Been in the Storm So Long (29 page)

The Yankees expected to find a degraded, inferior, primitive people, who were at the same time picturesque, comical, indolent, and carefree, always wearing “a happy and contented expression,” displaying their broad grins, touching their hats to the white folks, answering questions politely and humbly. That was the kind of Negro they had seen cavorting across the minstrel stages of the North and pictured in the popular literature, and now they were simply viewing Sambo and Dinah in their natural habitat. “Until I saw and conversed with the greater number of these persons,” a northern reporter wrote from South Carolina, “I believed that the appearance and intelligence of Southern field hands were greatly libeled by the delineators of negro character at the concert saloons. Now I cannot but acknowledge that instead of gross exaggerations the ‘minstrels’ give representations which are faithful to nature. There were the same grotesque dresses, awkward figures, and immense brogans which are to be seen every night at Bryant’s or Christy’s.” Nor did the Yankees obviously expect to find any particular intelligence exhibited by these minstrel-like characters, quite apart from the laws that barred them from learning to read or write. Thus did a Union soldier, who was himself barely literate, inform his parents that the “niggers” he had encountered “dont no as much as a dumb bruit.”
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Unlike many southern whites, the Yankees had little awareness of the complexity of the slave’s demeanor and personality. They still had some hard lessons to learn in the kind of dissembling and deception that enslaved blacks often practiced on whites. That would come with time and experience. “One of these blacks, fresh from slavery, will most adroitly tell you precisely what you want to hear,” a northern journalist discovered in South Carolina. “To cross-examine such a creature is a task of the most delicate nature; if you chance to put a leading question he will answer to its spirit as closely as the compass needle answers to the magnetic pole.” Still other revelations would emerge with additional exposure to the variety of black folk. Although Union soldiers were quick to note the blackness of the slaves, the gradations in color did not escape them, and the abundant evidence of miscegenation would evoke considerable comment and curiosity. “Many of the mongrels are very beautiful,” a Massachusetts soldier conceded, “with their fine hair, straight or wavy, and their blue or dark eyes, always soft and lustrous and half concealed by the long lashes. They look more like voluptuous Italians than negroes.” He had been told by one “Southern gentleman” that the mulattoes were “more docile and affectionate” than “the unmixed negro,” although “less hardy” and “generally unchaste.” Whatever “handsome” qualities the mulattoes and quadroons
possessed, the Yankees naturally attributed them to their white ancestry. How else could they explain the startling incongruity in the appearance of a mulatto child with his mother? “Judging by the extreme hideousness of some of these mothers,” a soldier wrote, “I was led to conclude that Southern passion was superior to Southern taste.”
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Although the prevailing image pictured blacks as a happy-go-lucky and carefree race, at best a source of amusement, some Yankee soldiers came away with altogether different impressions. The slaves they saw did not resemble “the rollicking, joyous, devil-may-care African” they had anticipated, nor did they hear any of the laughter and jubilant songs that were said to radiate from the slave cabins. When he had come to the South, Private Henry T. Johns of Massachusetts, like most of his comrades, had believed that the blacks, “if not a happy race, were at least careless and light-hearted.” But the longer he remained in the South, the more skeptical he became of that stereotype. “I have been with them a great deal,” he wrote from Louisiana, “and never before saw so much of gloom, despondency, and listlessness. I saw no banjo, heard none but solemn songs. In church or on the street they impress me with a great sadness. They are a sombre,
not
a happy, race.” Several weeks later, when his regiment was encamped near Baton Rouge, he attended a black religious service and described the “mingled excitement and devotion,” the shouting, the clapping of hands, the jumping, the often wild and excited singing. It all impressed him, however, as “a
mournful
joy,” and the hymns seemed “more a loud wail than a burst of joyous melody.”

