Been in the Storm So Long (25 page)

“D
E WAR COMES
ter de great house an’ ter de slave cabins jist alike,” recalled Lucy Ann Dunn, a former slave on a North Carolina plantation. When the Yankees were reported to be approaching, even the less perceptive whites might have sensed the anxiousness, the apprehension, the excitement that gripped the slave quarters. “Negroes doing no good,” a Tennessee planter reported. “They seem to be restless not knowing what to do. At times I pity them at others I blame them much.” The tension was by no means confined to the fields but entered the Big House and affected the demeanor of the servants, including some who had hitherto betrayed few if any emotions about the war. “I tole you de Nordern soldiers would come back; I tole you dose forts was no ’count,” Aunt Polly, a Virginia house slave, exclaimed to the master’s son. “Yes,” he replied, obviously taken aback by her bluntness, “but you told me the Southern soldiers would come back, too, when father went away with them.” “Dat because you cried,” she explained, “and I wanted to keep up your spirits.” With
those words, Aunt Polly, a long-time family favorite for whose services her master said he could set no price, prepared to leave her “accustomed post” in the kitchen.
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Although few slaves demonstrated such “impertinence” in the presence of the master’s family, they did appear to be less circumspect in expressing their emotions. The pretenses were now lowered, if not dropped altogether. “The negroes seem very unwilling for the work,” a young white woman confided to her journal; “some of their aside speeches very incendiary. Edward, the old coachman, is particularly sullen.” On some plantations, the once clandestine prayer meetings were noticeably louder and more effusive, and there appeared to be fewer reasons to muffle the sounds before they reached the Big House. The singing in the slave quarters, Booker T. Washington remembered, “was bolder, had more ring, and lasted later into the night.” They had sung these verses before but there was no longer any need to conceal what they meant by them; the words had not changed, only their immediacy, only the emphasis with which certain phrases were intoned. “Now they gradually threw off the mask,” Washington recalled, “and were not afraid to let it be known that the ‘freedom’ in their songs meant freedom of the body in this world.”
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The mood of the slaves often defied the analysis of the master. On certain plantations, the slaves continued to act with an apparent indifference toward the war and the approaching Union troops, leaving their owners to speculate about what lay behind those bland countenances. In early 1865, as General Sherman’s troops moved into South Carolina, a prominent rice planter observed little excitement among his slaves; in fact, they seemed “as silent as they had been in April, 1861, when they heard from a distance the opening guns of the war.” Each evening the slave foreman dutifully obtained his instructions for the next day, and the work proceeded smoothly and silently. “Did those Negroes know that their freedom was so near? I cannot say, but, if they did, they said nothing, only patiently waited to see what would come.” A neighboring planter found his slaves performing little work but they “appear to be calm and are quite lively. They are orderly and respectful more so than one could expect under the circumstances.” With Yankee raiding parties reported a few miles away, the daughter of a Louisiana planter observed the slaves busily engaged in preparations for a Christmas party. That night, after hearing that a nearby town had been virtually destroyed, the white family witnessed the slave festivities with mixed feelings.

On New Year’s Day 1864, Catherine Broun gave her servants their customary party—“everything I would prepare for a supper for my own company”—even as she wondered how many of them would be with her by the end of the year; the “general opinion” in her neighborhood was that few of the slaves would remain. “I sometimes think I would not care if they all did go, they are so much trouble to me we have such a host of them.”
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Before the arrival of the Union Army, the roadsides were apt to be filled with the retreating columns of Confederate troops, their condition imparting most vividly and convincingly the visage of defeat. For many slaves, that sight alone confirmed what the “grapevine” and the demeanor of their “white folks” had earlier suggested, and the contrast with the initial predictions of ultimate victory could hardly have been more striking.

But even the anticipation of freedom did not necessarily prompt slaves to revel in the apparent military collapse of the Confederacy. Whether from loyalty to their “white folks,” the need to act circumspectly, or fear of the Yankees, many slaves looked with dismay at the ragged columns of Confederate soldiers passing through the towns and plantations. For some, faithfulness may have been less important than simply pride in their homeland, now being ravaged by strangers who evinced little regard for the property and lives of Southerners, black or white.
