Recent
spasms of old-school racism – L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s bizarre
recordings, and the musings of freeloading anarchist Cliven Bundy – have put
the subject of racism back in the news on a more or less national scale. It
lesser ways, racism is in the news every day, but is probably not something a
lot of Americans have cause to spend time thinking about.
Bundy
put forth a familiar version of the modern “slaves through dependency” meme,
but enlivened it with some choice neo-Confederate sentiments by suggesting that slave days were happy days, and that
picking cotton gave black people a sense of purpose. He said, “And because they
were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do? They abort their
young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned
how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves,
picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better
off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less
freedom.”
Reading
that, one can’t help but think of the famous quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln,
“Whenever I hear any one arguing for slavery I feel
a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally” (The
Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited
by Roy P. Basler, Volume VIII, "Speech to One Hundred Fortieth Indiana
Regiment" (March 17, 1865), p. 361).
Coincidentally,
when the Bundy and Sterling brouhahas broke out, I was reading an old Civil War
memoir by a Wisconsin soldier which addressed the treatment of slaves in the
South. It’s strange and disquieting that as a society, we’re rebutting the same
arguments and same mythologies that people were rebutting 150 years ago. It
seems like it should be ancient history, but it's not.
Melvin
Grigsby’s memoir, The Smoked Yank, was published in 1888. Grigsby, a member of the 2nd
Wisconsin Cavalry, spent the early part of the war mostly in Arkansas and
Mississippi. He was captured by guerillas outside of Vicksburg and was
transported to Castle Morgan, the prison at Cahaba, Alabama. Eventually he was
transferred to Andersonville prison in Georgia, and later to Florence, South
Carolina. He made a number of escape attempts, finally succeeding on the last
and made his way back home.
Grigsby
and his comrades disdained slavery, and likewise disdained the early-war policy
of protecting the property of slaveowners in areas where the Union army held sway.
While stationed at Helena, Arkansas, Grigsby and some buddies took emancipation
into their own hands. Of that time, he wrote:
Helena is in the cotton belt. There were thousands of negroes on
the cotton plantations. The government was at that time trying to save the
Union and slavery too. The negroes came into Helena by hundreds. Their masters
would follow them in and get permits to take them back. The privates, many of
us were not in accord with the Government on the negro question. We used to follow
the masters when they started away with their slaves, release the slaves and
convince the masters that it would be best to keep away from camp.
On one occasion, Carr and I saw a man leave town with a lot of
his negroes who had run away. We followed him out about ten miles and then
stopped him. We sent the negroes back to town, took the master's horse, and
told him to stay out of Helena. Carr asked me to ride back with the negroes, as
they were afraid other slave-owners would arrest them, while he would conceal
himself and see if the enraged master would attempt to follow us into
camp.
Before I got back to town, Carr overtook me leading another
captured horse. He absolutely refused to answer any questions, and, fearing
that the man had started to follow us back, and that Carr had killed him, I was
willing that silence should be maintained. A few weeks after, I saw this
slave-owner in town. He wasn't trying to take out negroes any more. I pointed
him out to Carr, who then told me what had happened before. He saw the man
coming on a horse, waylaid him, took him into the woods and handcuffed his
hands around a tall tree and left him there. Carr had found the handcuffs on a
plantation where they had been used in disciplining negroes, and he carried
them in his saddle-bags as a curiosity ; said he left the man near the traveled
road so that there would be no question about his being released.
All that summer we carried on a warfare of that kind against
what we believed to be the mistaken policy of the government. It had a bad
effect on the soldiers.
Grigsby, as I mentioned, would have taken issue with Rancher
Bundy’s notions of happy days on the old plantation. On that subject, he
wrote:
On
that plantation I used to read the records kept by the overseer. It seems that
every overseer of a large plantation kept a daily record. That record showed
that there were negroes whipped, bucked, and gagged, and otherwise punished
every day. Every negro who came from the field with less than his stint of
cotton, received so many lashes. I saw there the same kind of instruments of
torture that I afterward saw in Andersonville. One machine was rigged for
stretching negroes over a large roller, so that the lash could be applied to
the bare skin. If anyone believes that the cruelties practiced on slaves were
exaggerated in Uncle Tom's Cabin, let him hunt up and read one of those
plantation records.
