Been in the Storm So Long Page 9
The extent of black insurrectionary activity during the Civil War remains a subtle question. What is nearly impossible to determine in each instance is whether the reported revolt or plot was actually consummated, whether it existed only in the fevered imaginations of war-weary whites, or, far more commonly, whether “insurrection” simply became a way to define “suspicious activity,” “insubordination,” and organized flight to the Yankees. None of the wartime slave plots and uprisings achieved any spectacular results. But the psychic impact was formidable, each report and rumor reminding the white South of the potential that resided in its black population. The specter of servile insurrection hovered over the debate on enlisting blacks into the Confederate Army and intruded itself on the confidence with which whites periodically congratulated themselves over the docility of their slaves. The many reports that quantities of arms, gunpowder, knives, and hatchets had been found secreted under the floors of slave cabins revived traditional fears, and some planters ordered that hoes, axes, and other implements that might serve as weapons be locked up at night. The sound of fire bells excited still more panic, with the increase in arson attempts ascribed to blacks, particularly after it became known that slave rebels in Mississippi had planned to inaugurate an insurrection by burning the city of Natchez.103
The initial fears stemmed from reports that slaves in certain regions were preparing to wage insurrectionary warfare the moment the white volunteers left for military service or as soon as Yankee troops came into the vicinity. Within months after the bombardment of Fort Sumter, rumors of a black uprising placed Charleston residents on alert, and insurrectionary plots were uncovered in Georgia, Virginia, Arkansas, Kentucky, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi.104 In May 1861, a citizens’ committee in Kingston, Georgia, ordered the hanging of a slave after hearing evidence that pointed to “one of the most diabolical schemes ever devised by any fiend to murder the citizens of this county, and take possession of their property.” That same month, Edmund Ruffin reported the discovery of a conspiracy in Virginia which had been organized at “night meetings for pretended religious worship.” But he claimed to be unshaken by the news.
A conspiracy discovered & repressed is better assurance of safety than if no conspiracy had been heard of or suspected. While I deem there is not the least ground for alarm & that this conspiracy, if undiscovered, would have had no dangerous results—still we ought to be always vigilant, & be ready to meet attacks, whether from northern invaders or negro insurgents.
With less equanimity, a white family in Bossier Parish, Louisiana, described the slaves in their neighborhood as “verry bold” and “trying to make up a company to rise.” When overtaken, one of the conspirators “abused his Master to the last and told him that the North was fighting for the Negroes now [and] that he was as free as his Master.” The accused rebel was then bound and left behind while the whites pursued the remaining conspirators. Upon their return, they found that “he had got loos and taken the cords that he was tied with and hung him self.” Not far from this scene, and at nearly the same time, a Louisiana planter, having crawled under a slave cabin, overheard his slaves plotting a revolt.105
Although whites tried to downplay the impact of the Emancipation Proclamation, President Lincoln’s preliminary announcement in September 1862 promptly set off a new wave of rumors and reports of insurrection. “It was very weak and ill-arranged,” Emma Holmes of Camden, South Carolina, said of a plot discovered in her district, and several blacks were scheduled to hang. In December, one month before the Proclamation took effect, a Confederate militia unit from Mississippi requested that it be permitted to disband and return home for the Christmas holiday, not for purposes of merriment but to forestall an anticipated slave uprising. “[W]e deem it highly necessary that we should be there for the defense of our families,” a spokesman for the group advised the governor, “as the negroes are making their brags that by the first of January they will be free as we are and a general outbreak is expected about that time.” No doubt this was not the only militia unit which preferred to take its chances with slave rebels rather than Yankee soldiers.106
With emancipation an avowed Union objective, persistent reports circulated that blacks intended to stage a general revolt that would affect every part of the South and begin with the destruction of railroad tracks, telegraph lines, and bridges. Julia LeGrand, a young white woman, heard that the revolt would fall on New Year’s Day 1863, and no place would be safe, not even the Union-occupied New Orleans in which she resided.
