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a successful escape, the magnitude of the risks, and the certainty of severe punishment for those who failed. “Ah, you know, my bredren,” an elderly runaway told a group of freedmen, “how dey try to keep us from gittin’ to Camp Nelson. Some o’ you hev only jist got from behind; where Massa ask you, ‘Would you like to be free, David?’ O’ course I should; but den, if I say so, dey jist cross my hands, tie ’em up, strip me; den whip me wid the cowhide, till I tell a lie, and say ‘No.’ ” That only a small percentage of slaves chose flight suggests the kinds of obstacles they faced. There were mounted citizens’ patrols, river patrols, and Confederate sentinels that had to be eluded, as well as pursuing bloodhounds (“the detective officers of Slavery’s police,” one freedman called them); some of the boats used by runaways broke apart or overturned, drowning the occupants; and nervous Union guards sometimes mistook escapees for enemy soldiers and shot and killed them. While attempting to escape across a river to the Union lines, a young slave and his mother were fired upon by the master’s son; the mother managed to reach the other bank safely but her son died soon afterwards from bullet wounds. Some years before, her husband and two other sons had been sold, and she was now left to lament her most recent and ironic fate:

My poor baby is shot dead by that young massa I nussed with my own boy. They was both babies together. Missus made me nuss her baby, an’ set her little girl to watch me, for fear I’d give my baby too much, no matter how hard he cried. Many times I wasn’t allowed to take him up, an’ now that same boy has killed mine.

Even if certain and severe punishment awaited apprehended runaways, they might have counted themselves fortunate to be returned to their masters; in numerous instances, mounted slave patrols ran them down with their horses, shot them on the road, or tied them to the horses and dragged them to the nearest jail.121

Although hardly unique to the Civil War, the slave runaway most vividly demonstrated to an already apprehensive white South the breakdown and possible collapse of discipline and control. To many whites, in fact, there was little to distinguish the runaway from the rebel; both threatened to bring down the system, and reports of new desertions invariably fueled talk of subversion, insurrection, and the very death of slavery. “They are traitors who may pilot an enemy into your bedchamber!” the Reverend C. C. Jones of Georgia warned. “They know every road and swamp and creek and plantation in the county, and are the worst of spies. If the absconding is not stopped, the Negro property of the county will be of little value.” This usually reserved churchman, who prided himself on his religious work with the slaves, became so deeply disturbed over the mounting reports of runaways in the neighborhood that he suggested the need to define them as insurrectionists and mete out summary justice. After all, he wrote his son in the Confederate Army, “they declare themselves enemies and at war with owners by going over to the enemy who is seeking both our lives and property.” Responding to his father’s concerns, Charles C. Jones, Jr., who had served as mayor of Savannah before enlisting in the Army, disdained anything that would “savor of mob law” but agreed that defectors who evinced sufficient intelligence and leadership qualities to devise “a matured plan of escape” and to influence others to flee should be treated as armed insurrectionists and executed. “If insensible to every other consideration,” Colonel Jones suggested, “terror must be made to operate upon their minds, and fear prevent what curiosity and desire for Utopian pleasures induce them to attempt.”122

Nearly everyone loyal to the Confederacy conceded that the effectiveness of any system designed to thwart slave desertions rested ultimately on local and individual vigilance. While some whites might choose to debate legal niceties, most of them were concerned only with achieving immediate and conclusive results. Henry A. Middleton, a South