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had become unmanageable. “I am not allowed to say any [thing] a bout Work and have not been to the Barn for the last five days. Jacob is the worst man on the Place, then comes in Scipio Jackey Sawney & Paul.” And in a “P.S.” he added: “Most all of them have arms.” Although Adele Allston continued to support him, she wondered in the aftermath of the war if Belflowers had not outlived his usefulness to the plantation now that the blacks considered themselves to be free. “Belflowers is cowed by the violence of the negroes against him,” she wrote to her son, “and is afraid to speak openly. He is trying to curry favour. His own morals are impaired by the revolution, and he always required backing as your father expressed it. You must tell him what to do and support him in carrying it out.” This proved to be an accurate assessment. Belflowers never really recovered from his wartime experience and he found it impossible to adapt himself to the post-emancipation changes. “[I]t Looks Verry hard to Pull ones hat to a Negro,” he conceded in April 1865. Within a year, he was dead—by natural causes. “He is one of our true friends,” Adele Allston wrote when she learned he was seriously ill, “and a link connecting us with the past.”85

Not surprisingly, the war and emancipation played upon and exacerbated white fears and fantasies that were as old as slavery itself. Despite the apprehensions they voiced, far fewer masters and mistresses were murdered and assaulted than expected to be. While hiding from the Yankees, Joseph LeConte encountered a fellow South Carolinian who lived from day to day in a state of terror, convinced that a neighbor’s slave he had once flogged would now murder him. “We tried to reason with him and show him the absurdity of his fears,” LeConte recalled, “but all in vain. He looked upon himself as a ‘doomed man.’ ” Although the planter escaped the anticipated vengeance, the fears he had felt were neither unique nor groundless. Always eager for news from her beloved Charleston, Emma Holmes recoiled at the reported murder of “my old friend” William Allen, “who was chopped to pieces in his barn.” Still other reports and rumors of murder and assault dominated the conversations of whites, including the ominous story of a planter who “narrowly escaped being murdered by two of his most trusty negroes.” In a South Carolina community, the Union commander reported that whites were imploring him for protection from the blacks, “who were arming themselves and threatening the lives of their masters,” and one slaveholder had requested protective custody “to save his life.” In nearly all instances of slave violence against their owners, whites tended to blame the Yankees, as did Emma Holmes, for having aroused “the foulest demoniac passions of the negro, hitherto so peaceful and happy.” At least, such explanations preserved whites from what would have otherwise been a most excruciating self-examination.86

Rather than murder their masters, some slaves preferred to expose them to the humiliations they had once meted out so freely. In Choctaw County, Mississippi, slaves administered several hundred lashes to Nat Best, a local planter; in nearby Madison County, two slaves, one of them disguised as a Union soldier, were reported to have “mercillesly whipped” an elderly white woman; and in Virginia, near Jamestown, the former slaves of a reputedly cruel master whipped him some twenty times to remind him of past punishments. When the Yankees arrived, a former Virginia slave recalled, the mistress on a neighboring plantation was whipping a housegirl. “The soldiers made the house girl strip the mistress, whip her, then dress in her clothes. She left with the soldiers.” Young Sarah Morgan reacted with horror rather than skepticism to the reports from Baton Rouge, her home town, that blacks were stopping ladies on the street, cutting the necklaces from their necks, stripping the rings from their fingers, and subsequently bragging of these feats.87

That these proved to be exceptional and isolated examples made them no less sensational and