River Run Red

The slave insurrectionist Nat Turner drove the final nail into the coffin of Southern emancipationism. For two days in August 1831, he and his comrades hacked and stabbed to death fifty-five white men, women, and children. His followers were killed almost immediately, but Turner himself eluded his captors for two months. Whites mustered all through the South, sending squads of “country bullies and poor whites” to plantations to hunt for weapons in the slave quarters. Slaves were dragged off, flogged, and shot to death by gangs of whites who “exulted in such a chance to exercise a little brief authority, and show their subserviency to the slaveholders.” “The brightest and best” slaves, said Charity Bowen, “were killed in Nat’s time.”²

It didn’t take much to set whites off. George L. Knox recalled the 1856 insurrection panic that gripped Wilson County, just east of Nashville. According to one version, about a month before Christmas a slave named Wash Smith traded with somebody for a bugle. Soon the rumor circulated that Wash intended to blow his bugle to signal the slaves to rise up, and as Christmas approached “the excitement grew.” Most Southern states had already passed legislation denying slaves a virtual Bill of Rights’ worth of freedoms, including literacy, assemblies, unmonitored religious observances, travel without passes, and contact with freedmen. Now slaves were forbidden to leave their masters’ premises “unless sent for the doctor.” Patrollers stepped up their inspections, and “orders were issued that two colored men were not to be seen talking together,” nor were slaves allowed to talk to poor whites “for fear that they would take the Negro’s part and aid him in the uprising.” Violators were to be given “thirty-nine licks with a raw cow-hide on their bare backs.” Just before Christmas, a white doctor reported that weapons had been found hidden in haystacks. In the ensuing panic, five slaves were lynched and “a few thousand” were whipped. According to one slave, the whites “shot niggers and chopped their heads off, and stick their heads on poles and throw their bodies in the river.”³

After John Brown’s abortive raid on Harpers Ferry, the Southern press got hold of a letter apparently from one of Brown’s more deluded operatives claiming that in Arkansas and Tennessee there were not only “an immense number of slaves ripe and ready at the first intimation to strike a decided blow” but an astoundingly “large number of whites” in Memphis “ready to aid us.” In West Tennessee, authorities intercepted a letter from a Northern teacher in Brownsville urging others to come south in the guise of schoolteachers and spread the gospel of abolitionism. The result was another panic. Vigilantes attacked everybody from “aged eccentrics and itinerant piano-tuners to substantial citizens of long residence.” Northern laborers were special targets, and various states expelled dozens of schoolteachers. Others were flogged, tarred and feathered, and even lynched. There were public book burnings of abolitionist works, mobs attacked printing offices, and sheriffs closed down newspapers. Editorialists blacklisted Northern companies and urged a boycott of all Northern goods, driving Unionists and antislavery advocates out of the state.⁴

The slaves, however, suffered most. In Paris, Tennessee, a young black boy first realized that he was a slave when a white mob “cut darkies’ heads off in a riot. They put their faces up like a sign board,” he recalled, and threatened “to burn the niggers by the hundreds.” In the late 1850s, when a seer named Fredonia Gallatin announced that the slaves of Tennessee were about to rise, whites sought out any slave who could read and whipped several of them to death. They lashed a black preacher named Henry King and beheaded an antislavery white named “Red Head” Bill Martin, displaying his head on the end of a stick until one of his comrades was forced to bury it.⁵

After these panics ebbed away, the slaves “began to talk over the great wrong that had been done,” recalled a former slave named George Knox. “Many wondered what would next take place” and whether they could stand it. But they also saw in the white man’s savage desperation that something was shaking the peculiar institution to its foundations. “In the midst of all the oppression,” wrote Knox, “I could feel that freedom was not far away.”⁶

Though often isolated and mostly illiterate, slaves did not lack for information. They were among the very first, for instance, to get wind of the Emancipation Proclamation. A visitor to the South once asked a group of Confederate officers what effect Lincoln’s “Proclamation of Freedom” had had on slave owners.

