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who had already proven troublesome or whose past conduct raised questions about their dependability in a crisis. Louis Manigault of Georgia had no hesitation in selling a slave he considered “a most dangerous character & bad example to the others.” Of the ten slaves belonging to a Missouri couple, only one had given them grounds for concern: “He used to wait in the house and was a likely boy and very smart. Well he must needs have his freedom—it was two years ago—so he bought a knuckleduster and was for killing my husband; but we found it out and sold him right off. We only got $700 for him, though.” In the absence of any overt act, wartime tensions still had a way of magnifying suspicions. “Sell Tom,” a Florida woman advised her husband about his personal slave, “I am not happy with the thoughts of your being alone with him.… He will never abandon the hope of freedom, and if your life should stand in his way, you are not safe.… I would not have you between him and freedom for the wealth of the world. Tom must go out of our household.”75

The wartime trade in slaves did not always suggest doubts about the future of the institution. In areas where the restricted acreage devoted to cotton, along with the concentration of relocated planters and their slaves, produced a surplus of slave laborers, purchasers were available to capitalize on good bargains. The market value of slaves remained relatively high, compared with prewar rates, but the prices paid for slaves reflected the rapid rate of inflation, the depreciated Confederate currency, and the military fortunes of the Confederacy; the slaves sold in Richmond in early 1865 for $10,000, for example, represented a real (gold) value of not more than $100. The capacity for self-deception proved limitless for those whites who chose to interpret the high prices as demonstrating confidence in the ultimate triumph of the Confederacy or as a firm rejection of the legality of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Most slaveholders, however, retained a sufficient business and political sense to know better. In December 1864, with the outcome of the war nearly decided, Edmund Ruffin, the staunchest Confederate patriot of them all, sold fifteen of his slaves, mostly women and children. His son made no attempt to conceal the reasons: “these were all consumers and likely to be for some time and were sold on account of the expense of keeping and the doubtful tenure of the property.”76

When confidence in the survival of the Confederacy faltered, some slaveholders abandoned any patriotic or paternalistic pretenses and made a final, desperate effort to unload their slaves. “Us was sold on de block,” Wash Wilson recalled, “ ’cause Marse Tom say he gwine git all he done put in us out us, iffen he can ’fore de Yanks take dis country.” Shortly before the shelling of Petersburg, Virginia, began, Fannie Berry remembered, “dey were selling niggers for little nothin’ hardly,” and as late as March 1, 1865, Mary Chesnut noted the “sale” of two slaves in besieged Richmond: a black woman traded for yarn, and a black man sold for a keg of nails. Although most slaveholders chose not to dispose of their property in this manner, they were hardly indifferent to the pecuniary consequences of emancipation. With an eye to the future, masters prepared for the Yankees by affixing a price to each of their slaves. If they could not retain them after the war, they would at least be in a position to claim compensation for their losses.77

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THE CONDITIONS CREATED by wartime dangers and necessities had few precedents in southern life or in the long history of slavery. If numerous blacks were removed to safe havens to keep them from the Yankees, still others were impressed into service as military laborers to help repel the Yankee invaders or kept in the fields to grow the crops necessary to feed the Army. Forced to muster every resource at its command, the white South would find itself in the position of debating the increased use of blacks in the military effort, even as fears mounted that blacks might, if given