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The ambivalence that characterized the reaction of some slaves to the demise of the Confederacy reflected an understandable tension between attachment to their localities and the prospect of freedom. Three years after the war, an English visitor asked a Virginia freedman his opinion of Robert E. Lee. “He was a grand man, General Lee, sah,” the ex-slave replied without hesitation. “You were sorry when he was defeated, I suppose?” the visitor then asked. “O no, sah,” the freedman quickly retorted; “we were glad; we clapped our hands that day.” If few slaves yearned for a Confederate victory, they did nevertheless view themselves as Southerners, they did sense that their lives and destinies were intricately bound with the white people of the South, and some even shared with whites the humiliation of defeat. “Dere was jes’ too many of dem blue coats for us to lick,” a former Alabama slave tried to explain. “Our ’Federates was de bes’ fightin’ men dat ever were. Dere warn’t nobody lak our ’Federates.”
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When the unfamiliar roar of gunfire echoed in the distance, the emotions of individual slaves ranged from bewilderment and fear to unconcealed elation. In eastern Virginia, within earshot of the battle raging at Manassas, an elderly slave “mammy” preparing the Sunday dinner
greeted each blast of the cannon with a subdued “Ride on, Massa Jesus.” When the guns were heard near Charleston, a sixty-nine-year-old woman exclaimed, “Come, dear Jesus,” and she later recalled having felt “nearer to Heaben den I eber feel before.” The younger slaves were apt to be less certain about what was happening around them. The strange noise, the hasty preparations, the talk in the slave quarters were at the same time exciting and terrifying. Two young slaves who lived in different sections, Sam Mitchell of South Carolina and Annie Osborne of Louisiana, each heard what sounded like thunder when the Yankees approached, and both of them sought an explanation. “Son,” Sam’s mother assured him, “dat ain’t no t’under, dat Yankee come to gib you Freedom.” When the cannons ceased booming, Annie’s brother told her, “We’s gwine be all freed from old Massa Tom’s beatin’s.” No amount of time could dim those recollections, any more than Sarah Debro, who had been a slave in North Carolina, could forget the moment she asked her mistress to explain the thunder that had frightened her “near ’bout to death.” Those were Yankee cannons killing “our men,” the woman replied, before breaking down in tears. Alarmed by this unusual sight, Sarah ran to the kitchen, where Aunt Charity was cooking, and told her what had just happened. “She ain’t cryin’ kaze de Yankees killin’ de mens,” the black woman declared, “she’s doin’ all dat cryin’ kaze she skeered we’s goin’ to be sot free.”
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To perform the usual plantation routines under these conditions proved to be increasingly difficult. Although planters and overseers tried to maintain business as usual, and some succeeded, the reported approach of the Union Army tended to undermine slave discipline and in some places it brought work to a complete standstill. From the moment Yankee soldiers were sighted in the vicinity, John H. Bills, a Tennessee planter, found he could exert little authority over his slaves. “My people seem Contented & happy, but not inclined to work. They say ‘it is no use’ the
Yankeys
will
take it all
.” Moble Hopson, who had been a slave in Virginia, recalled how they had paid little attention to the war until the day they reported to the field and found no one there to supervise them. “An’ dey stand ’round an’ laugh an’ dey get down an’ wait, but dey don’ leave dat field all de mawning. An’ den de word cum dat de Yankees was a comin’, an’ all dem blacks start tuh hoopin’ an’ holl’rin’, an’ den dey go on down to deer shacks an’ dey don’ do no work at all dat day.”
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The approach of the Union Army forced planters and slaves alike into a flurry of last-minute activity. “ ’Fore they come,” a former Georgia slave recalled, “the white folks had all the niggers busy hidin’ everything they could.” On the assumption, which proved to be incorrect, that the Yankees would not disturb the slaves’ possessions, many white families secreted their valuables in or under the slave cabins or on the very persons of the slaves. “Miss Gusta calls me and wrops my hair in front and puts her jewelry in under the plaits and pulls them back and pins them down so you couldn’t see nothin’.” With Union troops sighted nearby, a South Carolina planter moved some of his house furniture into the cabin belonging to
Abram Brown, the driver and headman on the plantation, and told him to claim ownership if the Yankees asked any questions. To the Union soldiers, it must have looked like the best-furnished slave cabin in the South, and they refused to believe Brown’s story. Knowing the risks, some slaves simply refused to accept such responsibilities, using time-honored devices. “Mamma Maria was too nervous,” her mistress wrote, “and cried too much to have any responsibility put on her.”
