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By Root 1420 0

wanted to confront. After awakening one morning to discover that every one of his servants had decamped, a Georgia planter found himself revising assumptions he had never thought to question. “We had thought there was a strong bond of affection on their side as well as ours! We have ministered to them in sickness, infancy, and age.” Not all masters failed to appreciate the attraction of freedom, and a few treated the slaves’ aspirations with the respect they deserved. After losing a trusted slave, James Alcorn, a Mississippi planter, experienced the usual humiliation over being deceived but he stopped short of condemnation and had little difficulty in ascertaining the cause. “I feel that had I been in his place I should have gone, so good by Hadley, you have heretofore been faithful, that you should espouse your liberty but shows your sense. I wish you no harm.” Unlike Alcorn, most planters reacted with outrage and bewilderment, suffering a severe shock to their egos as well as their pocketbooks, and demanded to know why their trusted servants fled a situation in which they appeared to be perfectly content.106

The house servants achieved a reputation as the “white niggers” and “Uncle Toms” of slavery, who identified with and tried to emulate their masters, and whose disdain for the field hands was exceeded only by the pride they felt in their quality “white folks.” “We house slaves thought we was better’n the others what worked in the field,” a former Tennessee bondsman recalled. “We really was raised a little different, you know …” From the vantage point of the fields, a former South Carolina slave confirmed a common impression: “De house servants put on more airs than de white folks.” Contrary to this image of a slave hierarchy, house servants and field hands actually spent a great deal of time together, not only in the slave quarters which they often shared (sometimes as husband and wife, with one working in the house and the other in the field) but in the daily agricultural operations, with the servants often called upon to help at harvest time. In the few urban centers (like Charleston, New Orleans, and Richmond) and on the relatively small number of large “aristocratic” plantations (like those of low-country South Carolina and the Mississippi River), house servants approximated an elite class that lived up to the legend. Elsewhere, the lines were not so clearly drawn between field and house slaves. Typically, the slave quarters rather than the Big House constituted the real social world for most slaves; consequently, few house servants were unconcerned about how their fellow slaves judged them and many of them acted as an intermediary between the Big House and the quarters. Although some field hands spoke scornfully of the superior airs of house slaves, many relished the tales of life inside the Big House and took a vicarious delight in watching house slaves deceive their masters and mistresses.107

The distinctions between house and field slaves seem more pronounced in the literature than in the day-to-day operations of slavery. Sufficient examples of the elite house servant lording it over his or her fellow slaves were always on hand, however, to sustain and reinforce the prevailing image. The accounts of both fugitive slaves and planter families lent further “inside” credence to that view. While the number of defections increased each day, Susan Smedes wrote, George Page, her father’s servant, “tried to make up in himself for what he looked on as the lack of loyalty on the part of the other servants. They were field Negroes; he belonged to the house.” Similarly, in the Allston household, Mammy Milly “held herself and her family as vastly superior to the ordinary run of negroes, the aristocracy of the race.” Nevertheless, surprisingly large numbers of house servants fled at the first opportunity, sometimes entire households, and if they remained, many of them refused to wait upon their masters and mistresses, coveted possession of the Big House and its contents (even Mammy Milly fell under suspicion), and “behaved