'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

Although such imaginings could be seen as evidence of the painful and potentially debilitating legacy of enforced dependency, they more likely exemplified one of the ways in which ex-slaves chose recognized and available appellations of authority and respect to interpret the great events sweeping the South (and, not incidentally, to rebuke their former owners). Significantly, they also chose others which assimilated Lincoln into their own leadership and struggles. `The "rice people" always spoke of the President as "Uncle Sam" and "Pap" Linkum', the sensitive northern teacher, Elizabeth Hyde Botume, wrote from the coast of South Carolina, hinting at his association with the elders and preachers of the slave community: `They gave him credit for all the wonderful things that had been done since the world began'.(25)

Such personified representations of the coming of freedom melded with, and were reinforced by, the millennial strains that ran through a developing Afro-Christianity. For years the slaves, linking the figures of Moses and Jesus in a manner that some white observers deemed `curious', `crude', or `ignorant of the scriptures', had prayed for deliverance from their collective suffering; when it came, the linkage seemed to be embodied in God's new earthly agents.(26) `[The negroes] almost adore the persons who have brought them deliverance', Revd Horace James noted, `but Abraham Lincoln is to them the chiefest among ten thousand ... They mingle his name with their prayers and their praises evermore. They have great reverence for the "head men" and for all in authority'. A South Carolina freedman, after learning of Lincoln's death, told Philadelphia Laura M. Towne that `Lincoln died for we, Christ died for we, and me believe him de same mans'. `Talk of Linkum; no man seen Linkum; Linkum walk as Jesus walk', another somewhat mystically informed a federal army captain who later remarked on `what ideas they get from the Bible'. Others conflated the figures of Abraham Lincoln, William T. Sherman and Rufus Saxton with those of Moses and Jesus.(27)

The rumours of land redistribution resonated powerfully with the millennial meanings the slaves attached to their deliverance from bondage. After all, they called emancipation the `day of Jubilo' and sang of it in many parts of the South:

Old masater's gone away and the darkies stayed at home;

Must be now that the kingdom's come and the year for jubilee.

Rich in the stories, characters, images and allegories of the Bible as their community religious experiences came to be, could they not have known too that the Biblical `jubilee' joined freedom with the restitution of the land to its rightful claimants?(28)

Freedpeople in south Georgia may well have been signifying such an understanding when they proclaimed `that "Head man" will come before next Christmas and will make them "more free" and "distribute the lands" to them'. Others in Mississippi heard (`from the voice of the Angels probably', as a local agent chortled, perhaps acknowledging echoes of the millennial Book of Revelation) `that a Great Document has been received by the "Freedmens Bureau" sealed with four seals ... to be broken on the 1st day of January 1866', the third anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. `This wonderful paper [is believed] to contain [the freedmen's] final orders from the Yankee Government which they believe is omnipotent'. The abolitionist, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who commanded black troops in wartime South Carolina and listened carefully to their spirituals, thus tellingly insisted that `the Apocalypse ... with the books of Moses constituted their Bible; all that lay between, even the narratives of the life of Jesus, they hardly cared to read or hear'.(29)