Been in the Storm So Long (53 page)

If they achieved nothing else, the mock wedding rites, highlighted by “jumping the broomstick,” sanctioned such marriages in the eyes of the man and woman and their fellow slaves. But the white owner determined the longevity of their relationship, and the forcible breakup of slave marriages occurred with sufficient regularity to warrant the casualness of the ceremony, the fears of the couple, and some bitter recollections:

The police had to be summoned to restrain the grief-stricken mother and remove her to the local workhouse.
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No sooner had emancipation been acknowledged than thousands of “married” couples, with the encouragement of black preachers and northern white missionaries, hastened to secure their marital vows, both legally and spiritually. “My husband and I have lived together fifteen years,” the mother of a large family remarked, “and we wants to be married over again now.” Mildred Graves, a former Virginia house servant, remembered her courtship, the broomstick ceremony, and the cast-off dress her mistress gave her as a wedding present; nevertheless, after the war, she also recalled, “we had a real sho’ nuff weddin’ wid a preacher. Dat cost a dollar.”
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The insistence of teachers, missionaries, and Freedmen’s Bureau officers that blacks formalize their marriages stemmed from the notion that legal sanction was necessary for sexual and moral restraint and that ex-slaves had to be inculcated with “the obligations of the married state in civilized life.” But many of the couples themselves, who needed no instruction in such matters, agreed to participate in formalizations of their unions for more practical reasons—to legitimize their children, to qualify for soldiers’ pensions, to share in the rumored forthcoming division of the lands, and to exercise their newly won civil rights. Whatever the most compelling reason, mass wedding ceremonies involving as many as seventy couples at a time became a common sight in the postwar South.

Native whites looked upon these spectacles with a mixture of amusement, disdain, and indifference. Having forbidden legal marriages, condoned the breakup of families, and demeaned family relationships, some former masters and mistresses now mocked the efforts of ex-slaves to dignify with proper ceremony and affidavit marital ties of long standing. “They take the white man’s notions as they copy his manners, not for what they are but for the impression that’s made by them on the world,” a South Carolina white woman observed of the interest taken by blacks in solemnizing their marriage relationship.

Like most whites, she seemed incapable of explaining the actions of the freedmen except as a desire to imitate their superiors—and moral exemplars. Even the northern missionaries, who liked to think of themselves as rescuing the ex-slaves from the sins of concubinage, shared many of the prevailing assumptions about the moral depravity of blacks. Nevertheless, white Southerners and northern observers alike would hardly have disagreed with the potential benefits that flowed from stable black families. “Marital relations are invaluable as a means of promoting industry,” a northern correspondent wrote from Louisiana. “Morality encourages industry and prosperity. Immorality in the sexual relations produces idleness, intemperance, and apathy.”
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Not all slave couples hastened to legalize their marriages, at least not until they resolved the many complications stemming from multiple liaisons in a lifetime of bondage. The question facing numerous freedmen and freedwomen was not whether to formalize their slave marriage but which one should take precedence. With numerous spouses having remarried since their forced separation, that would frequently be a difficult and agonizing decision to make. Nor could they resolve the dilemma, as a South Carolina woman attempted to do, by alternating between two spouses on separate plantations. Newly enacted state laws usually validated unions between persons of color who were living together at the time of emancipation and required ex-slaves with multiple spouses to make an immediate decision about which “marriage” they wished to legitimate; Federal authorities,
who tended to take these matters more seriously, recognized the right of a husband or wife to leave a childless marriage to return to a previous partner by whom they had had children. “Whenever a negro appears before me with two or three wives who have equal claim upon him,” a Freedmen’s Bureau officer in North Carolina reported, “I marry him to the woman who has the greatest number of helpless children who otherwise would become a charge on the Bureau.”
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Although black preachers, white missionaries, and Bureau officials helped some couples to resolve these difficulties, the final decision was generally made by the partners themselves, who would have to reconcile conflicting emotions compounded by the manner in which they had initially been separated and the presence of children. In the District of Columbia, for example, a man who had been separated from his first wife for twenty-two years resolved to annul his present marriage “and live with the first by whom he has several grown children.” On the Sea Islands, Jane Ferguson, after hearing that her first husband had returned, had no hesitation in making a decision. “Martin Barnwell is my husband, ma’am,” she told a missionary teacher. “I am got no husband but he. W’en de secesh sell him off we nebber ’spect to see each odder more. He said, ‘Jane take good care of our boy, an’ w’en we git to hebben us will lib togedder to nebber part no more.’ ” When she subsequently married Ferguson, they had agreed that Martin’s return would annul their ties. “I told him I never ’spects Martin
could
come back, but if he did he would be my husband above all others.” But what if Ferguson refused to give her up? the teacher asked her. “Martin is my husband, ma’am, an’ the father of my child,” the woman replied; “and
Ferguson is a man.”
But the matter was not so easily resolved, as Ferguson, a Union soldier, pleaded with his wife not to abandon him: “Martin has not seen you for a long time. He
cannot
think of you as I do. O Jane! do not go to Charleston. Come to Jacksonville. I will get a house and we will live here. Never mind what the people say. Come to me, Jane.” But Jane dictated a response that terminated both the correspondence and their marriage: “Tell him, I say I’m sorry he finds it so hard to do his duty. But as he does, I shall do mine, an’ I shall always pray de Lord to bless him.… I shall never write to him no more. But tell him I wish him well.”
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Emancipation functioned in some cases as an instant and convenient divorce, enabling a couple to dissolve their marriage by mutually agreeing not to formalize it. Some freedmen and freedwomen seized the chance to annul an incompatible and loveless marriage, which in several instances had been forced upon them by their owner. In a “divorce” case argued before a Union officer in Louisiana, the husband claimed he had done everything in his power for the comfort of his wife and wished to retain her, but the woman declared she could now take care of herself and refused to stay with a man whom she did not love.
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Among families that had survived bondage intact, the difficult post-emancipation decision about whether to stay with their last master also produced conflicts which were sometimes
resolved by divorce. More often than not, however, those who lived together at the end of the war did not avail themselves of the opportunity to dissolve those ties, suggesting the extent to which their marriages had been based on considerations other than the convenience of the master.

