Been in the Storm So Long (14 page)

On the nearby Allston rice plantation, Stephen (the valet) had defected with his wife and children, and the effect on the other slaves, according to the overseer, had been noticeable: “I Can see since Stephn left a goodeal of obstanetry in Some of the Peopl. Mostly mongst the Woman a goodeal of Quarling and disputeing & teling lies.” That was all the more reason for Adele Petigru Allston, who had become the mistress of the plantation upon the death of her husband, to act firmly in this matter. Unable to apprehend Stephen, she resolved to make an example of his wife’s mother, not so much out of spite as the conviction that parents and relations should be held responsible for the actions of their families. “You know all the circumstances of Stephen’s desertion,” she wrote the local magistrate.

At the same time, Adele Allston informed Jesse Belflowers, the overseer, of her decision to remove Mary and James (Stephen’s father) to “some place of confinement” in the interior of the state and hold them there “as hostages for the conduct of their children.” If by making an example of these individuals, she had thought to instill proper subordination in the remaining slaves, subsequent events on the Allston plantations, particularly with the coming of the Yankees, would prove less than reassuring.
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What compounded the problem of control was the difficulty of anticipating defections; every slave owner would have to make his own determination and act accordingly. Anxious about retaining his house servant and cook, a Georgia planter put heavy iron shackles on her feet while she worked and locked her in the cornhouse at night. In the Mississippi River region, a Union officer who returned from a raid with two hundred slaves reported having found twenty-five of them chained in a cane brake. On the plantation in Virginia where Susie Burns labored, any slave contemplating an escape during the war years needed to elude the vigilant eye and drunken wrath of the master. “Used to set in his big chair on de porch wid a jug of whiskey by his side drinkin’ an’ watchin’ de quarters to see that didn’t none of his slaves start slippin’ away.” More commonly, a slave owner made an example of runaways who were apprehended and returned to the plantation. If not immediately sold, they were liable to be whipped, chained at night, put to work on Confederate fortifications, or removed for safekeeping to non-threatened areas. After thwarting an attempted escape, the son of a South Carolina planter sold two of the leaders in Charleston and punished the others “by whips and hand-cuffing,” making certain that they were chained and watched at night. But some planters, acting as though their tenure as slave owners might be short-lived, were so unnerved by defections that they vented all of their frustrations on those they could apprehend. “W’en de Union soldiers wur near us,” a freedwoman named Affy recalled, “some o’ de young han’s run off to git to de Union folks, an’ massa ketch dem an’ hang dem to a tree, an’ shoot dem; he t’ink no more’n to shoot de culled people right down.… But t’ank God, I got away, an’ him won’t git me agin.”
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Even in the face of danger and repeated failures, the slaves persisted in their attempts to reach the Union lines. Having been thwarted in their initial attempt to escape from a plantation near Savannah, a seventy-year-old black woman and her husband immediately made plans to try again. While the plantation whites were meting out punishment to her husband, she collected their twenty-two children and grandchildren in a nearby marsh. After drifting some forty miles down the river in a dilapidated flatboat, the family was rescued by a Union gunboat. “My God!” she exclaimed as they came aboard, “are we free?” Her husband subsequently made good on his second escape attempt. No less persistent was a Maryland servant who tried to join others in a mass escape despite the fact that his hands and feet had been amputated some years before because of severe frostbite. “Well, I got him back and had him tied up,” the owner told a
visiting Englishman, “for I thought he must be mad. But it was no use, he got away again, and walked to Washington.” How, asked the curious visitor, could he have managed such a remarkable deed? The answer no doubt must have seemed equally incredible.

The persistence of some black runaways came at the expense of their white pursuers. After overtaking his slave in a swamp, a South Carolina master found himself engaged in a fierce struggle. He managed to shoot the slave in the arm, shattering it badly. Knowing what awaited him if captured, the fugitive grimly fought on, unhorsed his master, and then beat him “until he was senseless.”
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Rather than flee to the Yankees, numerous slaves responded to particular provocations, as they had before the war, by decamping for the nearby woods or swamps, where they might hide out for extensive periods of time. After all, even the much-hunted Nat Turner had managed to elude his pursuers for nearly eight weeks. Near the end of the war, Anna Miller recalled, “my sis and nigger Horace runs off. Dey don’ go far, and stays in de dugout. Ev’ry night dey’d sneak in and git ’lasses and milk and what food dey could. My sis had a baby and she nuss it ev’ry night when she comes. Dey runs off to keep from gettin’ a whuppin’.” Far more dangerous were the colonies of runaways that formed in some areas, from which slaves would forage the countryside for provisions. While searching for runaways, a group of whites in South Carolina found such a settlement in a nearby swamp, “well provided with meal, cooking utensils, blankets, etc.,” as well as twelve guns and an ax. In Surry County, Virginia, a scouting party investigated a similar runaway camp but never lived to report their findings; the fugitives killed them.
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Assumptions about slave contentment, docility, or indifference prepared few whites for the extent of the runaway problem. “Unlettered reason or the mere inarticulate decision of instinct brought them to us,” thought one Union officer, while a white resident of Natchez deemed it little wonder “that they long to throw aside their chains and ‘live like white people’ as they say.” The slaves themselves had little difficulty in explaining why they had fled. Reflecting upon their escapes, exchanging stories across the campfires in the contraband villages, answering the queries of Union officers and reporters, they usually talked about the oppressiveness of enslavement, the difficulties of carrying out plantation duties while freedom was so close at hand, and the determination to liberate themselves rather than wait for the Yankees.

