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was a uniform; as a soldier he could force his way into private homes, bullying and insulting white women; he was often commissioned to tasks involving these things. He came into life in the abnormal atmosphere of a time rife with discussions of social equality theories, contentions for coeducation and intermarriage.” Asked to comment on the rampant violence that prevailed in the postwar South, Governor Benjamin Humphreys of Mississippi thought the presence of black troops sufficient explanation. “Everyone is afraid of the negro soldiers—they crowd everybody off the sidewalks, and shoot and kill us, and protect the freedmen in their indolence and acts of crime.” Despairing over the breakdown of the plantation labor system, Edmund Rhett of South Carolina placed the blame directly on the influence of the black troops. “If your desire is to restore quiet, and orderly labor to the land,” he advised the Freedmen’s Bureau commissioner in Charleston, “nothing in my judgment is more pernicious in its effect than the example, and presence of colored troops, amongst a class of colored agricultural laborers.”99

If Avary, Humphreys, and Rhett were oblivious to the tradition of the white rapist and vigilante in the South and the deeper roots of violence, sexual exploitation, and labor troubles, they nevertheless voiced the prevailing outrage and despair over the continued presence of more than 80,000 black occupation troops. Nothing seemed more contrived to humiliate white manhood, insult white womanhood, and demoralize the ex-slave than the “vindictive and revengeful” act of Federal authorities in stationing black troops in their midst. Nothing could evoke more terror in a southern community than the rumor that black troops might be sent there. “Think of a lot of negroes being brought here to play master over us!” young Eliza Andrews exclaimed, and few whites needed to be reminded of the terrible implications of what she had said. Nor were they oblivious to the fact that many of the soldiers were northern blacks who had been raised outside the plantation tradition and discipline. “Few of them perhaps have had opportunities of spiritual instruction,” Henry Ravenel observed, “or of forming attachments to their masters, or of being benefitted by that domestic relation which the presence of the master on the plantation always creates.”100

Regardless of how they conducted themselves, black soldiers by their very presence violated tradition and provoked a vehement response in a people who had always viewed armed blacks as insurrectionists. After all, a New Orleans newspaper explained, white men and women in the South had customarily encountered blacks “only as respectful servants,” and now they were understandably “mortified, pained, and shocked” to find some of those same blacks in the towns and villages and on the public roads “wearing Federal uniforms, and bearing bright muskets and gleaming bayonets. They often recognized among them those who had once been their own servants.” Few Confederate Army veterans were able to maintain their composure when they returned to their homes to find armed, uniformed black men patrolling the streets, jostling their women from the sidewalks, and claiming authority over their families. “Boy, le’ me see your gun,” a recently paroled Confederate soldier declared with disdain as he moved to examine the rifle of a black soldier. Not knowing what the white man’s intentions might be, the soldier stepped back and readied his gun for possible use. Hastily departing, the ex-Confederate murmured, “How the war has demoralized the cussed brutes!”101

The catalogue of “atrocities” and “daily outrages” for which black soldiers were held responsible seemed limitless, with nearly every white man and woman prepared to relate some still more horrible tale. While sometimes exaggerated or invented, the stories usually contained an element of truth; their authenticity, however, was less important than how whites chose to define an “outrage.” The black soldier mixed indiscriminately with whites, occasionally at “miscegenation