House slaves especially kept their eyes and ears open. Thomas Rutling’s mistress always made him promise never to repeat her family’s dinner table conversation, “but—well—in less than half an hour,” Rutling joked, “some way, every slave on the plantation would know what had been said up at massa’s house.” Even field slaves used to listen at the windows when their masters read the paper aloud or talked with their neighbors about Lincoln and Jefferson Davis.⁸

Some slaves divined freedom’s approach like a trembling in their bones. The mistress of a woman called Aunt Tilda told her that “God would visit the colored people with His displeasure for rejoicing at the success of the Yankees.” Aunt Tildy “could not read, and perhaps we colored people did not understand the thing, and Missus was right. But as I went about my work I prays, and when I was in the kitchen, taking up the dinner, a voice said, ‘Stand still, and see what I will do.’”⁹

For the most part, slaves were pragmatic country people. Their bondage had made them shrewd judges of where power lay. Before they would trade homes that were familiar and in many cases ancestral, and masters who at least clothed and fed and sheltered them, they first needed to settle in their own minds certain fundamental questions.

First of all, what was freedom? Slaves had been hearing about the promise of freedom for generations, and by 1861 some of them were heartily sick of it. “I thought it was foolishness then,” recalled one. “Free? Is anybody ever free?” asked Patsy Jane Bland. “Ain’t everybody a slave to some one or something or other?” Passing peddlers sometimes agitated slaves by telling them they would “be free someday.” Louis Hughs recalled how “the down-trodden slaves, some of whom were bowed with age, with frosted hair and furrowed cheek, would answer, looking up from their work: ‘We don’t believe that. My grandfather said we was to be free, but we ain’t free yet.’”¹⁰

For many others, however, freedom, like literacy and religion, was made all the more precious by the savage lengths to which their masters would go to deny it to them. “We had a man on our place named George,” recalled Charlotte Brooks. “Master did not like him very much, no how, and one day he overheard George talking about freedom; and, I tell you, he half killed him that day. He beat George awhile, and then would make the driver beat him awhile,” until the whip had put out one of his eyes.¹¹

“We knowed freedom was on us,” Felix Haywood explained, “but we - didn’t know what was to come with it. We thought we was going to be richer than the white folks, because we was stronger and knowed how to work, and the whites didn’t, and they didn’t have us to work for them any more. But it - didn’t turn out that way,” Haywood continued. “We soon found out that freedom could make folks proud, but it didn’t make them rich.” Some slaves understood this going in, however. “Freedom,” explained Charlie Davenport, may have “meant us could leave where us had been born and bred, but it meant, too, that us had to scratch for us own selves.”¹²

Their next question was What was this war all about? Their answers ranged from the metaphorical (“Somebody from across the water sent a shipload of money to us colored folks and somebody stole it; and now they gwine fight it out”) to the biblical (“Some of the old folks said it was near the end of time, because of folks being so wicked”). “It was the old story of the captivity in Egypt repeated,” concluded L. M. Mills. “The slaveholders were warned time and again to let the black man go, but they hardened their hearts and would not, until finally the wrath of God was poured out upon them, and the sword of the great North fell upon their first-born.” Whatever they may have guessed about the war’s causes, however, they quickly understood what was at stake. For whites the war might mean Union or Confederacy, victory or defeat, prosperity or ruin, even life or death. But for slaves it meant all this and more: freedom at last or generations more of bondage.¹³

To their next question—Who were these Yankees?—masters hastened to provide answers. Union soldiers were devils, they warned their slaves: baby-killing, cannibalistic monsters with claws in their gloves, tails in their trousers, and horns erupting under their blue caps. Others claimed they were bent on stealing slaves and selling them in Cuba, depositing them in chains on the coast of Africa, or drowning them in the ocean.¹⁴

A wiser master might have trusted a little more in his slaves’ intelligence, for their first encounters with real Yankees quickly dispelled such bogeyman notions, destroying the last shreds of their masters’ credibility. “Why,” a slave exclaimed on first meeting a squad of Yankees, “they’s folks!” Among the fugitive slaves who escaped above Fort Pillow to the Union navy’s river fleet was a man who said his master had described Lincoln to him as a man-eating ogre “with tail and horns” who intended to “devour every one of the African race,” and lay waste to the South. “Lord,” the slave exclaimed, “I don’t know nothing, but I knows too much for that there. I knows Master Lincoln wasn’t that kind of a person. Them there horns and tails,” he said, laughing out loud at his master’s belief in his slaves’ credulity, “I—I couldn’t swallow the horns and tails. Them was too much for this black man, sure.”¹⁵

