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Seeking “temporary relief” from the recent disasters, including the loss of “many of our servants,” Eva B. Jones of Augusta, Georgia, immersed herself in fourteen volumes of history. But she found little comfort in a study of the past, only additional evidence of human depravity.

How vice and wickedness, injustice and every human passion runs riot, flourishes, oftentimes going unpunished to the tomb! And how the little feeble sickly attempts of virtue struggle, and after a brief while fade away, unappreciated and unextolled! The depravity of the human heart is truly wonderful, and the moiety of virtue contained on the historic page truly deplorable.

If she found any consolation in her readings, it was only to know how often “these same sorrows and unmerited punishments that we are now undergoing [have] been visited upon the brave, the deserving, the heroic, and the patient of all ages and in all climes!” Returning to the history that was being acted out in her own household, she bemoaned the abolition of slavery as “a most unprecedented robbery,” intended only for the “greater humiliation” of the southern people. “However, it is done,” she sighed; “and we, the chained witnesses, can only look on.”27

With such thoughts preying upon them, slave-owning families prepared to surrender their human property but not the ideology that had made such possessions possible and necessary.

3

WHATEVER DOUBTS persisted in the minds of slave owners about the status of their blacks were largely resolved in the aftermath of the Confederate collapse. On the day he heard of General Lee’s surrender, Thomas Dabney, a prominent Mississippi planter, rode out into his fields and informed the slaves that they were free; at the same time, his daughter recalled, he advised them “to work the crop as they had been doing” and he promised to compensate them “as he thought just.” Not all masters acted with such decisiveness, even after Appomattox. Only gradually, often belatedly, did many of them concede freedom to their slaves, but not without considerable self-torment, bitterness, and anxiety about the future. After Union troops occupied Augusta, Georgia, some three weeks after Lee’s surrender, Jefferson Thomas read the edict from the commanding officer and only then did he feel compelled to call his slaves together to talk to them about the probability of freedom. When David G. Harris, a South Carolina planter, first heard about the emancipation edict in early June 1865, he said nothing to his slaves; not until mid-August, four months after the end of the war, and only after Union troops stationed nearby ordered the planters to inform their slaves, did most of them in his vicinity do so.28

Although they had anticipated it for some time, many slaveholding families still expressed incredulity when emancipation became a reality. “If they don’t belong to me, whose are they?” one woman asked, clinging to the certainty that black people had to belong to someone. To be deprived of property some of them had worked hard to accumulate struck them with particular dismay. “I tell you it is mighty hard,” a dispossessed slave owner averred, “for my pa paid his own money for our niggers; and that’s not all they’ve robbed us of. They have taken our horses and cattle and sheep and every thing.” Even when they faced up to the inevitable, some had no way of knowing how to go about freeing their slaves. “This is more than I anticipated,” the widowed mistress of a Georgia plantation wrote on May 17, 1865, “yet I trust it will be a gradual thing & not done all at once.” Twelve days later, she remained undecided on how to proceed. “What I shall do with mine is a question that troubles day & night. It is my last thought at night & the first in the morning.” After finally telling them they were free and promising to look after them, she wondered how she could possibly survive without them.29

The way to retain their slaves, some families determined, was to make freedom a vague and frightening prospect. Not until nearly two months