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By Root 498 0

1863, the day of the Jubilee finally arrived. President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. As magnificent as the tidings were, news of the Proclamation didn’t travel with the speed of today’s modern information. Instead it made its way slowly across the American South. Many plantation owners felt it best to withhold the information until the crops had been gathered. Some of the former enslaved, however, took it upon themselves to hasten the spread of the news and formed what was called Lincoln’s Legal Loyal League, or the 4-Ls; their mission was to bring the news of Freedom. And, like a rising tide that enveloped the land with the sureness of inevitability, the word passed through the tobacco fields of Virginia, through the rice-growing marshlands of the Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry, through the cotton fields of Mississippi and Georgia, and out to the indigo plantations of the Sea Islands. It sped along the cane breaks on Louisiana’s sugar plantations, where some of the slave owners were black themselves, and eventually arrived in the Texas outlands. Finally, all those who had worked in slavery’s fields could lay their burdens down.

Jubilee brought freedom and momentary rejoicing to the formerly enslaved, but while the War raged on, it offered little plan or solution for the newly freed. Illiterate for the most part and raised in a culture of dependency, they had no resources on which to depend. Many, known as contrabands, sought out the Yankee army and followed the soldiers, relying on them for food, clothing, and shelter. Others set out on their own, looking for a new way of life. Still others elected to remain with their masters and the security of the only world that they’d ever known.

Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s enslaved cook, William Mack Lee, followed him for the entire four years of the War, cooking and working as his butler. William Mack Lee recalled that the only time he’d been chastised by his master during the entire course of the war was when he’d killed a laying hen to provide a meal for a “crowd of generals” that his master had invited to dine before the Battle of the Wilderness. He dispatched General Lee’s black hen, “picked her good, and stuffed her with bread stuffing, mixed with butter”—feeding the generals what he deemed an appropriate meal for men of their rank. Like William Mack Lee, those who remained used the resourcefulness acquired during enslavement to help their former masters and mistresses survive the War and its aftermath.

In this manner, the Southern culinary symbiosis between black and white continued throughout the War until its end. Then, in an ironic coda, there was one final act of generosity. After Appomattox, the last rations distributed to the Louisiana regiment as they marched in defeat to Burkeville Station to take the train for the last journey home were several hundred ears of corn that they received from a freed black, who offered it saying, “They’s the last I’ll ever see.” Each man was given two ears and a cup of sorghum: a grace note to the interwoven reliance of whites and blacks for sustenance during the entire period of enslavement.

General Lee’s signing of the surrender at Appomattox did not signal the end of privations for the Souths former enslaved. Rather, it heralded the beginning of new difficulties and challenges. With no master responsible for their care, the newly freed, who had deliberately been kept ignorant and illiterate, now found themselves without jobs, housing, and food. The shock of liberation combined with the lack of preparation for the momentous event killed many of the former enslaved. Others starved, and still others persevered, using the ingenuity and survival skills that they had learned in their long years of enslavement. Thomas Ruffin, a former North Carolina slave who was interviewed by the Works Progress Administration, remembered “We used to dig up dirt in the smoke house and boil it dry and sift it to get the salt to season our food with. We used to go out and get old bones that had been throwed away and crack them