Been in the Storm So Long (22 page)

The Fort Pillow Massacre obviously had a different impact than General Forrest intended. If blacks were not to be treated as prisoners of war, they would fight that much harder to avoid capture. “As long as we are not recognized by the Federal Government,” a black corporal wrote, “we do not expect the enemy to treat us as prisoners of war; and, as there is no alternative left for us, we will kill every rebel we capture.” Writing from his camp near Petersburg, Virginia, a black sergeant noted that his regiment had gone into battle shouting “Remember Fort Pillow!” and that “more rebels gave themselves up that day than were actually taken prisoners.” No matter how inflated may have been some reports of black vengeance, sufficient instances were recorded to suggest that black troops
fought with even greater ferocity and determination, some of them apparently convinced that to be captured was to be murdered in cold blood. The fact that Confederate officers tried to disclaim any such intentions partly reflected a growing concern over the morale of their own troops. “The Johnnies are not as much afraid of us as they are of the Mokes [black troops],” a white Union soldier wrote from Petersburg. “When they charge they will not take any prisoners, if they can help it. Their cry is, ‘Remember Fort Pillow!’ Sometimes, in their excitement, they forget what to say, when they catch a man they say: ‘Remember what you done to us, way back, down dar!’ ”
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W
HEN UNION GUNBOATS
came up the Combahee River in South Carolina, the slave laborers on the rice plantations dropped their hoes and ran. Few of them knew what to expect of the Yankees, and some no doubt believed the atrocity stories related by their masters and mistresses. Imagine the surprise of these slaves when they finally caught their first glimpse of the invaders. None of their “white folks” had thought to tell them that the Yankee devils might also be black men. In this instance, the soldiers belonged to the newly formed 2nd South Carolina Volunteers, which had been recruited largely from former slaves. Colonel James Montgomery, the white commanding officer, had fought with John Brown in the Kansas guerrilla wars. And the “scout” who accompanied him on this raid was none other than Harriet Tubman, known to many of the slaves as “Moses” for the forays she had made into the South before the war to escort fugitives to freedom. This time she had the backing of Federal guns as she supervised the removal of slaves from the Combahee River plantations.

The slaves looked on in amazement as armed black men came ashore and burned down the homes of white men. “De brack sojer so presumptious,” one slave kept muttering, his head shaking with admiration and disbelief at what he was witnessing. “Dey come right ashore, hold up dere head. Fus’ ting I know, dere was a barn, then tousand bushel rough rice, all in a blaze, den mas’r’s great house, all cracklin’ up de roof.” It had to be an impressive spectacle, and this slave seemed to relish every minute, making no move to put out the flames. “Didn’t I keer for see ’em blaze?” he exclaimed. “Lor, mas’r, didn’t care notin’ at all.
I
was gwine to de boat.”
For the soldiers, as for the slaves who were now rushing to the gunboats, a holiday atmosphere prevailed. “I nebber see such a sight,” an exultant Harriet Tubman declared—“pigs squealin’, chickens screamin’, young ones squallin’.” Elderly couples vied with the young to reach the boats, determined to leave “de land o’ bondage”; numerous women came aboard, one of them balancing a pail on her head (“rice a smokin’ in it jus’ as she’d taken it from de fire”), most of them loaded down with baskets and bags
containing their worldly possessions. “One woman brought two pigs, a white one an’ a black one,” Harriet Tubman recalled; “we took ’em all on board; named de white pig Beauregard, and de black pig Jeff Davis.” With more than 700 slaves aboard, the gunboats finally set out for Beaufort.
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Nowhere in the Confederate South was the impact of the Civil War more graphically demonstrated than in the sight of armed and uniformed black men, most of them only recently slaves, operating as a liberation and occupation army. The grievances of the black soldier often took on a diminished importance when he contemplated his role in this war. “Men and women, old and young, were running through the streets, shouting and praising God,” one soldier wrote after his regiment had entered Wilmington, North Carolina. “We could then truly see what we had been fighting for, and could almost realize the fruits of our labors.” With his regiment nearing Richmond, another soldier exulted, “We have been instrumental in liberating some five hundred of our sisters and brethren from the accursed yoke of human bondage.” The scenes which greeted black soldiers in their march through the South—abandoned plantation houses, joyous celebrations of freedom, reunions of families separated by slavery, the shocked and angry faces of white men and women—were bound to make a deep and lasting impression. For many of the northern blacks, this was their first look at the South and the Southerner. “I have noticed a strange peculiarity among the people here,” a soldier with the 54th Massachusetts Regiment noted. “They are all the most outrageous stutterers. If you meet one and say, ‘How are you?’ as you pass, you could walk a whole block before he could sputter out the Southern, ‘Right smart, I thank-ee.’ ” The soldiers were moved not only by the effusive welcomes they usually received from the slaves but also by observing at first hand the effects of a lifetime of bondage. “I often sit down and hear the old mothers down here tell how they have been treated,” a Pennsylvania soldier wrote. “It would make your heart ache.… They have frequently shown me the deep marks of the cruel whip upon their backs.” Many of the black soldiers located family members and revived old friendships, while some began courtships that would result in new relationships.
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Perhaps most memorable were the occasions on which the soldiers who had once been slaves were afforded the opportunity to manifest their contempt for the relics and symbols of their enslavement. “We is a gwine to pay our respectable compliments to our old masters,” one soldier declared, summing up the sentiments of his regiment. While marching through a region, the black troops would sometimes pause at a plantation, ascertain from the slaves the name of the “meanest” overseer in the neighborhood, and then, if he had not fled, “tie him backward on a horse and force him to accompany them.” Although a few masters and overseers were whipped or strung up by a rope in the presence of their slaves, this appears to have been a rare occurrence. More commonly, black soldiers preferred to apportion the contents of the plantation and the Big House among those whose labor had made them possible, singling out the more “notorious” slaveholders
and systematically ransacking and demolishing their dwellings. “They gutted his mansion of some of the finest furniture in the world,” wrote Chaplain Henry M. Turner, in describing a regimental action in North Carolina. Having been informed of the brutal record of this slaveholder, the soldiers had resolved to pay him a visit. While the owner was forced to look on, they went to work on his “splendid mansion” and “utterly destroyed every thing on the place.” Wielding their axes indiscriminately, they shattered his piano and most of the furniture and ripped his expensive carpets to pieces. What they did not destroy they distributed among his slaves. And when the owner addressed one of the soldiers “rather saucily,” he was struck across the mouth and sent reeling to the floor. Chaplain Turner, who witnessed the action, obviously thought no explanation was necessary for the punishment meted out to this planter. “It was on Sabbath,” he noted, and “as Providence would have it,” the men had halted their march to eat and rest near the home of this “infamous” slaveholder.

