According to Hettie McClain’s narrative, Lee’s surrender did not end slavery in Kentucky. Although 72,000 African Americans who served in the Union Army were freed, half the slaves in Kentucky belonged to Confederate sympathizers and were not given their freedom immediately at the end of the Civil War. When the Thirteenth Amendment was presented to the states for ratification, only a fraction of Kentuckians favored unconditional ratification. Some favored rejecting the amendment completely, and some, including the governor of Kentucky, favored the amendment only if Kentuckians were compensated for their loss of slaves. Consequently, the freedom of many slaves living in Kentucky was delayed while this debate was going on.
Mattie Jenkins said that slaves on her plantation were so deprived of news that they were not set free until a year after the Emancipation Proclamation was passed. Anthony Young was not told when the slaves were freed, either. One day his overseer was going to whip him, so Young hid in the home of a white neighbor, who informed him, “You’re a free man. If he whips you, you can have him arrested for assault and battery.” George Thompson stated that at the age of twelve he was too immature to leave the plantation: “I was so young and inexperienced when freed that I remained on the Thompson plantation for four years after the war and worked for my board and clothes as coach boy and any other odd jobs around the plantation.”
Some slaves were given a choice of leaving the plantation or staying and working for wages. Louis Watkins said that when his master told the slaves they could leave if they wanted to or stay on the plantation and work for wages, no one left right away. Peter Neal and his family were given the same choice, according to his son, Henry Neal, and decided to stay: “We remained for several years in the employ of this kind friend, and my mother was also employed as cook. While here my father was permitted to tend some ground for himself, and he raised chickens for market instead of stealing them, as so many do now.” Sylvester Smith also claimed that he was treated well as a slave, which encouraged him to stay with his master for a year without pay after the war, though on gaining her freedom his sister left immediately.
H. H. Edmunds recollected that the slaves were very happy when they heard they were free. Those who had been mistreated by slaveholders left the plantations right away, but many, not knowing what else to do, remained with their former owners. Some had no money and no place to go. As William M. Quinn explained, “We didn’t know that we were slaves, hardly. Well, my brother and I didn’t know anyhow ‘cause we were too young to know, but we knew that we had been when we got older. After emancipation we stayed at the Stone family for some time ‘cause they were good to us and we had no place to go.” Betty Smith, too, stayed on the plantation for a while, first working in the fields for food and clothes. A few years later she nursed children for twenty-five cents a week and food, though eventually she got fifty cents a week, board, and two dresses.
Some former slaves stayed on the plantations simply to keep their families together. When the slaves were freed, Sarah Parrott’s master ordered her off his plantation, but Parrott refused to go without her five children, since she knew that as soon as she was gone, her master would bind her children to work for him until they were twenty-one. At that time he would have to give her sons only $100 and a horse. When her husband returned from the war, Parrott left the plantation with her family and moved to Mitchell, where the Parrotts were married under civil law to protect their children from being considered orphans and indentured to their former slaveholder. Rosaline Rogers explained that she stayed on the plantation to keep her fourteen children with her, too: “I decided to stay on; that way, I could have my children with me. They were not allowed to go to school; they were taught only to work.”
When Samuel Watson’s mother learned that she was free, her former master ordered her and her three children off the plantation. They went to another plantation, hoping to find work so they could remain together; their wages would not support them, however, so they left that plantation, too, and worked from place to place for starvation wages. Two of the older children returned to their former owner, who had an article of indenture drawn up binding them to his service. Watson remained with his mother, who took him to a third plantation, where the owner had him indentured for eighteen years. Watson explained that an indentured person was supposed to be given a fair education, a good horse with bridle and saddle, and a suit of clothes after bondage, but the plantation owner said that Watson did not deserve them. Watson finally ended up with $95 after hiring a lawyer friend to sue the plantation owner.
