Been in the Storm So Long (2 page)

Whatever the surviving sources of black testimony, they have been compiled largely by white men and women. Not only could the reporter’s race influence what he chose to record but his unfamiliarity with black speech patterns affected how he transmitted the material. No attempt has been made in this book to alter the transcription of Negro dialect, even in those instances where the white man’s perception of black language seems obviously and intentionally distorted. But to transpose the dialect into standard English would only introduce other forms of distortion and project into black speech the biases and predilections of the modern observer. For that reason, the reader will simply be asked to keep in mind the conditions under which black people often related their experiences, including the circumspection some of them deemed necessary in the presence of whites.

Never before had black people in the South found any reason to view the future with more hope or expectation than in the 1860s. The war and freedom injected into their lives the excitement of anticipation, encouraged a new confidence in their own capabilities, and afforded them a rare insight into the vulnerability and dependency of their “white folks.” For many, these were triumphs in themselves. If their optimism seems misplaced, the sights which greeted newly freed slaves suggested otherwise—black armies of occupation, families reunited, teachers offering to instruct them, Federal officials placing thousands of them on abandoned and confiscated lands, former masters prepared to bargain for their labor, and black missionaries organizing them in churches based upon a free and independent expression of their Christianity. To measure the significance of emancipation is not to compare the material rewards of freedom and slavery, as many contemporaries were apt to do, but to appreciate the many and varied ways in which the newly freed moved to reorder their lives and priorities and the new assumptions upon which they acted.

Even as many freed blacks found themselves exhilarated by the prospects for change, the old ways of living, working, and thinking did not die easily and those who had been compelled to free them immediately searched for alternative ways to exploit their labor and command their lives. Seldom in history have any people faced tasks so formidable and challenging as those which four million southern blacks confronted in the aftermath of the Civil War. This experience, like that of their enslavement, they could share with no other Americans. Nor was the dominant society about to rearrange its values and priorities to grant to black Americans a positive assistance commensurate with the inequalities they had suffered and the magnitude of the problems they faced. If the ex-slaves were to succeed, they would have to depend largely on their own resources. Under these constraints, a recently enslaved people sought ways to give meaning to their new status. The struggles they would be forced to wage to shape their lives and destinies as free men and women remain to this day an epic chapter in the history of the American people.

L
EON
F. L
ITWACK
Berkeley, California
September 1978

A
T ITS INCEPTION
, this book was to have been a study of black life in the South from the Civil War to the turn of the century. But as the research progressed, the experience of the newly freed slaves took on a life of its own and became the primary focus. A John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship enabled me to devote a full year to research and writing. Funds provided by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health and a Humanities Research Fellowship from the University of California at Berkeley afforded me additional time and support to reformulate the project, conduct further research, and complete the writing of the manuscript. The Institute of Social Sciences and the Committee on Research at the University of California also generously provided funds for research assistance, travel, and microfilming expenses.

My travels in search of materials ranged from manuscript libraries and state and federal archives to a remote United States Cemetery outside of Port Hudson, Louisiana, where the gravestones of black Union soldiers, many of them marked “unknown,” stand as monuments to that dramatic moment in American history when armed black men, including recently freed slaves, marched through the southern countryside as an army of liberation and occupation. For the courtesies and generous assistance extended to me, I am grateful to the staffs of the Duke University Library; the Fisk University Library; the Henry E. Huntington Library; the Moorland Foundation Library at Howard University; the Louisiana State University Department of Archives and History; the Library of Congress; the National Archives; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library; the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina; the South Carolina Department of Archives and History; and the Valentine Museum and State Library in Richmond, Virginia. I should also like to express my appreciation to the Board of Trustees of the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia for their kind permission to use and microfilm
The Christian Recorder
, a rare and major source of black testimony from the wartime and postwar South that proved indispensable to my work.

