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By Root 1468 0

While some tried to deny or distort the news of freedom, others backed their denials with a show of force. The master on a Tennessee plantation interpreted a slave’s assertion of freedom as a display of insolence and slapped the woman across the face—the first time he had ever laid hands on her. Only after a visit to the nearby town did he reluctantly accept the fact of emancipation. “Seemed like he couldn’t understand how freedom was to be,” one of his former slaves recalled. No matter what they heard, however, some slave-owning families resisted the advent of freedom and used every wile and device to postpone or deny it. “Ed,” a Georgia mistress inquired of a young slave, “you suppose them Yankees would spill their blood to come down here to free you niggers?” That question he could not answer, but “I’se free anyhow,” he insisted. At that, the mistress dropped any further attempt to reason with him. “Shut up,” she ordered, or “I’ll mash your mouth.” Not until midsummer 1865, and only after the arrival of Union troops, did she acknowledge his freedom.36

With the end of the war, Federal officials attempted in various ways to impress upon slaves and masters that emancipation was now the law of the land. That ran contrary, however, to the persistent belief in some regions that slavery remained a legal institution until the new state legislatures and perhaps eventually the Supreme Court of the United States resolved the question. By offering inducements to their blacks to remain with them, some planters evidently hoped not only to complete the current crops but to reap the benefits of court decisions which might invalidate the Emancipation Proclamation. The only real question to be decided, according to the leading newspapers of Jackson, Mississippi, was whether or not the state should adopt a system of gradual and compensated emancipation. After visiting three counties in that state, a Union officer thought such opinions “to be the views of the people generally” and that the prospects for an early recognition of emancipation were quite dim. “Nowhere that I have been do the people generally realize the fact that the negro is Free.”37

Disturbed by the apparent resiliency of the “peculiar institution,” the Freedmen’s Bureau, a new Federal agency designed to ease the slave’s transition to freedom, undertook the task of publicizing and enforcing the abolition of slavery. In late May 1865, Bureau officers warned that any person employing freedmen who failed to compensate them for their labor would be adjudged disloyal to the United States government and risked having his or her property seized and divided among the freedmen. In Louisiana, Bureau agents were asked to read the Emancipation Proclamation on every plantation within their jurisdiction and to leave copies (in French and English) with the freedmen as well as the planters. At the same time, Bureau officers in Mississippi distributed circulars to black preachers and urged that meetings of freedmen be convened at which the Proclamation would be read and explained.38

For numerous slaves, in fact, freedom came only when “de Guvment man” made his rounds of the plantations and forced the planters to acknowledge emancipation. The mere threat of such visits and the rumors that Union soldiers were patrolling the countryside in search of offenders prompted a number of holdouts to free their slaves. The day she knew she was a free woman, Sarah Ford recalled, a Union officer came onto the plantation and read the Emancipation Proclamation to the assembled slaves. “Dat one time Massa Charley can’t open he mouth, ’cause de captain tell him to shut up, dat he’d do de talkin’.” On a Louisiana plantation, “way after freedom,” the same scene was acted out, except that the planter’s wife emerged from the house after the officer left and told her newly freed blacks: “Ten years from today I’ll have you all back ’gain.” Although most masters no doubt resented the interference of Federal officers and would have preferred to tell the slaves in their own time and way, Henry W. Ravenel requested