My friend who lives in the south and I debated about slavery and the context of who was really to blame for the Civil War, he claims that slavery wasn't all that bad and that there were some slaves who actually didn't want to be freed. I thought this was ridiculous and wanted to know if any of you professionals actually know anything about this, or if across the board no slaves were against abolition.
Why don't we ask them what they thought?
Here's Fountain Hughes, interviewed in Baltimore, Maryland on June 11, 1949:
Now… after we got freed and they turned us out like cattle…we could…we didn't have nowhere to go. And we didn't have nobody to boss us and we didn't know nothing. There wasn't no schools. And when they started a little school, why, the people that were slaves, there couldn't many of them go to school except they had a father and a mother. And my father was dead, and my mother was living, but she had three, four other little children, and she had to put them all to work for to help take care of the others. So we had … we had it what you call, worse than dogs has got it now. Dogs has got it now better than we had it when we come along.
Freedom was a big deal, but it didn't solve slaves immediate concerns: food, shelter, clothing -- the basic essentials of life. Until that moment, they knew where their next meal was coming from. Ezra Adams explained this in 1937:
"You ain’t gwine [going] to believe dat de slaves on our plantation didn’t stop workin’ for old marster, even when they was told dat they was free. Us didn’t want no more freedom than us was gittin’ on our plantation already. Us knowed too well dat us was well took care of, wid a plenty of vittles to eat and tight log and board houses to live in. De slaves, where I lived, knowed after de war dat they had abundance of dat somethin’ called freedom, what they could not eat, wear, and sleep in. Yes, sir, they soon found out dat freedom ain’t nothin’, ’less you is got somethin’ to live on and a place to call home. Dis livin’ on liberty is lak young folks livin’ on love after they gits married. It just don’t work. No, sir, it las’ so long and not a bit longer. Don’t tell me! It sho’ don’t hold good when you has to work, or when you gits hongry. You knows dat poor white folks and niggers has got to work to live, regardless of liberty, love, and all them things."
Many (if not most) slaves left their former masters simply because they now had the right to do so. Many eventually settled back into situations not much different from what they were in before. George Simmons, enslaved in Alabama and Texas, explained in 1937:
"Massa, he tell us when freedom come, and some of stays ’round awhile, ’cause whar is we’uns goin’? We didn’ know what to do and we didn’ know how to keep ourselves, and what was we to do to get food and a place to live? Dose was ha’d times, ’cause de country tore up and de business bad."
The North may have won the war, but the South won the peace. Robert J. Cook's Troubled Commemoration is an account of the Civil War centennial in 1960 and does a good job of explaining how Southern views of the war -- that slavery was a side issue, that secession was a noble but doomed action -- came to dominate the postwar era. Modern studies, starting right about the time of that centennial, have finally killed those notions, though they still live on among the less-informed and mis-informed.
"Six hundred thousand Americans did not die for anything as nebulous as states rights or tariffs," Jamie Malanowski wrote in a 2011 review of Troubled Commemoration. "They died because slaveholders wanted to preserve their human property and expand their slaveholding empire, and they were willing to demolish the union and bring tragedy to nearly every family in this land in order to protect their right to own human beings."
This reminds me of a well-known quote by Harriet Tubman: "I freed thousands. I could've freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves." Source: https://www.maxwell.syr.edu/news.aspx?id=262
Your friend is right in the sense that there were many that preferred living in their current state on a plantation to going into a world in which they had no support, shelter, skills or social network. This does not speak to slavery being "not that bad" but rather the lack of opportunity outside the plantation and the fact that most slaves were intentionally kept illiterate and unskilled.
Source: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery/experience/education/docs1.html
I liken it to an abusive relationship in which one partner stays with the other because because they are worried they will never find another better situation.