Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [6]
Neither white nor black Southerners were unaffected by the physical and emotional demands of the war. Scarcities of food and clothing, for example, imposed hardships on both races. But the slaves and their masters did not share these privations equally; black families could ill afford any reduction in their daily allowances, and they observed with growing bitterness that provisions needed to sustain them were often dispatched to the Army or hoarded for the comfort of their “white folks.” Reduced diets opened the way for all kinds of ailments in weak and undernourished bodies, and yet there was no corresponding reduction in the hours of labor demanded of the slaves or in the diligence with which they were expected to carry out their assigned tasks. Later in the war, depredations committed by both Confederate and Union soldiers nearly exhausted the food supplies in some regions, and many a slave repeated the complaint made by Pauline Grice of Georgia: “De year ’fore surrender, us am short of rations and sometime us hongry.… Dey [the soldiers] done took all de rations and us couldn’t eat de cotton.” Even earlier, the shortage of food had driven slaves to the point of desperation; incidents of theft mounted steadily, some slaves went out on foraging missions (with the tacit consent of their owners), while still others preferred to risk flight to the Yankees rather than experience constant hunger. When asked if the Emancipation Proclamation had prompted his flight to the nearest Union camp, one slave responded, “No, missus, we never hear nothing like it. We’s starvin’, and we come to get somfin’ to eat. Dat’s what we come for.”6
Despite the wartime shortages, slaves were reluctant to surrender the traditional privileges they had wrested from their owners. Any master, for example, who decided to dispense with the usual Saturday-night dances, the annual barbecue, the “big supper” expected after a slave wedding, or the Christmas holiday festivities might find himself unable to command the respect and labor of his slaves. Nor did servants who enjoyed dressing up in their master’s or mistress’s cast-off finery to attend church believe that the Confederacy’s strictures on extravagance and ostentatious display applied to them. But no matter how disagreeable patriotic whites now found these displays, many slaveholders thought it best to tolerate them as a way of maintaining and rewarding loyalty in their blacks. When slaves dressed up in fine clothes, one white woman observed, they became “merry, noisy, loquacious creatures, wholly unconscious of care or anxiety.” Such diversions presumably took their minds off the larger implications of the war and rendered them more content with their position—at least, many whites preferred to think so.7
The extent of the slaves’ exposure to the war varied considerably, with those residing in the threatened and occupied regions obviously bearing the brunt of the disruptions along with the white families they served. In some sections of the South, however, life went on as usual, there were ample provisions, the white men remained at home, the slaves performed their daily routines, and the fighting remained distant. “The War didn’t change nothin’,” Felix Haywood of Texas recalled. “Sometimes you didn’t knowed it was goin’ on. It was the endin’ of it that made the difference.” By sharp contrast, a former Mississippi slave remembered feeling as though “the world was come to the end,” and Emma Hurley, who had been a slave in Georgia, recalled the war years as “the hardest an’ the saddest days” she had ever experienced. “Everybody went ’round like this [she took up her apron and buried her face in it]—they kivered their face with what-somever they had in their hands that would ketch the tears. Sorrow an’ sadness wuz on every side.”8
Even if the issues at stake were sometimes unclear, slaves could only marvel at a war that sent white men off to kill other white men, made a battleground of the