The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (35 page)

The Confederate circumstance imposed strains upon the very core of Southern slavery: the master-slave relationship. In a number of ways the war experience demanded that individual slaveholders act less like masters, and in turn individual slaves acted less like slaves.

When slaveholders joined Southern armies, they left “their people” in the care and under the direction of another while they were away at war. Sometimes an elderly relative, a wife, an overseer, a neighbor, or a teen-aged son were able to fulfill the master’s role. Often, however, these substitute masters failed because they did or could not furnish the paternal mastery and maintenance of the absent master. And because whites failed as masters, blacks “failed” as slaves.
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The experience on the Pryor farm in Georgia was exemplary. Shepard G. Pryor owned thirteen slaves in 1861 when he left his farm to fight on the Virginia front. Pryor’s wife, Penelope, remained on the farm with Uncle Dick Bass, an overseer of sorts. Uncle Dick was an old man who possessed the legendary Southern “habit at command” not at all. The Pryor slaves ignored him, and Uncle Dick did little more than drink and swear. Penelope Pryor summed up her plight in October 1861: “[T]hey dont hear him at all. I believe they would do better without him, but I cant stay here without some [white] man on the place.”
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Shepard asked Penelope to, “speak to the Negroes and try to make them feel the responsibility to take care and make something.”

Early in 1862, Uncle Dick and his successor overseer left the Pryor farm. Penelope was alone with her chattels. At this juncture Shepard Pryor made a crucial decision; he appointed a black overseer. “Say to Will,” Pryor wrote his wife, “that he is my last overseer and he must try himself farming and take care of everything[.] You must not make him work as the rest do[.] he must look around and see that every thing goes on right[.]”
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Pryor hoped to transmit his paternalism via the mails to his wife and through her to a black manager. The process did not work.

Shepard Pryor’s chosen surrogate, Will, for a time was faithful to his charge. Then, having harvested the 1862 crop, Will began working against the slave-plantation regime by helping runaway slaves and hiding black fugitives. When Penelope Pryor informed her husband of his trustee’s crimes, Shepard Pryor faced his own problem mindful of Will’s dilemma. “I am truely sorry,” he wrote, “that it happened with Will for I think a great deal of him. It is true that he did very wrong in denying the charges after he was caught[,] but Dear I never could blame a negro much for assisting one that was run away.”
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Thus did the Pryor family confront the quiet crisis within the slave system. When Shepard Pryor ceased to be master, Will ceased to be slave.

Louticia Jackson’s experience on her small holding in the Georgia Piedmont was similar to that of Penelope Pryor. Mrs. Jackson and her teen-aged son Johnny attempted to carry on when an older son left to join the army; but they had less and less success with their black work force. By 1863 she was reporting to her absent son:

They seem to feel very imdepenat [i.e. independent] as no white man comes to direct or look after them, for Willes speaks shorter to johny and orders
him
about more than any negro on the place, in consequence … [Johnpy] seldon tells him to do anything, so sure as he does … Willes will make some insulting reply such as thus[:] ‘what’s the matter with you[,] what the reason you can’t do it,’ and so on, and when I ask him why he has not done certain things he will say John never told him, and says that John will tell a story in a minute. I told him he did not have to tell me so again, but he sayed he did not care what I sayed about it. a few evenings ago I asked him where he had been all the evening; he did make any reply. John then sayed ‘mas talking to you.’ he sayed he knew that and she’s allways asking some silly question[.] he then commenced in such a loud harangue you might have heard him half a mile or more. It so excited me I left the door[,] went in the room[,] and lay down with the back ache, he does not suffer me to enquire in to anything without giving some insulting reply, though I tell them all together generally what must be done so as to avoid any difficulty with him.

He done as well as he knew how the first 6 months after you left[.] I was truly proud to see him seem to take such an intrust in the farm[.] but he got his own crop laid by[,] he then helped some in threshing the wheat, he took the fever immediately after[,] which lasted some 5 or 6 weeks in which time I attended him closely day and night[,] bathed and rubed him with my own hands fearing it would not be faithfully done [otherwise][.] in 6 months he grew w[e]ary in well doing, [and] has been a drag ever since, and we … can see his evil influence in most all the others that are large enough to notice him…. Some person must have been lecturing him I think, for he runs about a goodeal & but seldom asks for a pass and when he does he will walk up to the door and say
‘some of you
write me a pass,’ rather in a commanding tone…. I believe he had got Johny afraid of him…. he does seem so wicked [that] if any one was to come upon him about his conduct I do not know what he would do afterwards.
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Will on the Pryor farm and Willes at the Jackson farm responded to the breakdown of the master-slave relationship by asserting their own mastery. Other black Southerners in other places did the same kind of things. Still others responded by reversing the master-dependent roles; they took paternal care of their owners and their property. Mary Chesnut recorded one example of this reversal in her diary. Shortly after the war a black man told his former master, “When you ‘all had de power you was good to me, and I’ll protect you now. No nigger, no Yankee, shall touch you. If you want anything, call for Sambo. I mean, call for Mr. Samuel—that’s my name now.”
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Mr. Samuel and those like him were neither “Uncle Toms” nor were they the stereotypical “loyal darkies” of white legends. Like Will and Willes they coped with altered racial realities imposed by wartime. Their response differed in form but not in substance. The Confederate experience offered many black Southerners a kind of first freedom even while they were still slaves.
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The departure of a slaveholder for the army was only one form of strain imposed upon master-slave relationships. Shortages of life’s necessities also impaired the exercise of the master role, whether or not the master stayed at home. Salt was scarce throughout the Confederacy, and thus meat, too, was in short supply in many localities. These and other scarcities could and did prevent slave masters from fulfilling their maintenance responsibilities toward their bondsmen. In turn the slaves, out of resentment and/or malnourishment, were less diligent about their own responsibilities.
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When Union armies threatened to occupy land areas, the slaveholders involved usually fled with their slaves before the invaders. The results of “refugeeing” (a verb contributed by the Confederate experience) for blacks were unsettling. Not only was a master in flight something less than a patriachal figure, the resettlement of slaves in many cases meant the destruction of black families and plantation communities. Not surprisingly refugee blacks responded to the novel circumstance by acting less and less slavish.
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Impressment, too, upset the stability of the slave system. Large numbers of slaves had to leave their homes and serve institutional masters when armies or cities required labor for constructing fortifications. Neither slaveholder nor slave liked the prospect. Impressment deprived the owner of his slave’s services and usually meant hard labor and harsh treatment for the slave. And the impressment practice, like the enlistment of a master in the army, the flight of a plantation community before enemy troops, and the scarcities of wartime, weakened the bonds of the master-slave tie.
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In the urban Confederacy, as in the countryside, the war experience tended to break down traditional racial mores. Cities were small and few in the Old South, and slave populations within them had declined during the prewar years. With the advent of the Confederacy and its war, however, Southern cities experienced phenomenal growth in a short time. War industries, armies, hospitals, supply depots, and refugees contributed to the influx, and each of these items and activities brought more black Southerners to town.
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By their very nature, cities undermined the slave system. Cities allowed, even encouraged, anonymity. Urban slaves “hired out” and “lived out” in greater numbers than rural slaves. However much municipal authorities tried, through ordinances and police vigilance, they were never able to make the city a surrogate master to resident slaves. And greater concentrations of blacks, both slave and free, made a sense of black community deeper and broader. When Southern cities swelled in size during the Confederate period, the inherent weaknesses of urban slavery increased as well.
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The experience of Jefferson Davis was an index of the uneasy nature of urban slavery in wartime. During the single month of January 1864, the Davises lost three slaves. The last runaway lingered long enough to start a fire in the basement of the executive mansion; only fast action on the part of the household confined the blaze and prevented the entire building from burning down. The Confederate President blamed the unfaithfulness of his slaves on bribes delivered by secret agents of the enemy.
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Perhaps Davis was correct; more likely, however, the conduct of Davis’s slaves resulted more from unrest within the slave system than from external influences.