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During those tense, anxious days of waiting, there were slaves who provided whatever encouragement and support they could muster for their masters and mistresses. With the Yankees expected any moment, Emma LeConte, the daughter of a prominent South Carolinian, found great comfort in the declaration of her servant, Henry, that he would stand by the family, whatever the consequences. “I believe he means it, but do not know how he will hold on.” On the day the Union Army entered Columbia, the LeConte servants (including Henry) returned from the center of town laden with looted provisions which they then shared with the white family. “How times change!” a grateful Emma LeConte wrote in her diary that night. “Those whom we have so long fed and cared for now help us.” Where the mistress and her daughters were the only remaining whites on the plantation, the slave women sometimes reversed paternalistic roles and insisted upon moving into the Big House, even into the same room, to afford them a greater degree of security. And with so many strangers prowling through the neighborhood, including Confederate Army stragglers and deserters, the slaves often treated with apprehension anyone who approached the plantation. On one Georgia plantation, a “suspicious-looking character” asked for food, only to be told by the servants that the master was not at home. But the mistress, who remained upstairs at the insistence of the servants, sent word to them to feed the stranger. “They made him sit in the piazza,” she wrote her son afterwards, “and when he attempted to come into the house (as he said, ‘to see how it looked’) Flora and Tom barred the front door. I could see him from the balcony, and when his dinner was ready they … would not even trust him with a knife or fork, but gave him only an iron spoon.”
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Not only did some slaves vow to protect their “white folks,” as though the imminent arrival of the Yankees required a reaffirmation of loyalty, but they did what they could to ensure their safety. Preparing for the Union soldiers, a maid in Mary Chesnut’s household urged her mistress to burn the diary she had been keeping lest it fall into the hands of the enemy. During the siege of Vicksburg, Mary Ann Loughborough, along with her daughter and servants, took refuge in a cave and remained there during the Yankee bombardment; one of the servants stood guard, gun in hand, assuring his mistress that anyone who entered “would have to go over his body first.” No one had more experience in anticipating the changing moods of a master than did his slaves, and this valuable asset enabled some of them to save the lives of their masters. When the Yankees were sighted, Charley Bryant, a Texas slaveholder, ran into the house and grabbed his
gun. But George Price, the head slave on the plantation, fearing for the safety of his volatile master, disarmed him and locked him in the smoke-house. “He ain’t do dat to be mean,” a former slave recalled, “but he want to keep old massa outten trouble. Old massa know dat, but he beat on de door and yell, but it ain’t git open till dem Yankees done gone.”
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Anticipating the path of the Union Army, many planters had already removed the bulk of their slaves to safer areas. If that proved impractical, some attempted to hide them, along with the family jewels, money, and livestock, until the Yankees had passed through the neighborhood. Reversing traditional roles, the planter himself might seek refuge in the nearby woods or swamp, depending upon the slaves to supply him with food and not to betray his hiding place. Rather than take such chances, Amanda Stone and her family, like so many others, chose to abandon their plantation in Louisiana. In helping them to prepare for the hasty evacuation, the slaves proved helpful—almost too helpful. The family claimed not to be deceived. “You could see it was only because they knew we would soon be gone. We were only on sufferance. Two days longer and we think they would all have gone to the Yankees, most probably robbing and insulting us before they left.” Only two of the remaining slaves agreed to accompany them. “So passes the glory of the family,” Kate Stone sighed. Appearances could, indeed, be deceptive. John S. Wise, the son of a prominent Virginian, recalled the abandonment of the family plantation near Norfolk and how Jim, the butler, had diligently assisted them. “Jim my father regarded as his man Friday. Nobody doubted that one so faithful and so long trusted would prove true in this emergency.” But after helping to load the carriage with silverware and valuables, and just before they were to depart, Jim disappeared. “In vain we called and searched for him. We never saw him again. The prospect of freedom overcame a lifetime of love and loyalty.”
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