Early in the war, few Yankee soldiers saw themselves as agents of black liberation, and many treated slaves and slave owners with equal contempt. Some slaves reciprocated. “Now, if you please,” an elderly slave remarked to his mistress as his fellow slaves rushed to greet the Yankees, “look at the poor, white trash them niggers is running after. If they was in the gutters,” he said, they “wouldn’t pick them up, unless they wanted them to fight for them. I tell you now they won’t get this nigger,” he assured his mistress. “And I thank God I know who my friends are.”¹⁶

Many slaves were outraged by the rapacity with which Yankee foragers scoured their masters’ plantations, hauling away every scrap of food, digging about the grounds for the family silver, overturning slaves’ mattresses in search of their paltry savings. “Lincoln freed us,” said Patsy Perryman, “but I never liked him because of the way his soldiers done in the South.” Willie Doyle remembered that when the Yankees thundered onto his plantation, his master, who had been reading the paper, “throwed back his head and was dead. Just scared to death.” With “Old Master Jim stretched dead in his chair” the Yankees began hurling meat out of his smokehouse and commanding the slaves to “Come and get it. Take it to your houses.” The frightened slaves obeyed, but as soon as the Yankees left they returned the meat to the smokehouse.¹⁷ “You nasty, stinking rascal,” Sam Ward’s slave mother scolded a Yankee forager. “You say you come down here to fight for the niggers, and now you’re stealing from them.”

“I wanted to be free,” said Jack Daniels, “and I was glad the Federal army was so lucky as to free me.” Though he had “no influence,” he had “wanted to see the Yankees come,” and “just prayed with my whole heart that the Yankees might come and overcome my old masters, and whip them out.”²⁰

Having established at least that the Yankees were human (if not always humane), slaves asked, as a corollary, who this Abraham Lincoln was. The former slaves who were interviewed in their old age would prove surprisingly divided in their opinion of Lincoln. A good many revered his memory. “Abraham Lincoln?” asked Nancy Gardner of Oklahoma. “Now you is talking about the niggers’ friend! Why that was the best man God ever let tramp the earth!”²¹

For some slaves he was an almost biblical figure. James Southall called him “God’s emmissary.” “I thought he was partly God,” said Angie Garrett. Annie Young thought Lincoln was a greater man than Moses. “He done more for us,” declared Charles Willis, “than any man done since Jesus left.” But others were not so sure. Hannah McFarland “didn’t care much about Lincoln. It was nice of him to free us,” she admitted, “but’course he didn’t want to.” George Strickland agreed. “It was the plans of God to free us niggers, and not Abraham Lincoln’s.”²²

That was all in retrospect, however. The name “Abraham” had a special resonance for the slaves who first heard it. “Father Abraham” many called him, and only “Moses” would have seemed a more fitting name for this lofty entity who had promised, they believed, to lead them out of bondage. But would he win? Was he wise? Did he mean what he said?

Southern whites asked blacks what they thought freedom was, and entertained each other recounting their quaint replies: never having to work again, living in a mansion, sailing back to Africa. But the replies whites cited as proof of their slaves’ ignorance revealed instead that what freedom meant to them at least in part was the right to dream, to hope, to fancy.

