Been in the Storm So Long (30 page)

The actions of white men could not surprise some blacks. Many of those who hailed the Yankees as their champions and liberators nevertheless were to experience a rude awakening. In Norfolk, Virginia, the slaves had rejoiced at the coming of the Yankees. “There was nothing we would not do for them,” one black resident remarked; “and they knew it, too. We were humble, grateful and respectful.” But the soldiers destroyed their property, shot at them, and abused them “in every possible way,” and it now appeared to him “as if we had no one to protect us, and there’s nothing
left us but to protect ourselves.” Such experiences were more than unsettling; they raised real questions about the quality of the newly acquired freedom. What were the blacks to think when “those individuals whom we all regarded as our friends, and hailed as our deliverers,” broke up their celebrations, heaped physical and mental abuse on them, shoved them off sidewalks, cursed them as “niggers” and “mokes,” robbed them of their few belongings, and ravished their women? It was as if one set of masters had been replaced by another, and that was precisely how a Norfolk black woman viewed the change in her status: “I reckon I’m Massa Lincoln’s slave now.”
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Reflecting the wide range and diversity of northern opinion, the Union Army also contained in its ranks men who were imbued with abolitionist ideals, who were anxious to wage an antislavery war, and who would have resented any implication that they harbored racist attitudes. “I tell the boys right to their face I am in the war for the freedom of the slave,” a Wisconsin soldier boasted. Initially indifferent or hostile to emancipation, some Union soldiers were won over by military considerations, while others resolved their doubts when they came face to face with the victims of the “peculiar institution.” After hearing from slave runaways the stories of their escape and the bondage they had left behind them, a Union soldier in North Carolina wrote his parents that “every man in our army is
now
an abolitionist.” Even more convincing than the familiar tales of whippings and the separation of families was the direct physical evidence of how slaves had been treated. Upon visiting several plantations near New Orleans, where he released slave prisoners from heavy chains and weights, one Union soldier said he had seen “enough of the horrors of slavery to make one an Abolitionist forever.” When several new black recruits stripped for a physical examination in Louisiana, prior to their induction, a Union soldier afterwards described in detail the marks which bondage had left on the bodies of these men. It was a depressing sight.

The more sympathetic Union soldiers tried to alleviate the condition of the slave refugees who flocked in ever greater numbers to their camps. Anticipating the movement of teachers and missionaries into the South, they volunteered their time to establish informal classes for the slaves in reading and writing, and some insisted on giving them religious instruction. The life of an abolitionist in the Union Army, however, much like that of his counterpart in the North, was never very comfortable, particularly
if he sought to proselytize his fellow soldiers, and he almost always sensed that he was in a small minority. “Most of the boys have their laugh at me for helping the ‘Niggers,’ ” a Wisconsin soldier confessed. The hostility toward abolitionism and blacks that so many Northerners carried with them into the war was sometimes vented on those who tried to agitate the subject in the Army. “If some of the niger lovers want to know what the most of the Solgers think of them,” an Ohioan informed his father, “they think about as much as they do a reble. They think they are Shit asses.”
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The abolitionist Yankee found himself troubled by more than the hostility of his fellow soldiers. Mirroring the ambivalence of the antislavery movement itself, he often found it easier to preach abolitionism than to accept the black man as an equal or to mix with him socially. Henry T. Johns, the well-meaning and sympathetic Massachusetts soldier, frankly confessed near the end of the war, “I know I always revolt at shaking hands with a darkey or sitting by him, but it is a prejudice that should shame me.” To free the slaves, he recognized approvingly, was to grant them equality. “There is no help for it, and the sooner we get rid of our foolish prejudices the better for us. In me those prejudices are very strong. I can fight for this race more easily than I can eat with them.” As they moved through the South and ultimately became an army of occupation, Union soldiers, like the North itself, failed to agree on the proper place of black people—both freed slaves and free blacks—in American society. If there was anything approaching a typical attitude, a Union Army physician stationed in Virginia may have come close to capturing it. He did not regard himself as proslavery. He wanted to see the institution of slavery abolished. But he found it difficult to view blacks as people possessing emotions, sensitivities, and aspirations like everyone else: “He thinks they are nobody and ought never to be anybody.”
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The attitudes and behavior of the Union soldiers varied considerably, ranging from condescension to outright brutality. That made the Yankees no different in the eyes of many slaves than their own masters and mistresses. Despite the uncertainties that awaited them, the movement of slaves toward the Union lines that had begun in the early months of the war continued unabated, with growing numbers now running away with Yankee raiding parties, or following Union troops when they passed through the vicinity, or seeking out the Union gunboats plying the southern rivers. The exodus reached such proportions in some regions that it took on all the drama and tragedy of the most classic wartime refugee scenes. When Sherman’s army moved through Georgia and the Carolinas, tens of thousands of slaves tried desperately to keep up with the marching columns, many of them carrying their household goods and children, fighting off hunger, exhaustion, exposure, harassment, and the efforts of Union officers to drive them off. “[W]e only wanted the able-bodied men (and to tell you the truth the youngest and best looking women),” one officer wrote. “Sometimes we took off whole families and plantations of niggers, by way of repaying some influential secessionist. But the useless
part of these we soon manage to lose—sometimes in crossing rivers—sometimes in other ways.” This letter, allegedly found in the streets of Camden after the Yankees departed, may have been fabricated by Confederate propagandists but other evidence suggests little distortion of what took place on Sherman’s march. Numbers of slaves were left behind on the roads and at the river crossings, where they subsequently fell prey to General Wheeler’s Confederate raiders, and some drowned while attempting to cross the rivers. “The waters of the Ogeechee and Ebenezer Creek,” one of Sherman’s officers wrote, “can account for hundreds who were blocking up our columns, and there abandoned.… Many of them died in the bayous and lagoons of Georgia.” The terrible plight of the Georgia refugees moved a young Boston teacher to observe that “freedom means death to many.”
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Exulting over the mass desertion of slaves to the Union Army, a black newspaper in New Orleans proclaimed, “History furnishes no such intensity of determination, on the part of any race, as that exhibited by these people to be free.” But historical comparisons immediately came to mind, and abolitionist-minded northern whites and black leaders made the most of them. This “vast hegira” of slaves, they agreed, resembled the movement of the Israelites out of Egypt and to the Promised Land. The differences, however, seemed almost as striking. “There was no plan in this exodus, no Moses to lead it,” observed a Union officer who had been entrusted with the supervision of over 20,000 black refugees in the Mississippi Valley. Nor did it appear to have a Promised Land. By the time they reached the Union camps, the refugees were exhausted, half starved, frightened, and sick. It was not uncommon for malnutrition and pulmonary disease to claim the lives of three or four blacks every day in the hastily constructed and congested contraband villages. “The poor Negroes die as fast as ever,” a missionary teacher reported. “The children are all emaciated to the last degree and have such violent coughs and dysenteries that few survive.”
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The number of slaves entering the Union lines provoked considerable dismay among commanding officers who found their camps overrun and the movement of their troops impeded. “What shall I do with my niggers?” asked one beleaguered commander, while another complained that he had more blacks in his camp than whites and no rations to feed them. What to do with these slaves proved to be a formidable problem that would never be satisfactorily resolved. The most immediate solution took the form of the contraband camps in which slaves were put to work as government laborers, paid wages, fed on army rations, and clothed by philanthropic agencies. The camps soon became overcrowded, disease took a heavy toll, the promised wages were often not paid, and many slaves came to feel they had been defrauded.

