Been in the Storm So Long (43 page)

After their master completed his talk, the blacks, who had “listened silently,” passed before him, each one of them indicating that he intended to remain. Uncle Andrew, the black patriarch on this plantation, no doubt spoke the sentiments of most of them when he explained his decision: “Law, Marster! I ain’ got nowhar tuh go ef I was gwine!” The next morning, the freedmen went about their regular duties, except for Uncle Eph, who was nowhere to be found. Several days later, he returned, a disillusioned man and “the butt of the quarters for many a day.” On this Virginia plantation, the transition from slavery to freedom had been completed.

It was the perfect picture, embodying the notions of white nobility, black humility, mutual obligations, faithful service, and the extended family unit—black and white. The slaves had reacted precisely as any “grateful” and properly trained people would have been expected to react. And Uncle Eph had discovered for all of them the advantages of the old home compared to the uncertainty and insecurity that lay outside. “I jes wanter see whut it feel lak tuh be free,” he explained after his brief sojourn, “an’ I wanter to go back to Ole Marster’s plantation whar I was born. It don’ look de same dar, an’ I done see nuff uh freedom.”
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If every planter could have been reasonably confident of this kind of scenario, the anxieties and fears which gripped so many of them in the aftermath of emancipation might have been avoided. But that was not to be. Neither the dispossessed slaveholders nor their newly freed slaves were always willing or able to play the roles expected of them.

N
O MATTER HOW EASILY
the old paternalism might adapt itself to new realities, the death of slavery remained difficult to accept. The slave-owning class had always included in its ranks men and women of varying degrees of temperament and mental stability, with the vast majority falling somewhere between the legendary gentlemen and sadists. Understandably, wartime tensions, privations, and personal tragedies had taken their toll and left many white families shattered, bitter, angry, and betrayed. Now, in addition to the other calamities which had been visited upon them, they faced the loss of their slave property and perhaps their labor force. That proved to be more grief than some masters and mistresses were capable of handling. After acknowledging their freedom, “Big Jim” McClain, a Virginia planter, asked his more than one hundred slaves to continue to work for him. None of them expressed a willingness to remain, not even to harvest the current crops. At this affront, the pent-up bitterness in McClain suddenly exploded. Seizing his pistol, he fired wildly into a crowd of terrorized blacks, killing some outright and wounding others. When finally restrained, McClain tried to take his own life. At this point, several blacks promised to stay for another year and that seemed to placate him. But Union troops would have to intervene before he would permit any of his former slaves to leave the plantation.
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Although few of their masters reacted as violently, newly freed slaves had little way of knowing what to expect. The violent outburst of a McClain, based on his record as a slaveholder, probably surprised none of his blacks. But Matt Gaud, on the other hand, had treated his three slave families like they were members of his own family. At least, that was how Anderson Edwards remembered him. “The other niggers called us Major Gaud’s free niggers.” Gaud had no sooner heard of emancipation, however, than he began to curse his blacks vigorously, proclaiming that the Almighty had never intended such a thing as “free niggers.” And, as Edwards recalled, his master “cussed till he died.” Having endured a hard bondage, which included being sold six times, Jane Simpson expected no help from her last owners—a temperamental mistress and alcoholic master. Anticipating no change in their attitudes, she learned soon after emancipation how accurately she had assessed their character. Like most of the slaveholding families in the neighborhood, she recalled, “dey was so mad ’cause dey had to set ’em free, dey just stayed mean as dey would ’low ’em to be
anyhow, and is yet most of ’em.” Not surprisingly, the plantation mistresses, many of whom suddenly faced the unpleasant prospect of doing the cooking and housework themselves, often reacted with even greater resentment than their husbands, belying what may have been left of their reputation as the benevolent half of the household. Although the master “took it well,” a former South Carolina slave recalled, the mistress (who had lost two sons in the war) “just cussed us and said, ‘Damn you, you are free now.’ ” At the same time, the mistress of a Georgia plantation, where some two hundred slaves had resided, gave every indication of losing her mind after her husband acknowledged the emancipation decree. “I ’members how she couldn’t stay in the house,” Emma Hurley remarked, “she jest walked up an’ down out in the yard a-carrin’-on, talkin’ an’ a-ravin’.”
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To believe the testimony of former slaves, some of their masters and mistresses never did recover from emancipation but died shortly afterwards from “heartbreak” and grief. “Miss Polly died right after the surrender,” a former Virginia slave recalled. “She was so hurt that all the negroes was going to be free. She died hollering ‘Yankee!’ She was so mad that she just died.” Similarly, Isaac Martin, who had been a slave in Texas, remembered that his master “didn’ live long atter dey tek his slaves ’way from him. Well, it jis’ kill him, dat’s all.” In these instances, as in many others, it remains unclear whether the “heartbreak” was induced by the loss of slaves with whom the white owners thought they had intimate ties, the loss of property and suddenly dim economic prospects, or the fears engendered by the thought of four million free blacks. More than likely, the grief stemmed largely from a sense that the world as they had known it was collapsing all around them. Nevertheless, whatever the actual cause of death, the former slaves had their own ideas. Within ten or fifteen days after his freed slaves began to leave him, “Massa” Harry Hogan was dead, and one black he had owned attributed it to “all de trouble comin’ on him at once.” Within three weeks after the slaves on an Arkansas plantation heard they were free, they buried their mistress. “The news killed her dead,” one of them recalled. And when “Marster” Billy Finnely returned from the war (his brother had been killed in action), only to find the slaves freed and most of them leaving the plantation, he seemed unable to cope with reality; his mother found him one day in a shed, his throat slashed, and beside him the razor and a note which revealed that he did not care to live “ ’cause de nigger free.”
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To attribute the deaths of masters or mistresses to grief over the loss of their slaves poses obvious difficulties, despite the exactitude with which some blacks were able to pinpoint the occurrence. Still, the reported instances of this kind in the recollections of former bondsmen occur too frequently to dismiss them altogether as flights of fantasy or faulty memory. What remains crucial is that so many ex-slaves chose to recall the death of a master or mistress in this way, as if to suggest that their “white folks” had been so dependent on them that they were unable to conceive of a future without them. “Old Mistress never git well after she lose all her
niggers,” Katie Rowe recalled, “and one day de white boss [the overseer] tell us she jest drap over dead setting in her chair, and we know her heart jest broke.” Such testimony differed in no significant respect from how Duncan Clinch Heyward remembered the death of his grandfather, who had been one of the largest rice planters in South Carolina.

