Been in the Storm So Long (67 page)

During the war, thousands of slaves had been removed from the threatened regions, like the South Carolina low country, to the more remote sections of the state, where they would be out of the path of the Union Army, insulated from dangerous influences, and still available for some kind of labor. With the confirmation of their freedom, many of these “refugeed” blacks wanted to return to their old homes and friends and to the type of labor with which they were familiar. Not only did they seek employment “in labor which they understood better,” one observer noted, but “it might easily be that no place could well be worse than the region in which they found themselves when the war closed.” Near Kingsville, South Carolina, a black refugee camp was made up almost exclusively of men and women who had worked for a rice planter on the Combahee River before
being removed to the Richland district, where they were put to work raising other crops. For several days, they had been waiting beside the railroad tracks for transportation to their old residences. “All we gang o’ nigger is rice nigger,” they declared, as if that were sufficient explanation. If he could not obtain a piece of land for himself upon his return, one of the freedmen declared, he preferred to go back to the old rice plantation and labor there with his fellow workers for money or shares.
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With some 125,000 slaves having been removed to Texas during the war, many of these now joined the steady stream of migrants traveling along the old San Antonio road, eager to get back to their old homes in Louisiana, Mississippi, and elsewhere—“or, at all events, to get out of Texas.” To undertake the trek required considerable fortitude, many freedmen preferred to take their chances in Texas, and the decision in some instances split families asunder, with some returning to the old places and others remaining in their new homes. “Pappy, him goes back to Louisiana to massa’s place,” Fred Brown recalled. “Dat am de las’ we hears from him. Mammy and I goes to Henderson [Texas] and I works at dis and dat and cares for my mammy ten years, till she dies. Den I gits jobs as cook in Dallas and Houston and lots of other places.” After being abandoned by their master in the regions to which he had removed them, some freedmen were more than justified in invoking the cry of “ingratitude” and did so. Near Macon, Georgia, a northern traveler encountered a group of twenty-six former slaves who had come from Mississippi and were determined to reach their old homes in South Carolina. “My young master moved to Mississippi and took us with him,” an elderly freedman explained. “He had a great many slaves. When de Lord brought freedom to us, why my young master turned us out, said we was no good, we couldn’t work any, and said go away.” Such instances may have been exceptional. If the planter did not feel responsible for his former slaves, he might be sufficiently anxious for their continued labor to arrange for their transportation to the regions from which he had removed them.
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Rather than return to the plantations from which they had recently been moved, some freedmen chose, as did Cheney Cross’s father, to “put out for de place where he fust belong”—that is, to the old plantations on which they had once labored before being sold away. Such destinations were not nearly as inexplicable as some observers thought. When Jane Sutton, a Mississippi slave who had been given to her master’s married daughter, walked “all de way back” to the old place, she had a clear purpose in mind. “I wanted to see Old Mis’ an’ my Mammy an’ my brothers an’ sisters.” For a different reason, Andy J. Anderson resolved to return to the plantation in Williamson County, Texas, from which he had been sold several years before. After his first master, Jack Haley, had left for military service, the overseer made life intolerable for the slaves; Anderson was sold to a man “what hell am too good for” and then sold again to a “good” master. Once the war ended, he traveled at night and hid by day to avoid the patrollers and headed back to the old place, where he remained in hiding until Haley
returned and fired the overseer. Emerging from his father’s cabin, Andy Anderson then greeted his old master—a day he would recall many decades later as “de happies’ time in my life.”
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When Louisa Adams, a North Carolina freedwoman, returned with her parents to the same region in which they had been slaves, they did not go back to the old plantation, which had nothing but bad memories for them, but went to work for a neighboring planter. This typified the attachment which numerous ex-slaves felt not so much to the old master or mistress but to the region they knew most intimately, the familiar surroundings in which they had been raised. Attachments to “the old range,” as they called it, often took priority over attractive offers made by planters elsewhere who were reputed to be good employers. Joseph Maxwell, a Georgia planter, urged the slaves he had removed to Early County during the war to stay with him and “be well cared for.” But most of them insisted on leaving, not because they respected him any less (“We lub de massa an’ work ha’d fo’ him”), but because they wanted to return to “de place whar we libed befo’—Liberty County.” To the astonishment of a Freedmen’s Bureau officer in South Carolina, the blacks who had been removed to the up-country “were crazy to get back to their native flats of ague and country fever,” while the “Highland darkeys who had drifted down to the seashore were sending urgent requests to be ‘fotched home again.’ ”
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Even if only partially understood, the pervasive quality of local attachments provided some convenient answers to some troublesome questions about post-emancipation behavior. After examining the prevailing discontent among the blacks in a freedmen’s camp near Goodrich’s Landing, Louisiana, a northern reporter ascribed it all to “homesickness,” for few of them had been raised in this region. “Perhaps the most marked trait in the negro character,” he suggested, “is his love of home and of the localities to which he is accustomed. They all pine for their homes. They long for the old quarters they have lived in; for the old woods they have roamed in, and the old fields they have tilled.” Several of the physicians in charge of these camps came up with still another malady peculiar to the Negro psyche—“homesickness” and “nostalgia.” “They get thinking of their old homes and if they have left their families, or any part of them behind, they long to see them, and so they become depressed in spirits and yield readily to the first attack of disease, or succumb to the depression alone.” Only this strong local attachment could presumably explain why Lucy Sanders’ mother returned to her first master, though he had sold his slaves “to obtain the cash value” in the expectation that they might be emancipated. Whatever the most compelling reasons for these moves, the results proved quite acceptable to the planters who stood to gain by their labor. “This love for home,” a Freedmen’s Bureau official in Meridian, Mississippi, predicted, “will be of great service to us in reorganizing this Country under the new order of things.” In the lexicon of the Bureau, that meant getting the ex-slaves back to work.
