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To leave the plantation or farm, his worldly possessions stuffed into a small bundle slung over his shoulder, came easily to some, not so easily to most. On numerous places, the entire black population decamped at the same time, as if prearranged, leaving the owners to wallow in self-pity and to utter those familiar cries of betrayal. “Every Negro has left us,” the wife of a South Carolina planter exclaimed in July 1865. “I have never in my life met with such ingratitude, every Negro deserted.”8 But the postwar “exodus” usually reflected individual and family decisions and often sharply divided the ex-slaves on the same plantation. Typically, as a former Mississippi slave recalled, “they didn’t go off right at first. They was several years getting broke up. Some went, some stayed, some actually moved back. Like bees trying to find a setting place.”9 For white families to make sense out of those who left and those who stayed proved no less frustrating after emancipation than during the Yankee invasion. Again, previous records of behavior were misleading, verbal expressions of loyalty counted for little, and familial ties could induce various responses. No archetypal “deserter” emerged: the faithful and the troublesome left, the most and the least trusted, those who had endured a harsh bondage and those who counted themselves among the relatively well treated.

The “exodus” affected every kind of master. Those who had acquired notorious reputations, however, usually sustained the earliest and the largest losses. Austin Grant, who had worked as a field hand in Mississippi and Texas, recalled that his master had been “a pretty good boss” because he had fed them well. But he had also made frequent use of the “black snake” (a bullwhip) to maintain discipline and production, and he worked them hard.

We got up early, you betcha. You would be out there by time you could see and you quit when it was dark. They tasked us. They would give us 200 or 300 pounds of cotton to bring in and you would git it, and if you didn’ git it, you better, or you would git it tomorrow, or your back would git it. Or you’d git it from someone else, maybe steal it from their sacks.

When the master informed them of their freedom, he made himself quite clear: “Now, you can jes’ work on if you want to, and I’ll treat you jes’ like I always did.” That was all they needed to hear. “I guess when he said that they knew what he meant. The’ wasn’t but one family left with ’im. They stayed about two years. But the rest was just like birds, they jes’ flew.” On an Alabama plantation, Aunt Nellie, a “nurse girl” who had alternated between tending a temperamental mistress and her equally obnoxious children, left as soon as she learned of her freedom but not before giving the children a long-overdue thrashing.10

Whatever the pathos and nostalgia conveyed by the popular minstrel ballad “I Lost My Massa When Dey Set Me Free,” newly freed slaves, as the ballad itself suggested, might have felt and acknowledged a certain affection for their “white folks” but still left them. “It ain’t that I didn’t love my Marster,” Melvin Smith recalled, “but I jest likes to be free,” and when told that he “didn’t b’long to nobody no more” he immediately left his home plantation in South Carolina and headed for Tallahassee, Florida. Reputedly humane and generous masters who had expected to retain their former slaves were thus in numerous instances doomed to a bitter disappointment. “As a general rule,” a white woman in Virginia wrote of the “defections” in her region, “they are all anxious to leave home and many that seemed perfectly contented in slavery are now dissatisfied, and many humane kind masters, who owned large numbers of servants, have been left without a single one.” Having always thought of himself as a good master, a planter in Amelia County, Virginia, tried to understand why he had lost all but six of his 115 slaves. “My people were always well treated, and never were worked hard.