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By Root 1501 0

longer it would remain muted was the terrible reality every white man and woman had to live with and could never really escape. The tensions this uncertainty generated could at times prove to be unbearable. “The loom room had caught from some hot ashes,” Kate Stone confided to her diary, “but we at once thought Jane [the slave cook] was wreaking vengeance on us all by trying to burn us out. We would not have been surprised to have her slip up and stick any of us in the back.” If the vast majority of slaves refrained from aggressive acts and remained on the plantations, most of them were neither “rebellious” nor “faithful” in the fullest sense of those terms, but rather ambivalent and observant, some of them frankly opportunistic, many of them anxious to preserve their anonymity, biding their time, searching for opportunities to break the dependency that bound them to their white families. “There is quite a difference of manner among the negroes,” a South Carolina white woman noted in March 1865, “but I think it proceeds from an uncertainty as to what their condition will be, they do not know if they are free or not, and their manner is a sort of feeler by which they will find out how far they can go.”119

The war revealed, often in ways that defied description, the sheer complexity of the master-slave relationship, and the conflicts, contradictions, and ambivalence that relationship generated in each individual. The slave’s emotions and behavior invariably rested on a precarious balance between the habit of obedience and the intense desire for freedom. The same humble, self-effacing slave who touched his hat to his “white folks” was capable of touching off the fire that gutted his master’s house. The loyal body servant who risked his life to carry his wounded master to safety remounted his master’s horse and fled to the Yankees. The black boatman lionized by the Richmond press for his denunciation of the Yankees and enlistment as a Confederate recruit deserted to the Union lines with valuable information and “twenty new rebel uniforms.” The house slave who nursed her mistress through a terrible illness, always evincing love and affection, even weeping over her condition, deserted her when the moment seemed right—“when I was scarce able to walk without assistance—she left me without provocation or reason—left me in the night, and that too without the slightest noise.” On the Jones plantation, near Herndon, Georgia, the house servant had given no warm welcome to the Union soldiers. She dutifully looked after the white children entrusted to her care. “I suckled that child, Hattie,” she boasted, “all these children suckled by colored women.” And yet, when the Yankees threatened to burn down her master’s house, Louisa made no protest. “It ought to be burned,” she told a Union officer. “Why?” the astonished officer asked her, for he had been rather moved by her fidelity to the family and her apparent devotion to the children. “Cause there has been so much devilment here,” she replied, “whipping niggers most to death to make ’em work to pay for it.”120

To place the blame for slave disaffection on lax discipline or outside influences, as so many slaveholders chose to do, was to make the same false assumptions about blacks. If the war taught slaveholders anything, it should have revealed how little they actually knew their blacks, how they had mistaken the slave’s outward demeanor for his inner feelings, his docility for contentment and acquiescence, and how in numerous instances they had been deliberately deceived so that they might later be the more easily betrayed. The conduct of slaves during the recent crisis, a South Carolina planter conceded, should have impressed upon every slaveholding family that “we were all laboring under a delusion.”

Good masters and bad masters all alike, shared the same fate—the sea of the Revolution confounded good and evil; and, in the chaotic turbulence, all suffer in degree. Born and raised amid the institution, like a great many others, I believed it was necessary, to our welfare, if not to