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With less equanimity, a white family in Bossier Parish, Louisiana, described the slaves in their neighborhood as “verry bold” and “trying to make up a company to rise.” When overtaken, one of the conspirators “abused his Master to the last and told him that the North was fighting for the Negroes now [and] that he was as free as his Master.” The accused rebel was then bound and left behind while the whites pursued the remaining conspirators. Upon their return, they found that “he had got loos and taken the cords that he was tied with and hung him self.” Not far from this scene, and at nearly the same time, a Louisiana planter, having crawled under a slave cabin, overheard his slaves plotting a revolt.105

Although whites tried to downplay the impact of the Emancipation Proclamation, President Lincoln’s preliminary announcement in September 1862 promptly set off a new wave of rumors and reports of insurrection. “It was very weak and ill-arranged,” Emma Holmes of Camden, South Carolina, said of a plot discovered in her district, and several blacks were scheduled to hang. In December, one month before the Proclamation took effect, a Confederate militia unit from Mississippi requested that it be permitted to disband and return home for the Christmas holiday, not for purposes of merriment but to forestall an anticipated slave uprising. “[W]e deem it highly necessary that we should be there for the defense of our families,” a spokesman for the group advised the governor, “as the negroes are making their brags that by the first of January they will be free as we are and a general outbreak is expected about that time.” No doubt this was not the only militia unit which preferred to take its chances with slave rebels rather than Yankee soldiers.106

With emancipation an avowed Union objective, persistent reports circulated that blacks intended to stage a general revolt that would affect every part of the South and begin with the destruction of railroad tracks, telegraph lines, and bridges. Julia LeGrand, a young white woman, heard that the revolt would fall on New Year’s Day 1863, and no place would be safe, not even the Union-occupied New Orleans in which she resided.

I feel no fear, but many are in great alarm.… Fires are frequent—it is feared that incendiaries are at work. Last night was both cold and windy. The bells rang out and the streets resounded with cries. I awoke from sleep and said, “Perhaps the moment has come.” … Mrs. Norton has a hatchet, a tomahawk, and a vial of some kind of spirits with which she intends to blind all invaders. We have made no preparations, but if the worst happen we will die bravely no doubt.107

Reinforcing the rumors of an impending general insurrection, reports mounted during the last two years of the war of the existence of “underground” organizations among the slaves. An escaped Union prisoner related how he had been assisted by a secret society which included “men whom their masters trusted in important transactions.” In Livingston Parish, Louisiana, a woman informed her husband of “a terrible stir” involving more than a hundred slaves belonging to two planters; the conspirators organized a company, elected officers, stole guns and horses, and were “all ready just as quick as the word was given to go to work.” Local whites put down the uprising, numerous slaves were whipped “very bad,” and five were scheduled to hang.108

If whites tended to blur the distinction between an “insurrection” and an organized escape to the enemy, they often had good reason. In Amite County, Mississippi, some thirty or more armed slaves seized their masters’ horses and “openly with boldness, cheers and shouting” made their way toward Union-occupied Natchez; within fifteen miles of their destination, however, the slaves were overtaken and most of them killed. With far greater success, Elijah Marrs mobilized twenty-seven slaves in Simpsonville, Kentucky, for an escape to the Union lines nearby; they used