'Extravagant expectations' of freedom: rumour, political struggle, and the Christmas insurrection scare of 1865 in the American South

Past & Present, Nov, 1997 by Steven Hahn

Indeed, the rumours of federally sponsored property redistribution thrived, as rumours often do, on the mix of hopes and fears that the war had unleashed and on the great contention that characterized the making of federal policies. Observers pointed, not only to the influence of sympathetic Union soldiers and government agents who wished to break the slaveocracy even in the face of executive resistance, but also to the dire warnings of Confederate planters who had tried to rally support against the Yankee invaders. General Rufus Saxton, briefly the Freedmen's Bureau Assistant Commissioner for South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, summarized the situation:

Previous to the termination of the war the negroes had heard from those

in rebellion that it was the purpose of our government to divide up the

southern plantations among them, and that was one of the reasons the

rebels urged among their own people to excite them to greater activity

... Our own acts of Congress and particularly the one creating the

Freedmen's Bureau, which was extensively circulated among them,

further strengthened them in this dearest wish of their heart -- that they

were to have homesteads.(11)

The rapidity and scope with which rumours about federal policies, with attendant embellishments, circulated among southern blacks astonished some northern officials. `It was a wonder to me', Lt. George O. Sanderson, who served in North Carolina, remarked: `It seemed to pass, as intelligence will, in the strangest manner, from one to another quickly ... with unaccountable speed'.(12) The slaves had called their networks of communication, built out of years of struggle, experience and accumulated trust, the `grapevine way', or `grapevine telegraph'. House servants, coachmen, artisans and hired slaves, some of whom had gained the rudiments of literacy, carried news from the big house, the courthouse, the tavern and the market-place back into the quarters where it was discussed, interpreted and then further disseminated, when slaves visited kinfolk on other plantations and farms, met each other on the back roads, or held brush-arbour religious meetings. In these ways the slaves, in many different locales, learned of the antislavery movement in the North, the sectional conflict and other `great events'. So it was that `when the war came', as Virginia ex-slave Horace Muse recalled, `de news spread like a whirlwin'. We heard it whispered "round" dat a war come fer to set de niggers free'.(13)

The Civil War and early Reconstruction not only brought the slaves' communication networks to more public light, but also helped to extend, deepen and institutionalize them. The combination of Confederate mobilization and Union invasion pushed and pulled thousands of slaves to social sites where rumours, news and debate proliferated in a manner impossible to control: to Confederate fortifications and war industries; to Union and Confederate army posts; to federal contraband camps; and to newly formed black Union regiments. William I. Johnson, taken by his master into General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia in 1863, first `learned from another slave that Lincoln had freed all of us'. A year later, in camp near Fredricksburg, he seized an opportunity to talk with some recently captured Yankee prisoners, who `explained to us about slavery and freedom ... and told us if we got a chance to steal away from camp and got over to the Yankee side we would be free'. Along with four other slaves, Johnson soon fled and ended up in a Union quartermaster's corps.(14)