Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [102]
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.
Dey said that we, de able-body men, was to get $8 a month, an’ de women, $4 and de ration; only we was to allow $1 de month to help de poor an’ de old—which we don’t ’gret—an’ one dollar for de sick ones, an’ den anudder dollar for Gen’l Purposes. We don’t zactly know who dat Gen’l is, but ’pears like dar was a heap o’ dem Gen’ls, an’ it takes all dar is to pay ’em, ’cause we don’t get nuffins.
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.62
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.63
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,