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By Root 1261 0

one dat freed me, and anyways Abraham Lincoln and none of his North people didn’t look after me and buy my crop right after I was free like old Master did. Dat was de time dat was de hardest and everything was dark and confusion.” The number of blacks who responded to questions about their freedom by declaring, “Mas’ Henry ain’t told me so yit,” often infuriated postwar visitors to the South, as it did black clergymen like James Lynch and Henry M. Turner who reproached their people for the way they still cringed before their old masters and mistresses. Near Lexington, North Carolina, a northern correspondent encountered a seventy-year-old black ferryman who had outlived seven masters and who for forty-three years had conveyed passengers across the Yadkin River. Although freedom had been declared in this region, he had not yet severed his ties with the woman who owned him.

“Well, old man, you’re free now.”

“I dunno, master. They say all the colored people’s free; they do say it certain; but I’m a-goin on same as I alius has been.”

“Why, you get wages now, don’t you?”

“No, sir; my mistress never said anything to me that I was to have wages, nor yet that I was free; nor I never said anything to her. Ye see I left it to her honor to talk to me about it, because I was afraid she’d say I was insultin’ to her and presumin’, so I wouldn’t speak first. She ha’n’t spoke yet.”

Bewildered by these responses, the reporter finally asked him if he intended to work on “just the same” until he died. At this point the loyal slave made it clear that although good manners and a sense of mutual obligations had kept him from asserting his freedom, he was quite prepared to impose deadlines on his patience.

“Ye see, master, I am ashamed to say anything to her. But I don’t ’low to work any longer than to Christmas [1865], and then I’ll ask for wages. But I want to leave the ferry. I’m a mighty good farmer, and I’ll get a piece of ground and a chunk of a hoss, if I can, and work for myself.”42

The number of slaves who waited for the master to confirm their freedom, rather than assert it independently, is not altogether surprising. Whether the enslaved worker had labored on a plantation or a farm, he had been brought up to view his master as the primary source of authority—the provider and the protector, the lawmaker and the enforcer, the judge and the jury, and most masters had deliberately cultivated feelings of dependency and helplessness in their slaves. No edict of emancipation could immediately obliterate the habits of obedience and deference with which many slaves had been inculcated since childhood. Nor could it in some instances destroy a familiar relationship worked out over a period of time, involving mutual obligations of service, sustenance, and protection. The defeat of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery no doubt weakened the master’s stature in the eyes of many slaves. But it did not necessarily lessen the respect, fear, and obedience he commanded by virtue of his authority and economic power. “A lot o’ de niggers knowed nothin’ ’cept what missus and marster tole us,” a former Georgia slave observed. “What dey said wus just de same as de Lawd had spoken to us.” And in this instance, he told them that Lincoln was dead, they were still slaves, and he would distribute black cloth so they could mourn both Lincoln and their freedom.43

But there were sharply contrasting stories, too, which revealed the compelling need some slaves felt to confront their masters and mistresses with the truth about freedom, if for no other reason than to remove the last doubts and to observe their reactions. Hired out to another family during the war, a Virginia slave had been working in the fields when a friend informed her that she was now free. “Is dat so?” she exclaimed. Dropping her hoe, she ran the seven miles to her old place, found her mistress, “looked at her real hard,” and then shouted, “I’se free! Yes, I’se free! Ain’t got to work fo’ you no mo’. You can’t put me in yo’ pocket now!” Her mistress broke into tears