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By Root 1642 0

had never disappeared: it had simply gone underground. Within their most private selves, many Southerners—even those with large investments in the institution—had secret thoughts that they would never have spoken aloud; thoughts that, if spoken, would have been crimes. Even in South Carolina; even in the very heart of the rebellion. Mary Chesnut, the most penetrating gazer into the Southern soul, was married to a former United States senator and ardent Confederate, heir apparent to more than five hundred family slaves. (Indeed, James Chesnut was one of the two adjutants who delivered Beauregard’s surrender demand to Fort Sumter.) Publicly, Mary supported her husband when, for instance, he declared on the Senate floor that “commerce, civilization, and Christianity” all went hand in hand to sanctify Negro servitude. Privately, she wrote in her diary in March 1861: “I wonder if it be a sin to think slavery a curse to any land. [Charles] Sumner said not one word of this hated institution which is not true.” A few months later she confessed her belief that two-thirds of the slaveholders in the Confederate army inwardly “dislike slavery as much as Mrs. Stowe or Greeley.” And yet, she also recognized, they had just gone off to lay down their lives for it.36

The last time any significant misgivings about slavery had been aired publicly in Virginia was thirty years earlier, in the wake of the terrifying 1831 Negro uprising led by Nat Turner. A month after Turner’s execution—he was flayed, quartered, and beheaded—legislators gathered in Richmond to consider various plans that would have emancipated the state’s slaves and resettled them somewhere beyond the Old Dominion’s borders. The governor, John Floyd (father of the Buchanan administration’s notorious secretary of war), went so far as to write in his diary: “I will not rest until slavery is abolished in Virginia.” But it soon evolved into the same classic debate that would reemerge, in different shapes and colors, at other moments in American history: when threatened from within, should the state reform itself, or clamp down on dissent? In the end, Virginians chose to clamp down. And so sedition laws and slave patrols became indispensible elements of Southern life. Northern publications expressing unorthodox sentiments on the peculiar institution were seized and destroyed by local postmasters. By 1861, the patrols around Hampton paid surprise visits at least weekly to every slave quarter in the county, making sure that no Negroes would “stroll from one plantation to another” or hold “unlawful assemblies,” among other misdeeds. Colonel Mallory’s militiamen checked outbound vessels for fugitives. Order must be heaven’s first law.37

Memories of the Turner rebellion stayed fresh in Hampton. The calamity and its backlash had unfolded just across the James River in Southampton County—formerly just another quiet old corner of the tidewater, another place of small farms and “kind” slaveholders.38 There, in a matter of hours, the time-hallowed relationship between the races had devolved into a nightmare: white children with their brains dashed out, black men’s heads skewered on stakes along the road to deter other would-be conspirators. After that, who was to say that such horrors might not occur without warning elsewhere in the Virginia tidewater—or, indeed, in any town or county of the slave states? This never-ending threat of black violence must be met with a never-ending, and even more forceful, threat of white violence in return. Pieces of Turner’s body were distributed as talismans among the whites; one Southampton man made a change purse from its skin. Eternal vigilance would be the price of Southern liberties. Whites must learn, and must teach their children—as blacks had been doing for centuries—to bear a constant burden of fear. Perhaps even more difficult, they must learn to pretend that this fear did not exist. “There is something suspicious,” noted the sharp-eyed William H. Russell, reporting this time from a South Carolina plantation, “in the constant never-ending statement