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By Root 1434 0

body servants returning with their masters from the war front were feted by their fellow slaves not only for their heroism but for the valuable information they brought. “All de slaves crowded ’roun me an’ wanted to know if dey wus gonna be freed or not an’ when I tol’ ’em dat de war wus over an’ dat dey wus free dey wus all very glad.” Charlotte Brooks had been sold at the age of seventeen to a hard-driving Texas planter. Working in the house as a cook, she overheard a conversation about freedom, immediately ran into the field to inform the other slaves, and they all quit work together. Still another source of information was employers seeking to hire black laborers. Taking advantage of the momentary absence of a master, who had refused to tell his slaves they were free, two white men representing a nearby mill informed Lizzie Hughes’s mother she was a free woman, handed her “a piece of paper” to prove it, and offered to pay her twelve dollars a month if she would cook for the mill hands.33

Whatever the source, the news reached some slaves at a most opportune time. During an altercation with her mistress, Annie Gregg, a Tennessee slave, watched as she picked up a handful of switches with the intention of meting out the usual punishment for insolence. “I picked up the pan of boiling water to scald the chickens in. She got scared of me, told me to put the pan down. I didn’t do it.” Quickly called to the scene, the master scolded his wife rather than the slave, reminding her that the slaves were now “as free as you are or I am.” To Annie Gregg, the intervention of her master, whom she had always considered “cruel,” was only slightly less startling than the news itself. “That is the first I ever heard about freedom,” she recalled. The news of freedom had immediate significance, too, for the Louisiana slaves hiding out in the cane brakes along the Mississippi River, for the Texas mother who dreaded having to send her small child out into the fields to work, for the North Carolina slave still wearing a ball and chain after trying to run away (a Yankee officer had to take him to town to cut it off), and for the many slaves who suddenly found themselves released from slave pens and jails—among them, “Uncle Tom,” an Arkansas slave, “the best reader, white or black, for miles,” who had made the mistake of reading a newspaper with the latest war news to a gathering of blacks. And for a Tennessee slave who had been purchasing her freedom, the news relieved her of the need to pay any more. “De rest ain’t paid yet,” she said with a smile. “No, sah! leave dat to de judgment-day.”34

While their “white folks” refused to confirm their freedom, numbers of slaves continued to strike out on their own. The many blacks who flocked to the Union camps or left with the Yankee soldiers had acted to determine their own status, as did the slaves in Kentucky and Missouri and other states and regions unaffected by the Emancipation Proclamation. Yet despite examples of slave initiative, the habits and dependency learned as slaves, as well as the need to survive, prompted many blacks to refrain from any premature or hasty assertion of their freedom. If doubts persisted, both reason and fear sustained those doubts. Even when the Yankees informed them of freedom, they often accompanied the announcement with admonitions that left some blacks understandably confused. In explaining their new status to them, a Union officer in Liberty County, Georgia, reportedly warned the blacks “to stay at home and work harder than they had ever done in their lives.” The soldiers, he added, were there to make certain “that they behaved themselves.” A white resident who overheard the talk observed, “They (the Nigs) were quite disgusted.”35

The example of blacks who were beaten for claiming their freedom prematurely tended to make the others cautious about how they acted and what they said. Again, the temperaments of individual masters and mistresses varied considerably, particularly when they had to face still further losses from a war that had already cost them dearly.