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When the local Union commander backed Shields’s authority “to make the people work,” conditions improved perceptibly, but the officer’s departure prompted a return to the earlier manifestations of disaffection. “Let me again repeat,” Shields advised the owner, “that but very very few are faithful—Some of those who remain are worse than those who have gone—And I think that all who are able will leave as soon as the warm weather sets in—in no other way can I account for their present course of conduct for they will not even gather food for themselves.” Like the field hands, most of the house servants left when they pleased and did little when they remained. “I do not miss her,” Shields said of a departed servant, “for she had long since ceased to attend to her duties here.… When all leave me, if they do, I will be compelled to hire one or two, and they if possible shall be White servants.”

After the war, a disillusioned Shields compiled for his employer a list of the ex-slaves who remained on the plantations, and he affixed next to each name a mark denoting his evaluation of their wartime conduct and dependability. Of the 146 adult slaves on four plantations, 16 had been “perfectly faithful,” 30 had “done well comparatively,” and the other 100 had “behaved badly; many of them Outrageously.” Nearly every slave on this list, Shields noted, had absented himself from the plantation at some time and then returned, “some of them half a dozen times.” So grateful was he to those few who had remained “perfectly faithful” that he now urged his employer to present medals to four of them, with some “appropriate” inscription testifying to their loyalty. “The Medals coming from me,” he explained, “would be but little valued, from you greatly.” More than eighteen months after the war, Shields remained obsessed with how the slaves had behaved during that crisis, and he was perfectly willing to use it as a standard by which to judge the blacks under his supervision. When his employer instructed him to give five dollars to one of the freedmen, Shields retorted: “Robin was always one of my favorites, and I have ever thought him honest, but it is a question whether he was faithful to you or me—True he did not betray or rob us, as a great many others did, but he deserted us in two or three weeks after the Federal occupation of Natchez—for gain—instead of remaining here, as Ellen and Frank, and two or three others did, assisting me in protecting and saving the place and property.… This was fidelity.”66

What transpired on the plantations managed by Wilmer Shields would be repeated on countless places lying in the path of the Union Army. Far more than any Federal proclamation, the slaves themselves undermined the authority of the planter class. In Mississippi and Louisiana, for example, the many reports of slave “demoralization” and “defection” came close to suggesting a coordinated withdrawal of labor and efficiency. When a large Union force passed through the Bayou Lafourche region in late 1862, A. Franklin Pugh, the part owner and manager of four sugar plantations, first noted “great excitement” among the slaves; the next day, he found them “in a very bad way”; two days later, they were “completely demoralized,” some of them leaving and more preparing to depart. “I fear we shall lose them all. They go off in carts.” Before the week had ended, one of his plantations had been virtually “cleaned out,” with many of the slaves fleeing at night, and conditions steadily deteriorated at the other places. In what Pugh perceived as “a rebellion,” the slaves on a neighboring plantation overpowered their master and overseer, tied them up, and tried to remove them to a nearby town. Elsewhere in the rich plantation parishes, slaves refused to work without pay (or for worthless Confederate currency) and were generally found to be “demoralized,” “refractory,” and “in a state of mutiny”—that is, if they remained at all. “The negroes have all left their owners in this parish,” a planter’s son reported from Bayou Plaquemine. “Some planters have not even