Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [338]
Even with emancipation, he realized, this vast potential would be difficult to tap. No matter how often he celebrated the achievements of individual blacks, he remained deeply troubled in 1865 by the condition of the great mass of recently freed slaves, especially those outside of the urban centers who had spent a lifetime laboring in the fields, sustained only by the will to survive. Almost everywhere he traveled in the postwar South, Turner found freedmen still embracing and cherishing the old slave habits, exhibiting little of the racial pride he felt so intensely; some of them were too “timid,” “doubtful,” and “fearful” to exercise their freedom, preferring instead to defer to their old masters or to transfer their feelings of dependency to their new Yankee masters.
That old servile fear still twirls itself around the heart strings, and fills with terror the entire soul at a white man’s frown. Just let him say stop, and every fibre is palsied, and this will be the case till they all die. True, some possessing a higher degree of bravery may be killed or most horribly mutilated for their intrepidity, but should this be the case, the white man’s foot-kissing party will be to blame for it. As long as negroes will be negroes (as we are called) we may be negroes.
That so many of his brethren should behave in this way came as no surprise to him. “Oh, how the foul curse of slavery has blighted the natural greatness of my race!” he wrote in early 1865, while his regiment was camped in North Carolina. “It has not only depressed and horror-streaked the should-be glowing countenance of thousands, but it has almost transformed many into inhuman appearance.”
By the close of the war, the rapidly proliferating northern benevolent societies were actively engaged in tending to the religious, educational, and relief needs of the freedmen. Turner knew of their activities, and he welcomed the diligence, commitment, and resources they brought to the freedman’s cause. But he perceived, too, that hundreds of thousands of newly freed slaves remained beyond the reach of these societies. Enjoying only a superficial freedom, they survived as best they could without money, land, or homes; they had never seen the inside of a schoolhouse, they either embraced primitive notions of Christian worship or attended a white man’s church (where they heard their bondage sanctified), and they had little or no appreciation of the responsibilities and liabilities they had incurred with emancipation. “They want to know what to do with freedom,” Turner observed. “It is not natural that a people who have been held as chattels for two hundred years, should thoroughly comprehend the limits of freedom’s empire: the scope is too large for minds so untutored to enter upon at once.” If Turner understood better than most the magnitude of the problem, that necessarily tempered his optimism and prepared him for a long and demanding ordeal. “I do not expect a high state of things, in this day at most; it will be impossible for the present generation to become wonders of the world. Nothing more than a partial state of civilization and moral attainment can be hoped for by the most sanguine.”
That was more than sufficient inducement, however, for Turner to enlist his efforts in the critical work of redeeming the nearly four million slaves from the moral and spiritual degradation which their condition had forced upon them. Upon resigning his chaplaincy in 1865, he chose to remain in the South to organize freedmen into the African Methodist Episcopal Church and subsequently into