Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [120]
The range of conduct exemplified by George Page and the Virginia coachman prompted whites to seek some plausible explanation that might be translated into appropriate action. But the initial assumptions they made about slave behavior rendered any real analysis impossible. What they found so difficult to believe was that their slaves might have developed their own standards of accepted behavior and evolved their own concepts of freedom. It was so much easier to think that the troublesome slaves, the defectors, and the rebels were simply not themselves, that they had been misled, that their minds had been contaminated by outside influences. After a Richmond slave denounced Jefferson Davis and refused to serve any white man, a local editor demanded that he “be whipped every day until he confesses what white man put these notions in his head.” There had to be an explanation which slaveholding families could accept without in any way compromising their self-esteem or the fundamental conviction that slavery was the best possible condition for black people. To pretend that the Yankees instigated slave aggression and enticed and forced slaves to desert their masters proved to be a highly popular explanation, since it contained a semblance of truth and conveniently evaded the hard questions. “The poor negroes don’t do us any harm except when they are put up to it,” Eliza Andrews thought. “Even when they murdered that white man and quartered him, I believe pernicious teachings were responsible.”109
Although many whites gave public voice to this charge, few thought it adequately explained the rate of desertion and betrayal. The more they reflected over their own experiences, as well as their neighbors’, slaveholders came increasingly to question the lax discipline and familiarity which, they now argued, had produced pampered, spoiled, and overly indulged servants. “It has now been proven,” Louis Manigault maintained, “that those Planters who were the most indulgent to their Negroes when we were at peace, have since the commencement of the war encountered the greatest trouble in the management of this species of property.” Nor was that observation peculiar to Manigault’s rice plantations, for Julia LeGrand made precisely the same point based on her experience in New Orleans. “So many people have been betrayed by pet servants. Strange that some of the most severe mistresses and masters have kept their servants through all this trying year.” After noting how the most indulged slaves had turned out to be “the meanest” and least trustworthy, a Georgia planter indicated that his wartime experience left him with only one conclusion: “A nigger has got to know you’re his master, and then when he understands that he’s content.… Flail a nigger and he knows you.” That was, of course, time-honored advice. By nature, it had long been held, blacks required rigid discipline and the full exercise of the master’s authority; without those restraints, they would revert back to the barbarism from which they had emerged. The closer blacks approached a state of freedom, the more unmanageable and dangerous they became.110
To understand why their most trusted slaves turned against them, most masters need not have looked beyond their own households. The answer usually lay somewhere in that complex and often ambivalent relationship between a slave and his “white folks,” in the intimacy and dependency which infused those relations and created both mutual affection and unbearable tension in the narrow quarters of the Big House. Unlike the field slave, who enjoyed a certain degree of anonymity and a prescribed leisure time, the house servant stood always at the beck and call of each member of