Been in the Storm So Long (10 page)

T
HE CONDITIONS CREATED
by wartime dangers and necessities had few precedents in southern life or in the long history of slavery. If numerous blacks were removed to safe havens to keep them from the Yankees, still others were impressed into service as military laborers to help repel the Yankee invaders or kept in the fields to grow the crops necessary to feed the Army. Forced to muster every resource at its command, the white South would find itself in the position of debating the increased use of blacks in the military effort, even as fears mounted that blacks might, if given the opportunity, seek to undermine that effort. For the blacks, the situation and the choices were no less paradoxical, as they found themselves called upon to help sustain a war effort which, if successful, would perpetuate their bondage.

Appreciating the critical role of blacks in the economy, the white South, at the very outset of the war, pronounced slavery “a tower of strength” that would assure the ultimate triumph of independence. With enslaved workers providing the necessary labor at home, larger numbers
of whites would be available for military service, thereby giving the slave South a decided advantage over the North. “The institution of slavery in the South,” a Montgomery, Alabama, newspaper boasted, “alone enables her to place in the field a force so much larger in proportion to her white population than the North, or indeed than any country which is dependent entirely on free labor.” Frederick Douglass, the leading black abolitionist, conceded as much when he called the black laborer “the key of the situation—the pivot upon which the whole rebellion turns.” Without the immense human resources made available by slavery, he thought it unlikely that the Confederacy could sustain any prolonged military effort. “Arrest that hoe in the hands of the negro,” Douglass advised early in the war, “and you smite rebellion in the very seat of its life.”
⁷⁸

Not only did slaves constitute the mainstay of the agricultural economy—“the very stomach of this rebellion,” said Douglass—but their services as military laborers more than justified the Union Army’s belated decision to treat runaway slaves as “contraband of war.” In the Confederate Army, slaves worked as cooks, teamsters, hospital attendants, musicians, and body servants; elsewhere, slaves were employed in a variety of skilled trades essential to the war effort. They labored in railroad construction and maintenance, in the extraction of raw materials, in the erection of fortifications, and in the manufacture of weapons of war. More than half the workers at the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond were blacks, as were nearly three fourths of the employees in the naval ordnance plant at Selma, Alabama.
⁷⁹

Early in the war, when patriotism was at its peak, numerous slaveholders volunteered their blacks without wages (the government furnishing quarters and rations) or contracted (hired) them out to military authorities; at the same time, some free blacks sought to establish their loyalty by offering their services to strengthen defensive works around the cities and towns. When volunteers failed to meet increasing military needs, the Confederate government authorized the impressment of slaves and agreed to compensate the owners (thirty dollars a month and the full value of the slave in case of his death). The new law quickly fell victim to the growing conflict between state and Confederate authorities and failed to supply the necessary laborers. With somewhat greater success, local authorities and military commanders met emergency situations by arbitrarily mobilizing the available black laborers—free and slave alike—in a threatened region and forcing them into service. That was the fate of many blacks in Richmond, for example, as Union troops neared the city.

The growing reluctance of planters to part with their slaves, even to sustain a war for the preservation of that property, compounded the problem of meeting military labor requisitions. “Have you ever noticed the strange conduct of our people during this war?” a Confederate congressman from Georgia asked. “They give up their sons, husbands, brothers & friends, and often without murmuring, to the army; but let one of their negroes be taken, and what a howl you will hear.” Still another legislator claimed to know a planter with five sons in the Army who resisted attempts to impress his slaves. “The patriotic planters,” he observed, “would willingly put their own flesh and blood into the army, but when you asked them for a negro the matter approached the point of drawing an eye-tooth.”
⁸¹
Neither waning patriotism nor constitutional scruples explain altogether the resistance of slaveholders to impressment. Although many did protest it as an interference with individual rights and property, the principal objections reflected a fear of pecuniary loss and the consequences of losing control over their slaves. Not only were slave laborers frequently impressed at a crucial time in plantation operations but the work patterns, rigors, and demands of military labor tended to injure their health, sometimes demoralized them, and all too often rendered them almost useless—if not downright dangerous—upon their return to the plantation.

Except for sale or removal, few wartime disruptions imposed greater hardships on the slaves than impressment. Made available to military authorities for a specified period of time, such slaves were invariably overworked, underfed, poorly clothed, brutally treated, exposed to enemy gunfire, and given inadequate medical attention. The deplorable condition and neglect of hospitalized slave military laborers in Richmond, for example, moved a local newspaper to denounce their treatment as “a disgrace to humanity.” Letters poured in on the governor of Virginia from owners requesting that they be compensated for the slaves who had been laboring on fortifications and were lost because of disease, accident, exposure, and neglect. Ordered by local authorities to provide four blacks for the defense of Vicksburg, a Mississippi slaveholder noted their fate in his diary: “They were sent and put into the water up to the breast in the swamp below Vicksburg chop[p]ing trees the Consequence we have lost one by death the others are still ill one kept over there & got sick & we had to send a waggon & bed to bring him home.”
⁸²

Even if slaves survived the physical ordeal of military labor, owners expressed concern about their state of mind and the unwholesome moral influences to which they might have been subjected. The information and ideas such slaves imbibed would be transmitted to the other slaves and threatened to undermine proper discipline and control. Nor could slave owners be certain that their impressed blacks would choose to return to the plantation. Proximity to Union lines afforded military laborers numerous
opportunities for escape. The fact that some owners dispatched their troublemakers—the least intimidated slaves—made this all the more likely, but even the most carefully selected slaves found the prospect of freedom difficult to resist.
⁸³

Rather than flee to the Yankees, some impressed blacks who managed to escape headed for their homes. If they succeeded, they might then plead with their masters not to send them back to the fortifications, and some owners readily sympathized with such pleas. “[T]hey might kill him if they wanted to,” a North Carolina slave told his master, “but … he would never go back to that work.” Numerous slaves shared that aversion to military duty and did what they could to avoid it, often with the connivance of their masters. But for the many who served and survived, it proved to be an indelible experience.

