Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [37]
If every mother’s son of a black had thrown ’way his hoe and took up a gun to fight for his own freedom along with the Yankees, the war’d been over before it began. But we didn’t do it. We couldn’t help stick to our masters. We couldn’t no more shoot ’em than we could fly. My father and me used to talk ’bout it. We decided we was too soft and freedom wasn’t goin’ to be much to our good even if we had a education.
Only in retrospect, too, did Robert Falls, who had endured a harsh bondage in North Carolina, regret the essentially submissive role he had played during his more than twenty years as a slave. “If I had my life to live over,” he reflected, “I would die fighting rather than be a slave again.… But in them days, us niggers didnt know no better. All we knowed was work, and hard work. We was learned to say, ‘Yes Sir!’ and scrape down and bow, and to do just exactly what we was told to do, make no difference if we wanted to or not.” His father, in whom he had considerable pride, had symbolized for Falls the virtues and perhaps the futility of the slave rebel’s usually lonely struggle. “Now my father, he was a fighter. He was mean as a bear. He was so bad to fight and so troublesome he was sold four times to my knowing and maybe a heap more times.”102
The extent of black insurrectionary activity during the Civil War remains a subtle question. What is nearly impossible to determine in each instance is whether the reported revolt or plot was actually consummated, whether it existed only in the fevered imaginations of war-weary whites, or, far more commonly, whether “insurrection” simply became a way to define “suspicious activity,” “insubordination,” and organized flight to the Yankees. None of the wartime slave plots and uprisings achieved any spectacular results. But the psychic impact was formidable, each report and rumor reminding the white South of the potential that resided in its black population. The specter of servile insurrection hovered over the debate on enlisting blacks into the Confederate Army and intruded itself on the confidence with which whites periodically congratulated themselves over the docility of their slaves. The many reports that quantities of arms, gunpowder, knives, and hatchets had been found secreted under the floors of slave cabins revived traditional fears, and some planters ordered that hoes, axes, and other implements that might serve as weapons be locked up at night. The sound of fire bells excited still more panic, with the increase in arson attempts ascribed to blacks, particularly after it became known that slave rebels in Mississippi had planned to inaugurate an insurrection by burning the city of Natchez.103
The initial fears stemmed from reports that slaves in certain regions were preparing to wage insurrectionary warfare the moment the white volunteers left for military service or as soon as Yankee troops came into the vicinity. Within months after the bombardment of Fort Sumter, rumors of a black uprising placed Charleston residents on alert, and insurrectionary plots were uncovered in Georgia, Virginia, Arkansas, Kentucky, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi.104 In May 1861, a citizens’ committee in Kingston, Georgia, ordered the hanging of a slave after hearing evidence that pointed to “one of the most diabolical schemes ever devised by any fiend to murder the citizens of this county, and take possession of their property.” That same month, Edmund Ruffin reported the discovery of a conspiracy in Virginia which had been organized at “night meetings for pretended religious worship.” But he claimed to be unshaken by the news.
A conspiracy discovered & repressed is better assurance of safety than if no conspiracy had been heard of or suspected. While I deem there is not the least ground for alarm & that this conspiracy, if undiscovered, would have had no dangerous results—still we ought