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By Root 1284 0

wantonly murdering slaves rather than see them freed. But the attempts to communicate with their slaves on such subjects often became an exercise in futility. “Would I kill you, or let anybody else kill you?” a South Carolina mistress asked her butler. He remained apprehensive. “We know you won’t own up to anything against your side,” he replied. “You never tell us anything that you can help.” The white woman threw up her hands in exasperation, concluding that nothing more was to be expected of a slave who had been “a pampered menial” for twenty years. “His insolence has always been intolerable.”42

That slaves should have doubted what their masters and mistresses told them reflected more than an intuitive skepticism. Despite their relative isolation and the prevailing degree of illiteracy, slaves over the years had devised various methods by which to keep themselves informed, not only of doings in the household but in the outside world. The servants enjoyed the most advantageous position, overhearing the conversations of the white folks while ostensibly preoccupied with their domestic duties, and then passing the information and gossip along to the slave quarters. “No, massa, we’se can’t read, but we’se can listen,” a South Carolina slave explained, after coming over to the Yankees.43

Within the master’s house, numerous slaves formed their initial impressions of the war, why it was being fought, and how it might affect their own lives. Dora Franks, for example, who claimed to have been well treated in the Mississippi household in which she worked, overheard her master and mistress discuss the war: “He say he feared all de slaves ’ud be took away. She say if dat was true she feel lak jumpin’ in de well. I hate to hear her say dat, but from dat minute I started prayin’ for freedom.” From the vantage of the house slave, news about the war sometimes consisted of overhearing angry outbursts and harangues by the whites, punctuated with wild talk about abolitionists seizing the South, Yankees coming to kill “us all,” a war “to free the niggers,” and how the Confederates intended to send “de damn yaller bellied Yankees” reeling back to the North. Despite such bombast, proximity to the conversations of whites usually helped to clarify the war issues and keep the slaves abreast of the military situation.44

When plantation whites became more guarded in their discussions, lest they be overheard, the slaves simply became more resourceful. “[T]he greater the precaution,” a former South Carolina slave recalled, “the alerter became the slaves, the wider they opened their ears and the more eager they became for outside information.” Many slaves would take considerable pride in how they had surreptitiously acquired the war news. “My father and the other boys,” one recalled, “used to crawl under the house an’ lie on the ground to hear massa read the newspaper to missis when they first began to talk about the war.” On the occasion of festivities in the Big House like a dinner party, another slave recalled, he would climb into an oak tree, hide under the long moss, and wait until the master and his guests came out on the veranda for an after-dinner smoke. He would then invariably be treated to a full discussion of the latest war news and a frank appraisal of the military and political situation. An illiterate waiting maid experienced the frustration of hearing her master and mistress spell out certain words they did not want her to hear. This resourceful woman managed to memorize the letters, “an’ as soon as I got away I ran to uncle an’ spelled them over to him, an’ he told me what they meant.” No doubt some masters suspected the diligence with which slaves obtained news of the war but very few of them were able to adopt the tactic used by William Henry Trescot, a prominent South Carolinian. He had taken to sprinkling his conversation with French expressions. “We are using French against Africa,” he explained to a perplexed friend. “We know the black waiters are all ears now, and we want to keep what we have to say dark. We can’t afford