Been in the Storm So Long (41 page)

Disturbed by the apparent resiliency of the “peculiar institution,” the Freedmen’s Bureau, a new Federal agency designed to ease the slave’s transition to freedom, undertook the task of publicizing and enforcing the abolition of slavery. In late May 1865, Bureau officers warned that any person employing freedmen who failed to compensate them for their labor would be adjudged disloyal to the United States government and risked having his or her property seized and divided among the freedmen. In Louisiana, Bureau agents were asked to read the Emancipation Proclamation on every plantation within their jurisdiction and to leave copies (in French and English) with the freedmen as well as the planters. At the same time, Bureau officers in Mississippi distributed circulars to black preachers and urged that meetings of freedmen be convened at which the Proclamation would be read and explained.
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For numerous slaves, in fact, freedom came only when “de Guvment man” made his rounds of the plantations and forced the planters to acknowledge emancipation. The mere threat of such visits and the rumors that Union soldiers were patrolling the countryside in search of offenders prompted a number of holdouts to free their slaves. The day she knew she was a free woman, Sarah Ford recalled, a Union officer came onto the plantation and read the Emancipation Proclamation to the assembled slaves. “Dat one time Massa Charley can’t open he mouth, ’cause de captain tell him to shut up, dat he’d do de talkin’.” On a Louisiana plantation, “way after freedom,” the same scene was acted out, except that the planter’s wife emerged from the house after the officer left and told her newly freed blacks: “Ten years from today I’ll have you all back ’gain.” Although most masters no doubt resented the interference of Federal officers and would have preferred to tell the slaves in their own time and way, Henry W. Ravenel requested the presence of a Union officer in order to make clear
to his blacks that they were entitled to none of his land, they were expected to remain at work, and they were free to serve him without fear of reprisals. (The rumor had circulated, allegedly the work of black troops, that slaves found working for their previous owners would be shot.) The officer happily obliged Ravenel, warning the newly freed slaves of “the trouble & sufferings they would encounter if they left their homes.”
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The old order died slowly, often with considerable resistance. In the remote and relatively isolated interior counties and parishes where Yankee troops had rarely if ever been seen, the war had barely interrupted the old routines and the patrollers made certain that the blacks remained on the plantations. The news of emancipation, like much of the war news, had been delayed and sometimes deliberately suppressed or distorted. “De Yankees never come into de ‘dark corner,’ ” a black resident of Chester County, South Carolina, recalled, and not until two years after the war did they learn of their freedom—“then we all left.” In the up-country of North Carolina, a freedman remarked several years after the war, “the whip is a-goin’ and the horn a-blowin’ just as it used to be.” On some plantations, the owners barred all visitors, locked their slaves in the yards at night, and intimidated them with stories of how the Yankees intended to sell them to defray the cost of the war. Traveling through the upper and interior sections of Georgia in August 1865, James Lynch, a missionary for the African Methodist Episcopal Church, found that “in some places the people do not know really that they are free, and if they do, their surroundings are such that they would fear to speak of it.”
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Nowhere was the problem more persistent than in Texas, which had been relatively untouched by the war. The slave population, however, had swelled after many planters in neighboring states moved their chattel there in the hope of avoiding both the Yankees and emancipation. Not until June 19, 1865, more than two months after Appomattox, would black freedom be acknowledged in Texas. “Dat a long year to wait, de las’ year de war,” recalled Henry Lewis, who had been a slave in Jefferson County. But even then, some planters clung to the notion that “niggers would never be free in Texas” and acted in that belief. Wash Ingram, who had faithfully toted water for Confederate soldiers during the war, claimed that his master did not free the more than three hundred slaves on the plantation until at least a year after Lee’s surrender. Sometime around September, Susan Merritt recalled, “a gov’ment man” came to the plantation in Rusk County and demanded to know why the slaves had not yet been informed of their freedom. The master replied that he had first wanted to complete the crop. That day, the slaves were called out of the fields and told the news—“but massa make us work sev’ral months after that. He say we git 20 acres land and a mule but we didn’t git it.” What compounded the problem for the slaves in Rusk County, Susan Merritt remembered, was that freedom had been acknowledged several months earlier in neighboring counties. “Lots of niggers was kilt after freedom, ’cause the slaves in Harrison County turn loose right at freedom and them in Rusk County wasn’t. But they hears ’bout it and runs away to freedom in Harrison County and they owners
have ’em bushwhacked, that shot down. You could see lots of niggers hangin’ to trees in Sabine bottom right after freedom, ’cause they cotch ’em swimmin’ ’cross Sabine River and shoot ’em.”
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Even where the slaves realized they were free, some preferred to wait until their masters had confirmed their new status. Hearing about freedom from others, whether they be Yankees or even neighboring slaves, seemed somehow less satisfying, perhaps less believable. Morris Sheppard, a former Oklahoma slave, claimed to have learned about Lincoln the Emancipator only from what his children were later taught in school. “I always think of my old Master as de one dat freed me, and anyways Abraham Lincoln and none of his North people didn’t look after me and buy my crop right after I was free like old Master did. Dat was de time dat was de hardest and everything was dark and confusion.” The number of blacks who responded to questions about their freedom by declaring, “Mas’ Henry ain’t told me so yit,” often infuriated postwar visitors to the South, as it did black clergymen like James Lynch and Henry M. Turner who reproached their people for the way they still cringed before their old masters and mistresses. Near Lexington, North Carolina, a northern correspondent encountered a seventy-year-old black ferryman who had outlived seven masters and who for forty-three years had conveyed passengers across the Yadkin River. Although freedom had been declared in this region, he had not yet severed his ties with the woman who owned him.

