I have read of slaves who didn't want to leave their homes during and
after the war, in many cases they were forced away at gunpoint. It
happened to my husbands' gr-gr grandfather, a Harrison who lived in
Powhatan County, somehow related to the Va. Harrisons [it's a long
story]. A group of northern soldiers came riding up to his farm [the
brothers were carpenters and brickmasons, not the elite, a church
they built still stands in Pow. Co., it has stunning woodwork inside]
and ordered the slaves to leave. They were supposedly crying,
clustered at the door, didn't want to go, and the soldiers threatened
to shoot them if they didn't. Mr. Harrison [who had been a Conf.
Cavalry Captain and set fire to the 14th street bridge after the
evacuation of Richmond] appeared with a rifle and threatened to shoot
the soldiers if they shot any of the slaves, and they rode away. Or
so the family story goes.
I suppose there might have been genuine affection between some slaves
and their masters; and cases of life being good but as they had never
known freedom, they didn't know what they never had ["One can not
aspire to what one cannot imagine."- Eudora Welty]; cases of these
WPA accounts where, as the wit said, "marriage is the triumph of hope
over experience"- in the interim you forget the bad parts and only
remember the good; and what also comes to mind are the Russians, so
many of whom did not want democracy or freedom, it seemed to scare
them, they wanted to go back to the old Communist life or even the
Czarist days. Human psychology can be a puzzling thing.
Nancy
-------
I was never lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.
--Daniel Boone
On Feb 28, 2007, at 10:21 PM, Basil Forest wrote:
> I just finished reviewing the slave narratives taken from former
> slaves by
> the WPA during the Depression that is available from the National
> Archives. I
> was surprised at how many of the former slaves were so nostalgic
> for the
> days when they were slaves (it seemed to be the clear majority),
> and their
> comments on how well they were provided for by their masters. I
> was equally
> surprised by how few of the former slaves complained about their
> treatment by
> their masters.
>
> Has anyone compiled data on the positive versus negative comments
> of these
> 2300 former slaves that were part of the WPA project?
>
> I reviewed the entire group of interviews, not just those selected by
> ancestry.com for their CD.
>
>
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