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harbor. “I thought the Planter might be of some use to Uncle Abe,” he remarked afterwards. The North hailed him as a hero, and the government commissioned him an officer in the United States Colored Troops. Smalls returned at the helm of the Planter to witness the United States flag raised over Fort Sumter, and by this time he was well on his way toward becoming a legendary figure among South Carolina blacks. “Smalls ain’t God!” a skeptical black told one of Smalls’s admirers. “That’s true, that’s true,” he replied, “but Smalls’ young yet.” To the white South, the entire episode seemed impossible to grasp. Emma Holmes of Camden, South Carolina, confided her “horrified” reaction to the diary she kept, pronouncing Smalls’s act “most disgraceful” and “one of the boldest and most daring things of the war.”115

Few slaves were in a position to emulate the heroism of Robert Smalls. If they manifested their desire for freedom, it would have to take less spectacular forms. No less dramatic, however, and equally far-reaching, was the decision made by tens of thousands of slaves not to wait for the Yankees but to expedite liberation by fleeing to the Union lines. “We had heard it since last Fall,” an escaped slave told the Yankees in May 1861, “that if Lincoln was elected, you would come down and set us free. And the white-folks used to say so, but they don’t talk so now; the colored people have talked it all over; we heard that if we could get in here [the Union camp] we should be free, or at any rate, we should be among friends.” With the advance of the Union Army, the legendary North Star that had once illuminated the road out of bondage lost its strategic importance; freedom was as close as the nearest Union camp, perhaps only down the road or across a nearby swamp or river. “See how much better off we are now dan we was four years ago,” a successful runaway exulted. “It used to be five hundred miles to git to Canada from Lexington, but now it’s only eighteen miles! Camp Nelson is now our Canada.”116

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UNTIL AT LEAST MIDWAY through the war, Federal policy toward slave runaways remained unclear and inconsistent. Although the Lincoln administration endorsed the decision of General Benjamin F. Butler to treat them as “contraband of war,” Union commanders in the field persisted in making their own judgments, with some officers returning fugitives and upholding the legal right of loyal slaveholders to their property. The Fugitive Slave Act remained operative until mid-1864, though only loyal masters (as defined usually by local commanders) could seek to reclaim runaways under its provisions. Federal legislation in 1862, however, barred military personnel from participating in the return of fugitive slaves and decreed that the escaped slaves of disloyal masters would be forever free.117

Whether defined as “contraband of war,” “fugitives,” or “freedmen,” they ceased to be slaves when they reached the Union lines. That was the news the “grapevine telegraph” quickly circulated, thereby swelling the number of slaves seeking out the Yankees. The “exodus” affected some plantations and regions far more severely than others, with those more remote from the war and the advancing Union Army recording the fewest successful escapes. In King William County, northeastern Virginia, nearly half the able-bodied male slaves between the ages of eighteen and forty-five fled in the first two years of the war, and a white resident of northern Virginia thought scarcely any slaves remained in that section of the country—“they have all gone to Canaan, by way of the York River, Chesapeake Bay, and the Potomac.” In North Carolina, a Confederate officer estimated in August 1862 that one million dollars’ worth of slaves were fleeing every week. By 1863, Union-occupied Vicksburg and Natchez had become centers for slave runaways in Mississippi, and that same year thousands of Louisiana slaves entered the Union lines at Baton Rouge and New Orleans. After its capture in early 1862, Fernandina, Florida, served as a haven for fugitives from Georgia and Florida,