High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [62]
O FREEDOM!
Jubilee Jubilations
On Friday, April 12, 1861, the world changed for all residents of the United States, enslaved and free. Before sunrise, shots were fired on Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, from the Secessionist batteries. The Civil War had begun. During the four years of battle, brother fought brother, families were disrupted, and more men died than in any war before or since. The War freed the enslaved, but it also rent the country asunder and divided North and South in ways still felt more than a century later. It was a time of trial on all fronts. Despite the fact that many of the country’s aristocrats and most influential men were Southerners, the agricultural South was ill-prepared for the War. As it dragged on for years, they felt the privations more acutely than did those in the more industrialized North. The War Between the States, as the conflict is still known in the South, was the United States’ coming of age, and it was a bloody brutal transition.
Initially the enslaved were kept in ignorance of the politics of their day and duped by masters into believing that the Yankees were demons who would maim or otherwise harm them. However, as the war progressed, the truth of the situation was gradually accepted. It was a complex time of confusion, during which the enslaved in the South suffered along with their masters. Fear and uncertainty were daily fare, along with reduced rations. Indeed, most of the enslaved were unclear what the War was and how it would directly change their lives. Only as it progressed did the flickering hope dawn that the War might end their enslavement. Testimonies of the time from the former enslaved were rife with memories of the first glimpse of Yankee soldiers. Those who had been children remembered receiving candy or kind treatment from blue-coated soldiers marching through the South. The Union soldiers eventually arrived in Southern towns and hamlets, where the enslaved still went about their daily tasks. There were crops to plant and maintain and harvest, and as the fighting dragged on, the annual drudgery of the seasons repeated itself relentlessly, with mistresses taking over for the menfolk away at battle. The slave communication network that had so baffled and terrified owners throughout the period of enslavement, though, was at work. And then one day it came.
It began as a whisper that old Abe Lincoln, up in that place in the North known as Washington, where the white men sat in government, had made the decision to free the slaves. At first it seemed like just another of the rumors that made their way across the Southern states, giving hope to the overburdened and bringing the glimmer of possibility to those for whom each day was a fight against what others had imposed on them and called their destinies. It started on September 22,1862, as a trickle, a corner of hope. Word slowly spread. Discussions were overheard by house servants in Virginia plying heavy silver ladles and proffering elegant fare on bone china platters, and this was passed along to unheated cabins where moss and rags plugged up the holes to keep out the winds of the upcoming winter. In North Carolina, it was silently signaled as folks picked bugs off tobacco leaves. In Georgia, it was whispered over bowed backs in cotton fields. In Louisiana, it was shared in the steaming heat of the boiling houses over vats of bubbling cane juice. President Lincoln had issued a proclamation that gave the seceding states one hundred days to abandon their pro-slavery positions. Could it be?
Then, on January 1,