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By Root 1110 0

through her rice plantations, Adele Allston learned that the blacks had divided among themselves the furniture and livestock. But even when slaves were afforded these rare opportunities, their behavior defied predictability; many of them refused to have anything to do with such “looting” and were reluctant to accept any of the master’s property. In some instances, the slaves took what the soldiers gave them, so as not to anger them, but subsequently returned the goods to their owners, whether out of loyalty or because they feared the repercussions once the Union Army moved on.39

When Yankee troops looted the Morgan home in Baton Rouge, a faithful servant stood all he could before he exclaimed, “Ain’t you ’shamed to destroy all dis here, that belongs to a poor widow lady who’s got two daughters to support?” No matter how each slave felt inwardly, the sight of Yankees pillaging the plantation and perhaps humiliating the white residents had to be a unique experience. The way the soldiers “jes’ natcherly tore up ol’ Marster’s place,” as though they had a “special vengeance” for their “white folks,” left many slaves quite incredulous. So did the treatment of the women.

Upstairs dey didn’t even have de manners to knock at Mist’ess’ door. Dey just walked right on in whar my sister, Lucy, wuz combin’ Mist’ess’ long pretty hair. They told Lucy she wuz free now and not to do no more work for Mist’ess. Den all of’em grabbed dey big old rough hands into Mist’ess’ hair, and dey made her walk down stairs and out in de yard, and all de time dey wuz a-pullin’ and jerkin’ at her long hair …

With equal “impertinence,” the soldiers might force the white women to prepare meals and serve both them and the slaves. That was a sight Mary Ella Grandberry, a former Alabama slave, would never forget. “De Yankees made ’em do for us lak we done for dem. Dey showed de white folks what it was to work for somebody else.”40

Upon observing “the gloomy ebony scowl” on the faces of the slaves, a Union officer thought it arose from “jealousy at the liberties, taken by us, with what they consider their own plantations and possessions.” He was no doubt correct in his assumption. The slaves might have marveled at the audacity of the Yankees, and some perhaps derived pleasure from the discomfiture of their owners, but the indiscriminate and wasteful destruction of the food supply and what many regarded as their home struck them as excessive and unnecessary. The Yankees called it “a holy war,” a former South Carolina slave observed, “but they and Wheeler’s men was a holy terror to dis part of de world, as naked and hungry as they left it.” It was the pillaging, a former Mississippi slave recalled, that turned him against the Yankees, and he shared, too, the resentment of numerous blacks that the soldiers destroyed what they had worked so hard to produce. “We helped raise that meat they stole. They left us to starve and fed their fat selves on what was our living.” No less disturbing had been those planters and Confederate soldiers who had ordered the destruction of crops rather than leave them to the Yankees. “It made my innards hurt,” Charlie Davenport recalled, “to see fire ‘tached to somethin’ dat had cost us Niggers so much labor an’ hones’ sweat.”41

What compounded the bitterness was that the Yankees pillaged both whites and blacks, the Big House and the slave cabins alike. “The negroes all share the same fate as ourselves,” Emma Holmes noted after the Yankees had passed through Camden, South Carolina, “everything ransacked and whatever was wanted stolen, though the Yankees told them they had come to free them and called them ‘sis,’ talking most familiarly.” That they should be robbed and defrauded by those who claimed to be their liberators, that their cabins should be searched and ransacked, their wives and daughters insulted and abused, came as a shocking revelation to many slaves, leaving them both angry and confused. “I always bin hear dat de Yankees was gwine help de nigger!” one of the Allston servants exclaimed to her mistress after the Yankees