The degree of enthusiasm with which slaves greeted their “liberators” created something of a paradox. If they acted indifferently or hostilely, as some did, the Yankees concluded they were too ignorant to appreciate or recognize freedom. But if they were effusive in their response, the Union soldiers often mocked their behavior. The typical Yankee was at best a reluctant liberator, and the attitudes and behavior he evinced did not always encourage the slaves to think of themselves as free men and women. Although Union propagandists and abolitionists might exult in how a war for the Union had been transformed into a crusade for freedom, many northern soldiers donned the crusader’s armor with strong misgivings or outright disgust. “I dont think enough of the Niggar to go and fight for them,” an Ohio private wrote. “I would rather fight them.” Few Northerners, after all, had chosen to wage this kind of war. “Our government has
broken faith with us,” a Union deserter told his captors. “We enlisted to fight for the Union, and not to liberate the G-d d—d niggers.” Rather than view emancipation as a way to end the war, some Yankee soldiers thought it would only prolong the conflict. Now that the very survival of the southern labor system was at stake, not to mention the proper subordination of black people, the prospect of a negotiated peace seemed even more remote, and southern whites could be expected to fight with even greater intensity and conviction.
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That most Union soldiers should have failed to share the abolitionist commitment is hardly surprising. What mattered was how they manifested their feelings when they came into direct contact with the slaves. The evidence suggests one of the more tragic chapters in the history of this generally brutalizing and demoralizing war. The normal frustrations of military life and the usually sordid record of invading armies, when combined with long-held and deeply felt attitudes toward black people, were more than sufficient to turn some Union soldiers into the very “debils” the slaves had been warned by their masters to expect. Not only did the invaders tend to view the Negro as a primary cause of the war but even more importantly as an inferior being with few if any legitimate human emotions—at least none that had to be considered with any degree of sensitivity. Here, then, was a logical and convenient object on which disgruntled and war-weary Yankees could vent their frustrations and hatreds. “As I was going along this afternoon,” a young Massachusetts officer wrote from New Orleans, “a little black baby that could just walk got under my feet and it look so much like a big worm that I wanted to step on it and crush it, the nasty, greasy little vermin was the best that could be said of it.” And if anything, additional exposure to blacks appeared to strengthen rather than allay racial antipathies. “My repugnance to them increases with the acquaintance,” a New England officer remarked. “Republican as I am, keep me clear of the darkey in any relation.” Praying for an early end to the war, a Union soldier stationed in Missouri declared that he had had his fill of colored people. “I never want to see one of the animals after I leave here.”
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The thousands of slaves who flocked to the Union lines were apt to encounter the same prejudices, the same exploitation, the same disparagement, the same capacity for sadistic cruelty which they thought they had left behind them on the plantations and farms. To belittle the slave’s character, dress, language, name, and demeanor, to make him the butt of their humor, to ridicule his aspirations, to mock his religious worship, to exploit his illiteracy were ways of passing the duller moments of camp life and military occupation. Besides, the manipulation of blacks for the amusement of white audiences had a long and accepted tradition behind it. “There were five negroes in our mess room last night,” a New England soldier wrote from Virginia, “we got them to sing and dance! Great times. Negro concerts free of expense here.” Sarah Debro, who had been a slave
in North Carolina, recalled the Yankee soldiers who threatened to shoot her toes off unless she danced for them, and other former slaves remembered, too, how the Yankees forced them to sing and dance and called them “funny names.” The soldiers who shared in these diversions did so regardless of their feelings about slavery and emancipation. Henry M. Cross constantly deplored racist sentiment in his regiment; what he had seen of the slaves, he wrote, made him despise even more intensely the bondage “which has brought them to their miserable condition.” But even as he made that comment, Private Cross wrote of a sixteen-year-old black youth attached to the adjutant in his camp:

To strip the slave of his dignity and self-respect was not enough. Some Yankees exploited his ignorance and trust to defraud him of what little money or worldly goods he possessed. They might, for example, persuade him to exchange his money for certificates that turned out to be soap wrappers, or sell him equally worthless passes that permitted him to travel freely, or offer for a price to reunite him with his family. Some slaves were less gullible than the Yankees thought but were in no position to challenge their authority, while a few slaves managed to turn the tables on their liberators, like the elderly black man who claimed to be the original Uncle Tom and sold a souvenir-hunting Yankee the whip with which he had allegedly been beaten.
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To debauch black women, some Yankees apparently concluded, was to partake of a widely practiced and well-accepted southern pastime. The evidence was to be seen everywhere. Besides, Yankees tended to share the popular racist notion of black women as naturally promiscuous and dissolute. “Singular, but true,” a Massachusetts soldier and amateur phrenologist observed, “the heads of the women indicate great animal passions.” Although some Union officers made no secret of their slave concubines, sharing their quarters with them, a black soldier noted that they usually mingled with “deluded freedwomen” only under the cover of darkness, while they openly consorted with white women during the day. The frequency with which common soldiers mixed with black women prompted some regimental commanders to order the ejection of such women from the camp because their presence had become “demoralizing.” “I won’t be unfaithful to you with a Negro wench,” a Pennsylvania soldier assured his wife, “though it is the case with many soldiers. Yes, men who have wives at home get entangled with these black things.” Marriages between Yankees and blacks were rare, but when they did occur southern whites made the most of them.

Not surprisingly, Union soldiers often shared the outrage of local whites at such liaisons. In November 1865, a black newspaper in Charleston reported that an Illinois soldier had been tarred and feathered by his own comrades for having married a black woman. “He was probably a Southern man by birth and education,” the newspaper said of the victim, “and Hoosiers and Suckers don’t take readily to Southern habits.”
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Whatever the reputation of black women for promiscuity, sexual submission frequently had to be obtained by force. “While on picket guard I witnessed misdeeds that made me ashamed of America,” a soldier wrote from South Carolina; he had recently observed a group of his comrades rape a nine-year-old black girl. Not only did some Union soldiers sexually assault any woman they found in a slave cabin but they had no compunctions about committing the act in the presence of her family. “The father and grandfather dared offer no resistance,” two witnesses reported from Virginia. In some such instances, the husband or children of the intended victim had to be forcibly restrained from coming to her assistance. Beyond the exploitation of sexual assault, black women could be subjected to further brutality and sadism, as was most graphically illustrated in an incident involving some Connecticut soldiers stationed in Virginia. After seizing two “niger wenches,” they “turned them upon their heads, & put tobacco, chips, stocks, lighted cigars & sand into their behinds.” Without explanation, some Union soldiers in Hanover County, Virginia, stopped five young black women and cut their arms, legs, and backs with razors. “Dis was new to us,” one of the victims recalled, “cause Mr. Tinsley [her master] didn’ ever beat or hurt us.” Most Union soldiers would have found these practices reprehensible. But they occurred with sufficient frequency to induce a northern journalist in South Carolina to write that Union troops had engaged in “some of the vilest and meanest exhibitions of human depravity” he had ever witnessed. If such incidents were rare, moreover, the racial ideology that encouraged them had widespread acceptance, even among those who deplored the excesses.
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