Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [319]
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ALTHOUGH DISCERNING FEW CHANGES in his laborers, Donald MacRae, a North Carolina merchant, conceded in September 1865 a widespread sense of uneasiness in the white population. He suspected that the source of the anxiety lay in the expectation of blacks that they would ultimately share in if not possess entirely the lands and goods of their former masters. That expectation had become so pervasive, MacRae believed, that the disappointment, when it came, could only produce the most dreaded of consequences—a black uprising. Fortunately, the local military commander had warned the freedmen not to entertain or act upon such foolish notions. “This may quiet it down,” MacRae thought. But if it did not, he anticipated an insurrection that would exceed the worst horrors of the Civil War, “for total annihilation would be the war cry on both sides.” Preparing for such an eventuality, Ethelred Philips, the Florida farmer and physician, decided to teach his wife, “timid as she has always been,” to use a revolver. “She took the first lesson a few days ago with a rifle and was delighted to find shooting so easy, and when she saw the ball had struck in a few inches of the mark she was quite encouraged, tho she had spoiled her sleeve by the powder.… She shall become a sure shot—how many hours of fright may be avoided when a woman feels she holds her safety in her own hand.”86
The approach of the Christmas holiday in 1865, coinciding as it did with payday, new contract talks, and new land expectations, produced the first major postwar insurrection panic. Now that the blacks were no longer bound by the old restraints, many whites feared they would vent their frustrations and disillusionment over the betrayal of expectations by plunging the South into a racial holocaust. “If they dont massacre the white Race, it is not because the desire dont exist,” a South Carolina Unionist observed as he appealed to President Johnson to provide whites with the means to protect themselves from the fury of a race that had become “worse than Devels.” Newspapers fed the prevailing anxiety by claiming exclusive knowledge of sinister plots. “We speak advisedly,” one of them warned, “we have authentic information of the speeches and conversations of the blacks, sufficient to convince us of their purpose. They make no secret of their movement. Tell us not that we are alarmists.” For many whites, however, the idea of black insurrection had become such a self-fulfilling prophecy that they needed no fire-eating editors to tell them what they had long suspected would flow naturally out of emancipation. “It will begin the work of extermination,” sighed a South Carolina planter, without indicating which race he expected to survive.87
With imaginations running rampant, whites found no difficulty in conjuring up horrors and demons befitting the expected bloodbath. The slightest change in a freedman’s demeanor, the most trivial incident, the most innocent display of independence could trigger new rumors and fears. The mistress of a plantation near Columbia, South Carolina, had only to listen to the freedmen singing in their quarters—“as only they could sing in these times”—to imagine “a horde pouring into our houses to cut our throats and dance like fiends over our remains.” The sight of his former slaves “talking together, sometimes in whispers and sometimes loudly,” ignoring his orders to retire to their cabins by the curfew hour, prompted a Georgian to suspect “conspiracies” and to fear “an outbreak every moment.” Near Fort Motte, South Carolina, a young planter who had served in the war heard that his blacks planned