• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1328 0

South Carolina, where the reluctance of freed slaves to yield their brief occupation of the plantations often reached the dimensions of outright rebellion. The death of Robert F. W. Allston had left his wife with the responsibility of managing the several plantations belonging to the family, located in a section of South Carolina where blacks outnumbered whites by six to one. When the Yankees came into this region, many of the planter families had fled. On the Allston plantations, the slaves plundered the houses, seized the barn keys, locked up the overseer at Nightingale Hall, and completely intimidated the overseer at Chicora Wood. With the end of the war, Adele Allston moved almost immediately to reclaim her property and reestablish her authority. The initial skirmishes were fought over the keys to the barns, which contained the crops that the blacks had already made. Union soldiers had turned the keys over to the slaves, encouraging them in some instances to distribute the contents among themselves. Both the freed slaves and the planters recognized that whoever controlled those keys exercised more than symbolic authority over the plantations themselves. “This would be a test case, as it were,” wrote Elizabeth Allston, who would accompany her mother on the trip. “If the keys were given up, it would mean that the former owners still had some rights.”

After taking the oath of allegiance to the United States and securing a written order which commanded the blacks to surrender the keys, Adele Allston and her daughter set out for the plantations. They were under no illusions as to what they might expect to find there. “If you come here,” a close friend had warned, “all your servants who have not families so large as to burthen them and compel a veneering of fidelity, will immediately leave you. The others will be more or less impertinent as the humor takes them and in short will do as they choose.” If she still insisted on returning, her friend offered some advice: “I warn you … not to stir up the evil passions of the blacks against you and your family if you wish to return here. The blacks are masters of the situation, this is a conquered country and for the moment law and order are in abeyance.” And one sure way “to stir up the evil passions,” she believed, was to attempt to dispossess the blacks of the property they had seized. “The negroes would force you to leave the place, perhaps do worse. I have not been in my negro street nor spoken to a field hand since 1st March. The only way is to give them rope enough, if too short it might hang us. No outrage has been committed against the whites except in the matter of property.” If her friend’s warnings were not sufficiently alarming, Adele Allston had only to read a recent letter from the overseer at Chicora Wood, in which he related how the blacks permitted him to say nothing to them about work. Despite these ominous reports, Adele Allston remained adamant in her determination to return and face her former slaves. It was bound to be a memorable experience.

Arriving first at the Nightingale Hall plantation (where the blacks had been “specially turbulent”), Adele and Elizabeth Allston encountered less trouble than they had anticipated. Stepping out of the carriage (but insisting that her daughter remain inside), Mrs. Allston stood in the midst of her former slaves, spoke to each of them by name, and inquired after their children. Gradually, the initial tension eased, the black foreman surrendered the keys, and the Allstons quickly moved on. “She did not think it wise to go to the barn to look at the crops,” Elizabeth wrote of her mother. “Having gained her point, she thought it best to leave.” At the Chicora Wood plantation, the keys were handed over with even less difficulty. The Allstons concluded that was because Daddy Primus, the head carpenter, who held the keys, “was a very superior, good old man.” Although the blacks here “seemed glad” to see them, the house which they had helped to plunder stood there for everyone to view, and many of the furnishings now adorned their