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Who knows what similar horrors may lie in wait for us? When I saw the siege of Lucknow in that little theatre at Washington, what a thrill of terror ran through me as those yellow and black brutes came jumping over the parapets! Their faces were like so many of the same sort at home. To be sure, John Brown had failed to fire their hearts here, and they saw no cause to rise and burn and murder us all, like the women and children were treated in the Indian Mutiny. But how long would they resist the seductive and irresistible call: “Rise, kill, and be free!”134

It was precisely an incident like the Witherspoon murder, no matter how isolated, no matter how exceptional within the full record of slave behavior, that prompted white men and women, while publicly praising the exemplary behavior of their blacks, to reflect upon the combustible and unpredictable nature of a society in which the most devoted, the most pampered, the most humble slaves could strike terror and fear into a family whose confidence they commanded. Despite the accumulating evidence of betrayal, most slaveholders might have readily agreed that the faithful slave still constituted the vast majority of the black population; they could, as one Virginian did, dismiss any other thought from their minds.

Were not the negroes perfectly content and happy? Had I not often talked to them on the subject? Had not every one of them told me repeatedly that they loved “old Marster” better than anybody in the world, and would not have freedom if he offered it to them? Of course they had,—many and many a time. And that settled it.

But how could anyone be certain that the exception was not on his own plantation or in his own household? That was the essential problem, and it had plagued the white South for generations. Far more terrifying than Nat Turner and his “deluded and drunken handful of followers,” a Virginia legislator declared in 1832, was “the suspicion eternally attached to the slave himself, the suspicion that a Nat Turner might be in every family, that the same bloody deed could be acted over at any time and in any place, that the materials for it were spread through the land and always ready for a like explosion.” That was no less true in 1861 than it had been thirty years before.135

And there appeared to be no way to resolve this dilemma. Many a master was driven to sleepless nights in his attempt to penetrate behind the masks of his blacks, attaching significance to nearly every movement or word, and perhaps even more significance to their silence or apparent indifference. The meekest, the most passive, the most submissive slaves could unsettle a household. The very appearance of fidelity was sometimes suspect. “They carry it too far,” Mary Chesnut had written of her servants on the first day of the war. Not until nearly two years later did she begin to discern changes in them, and even then only in her father’s butler. Although he remained “inscrutably silent” about the war, she sensed a difference. “I taught him to read as soon as I could read myself, perched on his knife board; but he won’t look at me now. He looks over my head, he scents freedom in the air.… He is the first Negro that I have felt a change in.”136

The approach of the Union Army would raise new concerns for white families but the traditional fears remained paramount. “I am afraid of the lawless Yankee soldiers,” a Virginia woman confessed, “but that is nothing to my fear of the negroes if they should rise against us.”137

Slaves were no less apprehensive, and their concern was by no means limited to what they might expect from an invading army made up largely of whites. The Civil War would not last forever, a Texas slave advised his son, but “our forever was going to be spent living among the Southerners, after they got licked.”138

Chapter Two

BLACK LIBERATORS

Now we sogers are men—men de first time in our lives. Now we can look our old masters in de face. They used to sell and whip us, and we did not dare say one word. Now we ain’t afraid,