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By Root 1027 0

they were content to spend their remaining years in the service and care of those who had exploited them for a lifetime of labor. But as the troops prepared to move on, the woman suddenly stood up, and a “fierce, almost devilish” look came across a face that only minutes before had been almost devoid of expression. “What for you sit dar?” she asked, pointing her finger at the old man crouched in the corner of the fireplace. “You s’pose I wait sixty years for nutten? Don’t yer see de door open? I’se follow my child; I not stay. Yes, anudder day I goes ’long wid dese people; yes, sar, I walks till I drop in my tracks.” Only a Rembrandt, the officer later wrote, could have done justice to this scene. “A more terrible sight I never beheld.”64

If the Civil War initially drew some masters and slaves closer together, with both now sharing privations and suffering, the approach of the Union Army underscored the ambiguous nature of that relationship and forced the master to reevaluate not only individual slaves in whom he had placed his confidence but the entire system of racial subordination. Both sides in the war had an obvious stake in how the slaves responded to the Yankees. The faithful black reinforced the conviction that the great mass of slaves (there had always been some “bad niggers”) were perfectly content and had no real wish to alter their status; the fidelity and steadiness demonstrated by the slaves, a North Carolinian argued, “speaks not only well for themselves but well for their training and the system under which they lived.” Union propagandists and abolitionists, on the other hand, viewed the exodus of slaves to and with the Union Army as an oppressed and brutalized population welcoming its release from bondage. In that spirit, a Union reporter wrote of a recent victory:

The moment our forces defeated the enemy at Labadieville, hundreds of negroes, besotted by the most severe system of Slavery, were in a moment left to themselves, and in a delirium of excitement, they first threw themselves in an ecstacy of joy, on their knees, and “bressed God that Massa Linkum had come,” and then, as semi-civilized people would naturally do, they commenced indulging in all sorts of excesses, the first fruits of their unrestricted liberty.65

That captured the public mood in the North perfectly, indicting the enemy (slaveholders) while at the same time explaining black excesses in ways that reinforced prevailing racial beliefs and suggested the need for some form of continued racial control.

Caught between these polar positions were the slaves, themselves, many of whom were sufficiently familiar with the expectations of white people to frame an appropriate response.

5

THE EXPERIENCE of Wilmer Shields, who managed several plantations in Louisiana in the absence of the owner, suggests only the magnitude of the problem that thousands of masters and overseers had to confront when Union soldiers passed through the vicinity. “You can form no idea of my situation and the anxiety of my mind,” he informed his employer on December 11, 1863. “All is anarchy and confusion here—everything going to destruction—and the negroes on the plantation insubordinate—My life has been several times in danger.” Several weeks later, Shields confessed that he felt powerless to deal with “the outrageous conduct of the Negroes who will not work for love or money—but who steal every thing they can lay their hands on.” Although he offered to pay them for their labor, those who continued to work did so at their own pace; they reported to the fields in the late morning, picked a little cotton, and then returned to the quarters to cook the hogs and beef they had killed that day. “You have no idea of the mental agony I endure under this state of affairs,” Shields repeated, in still another dismal report to the absentee owner. “Neither life, liberty, or property is valued a pin here—bands of thieves stroll about the country plundering in every direction—and I have not been allowed a single weapon for self defense—I know not at what moment my time may