Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [105]
When Union forces in 1863 undertook an expedition into central and northern Louisiana, the news of their approach reportedly “turned the negroes crazy.” Not only did the slaves refuse to work, John H. Ransdell informed an absentee owner, but “they became utterly demoralized at once and everything like subordination and restraint was at an end.” The slaves who did not flee with the Yankees, he observed, “remained at home to do much worse.” For nearly a week, Ransdell, like other planter families in Rapides Parish, had to stand by helplessly (usually secluded in their homes) while the blacks engaged in “a perfect jubilee.” Some planters lost “nearly every movable thing,” as the slaves destroyed property, killed much of the livestock, and emptied the storerooms. “Confound them,” Ransdell wrote the governor of Louisiana, who owned the neighboring plantation, “they deserve to be half starved and to be worked nearly to death for the way they have acted.… The recent trying scenes through which we have passed have convinced me that no dependence is to be placed on the negro—and that they are the greatest hypocrites and liars that God ever made.” After enumerating his “considerable” losses, however, he thought them “nothing in comparison to those of the planters below us—and we really have great cause of thankfulness that we came off so well.”68
The heavy concentrations of slaves in parts of Louisiana and Mississippi help to account for the extent of the “demoralization”—that popular term used by whites to describe the disaffection of enslaved black workers. Even some ardent defenders of the “peculiar institution” might have agreed that slavery worked its greatest excesses in these regions and made the most impossible demands on black laborers. Not surprisingly, then, the brutalizing nature of the labor system in the Deep South supposedly made for a more volatile situation than elsewhere, and slaveholders were now reaping the consequences of years of abuse. Perhaps, too, the recalcitrant slaves who had been sold here from the more “benign” slaveholding states provided leadership or in some way influenced those who had known no other kind of bondage.
The problem with such explanations is that the excesses of bondage in the Deep South might have conceivably yielded some different results. As a number of fugitive slaves argued, the labor system in the Louisiana sugar parishes was calculated to produce the most docile, abject, obsequious, and degraded bondsmen, totally lacking in hope. If any system might have been expected to produce a crop of model Sambos, it should have been this one. But the reaction of these slaves at the approach of the Union Army, and the testimony of Louisiana and Mississippi planters, suggest that a people apparently broken in body and spirit had even more reason to contemplate the benefits of freedom and to hasten their liberation.
Every plantation, every farm, every town no doubt had its own version of how the slaves behaved. Until the Union Army made its presence felt, plantation life tended to remain relatively stable, crops were made, and most slaves went about their daily tasks. The Emancipation Proclamation by itself did little to alter this situation, with most slaves preferring to wait for a more propitious moment. But news that Yankee soldiers were somewhere within reach precipitated the rapid depopulation of the slave quarters, often without the slightest warning. “They have shown no signs of insubordination,” one observer noted. “Down to the last moment they cut their maize and eat their corn-cake with their old docility—then they suddenly disappear.” The experience of John H. Bills, the Tennessee planter, resembled that of his Mississippi neighbors and illustrated a pattern of slave response that crippled the labor system in substantial portions of the occupied South. With the appearance of the Yankees, the restlessness and reluctance to work he