Out of pity, loyalty, a horror of losing touch with their families, or slavish habits of mind, some slaves stuck by their masters through the war. “Master was too old to work when they set us free,” Nicey Kinney recalled, “so for a long time us just stayed there and run his place for him.” J. W. Stinnett’s mother pleaded with the Yankees not to make her quit her owner’s place. Her husband was in the South, she told them, “and I’ll never see him again if I leave the old home place, for he won’t know where to find me.” But the Yankees took her anyway.²³

Robert Glenn of North Carolina recalled, “I took my freedom by degrees,” and had a hard time “taking myself into my own hands and getting out of the feeling I was still under obligations to ask my master and mistress when I desired to leave the premises.” Other slaves—some house slaves, or solitary slave families who lived with their masters on isolated farms—regarded themselves as members of the family, and in some cases actually were their owners’ sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. “The Negroes knew as well what was going on as other people did.” Though “at this late day he is spoken of by the coarse and profane class as the ‘dam Nigger,’ with no right to standing room on God’s blessed foot stool,” declared James - Thomas, “while the Negroes’ superiors were trying to break up the best government on earth, the Negro was caring for the defenseless.”²⁴

Locked with their masters in the agricultural cycle of the seasons, some slaves could not bring themselves to abandon the crops they had planted and tended, or the storehouses they had taken such pains to fill. Some third-, fourth-, and fifth-generation slaves of the same family believed they had traditions to honor, standards to uphold, even as their masters galloped off to sustain their bondage.

and I’d call to Old Major, who was sitting on the porch, “Major, here comes a spy.” And Old Major, he’d start up from his chair and bawl, “Who-o-w-a-at?” If I said, “It’s Johnny,” and he was in a Rebel suit, he’d throw out his chest and prepare to greet them. But if I said, “Union,” he’d sneak to his room, change into the blue uniform with its red-lined cape, and come back out on the porch. As he sat down, he’d throw back the corner of his blue cape to show its red lining.²⁵

Slaves who had derived their sense of dignity and worth from their owners’ pride and prosperity were appalled by the rapidity with which even their most aristocratic owners fell apart toward the end of the war. “Old Mistress never get well after she lose all her niggers,” recalled Katie Rowe, “and one day the white boss tell us she just drop over dead setting in her chair, and we know her heart just broke.” One slave owner said he “no longer went about his slaves any more” and would have “nothing to do with any of them as long as I can not control them.”²⁶

Bob Maynard’s kindly master accepted emancipation “pretty good,” Maynard recalled, “losing us niggers and all,” but “lots of men killed theirselves.” Tom Wilson’s owner became so distraught that he “went off to a little stream of water and broke the ice and jumped in.” Two weeks later he died of pneumonia. Declaring that “he don’t want to live in a country where the niggers am free,” Anna Miller’s former master moved to Texas and “kills hisself about a year after they moves.”²⁷

Other masters were more extrovert. “‘The faithful slave’ is about played out,” a slave owner wrote in July of 1863. “They are the most treacherous, brutal, and ungrateful race on the globe.” “The negroes care no more for me,” wrote one Texas mistress during the war, “than if I was an old free darkey,” adding that she got “so mad sometimes” that she no longer cared whether her brutal and turbulent overseer beat the “last one to death.” A slave in - Davidson County who had remained with her owner was shocked when he started fulminating about emancipation. “He was gonna kill me ’cause I was free,” she recalled sadly. “I got shame about it, they talked about it so.”²⁸

The presence of Union troops, however, sometimes forced masters to watch their step around their slaves. Harriett Robinson’s mistress used to beat her slaves during the war. “You master’s out fighting and losing blood trying to save you from them Yankees,” she used to tell them, “so you can get your’n here.” One morning a master hit his slave. But “he didn’t know the Yankees were in town,” an ex-slave recalled, “and when he found out, he come back beggin’ me to stay with him, and said he was sorry.”²⁹

Slaveholders sometimes tried with what passed for logic to get slaves to see things their way. “Now look,” James Thomas remembered a white explaining, “them blue bellied scoundrels went to Africa, stole the niggers, brought them here, sold them to us, then stole them from us, starved them and otherwise mistreated them,” and now the Yankees “want to tell us what to do with the balance of them.” Many Southern whites “said they never thought the ‘peculiar institution’ right, but they did not want the Dam blue-bellied sons of bitches to tell them what to do with their property.”³⁰

