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By Root 1066 0

and to share with me his ideas on the “Moment of Truth”; he later read the completed manuscript and responded with his characteristically sharp and exacting criticism and warm encouragement. I am no less indebted to Eric Foner, Nathan I. Huggins, and Ronald G. Walters, each of whom expended considerable time and energy to read the manuscript and to suggest revisions which both improved the quality of the text and reduced its size. For their reactions to individual chapters, I would like to thank Herbert G. Gutman, James Kindregan, John G. Sproat, Peter H. Wood, and Arthur Zilversmit. During various stages of the book, I benefited from the assistance of Joseph Corn, Marina Wikramanayake Fernando, Susan Glenn, Alice Schulman, and Patricia Sheehan. For the thorough and perceptive reading of the book in page proofs, I am deeply grateful to Cornelia Levine. For sharing with me her skills in research and languages, Natalie Reid has my profoundest appreciation. I am also grateful to my editor at Knopf, Ashbel Green, for his careful reading of the manuscript and judicious comments.

But finally, this book belongs to my wife, Rhoda, who lived with it for more than a decade. Neither the dedication nor this brief acknowledgment adequately recognizes how much her love, personal insight, and support helped to ease the manuscript through its several passages.

Chapter One

“THE FAITHFUL SLAVE”

Either they deny the Negro’s humanity and feel no cause to measure his actions against civilized norms; or they protect themselves from their guilt in the Negro’s condition and from their fear that their cooks might poison them, or that their nursemaids might strangle their infant charges, or that their field hands might do them violence, by attributing to them a superhuman capacity for love, kindliness and forgiveness. Nor does this in any way contradict their stereotyped conviction that all Negroes (meaning those with whom they have no contact) are given to the most animal behavior.

RALPH ELLISON1

ROBERT MURRAY could already sense the change in his “white folks.” As a young slave, dividing his time between running errands and tending the horses, he had been treated tolerably well. “Massa” had been generous in providing food and clothing, “missus” had ignored both law and custom to teach several of the slaves to read, and the slave children had usually found a warm welcome in the Big House. “Been treat us like we’s one de fambly,” Murray recalled. “Jus’ so we treat de white folks ’spectable an’ wu’k ha’hd.” After the election of Abraham Lincoln, however, “it all diffrunt.” The easy familiarity of the master and mistress gave way to suspicious glances, and the slaves were permitted less freedom of movement around the place. When the children ventured up to the Big House, as they had done so often in the past, the master or mistress now barred their way and offered excuses for not inviting them inside. “Don’ go in de Big House no mo’, chillun,” Robert Murray’s mother advised them. “I know whut de trouble. Dey s’pose we all wants ter be free.”2

On the eve of the Civil War, the more than four million slaves and free blacks comprised nearly 40 percent of the population of the South. Although most slaveholders owned less than ten slaves, the majority of slaves worked as field hands on plantation-size units which held more than twenty slaves, and at least a quarter of the slave force lived in units of more than fifty slaves. Even without the added disruption of war, the awesome presence of so many blacks could seldom be ignored. While to the occasional visitor they might blend picturesquely into the landscape and seem almost inseparable from it, native whites were preoccupied with their reality. Oftentimes, in fact, they could talk of little else. Wavering between moods of condescension, suspicion, and hostility, slaveholding families acknowledged by their conversations and daily conduct a relationship with their blacks that was riddled with ambiguity. When the Civil War broke out, with the attendant problems of military invasion and