I feel no fear, but many are in great alarm.… Fires are frequent—it is feared that incendiaries are at work. Last night was both cold and windy. The bells rang out and the streets resounded with cries. I awoke from sleep and said, “Perhaps the moment has come.” … Mrs. Norton has a hatchet, a tomahawk, and a vial of some kind of spirits with which she intends to blind all invaders. We have made no preparations, but if the worst happen we will die bravely no doubt.107
Reinforcing the rumors of an impending general insurrection, reports mounted during the last two years of the war of the existence of “underground” organizations among the slaves. An escaped Union prisoner related how he had been assisted by a secret society which included “men whom their masters trusted in important transactions.” In Livingston Parish, Louisiana, a woman informed her husband of “a terrible stir” involving more than a hundred slaves belonging to two planters; the conspirators organized a company, elected officers, stole guns and horses, and were “all ready just as quick as the word was given to go to work.” Local whites put down the uprising, numerous slaves were whipped “very bad,” and five were scheduled to hang.108
If whites tended to blur the distinction between an “insurrection” and an organized escape to the enemy, they often had good reason. In Amite County, Mississippi, some thirty or more armed slaves seized their masters’ horses and “openly with boldness, cheers and shouting” made their way toward Union-occupied Natchez; within fifteen miles of their destination, however, the slaves were overtaken and most of them killed. With far greater success, Elijah Marrs mobilized twenty-seven slaves in Simpsonville, Kentucky, for an escape to the Union lines nearby; they used the local church for a headquarters, elected Marrs their captain, and accumulated an arsenal of “twenty-six war clubs and one old rusty pistol.” Reaching Louisville before their owners, the slaves marched to the recruiting office and enlisted in the Union Army.109
The awesome number of mass punishments meted out to suspected black rebels often reflected nothing more than sheer hysteria. Although some whites thought their worst fears were about to be realized, the fact remains that the slaves failed to execute a major wartime rebellion. That failure was something the postwar white South chose to recall, as did certain black leaders eager to calm post-emancipation fears of a wave of black terror. “We never inaugurated a servile insurrection,” Georgia freedmen would memorialize the legislature in 1866, exaggerating their race’s submission.
We stayed peaceably at our homes, and labored with our usual industry. While you were absent fighting in the field, though we knew our power at the same time, and would frequently speak of it. We knew then it was in our power to rise, fire your houses, burn your barns, railroads, and discommode you in a thousand ways, so much so, that we could have swept the country, like a fearful tornado. But we preferred then as we do now, to wait on God, and trust to the instincts of your humanity.110
With different degrees of emphasis, some observers ascribed the absence of any large-scale servile insurrection to “the habit of patience” that bondage had instilled in black people. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, for example, an abolitionist Union officer commanding a black regiment in the South, often asked himself why “this capacity of daring and endurance” he observed in his soldiers had not kept the South “in a perpetual flame of insurrection.” One answer, he reflected, must lie somewhere “in the peculiar temperament of the races, in their religious faith, and in the habit of patienc
e that centuries had fortified.”111
But the discussions which Colonel Higginson had with his own men revealed that “the habit of patience” explained rather little. Around the campfires, at least, when any of the black soldiers broached the subject of insurrection, they spoke of a lack of information, money, arms, drill, organization, and mutual confidence—“the tradition” that nearly every revolt had been betrayed at the outset. “The shrewder men all said substantially the same thing,” Higginson observed. “What was the use of insurrection, where everything was against them?” To many blacks, in fact, talk of rebellion was simply “fool talk,” a suicidal form of resistance. By mid-1862, the Christian Recorder, a black newspaper in Philadelphia, had lost its patience with those northern whites who envisioned a slave uprising as the death gasp of the Confederacy. When the war first broke out, the editor noted, and the North had expected a quick triumph, the mere hint of a slave rebellion would have aroused nationwide indignation.
Now, that same people want the slaves to rise up and fight for their liberty. Rise against what?—powder, cannon, ball and grape-shot? Not a bit of it. They have got too much good sense. Since you have waited till every man, boy, woman and child in the so-called Southern Confederacy has been armed to the teeth, ’tis folly and mockery for you now to say to the poor, bleeding and downtrodden sons of Africa, “Arise and fight for your liberty!”
