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By Root 1367 0

some of the freedmen were “in high dudgeon” over this action, claiming they now had “equal rights with a white man to bear arms.” The reports of armed blacks were not necessarily exaggerated. With emancipation, large numbers of freedmen had acquired the weapons denied to them as slaves. “These guns they prize as their most valued possessions next to their land,” a Bureau agent reported from the Sea Islands, “and to take them away would leave a lasting and bitter resentment, and sense of injustice.”91 But that was precisely what the whites intended to do, refusing to believe that when laborers carried weapons into the fields with them they wished only to shoot at stray rabbits and squirrels. Heeding the popular outcry, state governors ordered the militias to patrol the countryside and disarm blacks, legislatures rewrote and strengthened patrol laws, towns authorized the employment of additional police, and planters urged the white citizenry to fill the ranks of the militia. Although some Union Army officers and Bureau agents tried to calm the populace, perhaps as many shared the prevailing fears and cooperated with civil authorities and volunteer patrols to search the homes of blacks for guns. The occasional discovery of a cache of arms confirmed the worst fears and intensified the campaign to disarm the black population. In the Wilmington district of North Carolina, the Union commander went so far as to urge white citizens to form voluntary military companies as a precaution against the feared black uprising, and he promised them arms and ammunition as well as “the entire power at his command.”92

Although whites verged on panic, some moving their families to safer areas, many others volunteering for local patrols, none looked upon the rumors of impending insurrection with greater apprehension than the freedmen themselves. Previous experience had revealed all too vividly that whites had a way of exorcising imagined black demons by exterminating those within reach who most closely resembled them. And the purgation—with the inevitable floggings, beatings, and assassinations—would most likely exceed in brutality the terrors which whites had concocted in anticipation of a black uprising. Unaware of conspiracies in their midst, realizing the false basis of white fears, drawing upon their own intimate knowledge of the white man, some blacks concluded—logically enough—that the fear of insurrection served only the purposes of their former masters, providing them with the opportunity to invade their homes, to seize their weapons, to make examples of their leaders, and to otherwise terrorize and harass them until they revised their notions about the perquisites of freedom.93 When the white citizens of two Louisiana parishes appealed to the governor for arms, ammunition, and the authority to organize for “self preservation,” they cited the urgent need “to overawe the colored population, and thereby avoid the effusion of blood and all the horrors of a cruel insurrection.” To force blacks to stand in awe of the white man had of course been a vital ingredient of racial control under slavery. With that memory of bondage still vivid in their minds, blacks in some areas began to drill and accumulate arms in preparation for any eventuality. “We’ns smart nuff t’ hold ’r own,” a South Carolina freedman remarked, and the reporter who heard him thought the optimism justified. “Moreover,” the reporter observed, “the whites of all these low-country districts know that fact, too.”94

On the night of December 27, 1865, the widowed mistress of a plantation in the interior of Georgia sat up until after midnight, “fearing that something sad must occur with so many freedmen about me.” But the night passed “and with it all my fears.” Throughout the South, Christmas passed without the slightest hint of a contemplated black uprising. Only a few sporadic incidents, almost all of them provoked by overzealous whites, disturbed an otherwise quiet and orderly holiday season. Federal authorities who took the time to investigate the many rumors of black military