10/12/2026
Let the truth be told! 🤔
“De Yankees come. First thing they look for was money. They put a pistol right in my forehead and say: ‘I got to have your money, where is it?’”
That is what Lewis Evans, a black man interviewed near Winnsboro, South Carolina said the Yankees invaders did to him when they arrived at his home.
He was about 96 years old when interviewed in 1937, living in a two-room house and had been born enslaved around 1841.
When the Yankee bluecoats reached his place, the men were gone and the only people left behind were women, children, and the enslaved. Evans had no money to give them. A girl named Caroline did. They took it.
Then the Yankees stripped the place. They took the geese, the chickens, and everything else worth carrying. They cleaned out the smokehouse, emptied the corn crib, and drove the cattle out of the pasture. What they could not haul they burned: the gin-house and the cotton.
On the way out the Yankees shot cows and hogs and left the carcasses in the yard. Evans said the smell hung there for weeks.
Life did not improve with this new “Freedom”. He married Mary Douglas, and a Yankee took a fancy to her and carried her off. She was gone a long time. By the time she came back he had married again.
What was done to Evans was the ordinary work of that invading Union army across the South in 1865, and the hardship fell on white and Black alike.
With the men off fighting, Yankee soldiers pushed into houses where women and children remained, cursed, and demanded money, silver, jewels, and wh***ey. Plenty of those “Yankee” men were foreign-born, only a short time off the boat, marching around southern America plundering multi-generational Americans. If they could not carry something away with them, they would often ruin it: family portraits, beds, tables, dressers, pianos, books, etc. Then they usually took the meat and the corn, the food for both white and black families, and left everybody starving for the rest of the year and beyond.
Fannie Griffin, a black woman of Columbia called the day the Yankees came the worst time she ever had.
Rosa Starke said they left a thousand people cold and hungry. For a great many Black Southerners, the worst day was not the day they were born in slavery. It was the day the Union army arrived.
Things public schools censor, omit, and ignore. -RJ
Source: Interview with Lewis Evans, near Winnsboro, Fairfield County, South Carolina, by W. W. Dixon, Federal Writers’ Project, about 1937, in Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, South Carolina Narratives, Volume XIV, Part 2, pages 30–33, Library of Congress, Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1938.