Others simply tried to sell their slaves off while they could. “That old Yankee has got elected,” declared one master after Lincoln’s election, “and I am going to sell every nigger I got because he is going to free them.” When George W. Harmon’s master tried to sell his slaves during the war, he told them they were being appraised because “the Government was thinking of buying us free.” Some sold their slaves at greatly reduced prices, not necessarily because they had given up their hopes of a rebel victory but because, for the time being, they could not afford to feed them.³¹

Masters took to hiding their slaves in the woods when Yankee patrols came near. Some spirited them down to the Deep South or all the way west to Texas, where they believed there was at least some hope that the peculiar institution might survive a Yankee victory. “They’d always had them Negroes,” explained Allen V. Manning, “and lots of them had mighty fine places back in the old states,” but in Texas, “they had to go out and live in sod houses and little boxed shotguns.” Some slaveholders tried to move their slaves behind rebel lines deep in the mountains of northeastern Tennessee, where their slaves were kept in such isolation that they never heard about emancipation until the war was long over.³²

Slaves had been running away from their masters ever since the first African set foot on American soil. Running away had become something of an art in the South, but usually amounted to a kind of job action. If by the degraded standards of bondage, slaves deemed themselves unfairly treated, they would run into the woods and remain there, with their fellows’ furtive help, until their masters promised to ease up on them. The storied north-bound flights to freedom were much rarer, for they required of a slave not only an unusual degree of desperation, imagination, and courage, but a knowledge of geography, a trust in strangers, and access to the Underground Railroad’s network of safe houses without which a successful journey north was nearly impossible.³³

Slaves had developed ingenious techniques to confound slave catchers and their hounds. Tracking dogs were fearsome enforcers of human bondage. An elderly former slave recalled that whites regarded the crying of bloodhounds as the “sweetest music in the world.” Mississippi slaves said that when “anybody would come for the hounds to run a nigger, the hounds would say, ‘Our Father, I’ve got a heavenly home up yonder, hallelujah, hallelujah. ’” Plomer Harshaw recalled how, as his master was about to strike him, a slave snatched away his hickory club and ran off into the bushes. “But that was far as he got. The dogs leap on him and tear him to pieces.”³⁴

Gaunt, ragged, desperate, crazed by deprivation, exposure, isolation, and the never ending fear of capture, runaways reinforced slaves’ animist beliefs in ghosts and banshees. “A runaway Negro was the greatest bugaboo to all the boys and girls in the country,” recalled E. L. Davison of Kentucky. “We had been taught that they would keep us in a cave and cut off a limb at a time and cook it whenever they became hungry, keeping us alive as long as possible.” Runaways also provided larcenous, rapacious, and even homicidal whites with scapegoats for any crime they might choose to commit in a runaway’s vicinity.³⁵

Slaves were nevertheless so expert at hiding out that white boys hoping to elude rebel or Yankee press gangs turned to them for guidance. The son of a slave owner named Hawkens returned on furlough from service in the Confederate army and spent the rest of the war living in a runaway’s cave. Lee Guidon of South Carolina recalled how his master’s son used to “lay out in the woods” to avoid Confederate recruiters. “He say no need in him getting shot up and killed. He say, ‘Let the slaves be free.’ Mr. Jim say, ‘All they fighting about was jealousy.’”³⁶

Masters were shocked by how readily even their oldest slaves ran off, and the risks they would take to find freedom. A planter made his elderly slaves, Uncle Si and Aunt Cindy, promise that they would not go to the Yankee lines. “Oh no, Master,” replied Uncle Si. “I is going to stay right here with you.” But the next morning, he and Aunt Cindy and all the rest of the slaves had vanished. Searching for them in the woods, the planter came upon Uncle Si weeping over the body of his wife, who had died in the night of exposure. “Uncle Si,” asked the planter, “why on earth did you so cruelly bring Aunt Cindy here for, through all such hardship, thereby causing her death?”

Free, but uprooted in a land of ruins. “The last time I seed the home plantation,” recalled William Colbert, “I was standing on a hill. I looked back on it for the last time through a patch of scrub pines, and it look so lonely. There weren’t but one person in sight: the massa. He was setting in a wicker chair in the yard looking out over a small field of cotton and corn,” and there were “four crosses in the graveyard in the side lawn where he was setting.”³⁹