Been in the Storm So Long (9 page)

Whatever their owners told them, the slaves seemed to know instinctively (if not from the “grapevine”) why they were being sent away, and for some that proved to be sufficient reason to take immediate action to determine their own destinations. Stephen Jordon, who had been a slave in Louisiana, regarded his master as “a good man” but with a highly volatile temper. When slaves in the neighborhood ran off to Union-occupied New Orleans, however, he assured his master that he had no such intention. “I shall never leave you. Those Yankees are too bad, I hear.” But when his master announced plans to remove all the slaves to Texas, Jordon had to reconcile his sense of obligation with his deep yearning for freedom.

In low-country South Carolina, a planter made the mistake of telling his slaves that he intended to move them into the interior after the crop had been completed; seventy-six of them left the night of his announcement and reached the Union lines. The steady movement of Louisiana planters into Texas and Arkansas was to have included the slaves belonging to John Williams of Assumption Parish; the morning of his intended departure, however, he awakened to discover that twenty-seven of them, including several of the family favorites, were nowhere to be found. “Will you ever have faith in one again?” his daughter thought to ask him. No matter how hard the planter tried to conceal his intentions, the information managed to reach the slave quarters. Only two days after making some discreet inquiries in town about a plantation to rent, John Berkley Grimball, a prominent South Carolina planter, learned that nearly every one of his slaves, including “the best of them,” had disappeared during the previous night—“about 80 of them … men women and children.” He quickly confined most of the remaining slaves to the workhouse in the nearby town until he found another place in the up-country. “This is a terrible blow and has probably ruined me,” he sighed after adding up his losses.
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The wagon trains carrying the planter families and household goods, with the slaves, cattle, and horses trailing behind them, would become a familiar sight in parts of the wartime South. The fall of New Orleans and exposure to Federal raiding parties precipitated the largest exodus, with more than 150,000 slaves sent out of Louisiana and Mississippi, choking the
roads and towns leading into Texas. “It look like everybody in the world was going to Texas,” Allen Manning recalled. “When we would be going down the road we would have to walk along the side all the time to let the wagons go past, all loaded with folks going to Texas.” The slaves who made these treks would long recall the crowded roads, the inhospitable towns, the mothers toting the children on their backs, the fathers tending the wagons and livestock, and the many difficult detours that were ordered to avoid Yankee raiding parties. “Dat was de awfullest trip any man ever make!” Charley Williams, a former Louisiana slave, recalled. “We had to hide from everybody until we find out if dey Yankees or Sesesh, and we go along little old back roads and up one mountain and down another, through de woods all de way.” Virginia Newman remembered how “us all walk barefeets and our feets break and run they so sore, and blister for months. It cold and hot sometime and rain and us got no house or no tent.” To compensate for the drudgery of the journey, the slaves invented some appropriate songs and sang them to the slow steps of the oxen pulling the wagons.

