Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [238]
The white residents of Richmond, another black protested, still clung to and acted by the old motto: “Hickory stick growing in the ground, if you aint got one cent keep the nigger down.” Despite personal appeals to President Johnson, including a delegation of Richmond blacks, little was done to resolve their grievances; by August 1865, local blacks met again, this time to protest a series of outrages, involving not only the white citizenry and police but Union soldiers—“those individuals whom we all regarded as our friends, and hailed as our deliverers.”53
If freedmen came to the cities because of the reassuring presence of Union troops and a Freedmen’s Bureau office, and some apparently did, they might be bitterly disappointed over the quality of their reception and treatment. Not only did Federal authorities afford them minimal protection or none at all but Union commanders were most likely to greet the new arrivals by advising them to return to work for their former masters, who knew them best and would thus be more sympathetic to their problems. The slaves who had fled during the war to places like New Orleans and Natchez had already seen such advice translated into orders and vigorously enforced. Consistent with wartime policies, Federal officials were as eager as the planters themselves to return the freed slaves to plantation labor and they willingly supplied the necessary force to implement such decisions. Scarcely a day passed without complaints by urban blacks of mistreatment, arbitrary arrests, the suspension of food rations, robbery, and outright brutality at the hands of occupation troops. “It appears that all the jail birds of New York, and the inmates of Moyamensing had been left in this State to guard the freedmen’s interest,” a black correspondent wrote from South Carolina in July 1866. “No Southern white man in Charleston, has heaped as much insult upon colored females passing the streets, as those foul-throated scamps who guard this city.”54
The vigor with which Union officers acted to restrain urban blacks won some grudging admiration from local whites. When the Union commander in Galveston ordered freedmen with neither a “home” nor a “master” to be put to work on the streets, a Houston newspaper was both relieved and grateful that the blacks had been brought “to common sense in a summary manner.” Nor were Galveston’s mayor and city council displeased when the Union commander suggested that they adopt an ordinance punishing “all hired servants” who left their employers before the expiration of their contracts. But for the recently freed slaves, the actions of the Union Army deepened their disillusionment and frustrations. “It is not the Southerners we dread but the Federal soldiers,” a group of blacks in Mobile, Alabama, declared as they petitioned the Freedmen’s Bureau for help. Not long after the war had ended, Henry McNeal Turner, while still a chaplain in a black regiment, insisted that white troops were unfit to garrison the South. Not one in twenty, he thought, would treat the freedmen with any justice or respect; many soldiers, in fact, cursed, threatened, and whipped blacks “to gratify some ‘secesh belle,’ or to keep the good will of some Southerner who can keep a sumptuous table. I have been told, over and over, by colored persons, that they were never treated more cruelly, than they were by some of the white Yankees.”55
Whether undertaken by Federal authorities or by native whites, the efforts to control urban blacks and to forestall the urbanization of blacks began to assume a familiar pattern throughout the South. In Mobile, the mayor instructed the police to arrest “vagrants” and warned freedmen either to find employment, leave the city, or be forced to work on