The point was well made. From the outset of the war, it had been apparent to many observers, white and black, that the Yankees were as likely to betray a rebellion as some slave informer. The President, anxious to hold the border states in line, had made it clear on numerous occasions that this war was not being waged to provoke servile insurrection. Had there been a slave rebellion, Colonel Higginson conceded, it would surely have divided northern sentiment, “and a large part of our army would have joined with the Southern army to hunt them down.” It was not, then, a black journalist explained, that the slaves were too ill informed to revolt. “They are too well informed and too wise to court destruction at the hands of the combined Northern and Southern armies.”112
The absence of any major slave revolts during the Civil War should in no way obscure the nature and extent of the resistance that accompanied, often in the same person, the more celebrated slave virtues of obedience, fidelity, and patience. Not all slaves waited for freedom to be thrust upon them, nor did pro-Union blacks necessarily confine their activities to secretive prayers and midnight meetings. Where it was possible to expedite the Union cause, there were almost always some slaves and free blacks willing to take the risks. While a few operated as Union spies, still larger numbers provided the Union Army with valuable information about Confederate campsites, troop movements, and morale and guided Union forces when they came into the vicinity. “A negro brought the Yankees from Pineville,” a white South Carolinian noted with dismay, “and piloted them to where our men were camped, taking them completely by surprise, capturing Bright and killing two of his men.” Alarmed at the effective use made of slave informants by the Union Army, Confederate officials urged severe punishment of any blacks found engaged in such activity, and soldiers resorted to various ruses to ferret them out. In Berkeley County, South Carolina, where a black driver had come under suspicion as an informant, Confederate scouts disguised as Yankees went to his cabin, offered to pay him if he could lead them to a reported Confederate camp in the swamps, and then “hung the traitor” when he did so. By early 1864, however, a Confederate officer thought slave activity on behalf of the Union Army had reached the point of “an omnipresent spy system, pointing out our valuable men to the enemy, revealing our positions, purposes, and resources, and yet acting so safely and secretly that there is no means to guard against it.”113
The literature of the Civil War is replete, too, with stories of how slaves and free blacks rendered invaluable assistance to Union soldiers who had escaped from Confederate prisons. Several such prisoners testified that their escape would have been impossible had it not been for the blacks who fed them and guided them to the Union lines. “George has brought us food during the day, and will try to get us a guide to-night,” an escaped Union soldier noted in the diary he kept during his flight. “Sometimes,” another escapee reported, “forty negroes, male and female, would come to us from one plantation, each one bringing something to give, and lay it at our feet, in the aggregate corn bread and potatoes enough to feed a regiment.” Fearing the consequences if they were detected, some slaves proved less helpful, while still others treated the Yankees as enemies and reported escapees to local authorities. One Union soldier who managed to escape from Andersonville recalled an uncooperative black woman who proclaimed her hatred for all white men, Yankees and Confederates alike, and refused to assist him in any way. “She was the only one of the race I ever applied to in vain for assistance.”114
Judged by the reaction it generated, the most spectacular and celebrated exploit of a black man during the Civil War concerned the delivery of a Confederate steamer to the Union Navy. The protagonist in this drama was Robert Smalls, a Charleston slave who had been hired out on the waterfront for several years and had acquired a boatman’s skills. In 1862, impressed into service, Smalls worked as an assistant pilot on the Planter, a cotton steamer converted by the Confederate government into an armed transport. On the night of May 12, 1862, the ship was docked in Charleston with some artillery newly loaded aboard. The officers and white crewmen had gone ashore, leaving Smalls to prepare the vessel for departure the next day. But the black crew, including the families of Robert Smalls and his brother, chose to leave prematurely aboard the Planter, thereby culminating Smalls’s plan to deliver the steamer intact to the Union ships blockading Charleston harbor. “I thought the Planter might be of some use to Uncle Abe,” he remarked afterwards. The North hailed him as a hero, and the government commissioned him an officer in the United States Colored Troops. Smalls returned at the helm of the Planter to witness the United States flag raised over Fort Sumter, and by this time he was well on his way toward becoming a legendary figure among South Carolina blacks. “Smalls ain’t God!” a skeptical black told one of Smalls’s admirers. “That’s true, that’s true,” he replied, “but Smalls’ young yet.” To the white South, the entire episode seemed impossible to grasp. Emma Holmes of Camden, South Carolina, confided her “horrified” reaction to the diary she kept, pronouncing Smalls’s act “most disgraceful” and “one of the boldest and most daring things of the war.”115