Besides, after observing the work of General Sherman’s armies, Chaplain Turner concluded that “we were all good fellows.”
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Had such scenes been imagined at the outset of the Civil War, the sensibilities of white Americans would no doubt have been shocked. Yet, but two years later, black soldiers of the United States Army, most of them freed slaves, engaged their former masters in combat, marched through the southern countryside, paraded and drilled in southern towns and villages, and brought the news of freedom to tens of thousands of slaves. “The change seems almost miraculous,” a black sergeant conceded. “The very people who, three years ago, crouched at their master’s feet, on the accursed soil of Virginia, now march in a victorious column of freedmen, over the same land.” When violating southern codes and customs, black soldiers appeared to be fully aware of the significance of their actions. “We march through these fine thoroughfares,” a soldier wrote from Wilmington, North Carolina, “where once the slave was forbid being out after nine
P.M
., or to puff a ‘regalia,’ or to walk with a cane, or to ride in a carriage! Negro soldiers!—with banners floating.” And with unconcealed delight, James F. Jones wrote from New Orleans how he had “walked fearlessly and boldly through the streets of a southern city … without being required to take off his cap at every step, or to give all the sidewalks to those lordly princes of the sunny south, the planters’ sons!”
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Nor would any black soldier soon forget that exhilarating moment when he and his men marched into a southern city amidst crowds of cheering slaves who rushed out into the streets to embrace them and to
clasp their hands. It seemed to one soldier that the slaves “look for more certain help, and a more speedy termination of the war, at the hands of the colored soldiers than from any other source; hence their delight at seeing us.” Although some slaves greeted them initially with suspicion and disbelief (“Are you the Yankees?”) or even with hostility (“wild Africans”), the restraints broke down quickly in most places and what ensued were celebrations that lasted far into the night. “I was indeed speechless,” a black sergeant wrote from Wilmington after the tumultuous reception given his regiment. “I could do nothing but cry to look at the poor creatures so overjoyed.” To the disgust of a white resident of Camden, South Carolina, the black troops staged a regular camp meeting to which local blacks were invited—“tremendous excitement prevailed, as they prayed their cause might prosper and their just freedom be obtained.”
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When black troops entered Charleston singing the John Brown song, they found themselves immediately surrounded by the black residents. Upon seeing the soldiers, one elderly slave woman threw down her crutch and shouted that the year of the Jubilee had finally arrived. Some of the soldiers and their officers, after what they had witnessed, confessed that “the glory and the triumph of this hour” simply defied description. “It was one of those occasions which happen but once in a lifetime.” Several weeks later, newly commissioned Major Martin R. Delany arrived in Charleston, still hoping to consummate his vision of a “corps d’Afrique.” He could barely restrain himself at the thought of entering the city “which, from earliest childhood and through life, I had learned to contemplate with feelings of the utmost abhorrence.” After pausing momentarily to view “the shattered walls of the once stately but now deserted edifices of the proud and supercilious occupants,” he found himself “dashing on in unmeasured strides through the city, as if under a forced march to attack the already crushed and fallen enemy.”
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After a Virginia planter heard from his father alarming reports of black occupation troops, he vowed to keep the letter for his children in order to aid him “in cultivating in their hearts an
eternal hatred
to Yankeedom.” The expression “What I most fear is not the Yankees, but the negroes” summed up the apprehensions that gripped southern whites as Union troops neared their homes. Having expected little else, black soldiers grew accustomed to the cold stares and defiant looks on the faces of the defeated whites. “You cannot imagine, with what surprise the inhabitants of the South, gaze upon us,” a black sergeant remarked. “They are afraid to say anything to us; so they take it out in looking.” The sight of black troops patrolling the city streets and passing through the plantations, and the fact that many of their own slaves were among these regiments, constituted for many whites the ultimate humiliation of the Civil War. “There’s my Tom,” one planter muttered, his face reddening, as he viewed some passing soldiers. “How I’d like to cut the throat of the dirty, impudent good-for-nothing!” Some of the whites he observed, Henry M. Turner noted, appeared to be uncertain “as to whether they are actually in another world, or whether this one is turned wrong side out.”
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No
matter how hard whites tried to keep their thoughts to themselves, the indignation they felt could not always be contained. They shook their fists at the passing troops, spit at them from behind the windows where they were standing, ordered them to stay out of their yards, and expressed rage and disbelief whenever any black regiment was kept in the town or neighborhood as an occupation force. “Those dreadful negro wretches, whose very looks betokened their brutal natures,” one white woman observed, “caused an indefinable thrill of horror and loathing.”
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