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By Root 1045 0

and he was at a loss to know how to combat such behavior. “They have meekly accepted it,” he sighed. To a postwar English visitor, the derogatory terms used by blacks reflected the value they placed on color. “White was the tint of nobility; black the symbol of degradation. If one coloured man wanted to insult another, he called him a nigger. To call him ‘a charcoal nigger’ was the blackest insult of all, making him the furthest remove from the nobility of whiteness.” Based upon his experiences in postwar South Carolina, Sidney Andrews, a northern correspondent, offered a more positive view of black terminology. He discovered that the terms “cousin” and “brother” were commonly used and “seem to be expressive of equality.” Although “the older and more trusted blacks” on the plantation seldom referred to a field hand as “cousin,” the field hands themselves frequently addressed each other as “Bro’ Bob, Bro’ John, Co’n Sally, Co’ Pete, &c.” What Andrews described, however, was less a phenomenon of emancipation than the continuation of traditional practices.68

The term “nigger,” as used by blacks, had varying inflections, implications, and definitions, ranging from a description of slavish personalities to an expression of endearment. To a South Carolina freedman, the term had class connotations and suggested dependency on the white man. “Dey be niggers still, and dey will be for great many year, and dey no lib togeder widout de white man to look arter ’em. You take ten colored folks an tree of ’em may stop being nigger, but de rest allers be nigger and dere chil’n be nigger.” Whatever blacks meant by the term, they almost all detested its use by whites, but the very fact of emancipation appears to have increased its popularity in white circles. Early in 1865, Mary Chesnut claimed to have heard the word used for the first time “by people comme il faut. Now it is in everybody’s mouth, but I have never become accustomed to it.” No doubt the term became more popular as whites searched for ways to address those who had been slaves. Ethelred Philips, a Florida physician and farmer, stubbornly refused to call them “freedmen” or even “colored people,” a term which they preferred to “negroes.” “I never will call them ‘colored people,’ ” Philips vowed. “It sounds too much like a Yankee, besides, they are but negroes and never can be anything else.”69

Responding to a sympathetic Quaker missionary from Massachusetts who had rebuked her for referring to the freedmen as “niggers,” an elderly black woman in Savannah defended her use of the term as appropriate to the condition of her people. No matter what they might be called, she suggested, and regardless of what emancipation might bring, deeply entrenched views would not be easily given up. “We are niggers,” she insisted. “We always was niggers, and we always shall be; nigger here, and nigger there, nigger do this, and nigger do that. We’ve got no souls, we are animals. We are black and so is the evil one.” The missionary interrupted her at this point to explain that nothing in the Bible indicated that the devil might be black. “Well, white folks say so,” the freedwoman replied, “and we’se bound to believe ’em, cause we’se nothing but animals and niggers. Yes, we’se niggers! niggers! niggers!” Whether this Quaker missionary understood what the black woman was trying to tell her is not clear. Fortunately for the well-meaning emissary from New England, she could turn to some of the more attractive features of Savannah, like the “excellent music in a fine colored church,” to take her mind off this unpleasant encounter with “an old cotton-picking ‘auntie.’ ”70

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WHILE PROBING the limits of their freedom, black people quickly discovered that the line between impudence and the traditional subservience expected of them was perilously narrow, that matters of racial etiquette could seldom be compromised, and that whites were more sensitive than usual to any behavior which suggested social equality or manifested an unbecoming assertiveness, familiarity, or lack of respect. To have lost the