Few slaves were in a position to emulate the heroism of Robert Smalls. If they manifested their desire for freedom, it would have to take less spectacular forms. No less dramatic, however, and equally far-reaching, was the decision made by tens of thousands of slaves not to wait for the Yankees but to expedite liberation by fleeing to the Union lines. “We had heard it since last Fall,” an escaped slave told the Yankees in May 1861, “that if Lincoln was elected, you would come down and set us free. And the white-folks used to say so, but they don’t talk so now; the colored people have talked it all over; we heard that if we could get in here [the Union camp] we should be free, or at any rate, we should be among friends.” With the advance of the Union Army, the legendary North Star that had once illuminated the road out of bondage lost its strategic importance; freedom was as close as the nearest Union camp, perhaps only down the road or across a nearby swamp or river. “See how much better off we are now dan we was four years ago,” a successful runaway exulted. “It used to be five hundred miles to git to Canada from Lexington, but now it’s only eighteen miles! Camp Nelson is now our Canada.”116
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UNTIL AT LEAST MIDWAY through the war, Federal policy toward slave runaways remained unclear and inconsistent. Although the Lincoln administration endorsed the decision of General Benjamin F. Butler to treat them as “contraband of war,” Union commanders in the field persisted in making their own judgments, with some officers returning fugitives and upholding the legal right of loyal slaveholders to their
property. The Fugitive Slave Act remained operative until mid-1864, though only loyal masters (as defined usually by local commanders) could seek to reclaim runaways under its provisions. Federal legislation in 1862, however, barred military personnel from participating in the return of fugitive slaves and decreed that the escaped slaves of disloyal masters would be forever free.117
Whether defined as “contraband of war,” “fugitives,” or “freedmen,” they ceased to be slaves when they reached the Union lines. That was the news the “grapevine telegraph” quickly circulated, thereby swelling the number of slaves seeking out the Yankees. The “exodus” affected some plantations and regions far more severely than others, with those more remote from the war and the advancing Union Army recording the fewest successful escapes. In King William County, northeastern Virginia, nearly half the able-bodied male slaves between the ages of eighteen and forty-five fled in the first two years of the war, and a white resident of northern Virginia thought scarcely any slaves remained in that section of the country—“they have all gone to Canaan, by way of the York River, Chesapeake Bay, and the Potomac.” In North Carolina, a Confederate officer estimated in August 1862 that one million dollars’ worth of slaves were fleeing every week. By 1863, Union-occupied Vicksburg and Natchez had become centers for slave runaways in Mississippi, and that same year thousands of Louisiana slaves entered the Union lines at Baton Rouge and New Orleans. After its capture in early 1862, Fernandina, Florida, served as a haven for fugitives from Georgia and Florida, much as Beaufort did for South Carolina slaves.118
Although some runaways traveled in well-organized and armed contingents, this was largely a spontaneous movement, made up of single persons and groups of families. Slaves would leave the plantations at night, conceal themselves in the woods or swamps during the day, and seek out the nearest Yankee camp or Union-held town. The more fortunate fled in horse carts and ox carts, or even in the master’s buggy, while still others made use of boats, rafts, and canoes and their knowledge of the local waterways. Determined to enter the Union lines at Hilton Head, South Carolina, Jack Flowers hid in the rice swamps during the day and crept along at night until he reached the woods and a nearby river; he then made a basket boat, woven out of reeds cut in the swamp, caulked with cotton picked from the fields, and smeared with pitch from the pine trees, and successfully paddled his way to freedom. With few resources at their command, many refugees had to walk long distances on swollen and bleeding feet, carrying bundles of clothing or children on their shoulders. Two Louisiana families waded six miles across a swamp, spending two days and nights in mud and water to their waists, their children clinging to their backs. Some managed to carry away their few belongings, usually old rags, bedding, and furniture, which were piled onto carts and wagons. Several of the women attired themselves in their mistress’s clothes, and the men occasionally raided the master’s wardrobe before departing. Many, however, left with nothing but the clothes they were wearing: “Well, massa, we’d thought freedom better than clothes, so we left them.”119