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from a distance. The next morning, lines formed outside the polling places as freedmen waited anxiously for the moment when they would cast their first vote. With rumors circulating that blacks expected to return from the polls with a mule and a deed to a forty-acre lot, a reporter in one town thought to ask a freedman waiting to vote whether he shared that expectation. “No Sah,” he replied scornfully. “I spect to get nuffin but what I works hard for, and when I’se sick I’ll get docked.” If the lines were long and the process time-consuming, many freedmen seemed in no hurry, as though they wished to prolong the experience, some of them loitering around the polls long after they had voted. Seldom did the freedmen standing in line speak to each other, a reporter noted, apparently deeming silence more appropriate to the solemnity and “sacred importance” of the occasion. Noticing one of his laborers in line, an employer in Montgomery, Alabama, discharged him on the spot; the freedman smiled, looked down, said nothing, and voted.107

Except for a few sporadic skirmishes, election day in most of the South passed quietly—and with it, some mistakenly thought, the old political and social order.

Notes

Chapter One: “The Faithful Slave”

1. Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York, 1964), 92.

2. Orland Kay Armstrong, Old Massa’s People: The Old Slaves Tell Their Story (Indianapolis, 1931), 200, 269.

3. Mary Boykin Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie (ed. Ben Ames Williams; Boston, 1949), 38. For white perceptions of slave reactions to the outbreak of the war, see also Duncan Clinch Heyward, Seed from Madagascar (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1937), 130, and William H. Russell, My Diary North and South (Boston, 1863), 84. For slave recollections of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, see Armstrong, Old Massa’s People, 278.

4. Armstrong, Old Massa’s People, 276–77; George P. Rawick (ed.), The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (19 vols.; Westport, Conn., 1972), IV: Texas Narr. (Part 2), 174, 227; VI: Ala. Narr., 56; XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 62, 249; XVIII: Unwritten History of Slavery (Fisk Univ.), 3, 198.

5. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, XIV: N.C. Narr. (Part 1), 192. For a nearly identical recollection, see IV: Texas Narr. (Part 1), 122.

6. Ibid., III: S.C. Narr. (Part 4), 171–72; IV: Texas Narr. (Part 2), 100; XII: Ga. Narr. (Part 2), 277–78; Whitelaw Reid, After the War: A Southern Tour, May 1, 1865, to May 1, 1866 (London, 1866), 52; Weymouth T. Jordan, Hugh Davis and His Alabama Plantation (University, Ala., 1948), 155–56; Laura S. Haviland, A Woman’s Life-Work: Labors and Experiences (Cincinnati, 1881), 264. Unable to provide properly for their own families, some planters bitterly protested the burdens of slave maintenance. See, e.g., Mary Ann Cobb to John B. Lamar, Nov. 11, 1861, in Kenneth Coleman (ed.), Athens, 1861–1865 (Athens, Ga., 1969), 28; Rev. John Jones to Mrs. Mary Jones, Dec. 7, 1863, in Robert M. Myers (ed.), The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven, 1972), 1121–22; and Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 172, 243–44.

7. Letter from a slave to his mistress, in Robert S. Starobin (ed.), Blacks in Bondage: Letters of American Slaves (New York, 1974), 80–81; Francis B. Simkins and James W. Patton, The Women of the Confederacy (Richmond, 1936), 170–72; T. Conn Bryan, Confederate Georgia (Athens, Ga., 1953), 132.

8. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV: Texas Narr. (Part 2), 131; XVIII: Unwritten History, 206; XII: Ga. Narr. (Part 2), 277.

9. Ibid., III: S.C. Narr. (Part 4), 48–50; VII: Okla. Narr., 46, 312. See also V: Texas Narr. (Part 3), 107, (Part 4), 97, 152; and Charles L. Perdue, Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips (eds.), Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves (Charlottesville, 1976), 335.

10. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IX: Ark. Narr. (Part 3), 169, 174; IV: Texas Narr. (Part 2), 29; XIII: Ga. Narr. (Part 3), 300; II: S.C. Narr. (Part 1), 46. See also VI: Ala. Narr., 97, 226, 404; XII: Ga. Narr. (Part 2), 8; Armstrong, Old Massa’s People, 316.

11. Rawick