The opportunity to draw on the knowledge and insights of many friends and fellow teachers and scholars proved both rewarding and stimulating. Not all of them fully shared my views or approach but their suggestions and critical encouragement were deeply valued. For having first stimulated my interest in the history of slavery and the South, I remain indebted to my teacher and colleague, Kenneth M. Stampp. I am also grateful to Allan Nevins for having invited me to join the series he edited on the Impact of the Civil War—that proved to be the seed of the present volume. Among my associates at Berkeley, Paula S. Fass, Winthrop D. Jordan, Lawrence W. Levine, and Robert L. Middlekauff read and criticized the entire manuscript, bringing to it the insight, imagination, and sensitivity they have demonstrated so abundantly in their own published works. While completing his study of slavery, Eugene D. Genovese generously took time out to scrutinize early drafts of several chapters and to share with me his ideas on the “Moment of Truth”; he later read the completed manuscript and responded with his characteristically sharp and exacting criticism and warm encouragement. I am no less indebted to Eric Foner, Nathan I. Huggins, and Ronald G. Walters, each of whom expended considerable time and energy to read the manuscript and to suggest revisions which both improved the quality of the text and reduced its size. For their reactions to individual chapters, I would like to thank Herbert G. Gutman, James Kindregan, John G. Sproat, Peter H. Wood, and Arthur Zilversmit. During various stages of the book, I benefited from the assistance of Joseph Corn, Marina Wikramanayake Fernando, Susan Glenn, Alice Schulman, and Patricia Sheehan. For the thorough and perceptive reading of the book in page proofs, I am deeply grateful to Cornelia Levine. For sharing with me her skills in research and languages, Natalie Reid has my profoundest appreciation. I am also grateful to my editor at Knopf, Ashbel Green, for his careful reading of the manuscript and judicious comments.

But finally, this book belongs to my wife, Rhoda, who lived with it for more than a decade. Neither the dedication nor this brief acknowledgment adequately recognizes how much her love, personal insight, and support helped to ease the manuscript through its several passages.

R
OBERT
M
URRAY
could already sense the change in his “white folks.” As a young slave, dividing his time between running errands and tending the horses, he had been treated tolerably well. “Massa” had been generous in providing food and clothing, “missus” had ignored both law and custom to teach several of the slaves to read, and the slave children had usually found a warm welcome in the Big House. “Been treat us like we’s one de fambly,” Murray recalled. “Jus’ so we treat de white folks ’spectable an’ wu’k ha’hd.” After the election of Abraham Lincoln, however, “it all diffrunt.” The easy familiarity of the master and mistress gave way to suspicious glances, and the slaves were permitted less freedom of movement around the place. When the children ventured up to the Big House, as they had done so often in the past, the master or mistress now barred their way and offered excuses for not inviting them inside. “Don’ go in de Big House no mo’, chillun,” Robert Murray’s mother advised them. “I know whut de trouble. Dey s’pose we all wants ter be free.”
²

On the eve of the Civil War, the more than four million slaves and free blacks comprised nearly 40 percent of the population of the South. Although most slaveholders owned less than ten slaves, the majority of slaves worked as field hands on plantation-size units which held more than twenty slaves, and at least a quarter of the slave force lived in units of more than fifty slaves. Even without the added disruption of war, the awesome presence of so many blacks could seldom be ignored. While to the occasional visitor they might blend picturesquely into the landscape and seem almost inseparable from it, native whites were preoccupied with their
reality. Oftentimes, in fact, they could talk of little else. Wavering between moods of condescension, suspicion, and hostility, slaveholding families acknowledged by their conversations and daily conduct a relationship with their blacks that was riddled with ambiguity. When the Civil War broke out, with the attendant problems of military invasion and plantations stripped of their white males, that ambiguity would assume worrisome dimensions for some, it would lure others into a false sense of security, and it would drive still more into fits of anguish.

Within easy earshot of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, Mary Boykin Chesnut, whose husband was an extensive planter and political leader in South Carolina, tried in vain to penetrate behind the inscrutable faces of her servants. Why did they not betray some emotion or interest? How could they go about their daily chores seemingly unconcerned that their own destiny might be in the balance but a few miles away? “Not by one word or look can we detect any change in the demeanor of these Negro servants. Lawrence sits at our door, as sleepy and as respectful and as profoundly indifferent. So are they all. They carry it too far. You could not tell that they even hear the awful noise that is going on in the bay, though it is dinning in their ears night and day. And people talk before them as if they were chairs and tables, and they make no sign.” This almost studied indifference obviously troubled Mary Chesnut as much as it might have comforted and reassured her. “Are they stolidly stupid,” she wondered, “or wiser than we are, silent and strong, biding their time?”
³

The slaves were no less observant of their “white folks.” Although blacks had always been aware of frailties in their owners, the system of slavery had been based on the acknowledged power of the white man. But the Civil War introduced tensions and tragedies into the lives of masters and mistresses that made them seem less than omnipotent, perhaps even suddenly human in ways blacks had thought impossible. Rarely had slaves perceived their owners so utterly at the mercy of circumstances over which they had no control. Never before had they seemed so vulnerable, so beleaguered, so helpless. Unprecedented in the disruptions, stresses, and trauma it generated among both whites and blacks, the Civil War threatened to undermine traditional relationships and dissolve long-held assumptions and illusions. Even if many slaves evinced a human compassion for masters and mistresses caught in the terrible plight of war, invasion, and death, how long before these same slaves came to recognize that in the very suffering of their “white folks” lay their own freedom and salvation?