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When the war ended, Simon Crum, a black corporal in Higginson’s
regiment, vowed to leave the South altogether. “I’se made up my mind,” he declared, “dat dese yere Secesh will neber be cibilized in my time.” Although the explanation seemed plausible enough to many ex-slaves, particularly after the first year of “freedom,” few of them acted out his conclusion. Both during and after the war, several groups of freed slaves, largely women and children, were shipped to northern cities, where they were placed under the supervision of various benevolent societies. But this never became a significant movement. The few who did come North in this fashion were usually employed in domestic jobs. Before the expected arrival of a hundred Virginia blacks, a New York newspaper announced that applications were being accepted in the basement of Brooklyn’s Methodist Episcopal Church for “first-rate domestics.” Most freedmen and freedwomen, however, if they even considered the possibility, rejected migration to the North as neither feasible nor desirable. Whatever the mammoth problems of transition they now faced, the ex-slaves seemed to suggest by their actions that following the North Star no longer constituted the only way to achieve their freedom.
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If the North seemed unattractive or impractical, Africa was even more so. Although several prominent northern blacks had maintained their commitment to African emigration through the first years of the war, few of them remained active in the movement after the Emancipation Proclamation. Between 1866 and 1871, however, several thousand blacks, many of them from South Carolina, did accept the offer of the American Colonization Society for free transportation to Liberia. The explanation offered by a black colonizationist repeated the familiar argument. “We do not believe it possible, from the past history and from the present aspect of affairs, for our people to live in this country peaceably, and educate and elevate their children to that degree which they desire.” But most of the black leaders in the North who had enunciated the same position only a few years back no longer thought it applicable, at least not until disillusionment with the overthrow of Reconstruction forced a few of them—like Henry McNeal Turner—to reassess the situation. With black interest in African emigration sharply reduced, and in part because of that fact, President Lincoln’s scheme for removing the bulk of the freed slaves to Africa or Central America came to very little in the postwar years. “They say that they have lived here all their days, and there were stringent laws made to keep them here,” a Virginia freedman explained to a congressional committee, “and that if they could live here contented as slaves, they can live here when free.… If we can get lands here and can work and support ourselves, I do not see why we should go to any place that we do not want to go to.” Nearly every postwar black convention repeated that same sentiment.
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For the postwar migrants, Mecca lay neither in the North nor across the seas but southward, where Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas vied for needed laborers by promising “enormous” wages and evoked images of opportunity and even lushness. And as with so many subsequent black migrations, the participants would find upon reaching
their destinations that the attractions had been exaggerated and the shortcomings minimized. “I got to Texas and try to work for white folks and try to farm,” a former Virginia slave recalled. “I couldn’t make anything at any work. I made $5.00 a month for I don’t know how many year after the war.” The image of Texas as a “land of milk and honey” that had sustained so many involuntary wartime migrants gave way after the war to Florida as the “land of plenty,” where homesteads were plentiful, wages high, and laborers scarce. But the rewards proved to be far less than the promise, the homesteads less than plentiful and difficult to clear and sustain, and many of the disappointed freedmen had to settle for labor on the plantations. At the very least, the migrants who reached states like Florida, Arkansas, and Mississippi secured terms of labor that compared favorably to what they would have received had they remained in the older states. The Georgia planters, a northern traveler reported, “haggled at paying their freedmen six or seven dollars a month, while Arkansas and Mississippi men stood ready to give twelve and fifteen dollars, and the expenses of the journey.”
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Throughout those older states, labor agents eagerly sought recruits and advertised the advantages of their respective regions. All he had to do to obtain laborers, a Mississippi planter boasted from Eufaula, Alabama, was to send his “nigger” to talk with the local freedmen. “They had nothin’ to do,” he said of the Alabama blacks, and he could easily outbid his Georgian competitors who offered only board and clothing. The planter left Eufaula the next day with sixty-five black recruits. Not all the labor recruiters were quite this successful; they were apt to encounter not only the hostility of local whites but the suspicions of blacks who had heard tales of enticing offers that eventually resulted in sale to Cuba. Nevertheless, many freedmen listened eagerly to the promises of agents of their own race, accepted their assurances, and learned something about the biracial nature of deceit and betrayal.

Reflecting on the exaggerated claims of labor agents, white and black, John F. Van Hook, who learned about their operations from his parents in North Carolina, tended to be more philosophical about the consequences. “Some of those labor agents were powerful smart about stretching the truth,” he
recalled, “but those folks that believed them and left home found out that it’s pretty much the same the world over, as far as folks and human nature is concerned.”
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Despite the alarm they generated among whites, the numbers of exslaves who moved from state to state never reached the proportions suggested by contemporary accounts. The reports that blacks were leaving Georgia “by thousands,” that at least that many South Carolina freedmen were heading southward, and that Virginia had suffered massive losses, while essentially accurate in themselves, obscured the fact that most freed slaves, if they migrated at all, confined those movements within their respective states and counties. Most significantly, perhaps, they tended to seek out the counties where their people were already heavily concentrated and to abandon the areas of white preponderance. That they settled where the demand for black labor was greatest only partially explains their preference; equally important in some regions, racial violence and white hostility prompted ex-slaves to seek security in numbers, and that in turn drove them into the Black Belt counties, as in Alabama, and increasingly into the cities and towns—where, as many blacks thought, “freedom was free-er.”
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