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By Root 1070 0

“but I knowed better; we all knowed better dan dat. We’s been prayin’ too long to de Lord to have him forgit us; and now you’se come, and we all free.” At the sight of Sherman’s army, one slave recalled, the whites fled to the woods and most of the slaves ran to their cabins, “but I’se on top o’ a pine stub, ten feet high, an’ I’se jes’ shoutin’ ‘Glory to God! take me wid ye! Glory to God! Glory Glory!’ ” Eliza Sparks, who had been a slave in Mathews County, Virginia, recalled most vividly the Union officer who wanted to know the name of the baby she was nursing. “Charlie, like his father,” she told him. “Charlie what?” the officer asked. “I tole him Charlie Sparks.” After presenting the baby with a copper coin, the officer rode off, but not before bidding the slave a farewell she would long remember. “Goodbye, Mrs. Sparks,” he yelled. That was what impressed her. “Now what you think of dat? Dey all call me ‘Mrs. Sparks’!”36

When the Yankees entered Charleston, a sixty-nine-year-old slave woman greeted them with a simple, repetitive chant:

Ye’s long been a-comin’,

Ye’s long been a-comin’,

Ye’s long been a-comin’,

For to take de land.

And now ye’s a-comin’,

And now ye’s a comin’,

And now ye’s a-comin’,

For to rule de land.

That the coming of the Yankees should have been suffused with religious significance for many slaves is hardly surprising. “Us looked for the Yankees on dat place,” a former South Carolina slave recalled, “like us look now for de Savior and de host of angels at de second comin’.” To the elderly, those who had endured nearly a lifetime of bondage, what they were now witnessing appeared to be nothing less than acts of divine intervention, with the Yankees cast as “Jesus’s Aids,” General Sherman as Moses, and Lincoln as “de Messiah.” That was the only way some slaves could explain what was happening to them, the only way they could render comprehensible these remarkable and dramatic events. Seldom had their prayers been answered so concretely. “I’d always thought about this, and wanted this day to come, and prayed for it and knew God meant it should be here sometime,” a Savannah slave declared as she shook her head in disbelief, “but I didn’t believe I should ever see it, and it is so great and good a thing, I cannot believe it has come now; and I don’t believe I ever shall realize it, but I know it has though, and I bless the Lord for it.”37

But the arrival of the Yankees on many plantations and farms came to be viewed, by slaves and their owners alike, as the visitation of God’s wrath. The soldiers would assemble the white family and the slaves, demand to know where the valuables were hidden, threaten them if they refused to divulge the information, and then commence to ransack the entire plantation, venting their anger on whatever or whoever got in the way. “De worst time we ever had,” recalled Fannie Griffin, who had been a slave in South Carolina. “De Yankees ’stroyed ’most everything we had.” On the plantation in Alabama where Walter Calloway worked as a plow hand, Confederate soldiers had already taken off the best livestock, making it “purty hard on bofe whites an’ blacks,” but the Yankees proved to be even more thorough, “smashin’ things comin’ an’ gwine.”38

What the Yankees did not take they might distribute among the slaves, even urging them to join in the pillaging. With their restricted diet having been further reduced by wartime scarcities, some slaves found it impossible to resist the invitation to partake of the food supply created by their own labor or the Big House furnishings accumulated through generations of their unpaid labor. When the soldiers broke open the storeroom on the Pooshee plantation in South Carolina, the slaves seized nearly everything in sight, much to the shock of the owner, who had to witness the scene. Afterwards, his granddaughter informed a friend of what had happened: “It must have been too mortifying to poor Grand Pa for his negroes to behave as they did, taking the bread out of our mouths. I thought better of them than that.” After the Yankees passed