Finally,
I want to share a passage in which Grigsby has some fun at a slaveowner’s expense,
in a section he entitled “Joking with Johnnies.” He makes many sarcastic
references to “southern chivalry.” In this instance, Grigsby was being
transported to prison, and during one stop along the way, the prisoners were
guarded in a slave hut. I have edited out the “N-word,” because that’s the way
I was raised.
We
witnessed another illustration of southern chivalry at the same town. We were
guarded in a negro quarter or hut. Our supper was brought in by a good-looking
mulatto girl. The owner of the place, the girl's master, came in while we were
eating, and seemed desirous of arguing with us the questions that divided the
North and South.
"You
uns," said he, "think a [black] just as good as a white man, don't
you?"
"Yes,
in some respects," we said.
"Now,
I suppose you would just as soon marry a [black] wench as to marry a white
woman, wouldn't you?"
Thinking
the old gentleman would take a joke, I said to him:
“I
wouldn't like to marry any [black] wench that I have seen around here, for fear
I would have some of you rebels for a daddy-in-law."
As
I spoke, I looked from him to the mulatto girl, standing near. Whoopee! How the
old man did rave! He stormed and swore and finally started for the house
saying, he wouldn't stand such an insult from no damned Yankee. He meant
business, too, for he soon came back with a shot gun, which he would doubtless
have fired into us, had not Boatwright stood in the door, and, partly by the
influence of his drawn revolver and partly by persuasion, appeased the old
man's wrath. I was always careful after that about joking with Johnnies.
It was a great pleasure to finally meet two authors who’ve
written important works on the subject. Gene Salecker wrote what most consider
the definitive study in, Disaster on the
Mississippi, the Sultana Explosion, April 27, 1865. Gene was our guide for
the weekend, taking us to the site of Camp Fisk, where former Union POWs from
Cahaba and Andersonville, Midwesterners, were processed for parole. Much of the
area where Camp Fisk was situated remains undeveloped and bucolic. Once paroled, the soldiers were taken by train to
the Vicksburg depot, from whence they hiked to the wharf and boarded steamboats
for the trip home. The floodwall at Vicksburg boasts 32
murals depicting scenes from the town’s history, including the fateful boarding
of over 2,000 Union soldiers onto the Sultana. 
It was also a treat to meet author Alan Huffman (with Anne, at right), whose book,
Sultana: Surviving the Civil War, Prison,and the Worst Maritime Disaster in American History, features Anne’s
ancestor, Romulus Tolbert of the 8th Indiana Cavalry. In a bit of
geographical schizophrenia, Alan splits time between his exceedingly quiet and
lovingly restored old home in rural Mississippi, and an apartment in New York
City. Alan has written some intriguing books on a broad array of subjects,
which you can read about here. 
Three other books round out the respectable Sultana
bookshelf. First, Jerry Potter’s outstanding, The Sultana Tragedy: America’s Greatest Maritime Disaster (Jerry
also wrote the main article in "Blue and Gray" magazine’s Sultana issue –August
1990, vol. vii, issue 6). William O. Bryant’s contribution, from the University
of Alabama Press, is Cahaba Prison and
the Sultana Disaster, a fine, fast-moving, and well-documented narrative.
And finally, an all-important collection of first-person accounts by survivors
– recently reprinted in an attractive edition by the University of Tennessee
Press in their “Voices of the Civil War” series – Loss of the Sultana and Reminiscences of Survivors, by Chester D.
Berry.
There are a couple of lesser books on the subject, including
the flawed Transport to Disaster, by
James W. Elliott and, if I’m not mistaken, some historical fiction.
