White Southerners Had to Believe Blacks Didn’t Object to Being Enslaved
Before and during the American Civil War, most whites in the slave-holding Southern states professed an unwavering conviction that their slaves were happy and content in their bondage, and extremely loyal to their masters. That’s why they were so often surprised, then outraged, when enslaved men ran away and returned as Union soldiers with rifles in hand.
But why did Southerners believe, against all human nature, that black Americans enjoyed being enslaved? To a large degree, I believe, it was because of the Golden Rule.
Because the American South considered itself a Christian culture, a belief that slaves didn’t mind being slaves was necessary to avoid cognitive dissonance between faith and practice.
Southern whites were assured from practically every pulpit throughout the cotton states that slavery was an institution sanctioned by God. After all, they were taught, in the Bible, the patriarch Abraham owned slaves and God never condemned him for it.
But somehow that ecclesiastical reassurance wasn’t quite enough. For one thing, there was that inconvenient command from Jesus that made forcibly keeping people who had done nothing to deserve it in hopeless, never-ending bondage feel a little uncomfortable:
Do to others as you would have them do to you. (Luke 6:31, NIV)
No matter how completely white Southerners may have convinced themselves that slavery was acceptable to God, none of them ever wanted to be enslaved themselves. So, to justify enslaving other people, they had to find a way to believe that however much they themselves would hate being slaves, the real slaves had no problem with it.
White Christians who supported slavery had to believe, almost as an article of faith, that blacks were content to be slaves.
Source: Library of Congress via Wikimedia (public domain)
In his 1899 memoir, The End of An Era, former Confederate army officer John S. Wise expressed his convictions about enslaved black people this way:
“Were not the Negroes perfectly content and happy? Had I not often talked to them on the subject? Had not every one of them told me repeatedly that they loved ‘old Marster’ better than anybody in the world, and would not have freedom if he offered it to them? Of course they had, many and many a time. And that settled it.”
And Keziah Brevard, in a diary entry for November 9, 1860, recorded her conviction that,
“from my experience my own Negroes are as happy as I am: — happier.”
Even when some slaves attacked their masters, most whites managed to reassure themselves that their own slaves loved them. After Mary Chesnut’s cousin Betsey Witherspoon was murdered in her bed by enslaved people in her household, Chesnut wrote in her diary on October 7, 1861:
“If they want to kill us, they can do it when they please, they are noiseless as panthers… We ought to be grateful that anyone of us is alive, but nobody is afraid of their own Negroes. I find everyone, like myself, ready to trust their own yard. I would go down on the plantation tomorrow and stay there even if there were no white person in twenty miles. My Molly and all the rest I believe would keep me as safe as I should be in the Tower of London.”
With such convictions firmly planted in their minds, many Southern whites had great difficulty understanding how their slaves could voluntarily run away and take up arms against their former masters.
But what if they weren’t doing it voluntarily?
The Myth That Blacks Were Coerced Into Fighting for the Union
The comforting belief that black people were content in their enslavement was reinforced again and again by newspaper accounts claiming that whenever slaves ran away into Union-controlled territory and joined the U.S. Army, it was because they were kidnapped by Yankees and forced to do so.
A typical example of this type of story was carried in the January 3, 1863 edition of the Richmond (Virginia) Daily Dispatch, the most widely read newspaper in the Confederate capital city.
U.S. President Abraham Lincoln had issued his Emancipation Proclamation two days before, on January 1, 1863. In doing so he not only freed the slaves in the rebellious states, but also invited black men to join the Union Army and fight to destroy slavery once and for all.
In the wake of the Proclamation, the Dispatch reported on the efforts of “Abolition Generals Hunter and Sexton” to recruit blacks into the Union Army at Beaufort, South Carolina. The article said:
“The negro brigade proved a failure. Conscription was resorted to to fill its ranks. Guards were sent to Beaufort from the camp to arrest and bring before the recruiting officers such negroes as were physically competent to serve in the army, that they might volunteer into the Black Brigade — at least get into it in some shape or other. The poor fellows attempted to resist, but found it of no avail. They attempted to hide from their pursuers, but they were hunted like dogs, and dragged out of their houses, from barns, cellars, and taken from their wives and families, that they might enjoy the privilege of volunteering.”
Based on propagandistic reports such as this, many readers of the Confederate press were convinced that the ex-slaves who were undeniably fighting in Northern armies had been dragged kicking and screaming into the ranks.
Why are those happy slaves shooting at us?
— What Confederate soldiers may have been asking on the battlefield.
Yet, of the 180,000 black men who served in Union blue during the war, almost all enlisted as volunteers. At least half, about 90,000, were former slaves from Confederate states. And 25 African American soldiers and sailors were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for their gallantry in combat. That these were all unwilling victims of Yankee coercion must have become less and less believable as the war wore on.
Still, the notion that enslaved people were fundamentally loyal to their masters continued in the South throughout the war. In June of 1865, two months after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, Mary Chesnut wrote an entry in her Diary From Dixie referring to the “Negro slaves whom they (the Yankees) tried to seduce.”
Comforting delusions die hard.
© 2022 Ronald E Franklin