Bewildered by these responses, the reporter finally asked him if he intended to work on “just the same” until he died. At this point the loyal slave made it clear that although good manners and a sense of mutual obligations had kept him from asserting his freedom, he was quite prepared to impose deadlines on his patience.

The number of slaves who waited for the master to confirm their freedom, rather than assert it independently, is not altogether surprising. Whether the enslaved worker had labored on a plantation or a farm, he had
been brought up to view his master as the primary source of authority—the provider and the protector, the lawmaker and the enforcer, the judge and the jury, and most masters had deliberately cultivated feelings of dependency and helplessness in their slaves. No edict of emancipation could immediately obliterate the habits of obedience and deference with which many slaves had been inculcated since childhood. Nor could it in some instances destroy a familiar relationship worked out over a period of time, involving mutual obligations of service, sustenance, and protection. The defeat of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery no doubt weakened the master’s stature in the eyes of many slaves. But it did not necessarily lessen the respect, fear, and obedience he commanded by virtue of his authority and economic power. “A lot o’ de niggers knowed nothin’ ’cept what missus and marster tole us,” a former Georgia slave observed. “What dey said wus just de same as de Lawd had spoken to us.” And in this instance, he told them that Lincoln was dead, they were still slaves, and he would distribute black cloth so they could mourn both Lincoln and their freedom.
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But there were sharply contrasting stories, too, which revealed the compelling need some slaves felt to confront their masters and mistresses with the truth about freedom, if for no other reason than to remove the last doubts and to observe their reactions. Hired out to another family during the war, a Virginia slave had been working in the fields when a friend informed her that she was now free. “Is dat so?” she exclaimed. Dropping her hoe, she ran the seven miles to her old place, found her mistress, “looked at her real hard,” and then shouted, “I’se free! Yes, I’se free! Ain’t got to work fo’ you no mo’. You can’t put me in yo’ pocket now!” Her mistress broke into tears and ran into the house. That was all the slave needed to see. The momentary doubt at hearing the news had been resolved, and for the first time she could begin to think of herself as a free woman.
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The legends that grew out of emancipation would assume a special place in the folk history of Afro-Americans. Like their white owners, they retained strong, often emotionally charged memories of this critical moment in their lives. In the interviews with former slaves conducted more than seventy years later, no event would stand out with greater clarity in their minds than the day they heard of their freedom. Even as many of the slave descendants moved into the urban North in the next century, the stories of emancipation would follow them. That was how Kathryn L. Morgan came to learn of her great-grandmother Caddy, a strong-willed and defiant slave who had been sold many times in her life but never ceased to torment her owners. Of the many tales about this remarkable woman, the one that became the favorite among her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren was about the day she learned of her freedom.

A
LTHOUGH THE TIME
and manner varied from place to place, the majority of masters eventually got around to informing their slaves that emancipation had become the law of the land. Occasionally, they did so under the compulsion of a Federal order, upon the visitation of a Freedmen’s Bureau officer, or at the demand of their own slaves. Usually, the master himself decided how and when to make the announcement. When he sent out the word for his slaves to assemble the next day, nearly everyone knew what to expect. “There was little, if any, sleep that night,” Booker T. Washington recalled. “All was excitement and expectancy.” Except perhaps for the coming of the Yankees, it was like no other day in their lives. Outside the Big House, the master waited for them on the front porch, often with his entire family standing beside him. To the very end, he would invariably act the role of the patrician, even as he presided over the dispersion of his flock and the sundering of traditional and even intimate ties. Observing how their master “couldn’t help but cry” or “couldn’t hardly talk,” some former slaves confessed to having felt a certain compassion for him at this moment, putting the best possible face on his previous treatment of them. “We couldn’t help thinking about what a good marster he always had been,” a former Georgia slave recalled, “and how old, and feeble, and gray headed he looked as he kept on a-talkin’ that day.” Such sentiments were not shared by all slaves, not even on the same plantation, and each black had a different way of recollecting a master’s or mistress’s tears at the moment of emancipation. “Missy, she cries and cries, and tells us we is free,” a former Louisiana slave recalled, “and she hopes we starve to death and she’d be glad, ’cause it ruin her to lose us.”
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