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By Root 1189 0

in the Big House, could not escape the ambivalence that underlay the relationships formed in slavery. While most body servants remained loyal and faithful attendants, earning the laurels accorded them, significant numbers did not; in fact, some body servants calculatingly exploited the trust placed in them to desert to the Yankees at the first opportunity. Katie Darling, who had been a housegirl on a plantation in Texas, recalled how her father ran away from “Massa Bill” while the two men were on their way to the battlefield. “Massa say when he come back from the war, That triflin’ nigger run ’way and jines up with them damn Yankees.” Lieutenant Theodorick W. Montfort, a Georgia farmer and lawyer, considered his body servant, Prince, to be “a most excellent” attendant. “You would be surprised to see how well he can cook & wash & how neatly he can iron & put up clothes. He can do it as well as any woman. I dont think you will want any better cook, washer & Ironer than he is by the time the war is over.” But when the Yankees captured and then interned Lieutenant Montfort, his prize servant seized the opportunity to declare himself free. Not only did some body servants desert to the Yankees but they also provided them with information on the number and location of Confederate batteries; one such informer was subsequently recaptured, handed over to loyal servants for punishment, and reportedly “met a death at their hands more violent than any white person’s anger could have suggested.”89

When Confederate military fortunes declined and rations ran short, most of the body servants had to be sent home to help raise the necessary food supplies. In returning to the plantations, they imparted to their fellow slaves not only war experiences but the conversations they had overheard around the campfires and from captured Yankees about the prospects of a Union victory and emancipation. Although the white South would still accord the body servant a place in the pantheon of Confederate heroes, his conduct had often revealed an ambivalence that the coming of the Yankees would make even more explicit in the occupied South. That conflict between fidelity to the master and the yearning for freedom would manifest itself in numerous ways and deeply trouble both whites and blacks, leaving a bewildered white South to ponder, for example, over the behavior of a body servant who risked his life to carry his wounded master to safety and then remounted the master’s horse and fled to the Yankee lines. Recalling his own experience, Martin Jackson, who had been a slave in Texas, spoke with considerable pride about the company in which he had served, but he made no effort to hide the conflict of loyalties he had felt. “Just what my feelings was about the War, I have never been able to figure out myself. I knew the Yanks were going to win, from the beginning. I wanted them to win and lick us Southerners, but I hoped they was going to do it without wiping out our company.”90

Even as the white South persisted in touting the fidelity, contentment, and docility of its black population, there were limits to how much trust could be reposed in them and to what kinds of services they would be permitted to render. The employment of blacks as military laborers and body servants occasioned no particular alarm, as their duties were consistent with the servile position they occupied in southern society. But the proposal to enlist blacks as regular soldiers proved to be a different matter altogether. In opposing any such move, an Alabama legislator could think of no more effective argument than the example of his own body servant “who had grown up with him from boyhood, who had gone with him to the army and had shared with him, share and share alike, every article of food and clothing,” and yet, inexplicably, “had seized the first opportunity which presented of deserting him, and joining the Yankees.” Nevertheless, the Confederacy would have to confront the issue of slaves as soldiers, particularly after the Yankees began to reap such successes from the experiment.91