Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [152]
We have good white friends and we depend on them by the help of god to see us righted and we not want our rights by Murdering. We owe to[o] much to many of our white friends that has shown us Mercy in bygone dayes To harm thaim.… Some of us wish Mr. Jeff Davis to be Set at liberty for we [k]no[w] worse Masters than he was. Altho he tried hard to keep us all slaves we forgive him.
Elizabeth Keckley, who had worked as a maid for Davis, thought singling him out for punishment was simply irrelevant to the noble cause that had prompted her to leave his service. “The years have brought many changes,” she reflected; “and in view of these terrible changes even I, who was once a slave, who have been punished with the cruel lash, who have experienced the heart and soul tortures of a slave’s life, can say to Mr. Jefferson Davis, ‘Peace! you have suffered! Go in peace.’ ” Regardless of how blacks had viewed the war, most of them could concur with the idea of amnesty for Jefferson Davis, if only because they intended to remain in a society made up largely of people of his color and outlook.71
The ambivalence that had always characterized the relations between slaves and their white families, along with the pragmatic need to placate an angry and bitter white South, was bound to affect how freedmen perceived their beaten and discouraged former masters and mistresses. The way in which Samuel Boulware, a former South Carolina slave, recalled the day the Yankees pillaged his master’s plantation typified a widely felt reaction. “Us slaves was sorry dat day for marster and mistress. They was gittin’ old, and now they had lost all they had, and more than dat, they knowed their slaves was set free.” Even so, many white families were left to question the depth of such feelings, particularly after what some of them had endured at the hands of their blacks, and came away with altogether different impressions. While a South Carolina planter saw hatred of whites in the faces of the freedmen, a North Carolinian expressed the certainty that they “felt for their masters and secretly sympathized with their ruin,” and she appreciatively noted what local blacks had written on a huge banner they unfurled at a recent celebration: “Respect for Former Owners.”72
That “respect” might assume more tangible forms than commiserations and banners. Much as the wartime distress had sometimes brought masters and slaves closer together, the hard times that followed the war taxed the charitable instincts of both races. Although some freedmen returned to the old place seeking help to tide them over a difficult period, the need for assistance worked both ways. Numerous white families, reduced to economic privation by the war and the loss of their property, felt no compunctions (at least, none they admitted) about calling on their former bondsmen for help. Whether out of affection, pity, or that old sense of mutual obligations, ex-slaves invariably responded with generosity to the plight of their old masters and mistresses, at least to the extent they could afford to be generous. Had it not been for a former slave who shared his earnings with her, a North Carolina woman confessed, the family could hardly have survived the loss of their property. Two years after the war, her black benefactor died. “But even at the last,” the grateful woman recalled, “he had not forgotten us. He left $600 to me, and $400 to one of my family.”73
No doubt many