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By Root 1230 0

ominous. Although most slave owners did not meet personal violence at the hands of their slaves, the persistent reports and rumors of murder, insubordination, insolence, and plunder sustained the threat and the genuine fear that black freedom might degenerate into insurrectionary violence. “We are afraid now to walk outside of the gate,” a South Carolina woman confessed, after hearing that field hands in the immediate vicinity were “in a dreadful state.” To listen to jubilant slaves welcome the Yankees by singing (to the tune of a Methodist hymn) “We’ll hang Jeff Davis on the sour apple tree” may have been more of an irritation than an overt threat, but on the Magnolia plantation in Louisiana the slaves erected a gallows intended for their master. To achieve their freedom, the slaves on this plantation had come to believe, according to their master, that they must first hang him and expel the overseer. “[N]o one now can tell what a Day may bring Forth,” the threatened master wrote, “we are all in a State of Great uneasiness.” The gallows was never used, but that became less important than the vivid impression the sight made on the local populace, both whites and blacks.88

The activities of armed groups of slaves operating out of outlaw settlements helped to sustain the fears of insurrection. In some areas they concealed themselves in the swamps, cane brakes, and woods, periodically raiding nearby plantations and farms for provisions. Where planters had abandoned their homes, the slaves belonging to these and adjoining plantations would sometimes congregate to test their newly won freedom and to organize themselves into bands of marauders that roamed the countryside, seizing plantations and parceling out the land and terrorizing the white populace. Even after Union occupation, the threat posed by these outlaw gangs and communities persisted. Early in September 1865, a low-country planter in South Carolina informed the absentee owner of a neighboring plantation that it was “being rapidly filled up by vagabond negroes from all parts of the country who go there when they please and are fast destroying what you left of a settlement. They are thus become a perfect nuisance to the neighborhood and harbor for all the thieves and scamps who wont work.”89

The point at which “insubordination” or “insolence” became “insurrection” was always somewhat obscure. Perhaps no real distinction existed in the white man’s mind, except for the number of blacks involved. When the slaves on the David Pugh plantation in Louisiana took their master and overseer prisoners, that was called “a rebellion.” When slaves on the nearby Woodland sugar estate refused to work without pay, that was termed “a state of munity [sic].” When a large group of slaves in low-country South Carolina indulged themselves in the wines and liquors obtained from the homes of former masters, they were perceived as laying the groundwork for “open insurrection at any time.” And when a group of Louisiana slaves, “armed with clubs and cane knives,” poured into New Orleans, a frightened white citizen wrote in his diary of “servile war” in parts of the city.90

If anything was calculated to revive the specter of black rebellion, it had to be the knowledge that substantial numbers of slaves now had access to weapons or were already in possession of them. “Molly tells me all of the men on our plantation have Enfield rifles,” Mary Chesnut noted bitterly, and perhaps now the enemy will get that “long hoped for rising against former masters.” To the shock of Henry W. Ravenel, blacks in a nearby town not only were armed but openly displayed their weapons and drilled, apparently modeling themselves after the black troops they had only recently observed. It became clear to Ravenel, as it eventually did to Union commanders, that some way would have to be found to deal with such an ominous situation. The “summary executions” of some of the leaders, Ravenel thought, had already had “a beneficial effect” and he suggested more of the same.91

Like the gallows the slaves in Louisiana had erected