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Even in the face of danger and repeated failures, the slaves persisted in their attempts to reach the Union lines. Having been thwarted in their initial attempt to escape from a plantation near Savannah, a seventy-year-old black woman and her husband immediately made plans to try again. While the plantation whites were meting out punishment to her husband, she collected their twenty-two children and grandchildren in a nearby marsh. After drifting some forty miles down the river in a dilapidated flatboat, the family was rescued by a Union gunboat. “My God!” she exclaimed as they came aboard, “are we free?” Her husband subsequently made good on his second escape attempt. No less persistent was a Maryland servant who tried to join others in a mass escape despite the fact that his hands and feet had been amputated some years before because of severe frostbite. “Well, I got him back and had him tied up,” the owner told a visiting Englishman, “for I thought he must be mad. But it was no use, he got away again, and walked to Washington.” How, asked the curious visitor, could he have managed such a remarkable deed? The answer no doubt must have seemed equally incredible.

Oh, he just stumped along. He was always a right smart nigger, and he could do many things after he lost his limbs. He could attend to the cooking and sew with his teeth very well, and could get on a horse and ride as easy as look. He was always a remarkably strong nigger. Why, even after he lost his hands, he could kill a man, almost, with a blow of one of his knobs.

The persistence of some black runaways came at the expense of their white pursuers. After overtaking his slave in a swamp, a South Carolina master found himself engaged in a fierce struggle. He managed to shoot the slave in the arm, shattering it badly. Knowing what awaited him if captured, the fugitive grimly fought on, unhorsed his master, and then beat him “until he was senseless.”126

Rather than flee to the Yankees, numerous slaves responded to particular provocations, as they had before the war, by decamping for the nearby woods or swamps, where they might hide out for extensive periods of time. After all, even the much-hunted Nat Turner had managed to elude his pursuers for nearly eight weeks. Near the end of the war, Anna Miller recalled, “my sis and nigger Horace runs off. Dey don’ go far, and stays in de dugout. Ev’ry night dey’d sneak in and git ’lasses and milk and what food dey could. My sis had a baby and she nuss it ev’ry night when she comes. Dey runs off to keep from gettin’ a whuppin’.” Far more dangerous were the colonies of runaways that formed in some areas, from which slaves would forage the countryside for provisions. While searching for runaways, a group of whites in South Carolina found such a settlement in a nearby swamp, “well provided with meal, cooking utensils, blankets, etc.,” as well as twelve guns and an ax. In Surry County, Virginia, a scouting party investigated a similar runaway camp but never lived to report their findings; the fugitives killed them.127

Assumptions about slave contentment, docility, or indifference prepared few whites for the extent of the runaway problem. “Unlettered reason or the mere inarticulate decision of instinct brought them to us,” thought one Union officer, while a white resident of Natchez deemed it little wonder “that they long to throw aside their chains and ‘live like white people’ as they say.” The slaves themselves had little difficulty in explaining why they had fled. Reflecting upon their escapes, exchanging stories across the campfires in the contraband villages, answering the queries of Union officers and reporters, they usually talked about the oppressiveness of enslavement, the difficulties of carrying out plantation duties while freedom was so close at hand, and the determination to liberate themselves rather than wait for the Yankees.

Massa wanted we niggers to go ’way with him, but we want come to Yankees ’cause he treat us too bad. We hear you come down ’long time ago. Massa said de