The former slaves were now the lords of creation and, with the aid of the Yankees, the lowest and most ignorant ones were on top. The better class of them, scorning freedom, were suffering as severely as their white masters. Thousands of house servants, the highest caste in the slave population, remained with their white folks, doing manual labor which had been beneath them in the old days. Many loyal field hands also refused to avail themselves of the new freedom, but the hordes of "trashy free issue n*****s," who were causing most of the trouble, were drawn largely from the field-hand class.
In slave days, these lowly blacks had been despised by the house n*****s and yard n*****s as creatures of small worth. Just as Ellen had done, other plantation mistresses throughout the South had pu
