Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [39]
The awesome number of mass punishments meted out to suspected black rebels often reflected nothing more than sheer hysteria. Although some whites thought their worst fears were about to be realized, the fact remains that the slaves failed to execute a major wartime rebellion. That failure was something the postwar white South chose to recall, as did certain black leaders eager to calm post-emancipation fears of a wave of black terror. “We never inaugurated a servile insurrection,” Georgia freedmen would memorialize the legislature in 1866, exaggerating their race’s submission.
We stayed peaceably at our homes, and labored with our usual industry. While you were absent fighting in the field, though we knew our power at the same time, and would frequently speak of it. We knew then it was in our power to rise, fire your houses, burn your barns, railroads, and discommode you in a thousand ways, so much so, that we could have swept the country, like a fearful tornado. But we preferred then as we do now, to wait on God, and trust to the instincts of your humanity.110
With different degrees of emphasis, some observers ascribed the absence of any large-scale servile insurrection to “the habit of patience” that bondage had instilled in black people. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, for example, an abolitionist Union officer commanding a black regiment in the South, often asked himself why “this capacity of daring and endurance” he observed in his soldiers had not kept the South “in a perpetual flame of insurrection.” One answer, he reflected, must lie somewhere “in the peculiar temperament of the races, in their religious faith, and in the habit of patience that centuries had fortified.”111
But the discussions which Colonel Higginson had with his own men revealed that “the habit of patience” explained rather little. Around the campfires, at least, when any of the black soldiers broached the subject of insurrection, they spoke of a lack of information, money, arms, drill, organization, and mutual confidence—“the tradition” that nearly every revolt had been betrayed at the outset. “The shrewder men all said substantially the same thing,” Higginson observed. “What was the use of insurrection, where everything was against them?” To many blacks, in fact, talk of rebellion was simply “fool talk,” a suicidal form of resistance. By mid-1862, the Christian Recorder, a black newspaper in Philadelphia, had lost its patience with those northern whites who envisioned a slave uprising as the death gasp of the Confederacy. When the war first broke out, the editor noted, and the North had expected a quick triumph, the mere hint of a slave rebellion would have aroused nationwide indignation.
Now, that same people want the slaves to rise up and fight for their liberty. Rise against what?—powder, cannon, ball and grape-shot? Not a bit of it. They have got too much good sense. Since you have waited till every man, boy, woman and child in the so-called Southern Confederacy has been armed to the teeth, ’tis folly and mockery for you now to say to the poor, bleeding and downtrodden sons of Africa, “Arise and fight for your liberty!”
The point was well made. From the outset of the war, it had been apparent to many observers, white and black, that the Yankees were as likely to betray a rebellion as some slave informer. The President, anxious to hold the border states in line, had made it clear on numerous occasions that this war was not being waged to provoke servile insurrection. Had there been a slave rebellion, Colonel Higginson conceded, it would surely have divided northern sentiment, “and a large part of our army would have joined with the Southern army to hunt them down.” It was not, then, a black journalist explained, that the slaves were too ill informed to revolt. “They are too