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By Root 1338 0

preparations found no justification for white fears, only a few organizations that blacks had formed for self-defense and with which they hoped to advance their prospects in the forthcoming negotiation of contracts. Perhaps the vigilance of the white community, the vigorous patrolling of the countryside, and the presence of reinforced police, militias, and volunteer patrols had saved the white South from a certain conflagration. Some whites began to suspect that was not the case, that the victory had been something of a sham. “It appears that there has been a great alarm without any cause,” the Reverend Samuel A. Agnew of Mississippi confided to his diary; the many reports of imminent insurrection, he now concluded, “were only the creations of the imaginations of timid people.” The white hysteria and the extraordinary measures it had provoked, he thought, might in their own way have constituted a tactical victory for the blacks. “As affairs have turned out the negroes must think that the white people are afraid of them.”95

Although the fears of insurrection proved to be unfounded, whites could never quite surmount them. The circumstances which had fed the rumors would persist. During the next several years, any new epidemic of restlessness, any new manifestation of discontent, any new report of black organization would precipitate still another crisis. If anything, the fears would take on even more lurid dimensions, no doubt reflecting growing apprehension over black political power. As the Christmas season of 1866 approached, James R. Sparkman, a plantation proprietor in South Carolina, shared his apprehensions with a long-time friend. While in town recently, he had attended “a secret conference” at which three “respectable citizens” described “an insurrectionary movement, wide spread, and terrible in its plot.” Within the next two months, the blacks planned to rise on a certain night and massacre the male adults and children, while retaining many of the females “for servile and licentious purposes.” By 1868, even Frances Leigh’s confidence and equanimity had ebbed considerably. If in 1865 she had felt “not the slightest” fear of the blacks on the Butler plantations, three years later she refused to sleep without a loaded pistol by her bed.

Their whole manner was changed; they took to calling their former owners by their last name without any title before it, constantly spoke of my agent as old R—, dropped the pleasant term of “Mistress,” took to calling me “Miss Fanny,” walked about with guns upon their shoulders, worked just as much and when they pleased, and tried speaking to me with their hats on, or not touching them to me when they passed me on the banks. This last rudeness I never permitted for a moment.

Frances Leigh thought that if she relaxed her vigilance for even a moment, she would lose control over the blacks altogether. For the next two years, she recalled, “I felt the whole time that it was touch-and-go whether I or the negroes got the upper hand.”96

It was not as though the blacks had no reason to revolt. Even as they persisted in testing their freedom, they had not succeeded in breaking the bonds that tied them to the farms and plantations as agricultural laborers. That had to be the uppermost thought in their minds after each settlement, about the same time whites were fashioning new notions of conspiracy and rebellion. On New Year’s Day 1866, black people commemorated emancipation, not by overturning their masters in a violent upheaval, but by attending appropriate ceremonies and listening to appropriate speeches. In Charleston, more than ten thousand assembled at the racecourse to hear their “best friends” advise them on future prospects. General Rufus Saxton implored them to be honest, industrious, and sober; if they wanted land, they would have to work for it, filling their pockets with greenbacks until they had enough to purchase a lot. Colonel Ketchum counseled them to emulate their brethren on Edisto Island who had met the loss of their lands with “remarkable dignity.” But easily the most