if dey Yankees or Sesesh, and we go along little old back roads and up one mountain and down another, through de woods all de way.” Virginia Newman remembered how “us all walk barefeets and our feets break and run they so sore, and blister for months. It cold and hot sometime and rain and us got no house or no tent.” To compensate for the drudgery of the journey, the slaves invented some appropriate songs and sang them to the slow steps of the oxen pulling the wagons.
Walk, walk, you nigger, walk!
De road am dusty, de road am tough,
Dust in de ey
e, dust in de tuft;
Dust in de mouth, yous can’t talk—
Walk, you niggers, don’t you balk.
Walk, walk, you nigger, walk!
De road am dusty, de road am rough.
Walk ’til we reach dere, walk or bust—
De road am long, we be dere by and by.
“We’uns don’t sing it many times,” Bill Homer remembered, “ ’til de missy come and sit in de back of de wagon, facin’ we’uns [who were walking], and she begin to beat de slow time and sing wid we’uns. Dat please Missy Mary to sing with us and she laugh and laugh.”70
Although many of the elderly slaves had been left behind on the old plantations, relocation would take its toll in exhaustion, disrupted families, and lives. After two years on the road, the Miles family of Richmond, Virginia, finally reached Franklin, Texas, but not before the master had sold and traded both slaves and livestock along the way, retaining only his personal servants. Elvira Boles, who had been a slave in Mississippi, left her baby buried “somewhere on dat road” to Texas. Louis Love of Louisiana recalled the death of his brother before they reached the Trinity River. A North Carolina planter, who “didn’ want to part with his niggers,” failed to survive the trip to Arkansas, as did three of the slaves. “We buried the slaves there [on the road],” Millie Evans remembered, “but we camped while ol’ master was carried back to North Carolina. When ol’ mistress come back we started on to Arkansas an’ reached here safe but when we got here we foun’ freedom here too.”71
Whether on the road or in the makeshift camps at night, the slaves had ample time to reflect over their situation—the places they had left behind, the breakup of families, the growing distance between themselves and the nearest Union troops, the uncertainty of what lay ahead. Their brooding boded only disastrous results for some slaveholders. Rarely a morning passed without the discovery that still more slaves had fled during the night, perhaps to the Union lines, perhaps even back to the old plantation. The difficulty in controlling their slaves on the road forced some owners to turn back; others simply tried to minimize their losses. With her husband in the Confederate Army, Mary Williams Pugh of Louisiana decided to attach her slaves to those of her parents, and the two families then set out for a month-long trip to Rusk, Texas. The morning they departed, her parents lost twenty-seven slaves. “The first night we camped Sylvester left—the next night at Bayou B. about 25 of Pa’s best hands left & the next day at Berwick Bay nearly all of the women & children started—but this Pa found out in time to catch them all except one man & one woman. Altogether he had lost about sixty of his best men.” Meanwhile, Mary Pugh’s brother had encountered similar losses the first two days on the road and he decided to turn back, “as he was afraid of being left with only women & children.” After these experiences, Mrs. Pugh could only be grateful for the “good behavior” of her own slaves. “[Y]ou have every reason to be proud of them,” she wrote her husband, “as I have told them you would be. They are the talk of every neighborhood they pass through as they are such exceptions to other negroes.”72