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By Root 1354 0

owners thought they had intimate ties, the loss of property and suddenly dim economic prospects, or the fears engendered by the thought of four million free blacks. More than likely, the grief stemmed largely from a sense that the world as they had known it was collapsing all around them. Nevertheless, whatever the actual cause of death, the former slaves had their own ideas. Within ten or fifteen days after his freed slaves began to leave him, “Massa” Harry Hogan was dead, and one black he had owned attributed it to “all de trouble comin’ on him at once.” Within three weeks after the slaves on an Arkansas plantation heard they were free, they buried their mistress. “The news killed her dead,” one of them recalled. And when “Marster” Billy Finnely returned from the war (his brother had been killed in action), only to find the slaves freed and most of them leaving the plantation, he seemed unable to cope with reality; his mother found him one day in a shed, his throat slashed, and beside him the razor and a note which revealed that he did not care to live “ ’cause de nigger free.”58

To attribute the deaths of masters or mistresses to grief over the loss of their slaves poses obvious difficulties, despite the exactitude with which some blacks were able to pinpoint the occurrence. Still, the reported instances of this kind in the recollections of former bondsmen occur too frequently to dismiss them altogether as flights of fantasy or faulty memory. What remains crucial is that so many ex-slaves chose to recall the death of a master or mistress in this way, as if to suggest that their “white folks” had been so dependent on them that they were unable to conceive of a future without them. “Old Mistress never git well after she lose all her niggers,” Katie Rowe recalled, “and one day de white boss [the overseer] tell us she jest drap over dead setting in her chair, and we know her heart jest broke.” Such testimony differed in no significant respect from how Duncan Clinch Heyward remembered the death of his grandfather, who had been one of the largest rice planters in South Carolina.

As my grandfather sat on the piazza of his house at the Wateree, his former slaves stopped on their way to the station to bid him goodbye. All they said was that they were going home, and would look for him soon. He never returned to Combahee and did not see them again. Broken in health and staggered by his losses, Charles Heyward could not recover under the final blow. The emancipated slave could look forward to a better day for himself and his descendants, but the old slaveholder’s day was done. He soon went to his grave and his traditions and his troubles were buried with him.59

Although dismay and anxiety over emancipation were hardly uncommon, not all slaveholders shared these fashionable ailments in the same degree and only a very few permitted the shock to drive them to suicide or a premature death. Several months after Appomattox, Josiah Gorgas, the former Confederate chief of ordnance, discussed recent events with a wealthy Alabama planter and found him very much troubled, both about himself and about the future of the white race in the South. Now that his slaves had been freed, he seemed to think that his entire life had been “wasted.” “This state of mind is natural, and leads to despondency in his case,” Gorgas confided to his journal after the conversation, “but not so in the case of most planters.” In his recent travels, Gorgas had been generally pleased by the conduct of the planter class, particularly their equanimity in the face of disaster. Here were Yankee officers coming onto their plantations, meeting and talking with the slaves, telling them they were free and promising to protect their new rights, while the former masters made no protest but avidly questioned the officers about their new relations with the blacks. It all seemed like “a gigantic dream.” Four months ago, Gorgas reflected, “that Yankee Captain attempting to make such an address to their slaves, would have been hung on the nearest tree, and left there.”60

But