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No matter how eloquently former slaveholders praised the fidelity of those who remained, thinking the old ties had survived still another disruptive challenge, the most faithful often turned out to be the elderly, the infirm, and the very young, those who felt least compelled to uproot themselves. Although many of the older slaves embraced emancipation, for their children and grandchildren if not for themselves, some thought it too late to aspire to anything beyond the security afforded by the master and mistress. While the former master might feel obliged to retain and look after these people, he also recognized how little labor was left in them. “My crowd of darkies is rapidly decreasing,” a South Carolina lawyer and politician informed his brother. “Almost two weeks ago, my cook departed with her child. Last week, our house girl left, and this morning, another girl, lately employed in the culinary department, vacated. We still have six big and little—one old, three children, one man sick, so that you may perceive there are mouths and backs enough, but the labor is very deficient.” Anticipating future losses, Emma Holmes thought in May 1865 that every servant would leave except for Ann, “who is lame, solitary, very dull, slow, timid and friendless.” In some instances, the few remaining slaves shared the dismay of their “white folks” over the departures, but for altogether different reasons. “I was de only nigger left on de place,” recalled Esther Green, who was ten years old at the time. “I jus’ cried and cried, mostly because I was jus’ lonesome for some of my own kind to laugh and talk wid.”84

To remain might be less of a commitment to the old place and the old ties than a necessary holding action, until the confusion surrounding emancipation had been clarified. After being informed of his freedom, Robert Glenn, a young Kentucky black, agreed to remain on the same plantation. But he spent much of his time, as he recalled, considering a different kind of life for himself. “I took my freedom by degrees and remained obedient and respectful, but still wondering and thinking of what the future held for me. After I retired at night I made plan after plan and built aircastles as to what I would do.” Nearly a year later, having failed to heed the first work call, he found himself awakened one morning by the foreman’s slap across the head. Glenn went about his usual tasks that day, feeding the stock and cutting firewood. His employer then ordered him to hitch a team of horses to a wagon and proceed to a neighboring farm where he was to pick up a load of hogs. Perhaps Glenn himself could not have anticipated his response. He refused to carry out the command. “They called me into the house and asked me what I was going to do about it. I said I do not know. As I said that I stepped out of the door and left.” He never returned.85

With sufficient time, freedmen like Robert Glenn gained additional confidence in themselves, learned more about the opportunities made possible by their freedom, and determined to take their chances elsewhere. After spending the first year on the plantation or farm of their bondage, scores of blacks in every section of the South chose to leave. Even larger numbers, however, began to stake out a greater degree of autonomy for themselves without moving at all. The more perceptive white families could discern the changes in those who had remained, often quite gradual and subtle but no less threatening and disconcerting. “Henney is still with me,” a South Carolina woman informed her niece, “but not the same person that she was.”86

Postscript: Four Letters

WHETHER OR NOT the freed slave and the former owner ever met again after emancipation, each of them retained his or her own memories of the old times and places and the quality of the “old ties” that had bound them together. For generations, members of slaveholding families and their descendants would regale the reading public with period pieces and reminiscences in which their “black