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By Root 1278 0

in charge of plantations, many of them simply resigned themselves to an increasingly untenable situation over which they could exert a minimum of influence and authority. “We are doing as best we know,” a Georgia woman sighed, “or as good as we can get the Servants to do; they learn to feel very independent as no white man comes to direct them.” When slaves on a plantation in Texas openly resisted the overseer’s authority, refusing to submit to any whippings, the mistress thought it best to avoid a showdown. Nothing would be gained by whipping the slaves, she wrote her husband, who was absent in the Army, “so I shall say nothing and if they stop work entirely I will try to feel thankful if they let me alone.”26

Nor did the presence of the master necessarily help. The difficulties in maintaining control and discipline pointed up ambiguities that had always suffused plantation relationships. But the apprehensions now voiced by beleaguered owners had even larger implications. The spectacle of a master and his family tormented and rendered helpless in the face of wartime stresses and demands could not help but make a deep impression on the slaves. To what extent they would seek to exploit that vulnerability to their own advantage came increasingly to dominate the conversations of whites.

3

WITH TENS OF THOUSANDS of white men joining the Confederate Army, leaving their families behind them on isolated plantations and farms, the quality of black response to the Civil War assumed a critical and urgent importance. Few whites could be insensitive to the exposed position in which the presence of so many enslaved blacks placed them. “Last night,” a Georgia woman wrote her son, “I felt the loneliness and isolation of my situation in an unusual degree. Not a white female of my acquaintance nearer than eight or ten miles, and not a white person nearer than the depot!” Amidst several hundred slaves, the mistress of a North Carolina plantation compared herself to “a kind of Anglo-Saxon Robinson Crusoe with Ethiopians only for companions—think of it!” Demonstrating a rare candor, a Confederate soldier from Mississippi, who had left his wife and children “to the care of the niggers,” thought it unlikely that his twenty-five slaves would turn upon them. “They’re ignorant poor creatures, to be sure, but as yet they’re faithful. Any way, I put my trust in God, and I know he’ll watch over the house while I’m away fighting for this good cause.”27

This was hardly the time for self-doubt. Whatever previous experience might have suggested about the fragile nature of the master-slave relationship, an embattled Confederacy, struggling for the very survival of that relationship, preferred to think differently and employed a rhetorical overkill to attain the necessary peace of mind. “A genuine slave owner, born and bred, will not be afraid of Negroes,” Mary Chesnut confided to her diary in November 1861. “Here we are mild as the moonbeams, and as serene; nothing but Negroes around us, white men all gone to the army.” That was the proper spirit of confidence, voiced by a woman who had already confessed failure in her attempts to understand what the slaves thought of the war. Most whites, like Mary Chesnut, no matter what suspicions and forebodings they harbored, chose to put on the best possible face, to demonstrate their own serenity and composure. The alternatives were simply too horrible to contemplate. “We would be practically helpless should the Negroes rise,” the daughter of a prominent Louisiana planter conceded, “since there are so few men left at home. It is only because the Negroes do not want to kill us that we are still alive.”28

Whether to overcome their own anxieties or to silence the skeptics, many whites flaunted pretensions to security. “We have slept all winter with the doors of our house, outside and inside, all unlocked,” a Virginia woman boasted in 1862. All too often, however, the incessant talk and repeated assurances betrayed something less than the confidence whites professed. Edmund Ruffin, for example, an ardent secessionist