That was only a precursor of the problems that would beset Federal policy toward the “contrabands.” By the end of the war, with more than a million ex-slaves under some form of Federal custody, the initial confusion regarding their status, disposition, and future remained unresolved, thereby frustrating anything approaching a genuine social reconstruction.
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What might have induced so many slaves to leave the relative security of the farm and plantation for the uncertainty of the Union Army and the contraband camps deeply troubled some slaveholding families. The most convenient explanation was that the Yankees forcibly removed them, and there were sufficient examples to warrant such a charge; some slaves, on the other hand, were thrown off the plantations by their owners, particularly the women and children of men who had run off or had enlisted in the Union Army. After the way the Yankees had stripped the plantations bare, some masters also pleaded poverty, claiming they simply could not feed or support the blacks. Recognizing this, numerous slaves had already left, deciding they might fare better on army rations. But most whites suspected that the prospect of immediate freedom, and the fear of losing it if they remained, induced many of their slaves to follow the Yankees. “Generally when told to run away from the soldiers, they go right to them,” Kate Stone observed in Louisiana, “and I cannot say I blame them.” More ominously, a Louisiana planter, after watching the slaves in his neighborhood for a week, thought many of them decided to leave with the Yankees because they feared retaliation for the outrages they had committed and they had heard that “the ‘rebel’ soldiers were coming on down and killing negroes as they came.” That may also help to explain why some slaves balked at Yankee questions about the names of their owners.
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The decision to desert their “home,” locale, and “white folks,” however, did not always come easily. Every slave would have to determine his own priorities. Near Milledgeville, Georgia, in the path of Sherman’s march, a staff officer came upon a scene that could have been enacted almost anywhere the Union soldiers appeared. In a hut he found a slave couple, both of them more than sixty years old. Nothing they said to him suggested that they were displeased with their situation; if anything, like many of the elderly slaves he had encountered, they were content to spend their remaining years in the service and care of those who had exploited them for a lifetime of labor. But as the troops prepared to move on, the woman suddenly stood up, and a “fierce, almost devilish” look came across a face that only minutes before had been almost devoid of expression. “What for you sit dar?” she asked, pointing her finger at the old man crouched in the corner of the fireplace. “You s’pose I wait sixty years for nutten? Don’t yer see de door open? I’se follow my child; I not stay. Yes, anudder day I goes ’long wid dese people; yes, sar, I walks till I drop in my
tracks.” Only a Rembrandt, the officer later wrote, could have done justice to this scene. “A more terrible sight I never beheld.”
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If the Civil War initially drew some masters and slaves closer together, with both now sharing privations and suffering, the approach of the Union Army underscored the ambiguous nature of that relationship and forced the master to reevaluate not only individual slaves in whom he had placed his confidence but the entire system of racial subordination. Both sides in the war had an obvious stake in how the slaves responded to the Yankees. The faithful black reinforced the conviction that the great mass of slaves (there had always been some “bad niggers”) were perfectly content and had no real wish to alter their status; the fidelity and steadiness demonstrated by the slaves, a North Carolinian argued, “speaks not only well for themselves but well for their training and the system under which they lived.” Union propagandists and abolitionists, on the other hand, viewed the exodus of slaves to and with the Union Army as an oppressed and brutalized population welcoming its release from bondage. In that spirit, a Union reporter wrote of a recent victory: