Been in the Storm So Long by Leon F. Litwack

by us, with what they consider their own plantations and possessions.” He was no doubt correct in his assumption. The slaves might have marveled at the audacity of the Yankees, and some perhaps derived pleasure from the discomfiture of their owners, but the indiscriminate and wasteful destruction of the food supply and what many regarded as their home struck them as excessive and unnecessary. The Yankees called it “a holy war,” a former South Carolina slave observed, “but they and Wheeler’s men was a holy terror to dis part of de world, as naked and hungry as they left it.” It was the pillaging, a former Mississippi slave recalled, that turned him against the Yankees, and he shared, too, the resentment of numerous blacks that the soldiers destroyed what they had worked so hard to produce. “We helped raise that meat they stole. They left us to starve and fed their fat selves on what was our living.” No less disturbing had been those planters and Confederate soldiers who had ordered the destruction of crops rather than leave them to the Yankees. “It made my innards hurt,” CharlieDavenport recalled, “to see fire ‘tached to somethin’ dat had cost us Niggers so much labor an’ hones’ sweat.” 41
    What compounded the bitterness was that the Yankees pillaged both whites and blacks, the Big House and the slave cabins alike. “The negroes all share the same fate as ourselves,” Emma Holmes noted after the Yankees had passed through Camden, South Carolina, “everything ransacked and whatever was wanted stolen, though the Yankees told them they had come to free them and called them ‘sis,’ talking most familiarly.” That they should be robbed and defrauded by those who claimed to be their liberators, that their cabins should be searched and ransacked, their wives and daughters insulted and abused, came as a shocking revelation to many slaves, leaving them both angry and confused. “I always bin hear dat de Yankees was gwine help de nigger!” one of the Allston servants exclaimed to her mistress after the Yankees had seized her few possessions. “W’a’ kynd a help yu call dis! Tek ebery ting I got in de wurld.” The depth of black disillusionment with the Yankees is suggested by the number of slaves who compared them to the much-despised and degraded poor whites. “By instinct,” Andy Brice of South Carolina observed, “a nigger can make up his mind pretty quick ’bout de creed of white folks, whether they am buckra or whether they am not. Every Yankee I see had de stamp of poor white trash on them.” Perhaps that was what a Mississippi slave had in mind after a Union soldier had addressed her as “Auntie.” “Don’t you call me ‘Auntie,’ ” she retorted, “I ain’t none o’ yo’ kin.” 42
    With considerable ingenuity, based on years of experience with their own “white folks,” some slaves managed to preserve their few possessions from the clutches of the Yankees. In Camden, South Carolina, for example, the soldiers seized the blankets belonging to an elderly black shoemaker. But he proved more than equal to the crisis. Feigning “a tone of terror,” he warned them not to mix his blankets with theirs, “as all the house girls had some catching disease.” On hearing this, the alarmed Yankees not only returned the blankets but presented the black with the mule on which they had placed the loot. Equally artful were the servants in the Mary S. Mallard household in Montevideo, Georgia, who sought both to avoid conscription into the Union Army and to save their belongings.
    From being a young girl she [the cook] had assumed the attitude and appearance of a sick old woman, with a blanket thrown over her head and shoulders, and scarcely able to move. Their devices are various and amusing. Gilbert keeps a sling under his coat and slips his arm into it as soon as they appear; Charles walks with a stick and limps dreadfully; Niger a few days since kept them from stealing