When mutilated masters returned from the bloodbath, some slaves raged as well as wept. "Dey brung" Massa Billy home, one South Carolina slave grieved to a contemporary, "with he jaw split open . . . He teeth all shine through he cheek. . . . I be happy iffen I could kill me jes’ one Yankee. I hated dem ’cause dey hurt my white people."
William W. Freehling, The South Vs. The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War, New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 90.
Sure slavery was wrong but the myth that slaves were regularly beaten and killed is wrong.
Some even carried guns, but the revisionists would one believe therwise.
Other aspects of the new work regimen operated to the slaves’ advantage. Slave lumbermen, many of them hired out for short periods of time, carried axes and, like slave drovers and herdsmen, were generally armed with knives and guns – necessities for men who worked in the wild and hunted animals for food and furs. Woodsmen had access to horses, as did slaves who tended cattle and swine. Periodic demands that slaveowners disarm their slaves and restrict their access to horses and mules confirmed that many believed these to be dangerous practices, but they did nothing to halt them. In short, slave lumbermen and drovers were not to be trifled with. Their work allowed considerable mobility and latitude in choosing their associates and bred a sense of independence, not something planters wanted to encourage. Slaves found it a welcome relief from the old plantation order.
Ira Berlin. Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves, Boston, MA: Harvard Univerity Press, 2004, pp. 90-91.
Spot on! Good post.