Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [110]
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THE TERMS with which slave-owning families described the conduct of their blacks—“insolence,” “impertinence,” “impudence,” and “ingratitude”—had been used often and indiscriminately to denote slave transgressions or departures from expected behavior. Once the Yankees arrived, masters and mistresses detected examples of such behavior almost everywhere—in the defection of the favorites, in the demeanor and language of the slaves who remained, in their refusal to submit to punishment, in their failure to obey orders promptly (or at all), and, most frequently, in their unwillingness to work “as usual.” To a Louisiana planter, traveling from Ascension Parish to New Orleans in mid-1863, the slaves he observed along the way were nearly all “insolent & idle,” which he defined as “working not more than half a day, yet demanding full rations of every thing.” To the wife of a prominent Alabama planter, the slaves behaved in “an insolent manner” by taking off whenever there was work to be done. “The negroes are worse than free,” she informed her son. “They say they are free. We cannot exert any authority. I beg ours to do what little is to be done.” To a Virginia white woman, the blacks were acting “very independent and impudent,” and like most whites she equated the two traits. To slave owners everywhere, the defections were difficult enough to understand but the ways in which some slaves chose to depart invariably provoked the most grievous charge of all—“ingratitude.” Few stated it more succinctly than Emily C. Douglas, a resident of Natchez who had earlier extolled the loyalty of her slaves: “They left without even a good-bye.”80
The “delirium of excitement” set off by the arrival of the Yankees gave scores of slaves a much-welcomed respite from their usual labors and momentarily paralyzed agricultural operations. That was the day, a former Florida slave remembered, when they dropped their plows and hoes, rushed to their cabins, put on their best clothes, and went into town to join with other slaves in a “joyous and un-forgettable occasion.” If the slaves did not stop work altogether, they often slowed down the pace and made only sporadic appearances in the fields, “going, coming, and working when they please and as they please,” sometimes spending the day in their cabins, sometimes venturing into town for a week at a time. The attempts to make a crop under these conditions were futile. On the Magnolia plantation in Louisiana, the overseer first complained that the slaves were “very slow getting out”; three weeks later, “the ring of the Bell no longer a delightful sound,” and the slaves were “moving very slowly”; more than a month later, in utter exasperation, he could only “wish every negro would leave the place as they will do only what pleases them, go out in the morning when it suits them, come in when they please, etc.” The erratic performance of the slaves even dismayed some northern observers, who wondered if this augured trouble for a free labor system. The Negroes’ idea of freedom, an alarmed Union reporter observed, “is that of unrestrained license to do as they please, and go where they choose.” The slaves might well have agreed, after having watched their masters and other whites for so many years interpret freedom in precisely that manner.81
To mark their release from bondage, blacks not only withheld their labor but in some instances vented their frustrations and bitterness on the most glaring and accessible symbols of their past labor—the Big House, which they might pillage; the cotton gin, which they might deliberately destroy; the slave pens and cotton houses, which in some cases were converted into freedmen schools and churches; and the overseer, who often represented the sole authority left on a plantation and who had come to personify the excesses of bondage. Many overseers clearly deserved their reputation for cruelty;