George Arnold acknowledged that some slaves reluctantly left the plantations because freedom “broke up a lot of real friendships and scattered many families.” One former slave who was reluctant to leave was Adeline Rose Lennox, who maintained that she did not know she was a slave until the close of the Civil War. After the war, Lennox did not want to leave the plantation when the master’s wife told her that she was free to return to her father’s home.
Mrs. Hockaday summarized the situation very well. She pointed out that after the Civil War, many slaves were unskilled and uneducated and, as during the Depression, found it difficult to find jobs. Thinking they might not find employment elsewhere, many former slaves never left the plantations. In fact, some who left eventually returned to their former plantations, where they continued to live much as they had during slavery. Mrs. Hockaday also said that in the North, as during the Depression, relief stations were established where former slaves who could not find jobs could get food and shelter. According to Anderson Whitted, however, the government provided former slaves with only hardtack and pickled beef. Whitted said his family was satisfied with the hardtack but believed that the strange-looking pickled beef was really horse meat.
Some slaves, such as Samuel Bell, were sent to contraband camps—camps within Union lines where slaves escaped to or were brought to during the Civil War. Bell said he was well cared for at the camp but soon grew tired of camp life and was granted permission to leave. He farmed for a while before settling in Evansville, where he worked as a janitor in a local bank for a number of years.
Matthew Hume could not understand why so many former slaves remained on the plantations. He thought the Emancipation Proclamation was Lincoln’s greatest contribution, though the slaves on his plantation did not hear about it until the following August. His master offered to let the former slaves remain on the plantation as sharecroppers, but Hume’s family chose to leave. Their only possession, a cow, was taken from them, so Hume said they came to Indiana homeless, friendless, and penniless. At the close of the war, Ethel Daugherty’s family, too, was simply turned off the plantation without any help from their master. When Solomon Hicks’s father was released after forty-seven years of servitude, he was given only a three-legged horse with which to begin a new life. Betty Guwn’s master “begged us to stay and offered us five pounds of meal and two pounds of pork jowl each week if we would stay and work,” but her family left the plantation, too.
Candies Richardson said that “old Marse Jim told us everyone was free, and that was almost a year after the other slaves on the other plantations around were freed.” The slaveholder told them “he didn’t have to give us anything to eat and that he didn’t have to give us a place to stay, but we could stay and work for him and he would pay us. But we left that night and walked for miles through the rain to my husband’s brother and then told them that they all were free.” After the war, Joseph Allen’s master told his slaves with tears in his eyes, “Boys, do you know what is up this morning?” They answered, “No, sir.” “Well, you are as free as I am; Abe Lincoln set you free,” he told them. Allen said, “Well, if I’m free, I guess I’ll get out.”
Nelson Polk’s family wanted to remain together on the plantation and work for shares or wages, but the planter did not want Polk around, so, leaving his wife and family in Mississippi with his former owner, Polk went to Tennessee, where he married another woman. James Childress said that the slaves on his plantation rejoiced when they got their freedom but “still depended on old Marse John for food and bed.... They hated to leave their homes, but Mr. Childress told them to go out and make homes for themselves.”
The mistreatment of blacks did not stop with the end of slavery. Mattie Jenkins said that some slaves were deprived of news and knew nothing of the Emancipation Proclamation until a year after it was passed. Many slaves, she said, were not freed when they should have been. Pete Johnson said that after the war he took a job with a terrible woman near Louisville. He said he “complained about the poor quarters, only to be told that ‘anything was good enough for niggers.’ This was a terrible woman who kept pistols, guns, and other firearms around in all rooms.” Angie Moore Boyce reported that she and her baby were not treated very well on arriving in Indiana, where they were arrested and returned to Kentucky. They were placed in the Louisville jail, where they shared a cell with a big, rough, drunken Irish woman, who got upset by the baby’s crying and threatened to “bash its brains out against the wall if it didn’t stop crying.” Richard Miller recounted that when slavery ended, some former slaves decided to leave Kentucky and head farther south to buy farms. When they got to Madison County, Kentucky, however, they were told that in the Deep South they would be forced into slavery again. Thinking that might be true, they remained on Madison County farms and worked for low wages. After the war, Sidney Graham worked in a powder mill in Tennessee. When he accidentally splashed some hot water on someone working near him, he was warned that Klansmen would visit him that night for burning a white man. The Klan arrived as promised, and broke through Graham’s barricaded rear door. Graham shot and killed the first man who tried to enter his house, and the Klansmen took the body and left. Graham slipped off to Nashville, Tennessee, where he was later joined by his family.