Although dismay and anxiety over emancipation were hardly uncommon, not all slaveholders shared these fashionable ailments in the same degree and only a very few permitted the shock to drive them to suicide or a premature death. Several months after Appomattox, Josiah Gorgas, the former Confederate chief of ordnance, discussed recent events with a wealthy Alabama planter and found him very much troubled, both about himself and about the future of the white race in the South. Now that his slaves had been freed, he seemed to think that his entire life had been “wasted.” “This state of mind is natural, and leads to despondency in his case,” Gorgas confided to his journal after the conversation, “but not so in the case of most planters.” In his recent travels, Gorgas had been generally pleased by the conduct of the planter class, particularly their equanimity in the face of disaster. Here were Yankee officers coming onto their plantations, meeting and talking with the slaves, telling them they were free and promising to protect their new rights, while the former masters made no protest but avidly questioned the officers about their new relations with the blacks. It all seemed like “a gigantic dream.” Four months ago, Gorgas reflected, “that Yankee Captain attempting to make such an address to their slaves, would have been hung on the nearest tree, and left there.”
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But the readiness with which Gorgas perceived the planters adapting themselves to the new conditions could manifest itself in many different ways, not all of them consistent with the image this class had long tried to cultivate. As slaveholders, many of them had preferred to view the “peculiar institution” as an obligation and a burden, binding them to feed, clothe, and protect the blacks in return for their labor and obedience. The plantation mistress who in a moment of exasperation screamed, “It is the slaves who own me,” gave perfect expression to that sense of burden. The slaveholding class had always taken considerable pride in its treatment of elderly slaves, contrasting such benevolence with the crassness of northern employers who cared neither for the aged nor the sick but turned workers
onto the streets when they ceased to be productive. Actually, few slaves lived long enough to constitute a burden on their owners, and even the aged slaves often performed tasks that defrayed the cost of their upkeep. When his grandmother was no longer able to work, Frederick Douglass recalled, her owners manifested their gratitude for her many years of service by removing her to the woods, where they “built her a little hut, put up a little mud-chimney, and then made her welcome to the privilege of supporting herself there in perfect loneliness.” Whatever the quality of care owners had bestowed on their elderly slaves, emancipation, as some viewed it, absolved them of any further responsibility. If the blacks were no longer his slaves, the master might feel neither the compassion, the gentlemanly compulsions, nor the economic need to provide them with the same degree of protection, sympathy, and support. None expressed it more graphically than the Georgia planter who burned the slave cabins to the ground and expelled the occupants from the plantation. Nor did Will Davison, a Texas planter, refrain from making himself clear on the day he freed his slaves. “Well, you black sons-of-bitches, you are just as free as I am,” he declared, and he promised to horsewhip any of them he found on the place the next morning.
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Upon freeing their slaves, the expressions of relief voiced by some white families drowned out or blended indistinctly with the painful cries of betrayal and ingratitude. But this reaction reflected not so much a sense of guilt as a welcome respite from the vexations of managing troublesome blacks, as if they—the slave owners—had been emancipated. “I was glad and thankful—on my own account—when slavery ended and I ceased to belong, body and soul, to my negroes,” a Virginia woman declared. With a fine ironic twist, many a master and mistress thus managed to turn the trauma and financial loss of black freedom into deliverance from the chains that had bound them to their black folk. Cornelia Spencer, a prominent resident of Chapel Hill and a future educator, hailed emancipation for the benefits it would bestow upon all whites; slavery, she insisted, had been “an awful drag” on the proper development of the South. “And because I love the white man better than I do the black, I am glad they are free.” Nor could she help but add, “And now I wish they were all in—shall I say Massachusetts?—or Connecticut? Poor things! We are doing what we can for them.” The equally high-minded Henry A. Wise, whose popularity in Virginia remained undiminished, told a meeting in Alexandria more than a year after the war that he praised God daily for having delivered him from the “negrodom and niggerdom” of slavery. But he claimed to feel some compassion for the real victim. “He is now a freedman but without a friend. But he is a freedman. I am now free of responsibility for his care and comfort, and, I repeat I am content.” The expressions of relief tended to grow more vociferous as they became purely self-serving, designed only to cover a family’s losses and to compensate shattered egos for the black betrayals. “I lost sixteen niggers,” a Charleston resident remarked; “but I don’t mind it, for they were always a nuisance, and you’ll find them so in
less than a year.… I wouldn’t give ten cents apiece for them.” Similarly, Emma Holmes expressed pleasure over the departure of several house slaves, “for we do not want unwilling, careless, neglectful servants about us,” and a Georgia woman described the loss of a maid as “Good riddance: all parties quite
relieved.
”
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