During the medieval period in western Europe, the rise of towns afforded refuge and liberation for peasants from the countryside. The process inspired the saying
“stat Luft macht frei, ”
“city air makes one free.” During the Confederate period in the South, for different reasons under different circumstances, city “air” often had the same effect upon black Confederates.

By mid-1863 white Southerners had already adopted some reforms toward liberalizing the institution of slavery. This process would continue and almost reach the logical extreme of emancipation.
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But even while whites tinkered with the institution, black Southerners had begun acting out their own liberation.

Ironically, as Confederate nationality ripened and defined itself, prospects for the continued existence of the Southern nation suffered severe setbacks on three fronts. Even while Southerners were realizing their identity as Confederates, reordering their world view, and adjusting their social and racial mores, their nation trembled on two continents.

At Vicksburg, Johnston’s worst fears materialized. Pemberton submitted to Grant’s siege in hopes that Johnston could raise a potent enough force to relieve the city. Johnston mustered about 30,000 and marched close enough to Vicksburg to decide that his relief was too little and too late. The garrison surrendered on July 4; Pemberton’s entire army were prisoners, and the Mississippi was open to the enemy all the way to its mouth.
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In Pennsylvania, Lee’s campaign came to grief at Gettysburg. The battle which Lee hoped would be another Chancellorsville began on July 1 as the two armies concentrated. On June 28, General George G. Meade had replaced Hooker as commander of the Army of the Potomac. When Lee reached the field, he found that his troops held the town of Gettysburg, but that Meade’s Federals were fortifying Cemetery Hill and the ridge line extending south to two domelike hills known as Big Round Top and Little Round Top. Next day Lee ordered Longstreet’s corps to attack the Round Tops and Richard S. Ewell’s corps to extend the Southern line around Cemetery Hill. Neither attack enabled the Confederates to dislodge their enemies from the heights. Finally on July 3, Lee determined to have a showdown. Meade’s reinforcements kept arriving to strengthen his position, but Lee believed his men could breach Meade’s center and felt that victory was worth the risk involved in a frontal assault. “Pickett’s Charge,” the attack on the Union center, was a gallant disaster. In a way it was the entire Confederate war in microcosm—a gathering of clans instead of military organizations led by an officer corps distinguished by its individual eccentricities, marching forth with bands playing and flags flying to take a gamble justified largely by the size of the stakes. Lee risked all and lost. After a day spent burying his dead and restoring organization to his army, Lee put his troops on the road south, back to Virginia.
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The third Confederate disaster of summer 1863 occurred in Europe. On June 30, Roebuck introduced his resolution to recognize the Southern nation in concert with France in the House of Commons. Amid debate on the resolution, he revealed the substance of his conversations with the French Emperor. Commons was incensed at Roebuck’s and Lindsay’s free-lance diplomacy, and Roebuck withdrew his resolution. Roebuck’s
faux pas
deepened the English chill, and Napoleon III, after learning of the results at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, resisted the notion of recognizing the Confederacy unilaterally. France needed a strong New World ally.
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Vicksburg’s defenders had numbered 30,000. Gettysburg had cost nearly as many in killed, wounded, and missing. The Confederacy had lost France as well, and in the aftermath of debacle, the Confederates suffered a severe loss of confidence in themselves.

Johnston blamed Vicksburg first upon Pemberton’s failure to follow orders and then upon Davis’ interference.
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Davis, when Josiah Gorgas lamely remarked that Vicksburg had fallen for want of supplies, snapped, “Yes, from want of provisions inside, and a general outside who wouldn’t fight.”
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Lee blamed himself for Gettysburg. When others did likewise in print, Lee offered his resignation and urged the President to fill his place with someone who could inspire more confidence among the public.
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