“We’uns don’t sing it many times,” Bill Homer remembered, “ ’til de missy come and sit in de back of de wagon, facin’ we’uns [who were walking], and she begin to beat de slow time and sing wid we’uns. Dat please Missy Mary to sing with us and she laugh and laugh.”
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Although many of the elderly slaves had been left behind on the old plantations, relocation would take its toll in exhaustion, disrupted families, and lives. After two years on the road, the Miles family of Richmond, Virginia, finally reached Franklin, Texas, but not before the master had sold and traded both slaves and livestock along the way, retaining only his personal servants. Elvira Boles, who had been a slave in Mississippi, left her baby buried “somewhere on dat road” to Texas. Louis Love of Louisiana recalled the death of his brother before they reached the Trinity River. A North Carolina planter, who “didn’ want to part with his niggers,” failed to survive the trip to Arkansas, as did three of the slaves. “We buried the slaves there [on the road],” Millie Evans remembered, “but we camped while ol’ master was carried back to North Carolina. When ol’ mistress come back we started on to Arkansas an’ reached here safe but when we got here we foun’ freedom here too.”
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Whether on the road or in the makeshift camps at night, the slaves had ample time to reflect over their situation—the places they had left behind, the breakup of families, the growing distance between themselves and the nearest Union troops, the uncertainty of what lay ahead. Their brooding boded only disastrous results for some slaveholders. Rarely a morning passed without the discovery that still more slaves had fled during the night, perhaps to the Union lines, perhaps even back to the old plantation. The difficulty in controlling their slaves on the road forced some owners to turn back; others simply tried to minimize their losses. With her husband in the Confederate Army, Mary Williams Pugh of Louisiana decided to attach her slaves to those of her parents, and the two families then set out for a month-long trip to Rusk, Texas. The morning they departed, her parents lost twenty-seven slaves. “The first night we camped Sylvester left—the next night at Bayou B. about 25 of Pa’s best hands left & the next day at Berwick Bay nearly all of the women & children started—but this Pa found out in time to catch them all except one man & one woman. Altogether he had lost about sixty of his best men.” Meanwhile, Mary Pugh’s brother had encountered similar losses the first two days on the road and he decided to turn back, “as he was afraid of being left with only women & children.” After these experiences, Mrs. Pugh could only be grateful for the “good behavior” of her own slaves. “[Y]ou have every reason to be proud of them,” she wrote her husband, “as I have told them you would be. They are the talk of every neighborhood they pass through as they are such exceptions to other negroes.”
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The decision to move the slaves, made in the interest of preserving the work force, could thus prove to be costly, and there appeared to be no way to predict accurately how the relocated blacks would respond. When two white men engaged in moving blacks from the South Carolina coast to the up-country made the mistake of laying down their weapons and going to sleep, the slaves seized the guns, shot and killed their escorts, and made off to the Yankees. Still further difficulties awaited masters at the end of these treks, when their slaves discovered something less than the land of milk and honey and the lakes filled with syrup they had been told to expect. Upon arriving in Texas, Van Moore recalled, a fellow slave tasted the water from a lake and spit it out in disgust. “I reckon he thinks dat funny syrup.” If work routines differed from what they had known on the old place, they were not necessarily less arduous. Many owners, in order to sustain themselves, hired out their slaves by the day, week, and month to work in whatever jobs might be available. At the same time, some slaves who had been accustomed to specialized tasks now found themselves little more than common field hands. Bill Homer, for example, had been a coachman on the plantation in Shreveport, Louisiana, but in Caldwell, Texas, he became an ox driver and hoer.
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Rather than finding any relief from the customary problems of management and discipline, slaveholders were apt to discover that the new environment encouraged greater independence in the slaves. Even owners
who removed their blacks only a short distance encountered unexpected problems. F. D. Richardson, a Louisiana planter, had moved the bulk of his work force from the Bayside plantation down a bayou and into the woods, in the hope that this more secluded spot would protect them from the Yankees; there he cleared some land, constructed a house and slave cabins, and hired an overseer. Four months later, his slaves pillaged the new place and fled; he subsequently located forty-five of them in nearby Opelousas, “together with six mule carts, two ox carts, one four horse wagon, twenty eight mules, eight yoke of oxen—mares & colts & saddle & buggy horses not to be found. This property I have lost and never expect to see it again.”
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After assessing the various options open to him, John Berkeley Grimball found little reason to be optimistic. “To move or to stay seems to be equally ruinous to my prospects,” he wrote in late February 1862. To compensate himself for the eighty slaves who had fled before he could move them, he sold nearly all his remaining slaves, retaining only the house servants and a few elderly blacks who would look after the old plantation. Like Grimball, a small minority of slave owners, rather than risk the perils of relocation or emancipation, turned to sale as a preferable if not altogether profitable alternative; perhaps as many, while retaining the bulk of their slave force, chose to rid themselves of the security risks, those who had already proven troublesome or whose past conduct raised questions about their dependability in a crisis. Louis Manigault of Georgia had no hesitation in selling a slave he considered “a most dangerous character & bad example to the others.” Of the ten slaves belonging to a Missouri couple, only one had given them grounds for concern: “He used to wait in the house and was a likely boy and very smart. Well he must needs have his freedom—it was two years ago—so he bought a knuckleduster and was for killing my husband; but we found it out and sold him right off. We only got $700 for him, though.” In the absence of any overt act, wartime tensions still had a way of magnifying suspicions. “Sell Tom,” a Florida woman advised her husband about his personal slave, “I am not happy with the thoughts of your being alone with him.… He will never abandon the hope of freedom, and if your life should stand in his way, you are not safe.… I would not have you between him and freedom for the wealth of the world. Tom must go out of our household.”
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The wartime trade in slaves did not always suggest doubts about the future of the institution. In areas where the restricted acreage devoted to cotton, along with the concentration of relocated planters and their slaves, produced a surplus of slave laborers, purchasers were available to capitalize on good bargains. The market value of slaves remained relatively high, compared with prewar rates, but the prices paid for slaves reflected the rapid rate of inflation, the depreciated Confederate currency, and the military fortunes of the Confederacy; the slaves sold in Richmond in early 1865 for $10,000, for example, represented a real (gold) value of not more than $100. The capacity for self-deception proved limitless for those whites who
chose to interpret the high prices as demonstrating confidence in the ultimate triumph of the Confederacy or as a firm rejection of the legality of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Most slaveholders, however, retained a sufficient business and political sense to know better. In December 1864, with the outcome of the war nearly decided, Edmund Ruffin, the staunchest Confederate patriot of them all, sold fifteen of his slaves, mostly women and children. His son made no attempt to conceal the reasons: “these were all consumers and likely to be for some time and were sold on account of the expense of keeping and the doubtful tenure of the property.”
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When confidence in the survival of the Confederacy faltered, some slaveholders abandoned any patriotic or paternalistic pretenses and made a final, desperate effort to unload their slaves. “Us was sold on de block,” Wash Wilson recalled, “ ’cause Marse Tom say he gwine git all he done put in us out us, iffen he can ’fore de Yanks take dis country.” Shortly before the shelling of Petersburg, Virginia, began, Fannie Berry remembered, “dey were selling niggers for little nothin’ hardly,” and as late as March 1, 1865, Mary Chesnut noted the “sale” of two slaves in besieged Richmond: a black woman traded for yarn, and a black man sold for a keg of nails. Although most slaveholders chose not to dispose of their property in this manner, they were hardly indifferent to the pecuniary consequences of emancipation. With an eye to the future, masters prepared for the Yankees by affixing a price to each of their slaves. If they could not retain them after the war, they would at least be in a position to claim compensation for their losses.
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