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“See that crack in the wall?” Master Jim say yes, and I say, “It’s just like the open door when the eyes are close to the wall.” He peek and see into the bedroom.

“That’s how I find out about the Mistress and Mister Headsmith,” I tells him, and I see he’s getting mad.

“What you mean?” And Master Jim grabs me hard by the arm like I was trying to get away.

“I see them in the bed.”

That’s all I say. The Demon’s got him and Master Jim tears out of the room looking for the Mistress. Then I hears loud talking and pretty soon the Mistress is screaming and calling for help …19

To maintain discipline and productivity among an enslaved work force under wartime conditions often required extraordinary efforts, for in the relative absence of white males with horses and firearms, slave restlessness, disaffection, and covert resistance might grow markedly. To a Virginia woman, it seemed like her slaves were trying “to see what amount of thieving they can commit”; to a North Carolina woman, the slaves had become, in her husband’s absence, “awkward, inefficient, and even lazy”; to a Mississippi woman, pleading with the governor to release her overseer from militia duty, the slaves were not even performing half the usual amount of work. The women of the Pettigrew family of South Carolina, finding themselves suddenly in charge of the plantation, fought a losing battle to assert their authority among the slaves. As early as 1862, they confessed their doubts that “things will ever be or seem quite the same again.” Later in the year, Caroline Pettigrew wrote her husband that she could feel no confidence in any of the slaves. “You will find that they have all changed in their manner, not offensive but slack.”20

Not surprisingly, in the master’s absence, the slaves were quick to test the mistress’s authority, seeking to ascertain if she could be more easily outmaneuvered or manipulated than her husband. To those women forced to undergo such trials, the motivation of the slaves seemed perfectly obvious, with some of them relishing every moment of discomfiture evinced by their owners. After being left in charge of a plantation in Texas, Mrs. W. H. Neblett kept her husband informed of the steady deterioration of discipline and the heavy price she was paying in mental anguish. “[T]he black wretches [are] trying all they can, it seems to me, to agrivate me, taking no interest, having no care about the future, neglecting their duty.” Neither her presence nor the harsh treatment meted out by the overseer had produced the desired results. The blacks refused to work, they abused and neglected the stock, they tore down fences and broke plows, and it did little good to give them any orders. “With the prospect of another 4 years war,” she wrote her husband in the spring of 1864, “you may give your negroes away if you wont hire them, and I’ll move into a white settlement and work with my hands.… The negroes care no more for me than if I was an old free darkey and I get so mad sometimes that I think I don’t care sometimes if Myers beats the last one of them to death. I cant stay with them another year alone.”21

Not all the women left in charge of plantations capitulated that easily. When unable to control their slaves, some mistresses called upon the assistance of local authorities or a neighboring planter to mete out punishment. After ordering local police to apprehend and jail a rebellious slave, a South Carolina woman derived considerable personal satisfaction from the way she had handled the matter. “What do you think,” she wrote to her son, “I at last made up my mind to have Caesar punished, after daily provoking & impertinent conduct, … & it was all done so quietly, that the household did not know of it, though I let him stay 2 days in Confinement.” Some women, on the other hand, needed little assistance or instruction in managing their enslaved labor but demonstrated a shrewdness and strength that compared favorably to that of their absent