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that the ownership of slaves had necessarily compromised their values or tortured their consciences. Nor was there any reason to suspect hypocrisy or self-deception in the “strong conviction” of Henry W. Ravenel, for example, “that the old relation of master & slave, had received the divine sanction & was the best condition in which the two races could live together for mutual benefit.” Any detectable twinges of conscience in the slaveholding class largely stemmed from the realization that some had abused the institution. But like any northern employer, the master maintained that the excesses of the few should not be permitted to question or undermine the system itself. Nor were most of them intent on foisting the responsibility for bondage on the New Englanders who had initially supplied them. After all, a New Orleans newspaper observed several years after the war, the transplantation from Africa to North America had “humanized” the Negro, regenerating him in body, mind, and morals. Rather than confess any misgivings about their slaveholding past, most masters at this moment viewed themselves as decent men, good Christians who had performed a useful, necessary, and benevolent task, fulfilling an obligation to an inferior people which more than compensated for the labor they had received in return. There was nothing for which they needed to apologize. As George A. Trenholm proudly told the Chamber of Commerce of Augusta, Georgia, in early 1866, “Sir, we have educated them. We took them barbarians, we returned them Christianized and civilized to those from whom we received them; we paid for them, we return them without compensation. Our consciences are clear, our hands are clean.”50

If any slave owner felt the need to reassure himself, he might use the occasion of emancipation to remind the assembled blacks how well they had fared under his tutelage. After making precisely that point, a Texas planter who had moved his slaves there from Virginia during the war asked them if he had ever treated anyone meanly. Every one of the slaves, Liza Smith recalled, shouted, “No, sir!” and that brought a smile to their master’s face. Equally confident of his image, Isaiah Day, known to his slaves as “Papa Day” because he never liked the title of master, read the official proclamation and then told them, as one of his slaves recalled: “De gov’ment don’t need to tell you you is free, ’cause you been free all you days. If you wants to stay you can and if you wants to go, you can. But if you go, lots of white folks ain’t gwine treat you like I does.” With slightly less confidence, a Georgia planter, proud of the behavior of his slaves during the Yankee occupation, confessed to them, as he freed them, that he had never realized the extent of their love for him. “He told us he had done tried to be good to us and had done de best he could for us,” one of his former slaves recalled. John Bonner, an Alabama planter, after reminding his slaves how well he had provided for them, simply warned any who now chose to leave that they would “jes’ have to root, pig, or die.”51

To impress his freed slaves with the bounties and security they had enjoyed was less designed to assuage any feelings of guilt than to entice them to remain with him. That prime consideration elicited many a personal note in the master’s announcement of freedom. With tears in his eyes, his head bowed, and his hands clasped behind his back, the Reverend Robert Turner, a preacher, farmer, and storekeeper, told his newly freed slaves how much he admired each of them, appreciated their faithfulness, and hated to lose them. The appeal had no apparent effect, as nearly every one of his blacks left him. To remind their slaves of the “good life” they had provided them, some masters chose to celebrate emancipation with a bountiful feast or party. On a plantation in Harnett County, North Carolina, Taylor Hugh McLean called his slaves out of the fields, met them at the gate, told them they were free, and invited them to eat dinner. It proved to be a feast few of them could forget.

He had