Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [25]
Neither extraordinary legislative measures nor increased vigilance proved adequate to the impossible task of wartime slave control, and even the swift and summary punishment of recalcitrant workers hardly allayed growing apprehension over the behavior of the blacks. In some instances, the subjugation achieved by the use of the whip must have seemed less than satisfying to those inflicting the beating. In Nansemond County, Virginia, a slave known as Uncle Toliver had been indiscreet enough to pray aloud for the Yankees. The master’s two sons ordered him to kneel in the barnyard and pray for the Confederacy. But this stubborn old man prayed even louder for a Yankee triumph. With growing exasperation, perhaps even bewilderment, the two sons took turns in whipping him until finally the slave, still murmuring something about the Yankees, collapsed and died. The “triumph” achieved by these two young white men sounded more like the death knell of the system they sought so desperately to maintain.64
Deprived of what they deemed essential protection, often frustrated in their attempts to anticipate black behavior, many anguished whites forgot all that talk about contented and loyal slaves and described a situation fraught with the most terrifying implications. Having heard that the home guard might soon be recalled to combat the Yankee invaders, the mistress of a plantation in the Abbeville district of South Carolina wondered how the remaining whites could possibly survive the internal enemy. “If the men are going, then awful things are coming, and I don’t want to stay. My God, the women and children, it will be murder and ruin. There are many among the black people and they only want a chance.”65 If any additional evidence were needed, the obsession with internal security and, perhaps most ominous, the deployment in some regions of Confederate troops to resist both Yankee invaders and rebellious blacks suggested a white South desperately clinging to the fiction of the docile slave without in any way believing it.
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REFUSING TO RESIGN THEMSELVES to the grim prospects of occupation and emancipation, numerous white families chose to remove their slaves to safer grounds. That was an abrupt change in his life that Allen V. Manning would never forget. Leaving the old plantation in Clarke County, Mississippi, Manning and his fellow slaves found themselves heading westward into a country they knew but little about. Several times the caravan halted in some place, while the master hired them out to planters trying to make a crop. Every time the Yankees came closer, he would move them out again until finally they crossed the Sabine River into Texas. That was where Manning’s sister gave birth, and the master promptly named the new girl Texana. When they reached Coryell County, the master decided to settle and plant a crop, satisfied that the Yankees no longer posed an immediate threat to his slave property. And it was here, more than 600 miles from the plantation where he had spent most of his bondage, that Allen Manning would learn one day of his freedom. He never returned to Mississippi.66
The decision made by Allen Manning’s master to run his slaves into Texas reflected the desperation with which numbers of planters sought to avoid the panic that often preceded the arrival of the Yankees and to find a place where they might keep their slave force intact and postpone for as long as possible the need to emancipate them. From the very outset of the war, some planter families anticipated the need for such a refuge and rented or purchased places to which they could move themselves and their slave property at the appropriate time. The first slaves to be relocated were often the most troublesome, those who were