Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [207]
The question of how a highly volatile white population might respond to emancipation had been an immediate concern of nearly every freedman and freedwoman. During slavery, they had been exposed to violence on the plantations and farms where they worked and from the dreaded patrollers if they ventured off those plantations. But the financial investment each of them represented had operated to some degree as a protective shield. Before the war, a Tennessee farmer explained, the slave “was so much property. It was as if you should kill or maim my horse. But now the nigger has no protection.” With black men and women no longer commanding a market price, the value placed on black life declined precipitately, and the slaves freed by the war found themselves living among a people who had suffered the worst possible ignominy—military defeat and “alien” occupation. Many whites, moreover, thought the abolition of slavery had doomed the African race in the South to extinction, and all too many of them seemed eager to expedite that prophecy. “If I could get up tomorrow morning and hear that every nigger in the country was dead, I’d just jump up and down,” the wife of a South Carolina planter exclaimed after hearing that Yankee soldiers had recently shot several blacks who were “getting very impudent.”117
The apparent indifference with which some whites regarded the fate of the ex-slave dismayed many visitors to the postwar South. “He is actually to many of them nothing but a troublesome animal,” Sidney Andrews wrote from South Carolina; “not a human being, with hopes and longings and feelings … ‘I would shoot one just as soon as I would a dog,’ said a man to me yesterday on the cars. And I saw one shot at in Columbia as if he had been only a dog,—shot at from the door of a store, and at midday!” Nor did visitors find this behavior confined, as they had expected, to the lower classes of whites; in many instances, it reached into the highest circles of southern society. In Alabama, for example, a planter found himself embroiled in a controversy with one of his former slaves over ownership of a horse left behind by the Yankees; the evidence clearly favored the freedman’s claim, the local Freedmen’s Bureau agent agreed and awarded him the horse, but the former master thought otherwise and for him the issue obviously went beyond rightful ownership of the animal. “A nigger has no use for a horse like that,” he explained. “I just put my Spencer to Sip’s head, and told him if he pestered me any more about that horse, I’d kill him. He knew I was a man of my word, and he never pestered me any more.” The planter enjoyed a reputation in the community as a just, upright, and honorable man, and that fact disturbed the visitor more than anything else. “No doubt if I had had dealings with him I should have found him so. He meant to give the freedmen their rights, but he was only beginning dimly to perceive that they had any rights; and when it came to treating a black man with absolute justice, he did not know the meaning of the word.” If a “just and upright” man could have so little regard for the rights of the freedmen, their fate in the hands of less paternalistic whites suggested a difficult and violent period ahead.118
How many black men and women were beaten, flogged, mutilated, and murdered in