Fearing imminent removal or sale, some slaves chose to escape. The moment her master ordered all the house servants into wagons, a Virginia slave went into hiding. Thomas Pritchard, a carpenter, disappeared while the master and a slave broker were discussing the terms of his sale. Some slaves had heard rumors that they were about to be conscripted for military service or put to work on Confederate fortifications. “They’s jest takin’ me, sir,” Tom Jackson of Virginia explained, “an’ I run off.” Some were eager to locate their families or join the slaves from their plantation who had already escaped. “All of our friends were ober here,” a runaway explained. Isaac Tatnall, who had been hired out, fled when his master refused to pay him his share of the wages. “Last month,” Tatnall remarked, “master took him all, but he lost by dat, cause dis month I runned away, and he’s lost $1,880.”
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The uncontrolled rage of their masters, often for no easily ascertainable reason other than the imminent loss of the war, hastened the departure of many slaves. “They does it to spite us,” a runaway woman testified, “ ’cause you come here. Dey spites us now ’cause de Yankees come.” This woman had just escaped with two of her children, leaving behind her eldest son whom the master had just “licked” almost to death because he suspected him of wanting to join the Yankees. Stories of recent beatings ran through the testimony of numerous newly arrived refugees. “Master whipped me two or three weeks ago,” a freedwoman declared, “because I let the cows from the bog road into the yard. Struck me and knocked me down with his fist. Left Monday night, and walked all the way. I am free; come here to be protected; was not safe to stay.” On the morning of his escape, a Georgia slave noted, he had been promised a whipping, but “when de time came dis chile was about five miles from dar, and he nebber stopped until las night.” Among the slaves who fled after harsh treatment were those who felt compelled to contain their anger rather than risk the consequences of direct retaliation. “They didn’t do something and run,” a former slave suggested. “They run before they did it, ’cause they knew that if they struck a white man there wasn’t going to be a nigger.”
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Although specific provocations helped to sustain the steady movement toward the Union lines, the overriding consideration remained the prospect of freedom and the pride that a slave took in expediting his or her own liberation. “I wants to be free,” a South Carolina runaway kept repeating. “I came in from the plantation and don’t want to go back; I don’t want to
go back; I don’t want to be a slave again.” The intensity of this feeling even induced elderly slaves to make the perilous trek, refusing to postpone any longer that dream that had eluded them for a lifetime. “Ise eighty-eight year old,” one refugee told the Yankees. “Too ole for come? Mas’r joking. Neber too ole for leave de land o’ bondage.” Near Vicksburg, where slaves had been deserting in substantial numbers, a planter went out to the quarters and asked the “patriarch” among his slaves, “Uncle Si, I don’t suppose you are going off to those hateful Yankees, too, are you?” “O no, marster,” he replied, “I’se gwine to stay right here with you.” When the planter visited the quarters the next morning, he found that every one of his slaves had left that night, including Uncle Si and his wife. Searching the nearby woods for them, he came across Uncle Si, bending over the prostrate body of his wife, weeping. The planter wondered why he had subjected her to such a difficult and now fatal journey. “I couldn’t help it, marster,” the old man replied; “but then, you see, she died free.”
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Whether or not a slave chose to desert his master did not necessarily reflect a personal history of brutal treatment. Alex Huggins, who ran away in 1863 at the age of twelve, recalled no complaints about the way his master and mistress had treated him: “Twa’nt anythin’ wrong about home that made me run away. I’d heard so much talk ’bout freedom I reckon I jus’ wanted to try it, an’ I thought I had to get away from home to have it.” The verbal exchange that took place in late 1861 between a Union soldier and a runaway revealed as vividly what many whites would find so difficult to understand and forgive in their slaves.

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EITHER THE NUMBER
of reported “insurrections” nor an accurate count of the runaways could adequately measure slave resistance and disaffection during the final years of the “peculiar institution.” Equally significant for slaveholders were the kinds of rumors that circulated, the fears that were generated, the outbreaks of “insolence” and “insubordination” which could drive individual families and entire communities to the brink of hysteria,
and the various ways in which enslaved blacks—consciously or otherwise—brought anguish and frustration to those who claimed to own them.