Thomas Lewis also related an encounter with a white gang who went “to my grandmother’s place and ordered the colored people out to work. The colored people had worked before for white men on shares. When the wheat was all in and the corn laid by, the white farmers would tell the colored people to get out and would give them nothing.... Our family left because we didn’t want to work that way.” Edna Boysaw told a grim tale about how former slaves coming from Virginia to work in Clay County mines were met by whites at the train station in Harmony: “When they arrived about four miles east of Brazil, or what was known as Harmony, the train was stopped, and a crowd of white miners ordered them not to come any nearer Brazil. Then the trouble began.... Mr. Masten took some of them south of Brazil about three miles, where he had a number of company houses, and they tried to work in his mine there. But many were shot at from the bushes and killed.”
Several former slaves and their families fared better than others in Indiana. George Washington Buckner got a medical degree, practiced medicine in Evansville for many years, and was appointed minister to Liberia during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency in 1913. Henry Clay Moorman’s family remained on the plantation for a year after slavery was abolished, moved to Evansville for a while, and in 1903 settled in Franklin, where he served as pastor of the African Methodist Episcopal Church for twelve years. J. B. Polk also was a minister. Rudolph D. O’Hara became an attorney and served the black population of Vanderburgh County. W. F. Parrott graduated from Mitchell High School and Indiana University. He taught at Spencer for ten years as well as at schools at Ghent and Carrollton, Kentucky.
After settling in Bloomington, Mattie Fuller took a course in hair dressing, took music lessons from some of the best music teachers in Bloomington, and became well-known in the community as owner and operator of Bloomington’s earliest beauty shop and as a church organist and singer. Until a year before the WPA interview, Ralph Kates worked as a paperhanger and interior decorator. His father “was a smart man, working as a stonecutter or stone mason and interior decorator. He was also a good accountant and bookkeeper. He helped to build the new Vanderburgh County courthouse, working in stone and mortar.” Bell Deam Kelley worked as a housekeeper and Alexander Kelley as a cook in Indianapolis and Muncie.
John Rudd labored on farms for several years before serving for fifteen years as a porter in an Owensboro hotel. For eight years he worked as a janitor in a hospital. Mary Elizabeth Scarber quilted for a number of people, and Lulu Scott was a cook for years. Alex Fowler, the first African American in Lake County, operated a barber shop. Anderson Whitted worked at the brickyards in Rockville, and he claimed that to make a decent living, he often did the work of two men. Pete Wilson was a furniture worker for Showers Brothers in Bloomington.
For thirty years, Preston Tate was a fireman in a sawmill; after the mill burned, he worked in a stone quarry. Then for a dozen or so years he worked in a greenhouse. Joseph Allen pushed a wheelbarrow and helped keep the fires burning at the Muncie Foundry until he was eighty-three years old. At that time he supposedly was the oldest manual laborer working in an Indiana factory.
Several former slaves, including Carl Boone and John Henry Gibson, farmed. Gibson farmed a section of the bottomlands where the James Whit-comb Riley Hospital now stands in Indianapolis. He raised corn and wheat, tended hogs and cattle, and traded horses. Another group of former slaves worked on boats. Moses Slaughter said, “After the war ended I took to the river trade, steamboating on the R. C. Gray from Cincinnati to Fort Smith, Arkansas.” When the Missouri woman who brought George Taylor Burns to Troy, Indiana, found out she could not own a slave in Indiana, for $15 a month she indentured Burns to a flatboat captain to wash dishes and wait on the crew. After gaining experience on the flatboats, Burns was hired as a cabin boy on a steamboat and spent most of his active days steamboating. Burns claimed to “know steamboats from woodbox to sternwheel.” George W. Arnold worked as a roustabout on a sternwheeler. He claimed that food was always plentiful on the boats but confessed, “In spite of these few pleasures, the life of a roustabout is the life of a dog.” After coming to Indiana, Cornelius Cross worked on a canal boat on the Wabash and Erie Canal and traveled between Evansville and Terre Haute. He reflected that “The [Wabash and Erie] canal was a pretty sight.” In his earlier days, Billy Slaughter worked on a steamboat that traveled from Louisville to New Orleans.