How a slave reacted to military labor depended to some degree on the kind of bondage he had known at home. Jacob Stroyer, for example, who had been raised on a plantation near Columbia, South Carolina, claimed to have “fared better” on the fortifications than on the plantation. He appreciated the spare time he had (in which he continued his quest for literacy), and he viewed the entire experience as a welcome diversion from the plantation routines. At the same time, he acknowledged the contradictions inherent in his role as a Confederate laborer:

Of the slaves who served the Confederate war effort, none would rank higher in southern legend than the body servant. Accompanying his master (usually a more substantial planter or one of his sons) to military service, he performed the duties of a personal attendant and relieved the master of the more onerous camp chores; he might also be called upon to forage the countryside for food, entertain the soldiers, help care for the wounded, and dig trenches. Stephen Moore, servant to a South Carolina planter, informed his wife that he had been well treated in camp and
enjoyed the leisure time available to him. “I have 3 meals of victuals to cook a day & the rest of the time is mine.” Proud of his position, he asked his wife “to take this letter & read it to all my people.… Tell them all I have been on the Battle field.”
⁸⁶

Since they would spend considerable time together and undergo the rigors of camp life and possibly enemy fire, a master took care in selecting the right slave for the position. Usually, the honor—for it was so considered by most—went to a slave who had already proven his fidelity, whose company the master enjoyed, and who could be expected to perform faithfully under the most trying circumstances; in many cases, he had previously served his master as a personal attendant, caring for his clothes, horses, and hounds. “Cyrus is a good boy indeed,” a Georgia officer wrote of his servant, who had demonstrated both faithfulness and competence as a forager and cook.

Overly pleased with the conduct and company of his body servant, a South Carolina master paid the highest compliment he could conceive: “Why weren’t you white! Why weren’t you white! Why weren’t you white!”
⁸⁷

If the admonitions of some slave owners had been heeded, few of the body servants would have been provided with opportunities for wartime heroism. The usual procedure was to keep them behind the lines, not only to protect their lives but to safeguard the owners’ investments as well. “I hear you are likely to have a big battle soon,” a Virginia slaveholder advised his son, “and I write to tell you not to let Sam go into the fight with you. Keep him in the rear, for that nigger is worth a thousand dollars.” Despite such considerations, the body servant often found himself sharing with his master the ordeal of battle and enemy fire. Like the white soldiers in his camp, he reacted with conduct that ranged from hysteria and flight to feats of incredible bravery. The stories of how he stood steadfast by his master and the instances in which he risked his life to recover the body of his slain master and carted him home for a proper burial would be accorded a prominent place in postwar recollections and tributes.
⁸⁸

The intimacy and affection that bound servant and master in the Army, like that which traditionally bound many house servants to the families residing in the Big House, could not escape the ambivalence that underlay the relationships formed in slavery. While most body servants remained loyal and faithful attendants, earning the laurels accorded them, significant numbers did not; in fact, some body servants calculatingly exploited the trust placed in them to desert to the Yankees at the first opportunity. Katie Darling, who had been a housegirl on a plantation in
Texas, recalled how her father ran away from “Massa Bill” while the two men were on their way to the battlefield. “Massa say when he come back from the war, That triflin’ nigger run ’way and jines up with them damn Yankees.” Lieutenant Theodorick W. Montfort, a Georgia farmer and lawyer, considered his body servant, Prince, to be “a most excellent” attendant. “You would be surprised to see how well he can cook & wash & how neatly he can iron & put up clothes. He can do it as well as any woman. I dont think you will want any better cook, washer & Ironer than he is by the time the war is over.” But when the Yankees captured and then interned Lieutenant Montfort, his prize servant seized the opportunity to declare himself free. Not only did some body servants desert to the Yankees but they also provided them with information on the number and location of Confederate batteries; one such informer was subsequently recaptured, handed over to loyal servants for punishment, and reportedly “met a death at their hands more violent than any white person’s anger could have suggested.”
⁸⁹

When Confederate military fortunes declined and rations ran short, most of the body servants had to be sent home to help raise the necessary food supplies. In returning to the plantations, they imparted to their fellow slaves not only war experiences but the conversations they had overheard around the campfires and from captured Yankees about the prospects of a Union victory and emancipation. Although the white South would still accord the body servant a place in the pantheon of Confederate heroes, his conduct had often revealed an ambivalence that the coming of the Yankees would make even more explicit in the occupied South. That conflict between fidelity to the master and the yearning for freedom would manifest itself in numerous ways and deeply trouble both whites and blacks, leaving a bewildered white South to ponder, for example, over the behavior of a body servant who risked his life to carry his wounded master to safety and then remounted the master’s horse and fled to the Yankee lines. Recalling his own experience, Martin Jackson, who had been a slave in Texas, spoke with considerable pride about the company in which he had served, but he made no effort to hide the conflict of loyalties he had felt. “Just what my feelings was about the War, I have never been able to figure out myself. I knew the Yanks were going to win, from the beginning. I wanted them to win and lick us Southerners, but I hoped they was going to do it without wiping out our company.”
⁹⁰