During slavery, interracial sexual liaisons—usually between slave women and white men, sometimes between slave men and white women—had occasionally developed into affectionate and lasting relationships. Obviously, such ties could neither be solemnized nor legalized, and few even cared to admit that they were based on genuine feelings of love, particularly those involving white women. Emancipation permitted interracial couples to formalize those relationships, at least to the extent state laws and public opinion would tolerate them. When the daughter of a former slave owner in Mississippi announced her intention to marry one of their former slaves, with whom she had already established a relationship, a local judge refused to believe her avowal of love for the man and ordered the arraignment and trial of the couple. With different results, a quadroon mistress of a planter in Mississippi refused to continue a relationship with her master after the war unless he agreed to marriage; they finally prevailed upon a reluctant army chaplain to perform the necessary rites after the master claimed he had “married her in the sight of God five years ago.” The difficulties that confronted a white woman and a black man made any permanent relationship almost impossible in the postwar South. Although the courts always dealt harshly with attacks on whites, whatever the evidence, a court in Fredericksburg, Virginia, acquitted a black woman accused of assaulting a white woman who had “stolen the affections” of her black husband, prompting him to leave her for the white woman. That came about as close to justifiable assault in the eyes of the white community as any black person could commit.
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Neither the legalization nor the sanctification of black marriages necessarily moved the ex-slaves to adopt in full the sexual code of upper-class whites. “The negroes had their own ideas of morality, and held to them very strictly,” the proprietress of a Georgia plantation observed; “they did not consider it wrong for a girl to have a child before she married, but afterwards were extremely severe upon anything like infidelity on her part. Indeed, the good old law of female submission to the husband’s will on all points held good.” While both races frowned upon certain sexual practices (such as adultery), the differences which persisted in defining moral behavior (such as the condoning of prenuptial sex among blacks) and the post-emancipation complications surrounding polygamy help to explain the intensity with which white missionaries and black preachers dwelled on black “moral vices” and admonished the ex-slaves to conform in every respect to the Victorian moral code. When Clinton B. Fisk, a sympathetic Freedmen’s Bureau officer, counseled freedmen and freedwomen that God would no longer close his eyes to “adultery and fornication” among them, he was saying little that black preachers had not already said on numerous occasions. “Look at de white folks,” one such
preacher told his congregation. “D’ye eber see a
white
man want to marry a woman when he had a lawful wife a libing? Neber! I neber heared ob sech a thing in all my life. A white man is ’structed; he knows dat’s agin de law and de gospil.”
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Although reports of rampant “polygamy, adultery, and indiscriminate sexual intercourse” among the ex-slaves would reinforce white notions of black moral laxity, some Freedmen’s Bureau officers readily conceded that a disproportionate number of such cases came to their attention. “If I exaggerate in this matter,” a Bureau officer in South Carolina wrote, “it is because, like most officers of justice, I saw chiefly the evil side of my public—all the deserted ones coming to me for the redress of their grievances or for help in their poverty.” Actually, the seriousness with which most blacks assumed and sustained their marital vows, like the intense interest they had shown in locating family members, surprised and elated many Bureau officers and northern missionaries, who had come to the South prepared for the worst. If Horace Greeley, the New York editor, thought “enslaved, degraded, hopeless races or classes are always lewd,” that was far from the conclusion reached by a white teacher in postwar Virginia. “The colored people easily assume the responsibilities, proprieties, and graces of civilized life. As a class, their tastes are comely, though they are acquainted with filth. I fancy they see the moral significance of things quite as readily as white people.” And if white masters and mistresses claimed credit for the “civilizing influences” they had exerted on their slaves, the freedmen and freedwomen took some pride in the moral values they had managed to sustain in the quarters, often in the face of the grossest forms of white savagery.
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The eagerness of blacks to assume the “graces of civilized life” manifested itself in ways that native whites found most disturbing. “The black women do not like to work,” an Alabama planter reported, “it is not ladylike.” The phenomenon he described was real enough, though whites tended to exaggerate its prevalence. With the acknowledgment of emancipation, many black women did withdraw their labor from the fields and the white man’s kitchen in order to spend more time tending to their own husbands and children. If the women themselves did not initiate such moves, the men often insisted upon it, and husbands and wives together effected arrangements that would be more compatible with freedom. Mary Jones, the Georgia proprietress, tersely summed up the changes affecting her own household: “Gilbert will stay on his old terms, but withdraws Fanny and puts Harry and Little Abram in her place and puts his son Gilbert out to a trade. Cook Kate wants to be relieved of the heavy burden of cooking for two and wait on her husband.” No less distraught, an Alabama planter claimed he had lost one fourth of his labor because the men regarded it as “a matter of pride” to exact from their employers a new division of labor that would exempt their women from field work. Where women continued to work, the men often insisted during contract negotiations that wives and mothers be given time off during the regular workweek to tend to their housekeeping chores.
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