As Henrietta Jackson noted, after the war some slaveholding families lost their wealth. Their households were broken up by the war, and their farms were destroyed by the armies. Jackson, nevertheless, remained with her former owner for a while. Then she found a job in a laundry “ironing white folks’ collars and cuffs.” Several years after the Civil War, Susan Smith came to Jeffersonville, where she worked in several homes. When she could not work anymore, she was put in the Clark County Poor Farm. At the time of the WPA interview, she still was not fond of her former owners, recalling how hard they had made her work.
Some former slaves living in Indiana survived on pensions. Alex Woodson and his second wife ran a sparsely stocked grocery store in the front room of their small house in New Albany and got along with the help of Woodson’s pension. After working two years in a coke plant in Gary, Reverend Wamble was laid off during the Depression. Though he had been a preacher for thirty-seven years, he was living on a small pension when interviewed. John Rudd and his second wife were living in Evansville on an old-age pension of $ 14 a month, and Nettie Pompey was living in Indianapolis on an old-age pension of $20 a month. Joe Robinson, also living in Indianapolis, said the pension he and his wife received was barely enough to live on, and he hoped it would be increased.
Alex and Betty Smith were living in a shack patched with tarpaper, tin, and wood, and their only income was a government old-age pension of about $14 a month. Joseph Mosley said it was not easy to get along on his small pension of $18 a month, and he wondered if the government was going to increase it. Samuel Watson was entitled to an old-age pension, which he received from 1934 through 1935, but on January 15, 1936, the money was withheld for some reason, and Watson was sent to the poorhouse. In 1936 he again applied for a pension and received $17 a month to pay for his upkeep.
Other former slaves were living in poverty in Indiana when they were interviewed during the Depression. The fieldworker described Maria Love’s house as “a little old worn shack, not very neat.” Robert J. Cheatham was an invalid, and his ill health had contributed to his poverty. He and his wife had lost their house and were living in a small apartment in a day nursery for black children. He had faith, though, that he and his wife would not be left to suffer from either hunger or cold.
In fact, some former slaves stressed that times were harder during the Depression than in slavery. Cynthia O’Hara contended that in Evansville she worked harder to support her children than she had ever worked as a slave on the plantation. Julia Bowman stated that she never knew deprivation in slavery as she knew it during the Depression. According to Adeline Rose Lennox, slaves on her plantation were well taken care of and had plenty of corn, peas, beans, and pork to eat. She claimed she had more pork as a slave than during the Depression.
Several former slaves interviewed in Indiana had visited or longed to visit the southern plantations on which they had been held. For instance, in her old age Sarah Parrott visited her former slaveholder in Kentucky. Much more feeble than Parrott, he greeted her cordially, and she said they enjoyed talking about the old days. Alex Woodson allowed that “I like to go back down in Kentucky on visits, as the folks there won’t take a thing for bed and vittles. Here they are so selfish that they won’t even give a drink of water away.” Elizabeth (Bettie) Jones regretted that she could not return to Kentucky: “I would like to go back to Henderson, Kentucky, once more, for I have not been there for more than twenty years. I’d like to walk the old plank walk again up to Mr. Alvis’s home, but I’m afraid I’ll never get to go. It costs too much.” Henrietta Jackson said that she sometimes longed for her old home in Alabama, where her friends lived, but for the most part she was happy in Fort Wayne.