The negro: the southerner's problem

by Thomas Nelson Page

IV

There is a universal belief that the Negroes under slavery had no education. I have seen it stated a number of times that it was made a crime by law, in every State of the South, to teach one to read. Such a statement is not true.[60] Teaching them was not encouraged, generally, and such laws existed at one time in four of the States of the South; but they did not exist in Virginia. Several of our Negroes could read, and if it was not the same on most of the plantations, it was at least the same on those of which I had any knowledge. My great-grandmother’s maid used, I have heard, to read to her regularly, and in our family the ladies used to teach the girls as much as they would learn. But apart from book-learning, they had, especially the house-servants, the education which comes from daily association with people of culture, and it was an education not to be despised. Some gentlemen carried on a correspondence about home affairs with their butlers during their absence from home. For instance, I recall hearing that when Mr. Abel P. Upshur was Secretary of the Navy, some gentlemen were at his house, and were discussing at table some public matter, when the butler gave them the latest news about it, saying that he had that morning received a letter from his master.

There is an idea that the Negroes were in the state of excitement and agonized expectancy of freedom that the Anglo-Saxon race felt it would have been in under similar circumstances. Much is made, at certain kinds of meetings, of the great part which they contributed toward saving the Union. Discussion of this may be set aside as bordering on the controversial. But it may not be outside of this phase of the matter, and it will throw some light on it to state briefly what was the attitude of the Negro slave population toward the quarrel between the North and the South.

The total number of Negro enlistments and reënlistments on the Federal side was between 189,000 and 190,000. When it is considered that this embraced all the soldier element of the Negroes in the North and of the refugee element in the South, who were induced to enter the army, either by persuasion of bounties or under stress of compulsion, whether of military draft or of “belly-pinching,” the number does not appear large. After midsummer, 1863, the North occupied the States of Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, half of Virginia, of Tennessee, of Louisiana, of Arkansas, of Mississippi, and considerable portions of the Carolinas and Alabamas. That is, she occupied a third, and nearer a half, of the entire slave-holding territory of the South, while the penetration of her raiding parties into the regions occupied by the Southern troops furnished, at times, opportunity to, possibly, a fourth of the young men of that section to escape from bondage had they been moved by the passion of freedom. It is at once a refutation of the charge of the cruelty of slavery, so commonly accepted, and an evidence of the easy-going amiability and docility of the Negro race that, under all the excitement and through all the opportunities and temptations surrounding them, they should not only have remained faithful to their masters, but that the stress of the time should have appeared to weld the bond between them.

That there was a wild and adventurous element among them is well known. It was to be expected, and was an element in whom the instincts of wild life in the jungle and the forests survived. Every large plantation had one or more who had the runaway spirit keenly alive. There were several on our place. They ran away when they were crossed in love or in any other desire of their hearts. They ran away if they were whipped, and, as they were the shirkers and loafers on the plantations, if anyone was whipped, it was likely to be one of them. Yet, curiously enough, if a runaway was caught and was whipped, he was very unlikely to run off again until the spirit seized him, when nothing on earth could stop him.[61]

One other class was likely to furnish the element that went off, and this was the “pampered class.” House-servants were more likely to go than field-hands. Their ears were somehow more attuned to the song of the siren.[62]

Against those who availed themselves of the opportunities offered them to escape from the bondage of domestic slavery may be put the great body of the Negro race who, whether from inability to grasp the vastness of the boon of liberty held out to them, or from fear of the ills they knew not of, or from sheer content with a life where the toil was not drudgery and the flesh-pots overbalanced the idea of freedom, not only held fast to their masters, but took sides with them with a quickened feeling and a deepened affection. For every one who fled to freedom, possibly one hundred stood by their masters’ wives and children.

Doubtless there were many—possibly, the most of them—who remained from sheer inertia or fear to leave. But a far larger number identified themselves with their masters, and this union was not one of lip-service, but of sentiment, of heart and soul.

In truth, they were infected with the same spirit and ardor that filled the whites, and had the South called for volunteers from the Negroes, I question not that they could have gotten half a million men.[63]

A story is told of one of the old Negroes who belonged to the family into which General Scott married. He went to the war to take care of one of his young masters. He had no doubt whatever as to the justice of the cause, but General Scott was to his mind the embodiment of war and carnage, and the General had espoused the other side. This disturbed him greatly, and one night he was heard praying down outside the camp. After praying for everyone, he prayed: “And O Lord, please to convut Marse Lieutenan’ Gen’l Scott and turn him f’om de urrer o’ he ways.”