Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [279]
The degree to which emancipation altered the day-to-day behavior and temperament of the former slaveholder became a matter of immediate concern to black men and women. On numerous farms and plantations, they soon discovered that the potential of the white family for volatile behavior had in no way been abated and it seemed like the old times again. Katie Darling, a former Texas slave, remembered staying with her “white folks” for six years after the war “and missy whip me jist like she did ’fore.” If Anna Miller perceived any change in her master after emancipation, it was only his rapid mental deterioration. “De marster gets worser in de disposition and goes ’roun’ sort of talkin’ to hisse’f and den he gits to cussin’ ev’rybody.” Within a year after vowing that he would not live in a country “whar de niggers am free,” her master killed himself.85
The previous behavior of their masters, as many ex-slaves suddenly discovered, often proved an unreliable guide to how they would now conduct themselves and manage their freed blacks. Frank Fikes, for example, claimed to have suffered few hardships or beatings as a slave. “Old miss and mars was not mean to us at all until after surrender and we were freed. We did not have a hard time until after we were freed. They got mad at us because we was free …” Nor were some of the former masters oblivious to how emancipation could work curious changes in their attitudes and temperament. When he had held slaves, a South Carolina planter recalled, he had always thought of himself as a model master and only once had he resorted to whipping one of his blacks. But now, in his relations with these same people as freedmen and freedwomen, he found himself increasingly moody and temperamental. On one occasion, he misinterpreted what a former slave told him and had to be restrained by several friends who were present from shooting the man on the spot; instead, he calmed himself by administering 130 lashes to him, “hard as I could lay on.” But if the whipping relieved this planter of his anger, it also left him displeased with his loss of self-control. “I was wrong, I know, but I was in a passion. That’s the way we treat our servants, and shall treat them, until we can get used to the new order of things,—if we ever can.”86
Although Federal officials were inclined to overlook how an employer chose to discipline his laborers, the blacks themselves refused to be passive spectators. If a planter relied on the old discipline, confident that fear and punishment could still maintain a captive labor force, he might discover that his intended victims, often his former slaves, no longer felt compelled to submit. After what they had endured as slaves, they saw no reason to tolerate such treatment as freedmen. “Damn him,” a South Carolina black remarked after an altercation with his old master, “he never done nufin all his damned life but beat me and kick me and knock me down; an’ I hopes I git eben with him some day.” In Mississippi, an overseer who responded to a disobedient field hand by threatening him with an ax suddenly found himself facing the laborer’s daughter and several other blacks, all of them holding axes. “I had to run for my life,” the overseer testified. On the Brokenburn plantation in Louisiana, John B. Stone, the highly temperamental son of the mistress, shot a black youth after an argument in the fields. That so infuriated the other hands that they turned upon Stone and might have killed him had not some others intervened. Still, Kate Stone would never forget the sight of her brother being escorted to the house by “a howling, cursing