Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [15]
Clearly, the threat of invasion and the depredations of “alien” troops were capable of unifying diverse and conflicting groups in the South. Those free blacks who had managed to accumulate property were no doubt intent on protecting their investments, along with whatever privileges they enjoyed in a slave society. If some slaves and free Negroes later compared support of the Confederacy to the black driver forced to use the lash on his fellow slaves, still others made no apologies. When offering his support, Bowman Seals, a free black from Clayton, Alabama, claimed to understand fully “the quarrel” between the North and the South and how it affected his people. “I make no claim to be adversed to their best interests; but I know enough of Yankees and of their treatment of the starving blacks among them to understand that their war upon the South is prompted by no love of us, but only by envy and hatred, and by an intermeddling and domineering spirit.” If the North should succeed, Seals warned, “disorder and ruin” and “extremist want and misery” would be visited upon all classes and both races.33
Had it not been for the exemplary conduct of “the faithful slave,” some white Southerners doubted that the war could have lasted for more than ten months. Hence the paeans of praise that would be heaped upon those black men and women who had stood with their masters and mistresses, the oratorical tributes to their loyalty, the monuments erected to their memory, and the romantic images and legends that would be elaborated upon to comfort and entertain generations of whites. The proven fidelity of such individuals even permitted slaveholders to indulge themselves with the notion of slaves as part of the extended family. “We never thought of them as slaves,” a Florida woman recalled, “they were ‘ours,’ ‘our own dear black folks.’ ” Underscoring this same theme, a Richmond woman remembered her slaves as “the repositories of our family secrets. They were our confidants in all our trials. They joyed with us and they sorrowed with us; they wept when we wept, and they laughed when we laughed. Often our best friends, they were rarely our worst enemies.” Even where the wartime evidence was at best inconclusive, many whites chose to dwell upon the supportive side of black behavior. When “massa” came home on leave, a Mississippi woman wrote, “no one showed himself [sic] more happy to see him than ‘Mammy’ as she fell upon the floor at his feet hugging and kissing him. ‘My Massa come.’ ‘My Massa come.’ I would be so glad if some of our northern friends could have seen her.”34
If only masters and mistresses had been less insistent about their sense of security and equanimity, they might have been more believable. No matter how many times he heard slaveholders profess confidence in their blacks, William Russell, an English visitor, remained skeptical. After his extensive travels and conversations in the South during the early months of the war, he came away feeling that the very demeanor of the slaves suggested less than contentment with their lot. If these were the happiest creatures on earth, as he had been assured, how was he to explain the “deep dejection” he observed on so many of their faces. On a “model” Louisiana plantation he visited, where “there were abundant evidences that they were well treated,” the slaves “all looked sad, and even the old woman who boasted that she had held her old owner in her arms when he was an infant, did not smile cheerfully.” If these were such docile and passive