Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [107]
After what many planters had experienced, the number of slave defections seemed less important than the behavior of those who remained. More often than most whites wished to believe or to concede publicly, the “demoralization” (as they preferred to call it) of the slave population took a violent and destructive bent. The victims of such depredations took little comfort in the ready explanation that these were exceptional cases. Nor was their anguish necessarily mitigated by the popular view that only the Yankees could have instigated the blacks to behave so outrageously. If only the slaves had been left alone, Henry W. Ravenel kept telling himself, they would have obeyed their natural instincts and remained “a quiet, contented, & happy people.” But Ravenel, a native of South Carolina, should have known better. The sacking of nearby Beaufort, early in the war, illustrated the capacity of the slaves for destructive activity in the days preceding the arrival of Union troops. (Local planters had already set an example by trying to burn down the cotton barns before their hasty departure.) If slaves in the Sea Islands region usually refrained from destroying the plantations on which they lived, the many who poured into Beaufort had little compunction about occupying and ransacking the stately town houses of well-to-do planters. When one planter momentarily returned to his home, he found a slave seated at the piano “playing away like the very Devil” and two young black women upstairs “dancing away famously”; he also discovered that many neighboring houses had been “completely turned upside down and inside out” and the local churches had been vandalized. When a Union landing party finally came ashore, they were startled by the extent of the devastation.
We went through spacious houses where only a week ago families were living in luxury, and saw their costly furniture despoiled; books and papers smashed; pianos on the sidewalk, feather beds ripped open, and even the filth of the Negroes left lying in parlors and bedchambers.
Much of the destruction, one reporter suggested, could not be defined as “plunder” but only as a “malicious love of mischief gratified.” When news of the sacking reached the North, Henry M. Turner, an outspoken black clergyman, was equally startled; in fact, he refused to believe the “ridiculous, outrageous, and cannibalistic reports” of slave excesses. Having been a resident of South Carolina for more than twenty years of his life, he could attest to the fact that “there are no class of colored people south of Mason and Dixon’s line, where more sound sense, morality, religion, and refined taste, prevails, than in Beaufort.” The slaves themselves said little about the fury they had unleashed on some of the more imposing symbols of the slaveholding aristocracy. Nor did they apparently deem an explanation necessary.73
Although the extent of slave “pillaging” in the South was sometimes exaggerated, or confused with Yankee depredations, that any should have occurred aroused consternation. “The Moorfield negroes are crazy quite,” a South Carolinian wrote; “they have been to Pinopolis, helping in the sacking of the houses.” In some areas, the slaves singled out the popular summer retreats for wealthy planters, where the quality of the furnishings provided sufficient temptation. Where white families had abandoned their homes, the slaves in many instances preferred occupation to pillage, moving from their own cramped quarters into