Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [218]
We the Coloured Men of Columbia, were Advised to whate [wait] and see what would be said or done a bout that act of Murder committed by Green. We have Seen and heard! We know it to be a mock trial and we will trie him next. He has committed Cold and Willful Murder and if not removed, we can and will have revenge.… By one thousand true and reddy We will have his Blood, Green the Murderer.
Two companies of Federal troops were brought into the city, the police chief secluded himself, and the black threats of violence failed to materialize. But “the worst feature in the case,” a black woman wrote the Freedmen’s Bureau, was that nothing had been done to satisfy the grievances of the black residents, thereby encouraging the whites to think themselves immune to prosecution or control.
We have very dark days here; the colored people are almost in despair.… The rebels here boast that the negroes shall not have as much liberty now, as they enjoyed during slavery. We can not have a party or gathering of any kind, unless we ask leave of the Mayor, & the men that the United States send here to keep things straight, wink at, & allow these things to go on thus.
God knows how we will do. We are not allowed to have arms; if a white man strikes us, & we attempt to defend ourselves, we are carried to Provost Court, & fined ten or twenty dollars. It is hard I tell you. Our friends in Congress are wasting time & breath, & all the bills they may pass, will do us no good, unless men are sent here, that will see those laws enforced.
Col. Greene [the Union commander] cares not a fig for a colored person. It is very seldom you can get a word with him. He spends all his time in the Billiard Saloon.…
I will tell you, if things go on thus, our doom is sealed. God knows it is worse than slavery. The negro code is in full force here with both Yankees and rebels.146
This graphic description of conditions in the capital of South Carolina in mid-1866 might have been duplicated in countless communities and regions. Neither her assessment nor her despair were unique. Although the talk of armed retaliation might evoke images of black “minutemen” and “regulators,” the freedmen possessed neither the weapons nor the power to offset the better organized whites. Nor could they successfully contend with the threat of Federal intervention to suppress them if they took the law into their own hands. Despite the rhetoric of violence, the great mass of blacks recognized where the power still resided.
If confronted with an intolerable situation on the plantation or in the neighborhood, alternatives other than armed resistance were presumably available to black people. Freedom permitted them to take their labor elsewhere. For many freed slaves, in fact, this right constituted the very essence of their new status, and they proposed to use such a weapon to carve out a greater degree of independence for themselves and their families. Not all freedmen exercised this prerogative in the same way, or at the same time, and some did not exercise it at all. Neither the former slave nor his former master, however, could easily predict the precise moment when confrontation and separation would become unavoidable.
Chapter Six
THE FEEL OF FREEDOM: MOVING ABOUT
So long ez de shadder ob de gret house falls acrost you, you ain’t gwine ter feel lak no free man, an’ you ain’t gwine ter feel lak no free ‘oman. You mus’ all move—you mus’ move clar away from de ole places what you knows, ter de new places what you don’t know, whey you kin raise up yore head douten no fear o’ Marse Dis ur Marse Tudder.
—RICHARD EDWARDS,
BLACK PREACHER, FLORIDA, 18651
Sun, you be here an’ I’ll be gone,
Sun, you be here an’ I’ll be gone,
Sun, you be here an’ I’ll be gone.
Bye, bye, don’t grieve arter me,
Won’t give you my place, not fo’ your’n,
Bye, bye, don