• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1125 0

places of bondage. The white South viewed them as taking to the road without purpose or destination, except to leave those who had previously cared for them in favor of settling in the nearest town. For the whites, this aspect of the migration created the most consternation. To see their former slaves abandon them for no better assurances or offers anywhere else did little for the master’s view of himself and simply heightened the bitterness and reinforced the sense of personal “betrayal.” After seeing a number of blacks leave his plantation, a proprietor in Georgia rode up to them and demanded to know where they were going. “I don’t know where I will get to before I stop,” one of the freedmen replied, apparently in a tone of voice that suggested anything but deference to a superior. Recounting the incident, Gertrude Thomas explained that only a white Southerner could have possibly appreciated “the feelings” such a reply provoked in the offended white man. “Buddy fired his pistol twice,” she reported, “and created much alarm among them.”23

That so many ex-slaves left their “white folks” for a difficult and unknown alternative attests to their remarkable courage and determination and to the brittle quality of the “old ties.” Unaccustomed to such displays of black independence, the old slaveholding class moved quickly to save itself—to check the movements of the freedmen and to restore stability to the shattered labor system.

4

TO LOOK AT the congested railroad depots, the makeshift camps along the tracks, the hastily constructed freedmen villages, and the stragglers crowding the country roads, bundles under their arms or slung over their shoulders, many of them hungry, sick, and barely clad, the impression conveyed was that of an entire people on the move. Such scenes took on, in fact, all the dimensions of the more classic postwar movements of refugees. Traveling between Jackson and Vicksburg, a Union Army officer found the roads filled with “hungry, naked, foot-sore” freedmen and their families, “aliens in their native land, homeless, and friendless,” some of them becoming “vagabonds and thieves from both necessity and inclination.” Less sympathetic was the Freedmen’s Bureau officer who thought most of the ex-sJaves left their homes under the impression “that Freedom relieved them from Labor.”24

If native whites and Federal officials perceived thousands of freedmen on the road with no purpose but to experience the sensation of freedom, they tended to exaggerate the numbers of such migrants and failed to appreciate many of the more substantial reasons for moving. For many black men and women, the post-emancipation migration represented something more than mere caprice or wanderlust. To move was to improve their economic position, to locate family members, to return to the homes from which they had been removed during the war, and to relocate themselves in places where they could more readily secure their newly won rights. “I met men plodding along Virginia and North Carolina roads,” a northern reporter wrote, “who had come from distant parts of those States, or from distant States, seeking work or looking for relatives. One man I remember who had walked from Georgia in the hope of finding at Salisbury a wife from whom he had been separated years before by sale. In Louisiana, I met men and women who since the war had made long journeys in order to see their parents or children.… These were sights that seemed to fill every white Southerner with anger.”25

During the war, thousands of slaves had been removed from the threatened regions, like the South Carolina low country, to the more remote sections of the state, where they would be out of the path of the Union Army, insulated from dangerous influences, and still available for some kind of labor. With the confirmation of their freedom, many of these “refugeed” blacks wanted to return to their old homes and friends and to the type of labor with which they were familiar. Not only did they seek employment “in labor which they understood better,” one observer noted, but