Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [142]
No I wont whip you. Never no more. Sit down thar all of you and listen to what I got to tell you. I hates to do it but I must. You all aint my niggers no more. You is free. Just as free as I am. Here I have raised you all to work for me, and now you are going to leave me. I am an old man, and I cant get along without you. I dont know what I am going to do.
In less than ten months, he was dead. “Well, sir,” Falls explained, “it killed him.”47
What the slaves recalled most vividly, “jes like it yestiddy,” was the manner in which the master recognized their freedom, both his words and temperament at that moment. The way he imparted the information revealed much about his state of mind, the kind of relationship he thought he enjoyed with his slaves, and how he viewed the future. He first read to them some official-looking paper setting forth the details of emancipation. It might have been the Emancipation Proclamation itself or a recent Federal circular; in any event, the language was cold, detached, bureaucratic, and often incomprehensible. After the formal reading, Silas Smith of South Carolina remembered, “us still sets, kaise no writing never aggrevated us niggers way back dar.” Since such a moment called for absolute clarity, most masters obliged with their own explanation, and those were the words the slaves had waited to hear. “We didn’t quite understand what it was all about,” a former Missouri field hand recalled, “until he informed us that it meant we were slaves no longer, that we were free to go as we liked, to work for anyone who would hire us and be responsible to no one but ourselves.” As if to underscore the significance of his remarks, and perhaps in some instances to commemorate the slave’s graduation to a different status, some masters ceremonially presented to each of them “de age statement,” which included his or her name, place of birth, and approximate age or date of birth. “I’s 16 year when surrender come,” Sam Jones Washington told an interviewer many years later. “I knows dat, ’cause of massa’s statement. All us niggers gits de statement when surrender come.”48
To free his blacks was not to surrender the convictions with which he had held them as slaves. In explaining to them the circumstances that now made freedom necessary, most masters made it abundantly clear that their actions did not flow from some long-repressed humanitarian urge. “We went to the war and fought,” a Texas planter declared, “but the Yankees done whup us, and they say the niggers is free.” That was the typical explanation, as most ex-slaves recalled it: they were now free “ ’cause de gov’ment say you is free” or “ ’cause the damned Yankees done ’creed you are.” If some slaves had felt that only “massa” could free them, many masters insisted that the Yankees had set them free. That they chose to view emancipation in these terms was perfectly consistent with their own self-image. “I have seen slavery in every Southern State,” a prominent Virginian concluded in June 1865, “and I am convinced that for the slave it is the best condition in every way that has been devised.” The “tens of thousands” of old men, women, and children he expected would now starve for lack of support only made him that much more certain. “A Farmer now has to pay his hands and he will keep none but such as will work well, women with families and old men are not worth their food and they are being turned adrift by the thousands.” As many masters viewed this moment, then, if they had acted from humanitarian considerations, they would have retained slavery, because of the protection and sustenance it afforded a people incapable of caring for themselves.49
If slaveholders felt morally reprehensible or guilt-ridden, they evinced no indication of it at the moment they declared their blacks to be free. Nothing in the postwar behavior and attitudes of these people suggested