1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [193]
Yet the slaveholders’ confident public declarations were belied, as usual, by their private confessions.
It is true that some Confederate officers had enough faith in certain trusted slaves to bring them along to war and even put guns in their hands. This occurred especially at the beginning of the war, in tight-knit local militia units, including those around Hampton. It is also true that some free blacks, especially those of mixed race, voluntarily—perhaps even enthusiastically—joined up. Human nature is a complicated thing. Later history would show, moreover, that such support of their oppressors was not entirely irrational. Moble Hopson, a very light-skinned mixed-race man near Hampton, would recall that when he was a boy before the war, no one mentioned his race, and local authorities even looked the other way when he attended a tiny church school with the white children. But as soon as the war ended, he was summarily thrown out of that school. He and his family would henceforth be classed as Negroes and lumped together with the masses of destitute (and now dangerous) black freedmen, their past privileges revoked.64
The “black Confederates”—a misleading term, since the Confederacy never accepted Negro enlistments—have received a great deal of attention from present-day apologists for the Lost Cause. Far more widespread throughout the South in early 1861, though, were signs of white fear and black rebellion.
On April 13, as her Charleston mansion trembled with the shock waves of bombs falling on Sumter, and with her husband away at the Confederate fortifications, Mary Chesnut had found herself studying the faces of her black house servants. James Chesnut’s valet, Laurence, sat by the door, apparently “as sleepy and as respectful and as profoundly indifferent” as ever. The other Negroes wore similar expressions. But, the canny Mrs. Chesnut observed, “they carry it too far. You could not tell that they hear even the awful row that is going on in the bay, even though it is dinning in their ears night and day. And people talk before them as if they were chairs and tables. And they make no sign. Are they stolidly stupid or wiser than we are, silent and strong, biding their time?”65
For her, as for many slaveholders, that question answered itself. As early as November, towns and counties across the South had begun stepping up slave patrols, worried that Lincoln’s election would inspire Negroes to rebel. One unsettling story told of a Georgia slave who suddenly refused to chop wood for his master and mistress, telling them that “Lincoln was elected now, and he was free.” The black man, according to a newspaper, “after being sent to the whipping-post, gained new light on the subject of Lincoln and Slavery, and returned to his duty.” Many of the first Southern militia companies that formed that winter, the reporter added, “had quite as much to do with fighting niggers as with repelling Abolitionists.”66
When war became inevitable, Mary Chesnut herself predicted that Southerners would have to deal “with Yankees in front and negroes in the rear.”67 Many whites shared this expectation. On May 4, a farmer in Alabama named William H. Lee wrote to warn Jefferson Davis: “the Negroes is very Hiley Hope up that they will soon Be free so i think that you Had Better order out All the Negroe felers from 17 years oald up Ether fort them up or put them in the army and Make them fite like good fells for wee ar in danger of our lives hear among them.”68
Southerners tried in vain to keep their slaves from learning any information that might put the wrong sorts of ideas into their heads. William Henry Trescot, the wealthy Charlestonian who had acted more or less as a double agent within Buchanan’s State Department, took to speaking about current affairs only in French when a Negro was present. This was not a widely