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By Root 1294 0

Yankees; instead, he secluded himself in the nearby swamplands, where other neighborhood runaways soon joined him, including Charles Lucas, a Manigault slave (“one of our Prime Hands”) who had been entrusted with the plantation stock and who had recently been punished after the mysterious disappearance of some choice hogs. “His next step,” Manigault guessed, “was to follow the animals which he had most probably killed himself, and sent to the retreat where he expected soon to follow.” Shortly after this incident, Manigault sold a large portion of the livestock. “This was,” he explained, “through fear of their being all stolen some night by our Negroes.” On August 16, 1863, nearly eighteen months after his escape, Jack Savage returned to the plantation, “looking half starved and wretched in the extreme,” but acting with such impertinence that Capers suspected he would soon flee again. With Manigault’s approval, Capers quickly sold him in Savannah for $1,800, despite Savage’s attempt to depress that price: “It would have provoked you,” the overseer wrote, “to have heard Jack’s lies of his inability &c.” That same month, Charlie Lucas was apprehended.

While trying to anticipate runaways among the field hands, Manigault also had to deal with defections among his household servants. The disappearance of “his Woman ‘Dolly’ ” must have particularly perplexed him, as the description which he posted in the Augusta and Charleston police stations indicates:

She is thirty years of age, of small size, light complexion, hesitates somewhat when spoken to, and is not a very healthy woman, but rather good looking, with a fine set of teeth. Never changed her Owner, has been always a house Servant, and no fault ever having been found with her.

At a loss for a plausible explanation, Manigault finally concluded that she had been “enticed off by some White Man.” Although such defections annoyed Manigault, he found even more incredible the strange behavior of Hector, who for nearly thirty years had been his “favorite Boat Hand” and “a Negro We all of us esteemed highly.” He had been a good worker, a trusted slave, “always spoiled both by my Father and Myself, greatly indulged,” and “my constant companion when previous to my marriage I would be quite alone upon the plantation.” And yet, he was “the very first to murmur” and “give trouble” after the outbreak of the war. Only after considerable personal anguish did Manigault agree to remove him to Charleston; there was no question in his mind but that Hector “would have hastened to the embrace of his Northern Brethren, could he have foreseen the least prospect of a successful escape.”

The wartime experience with his slaves unsettled Manigault. The unexpected behavior of Hector proved to be “only One of the numerous instances of ingratitude evinced in the African character.” In the end, he would no longer harbor any illusions about the depth of slave fidelity. “This war has taught us the perfect impossibility of placing the least confidence in any Negro. In too numerous instances those we esteemed the most have been the first to desert us.”

When Manigault paid his last wartime visit to his Georgia properties, the sound of cannon fire could be heard in the distance. He thought the slaves still seemed pleased to see him. More than two years would elapse before he would see any of them again; meanwhile, on Christmas Eve 1864, Yankee troops left a trail of destruction as they moved through the largely abandoned Savannah River plantations.2

2

“DE WAR COMES ter de great house an’ ter de slave cabins jist alike,” recalled Lucy Ann Dunn, a former slave on a North Carolina plantation. When the Yankees were reported to be approaching, even the less perceptive whites might have sensed the anxiousness, the apprehension, the excitement that gripped the slave quarters. “Negroes doing no good,” a Tennessee planter reported. “They seem to be restless not knowing what to do. At times I pity them at others I blame them much.” The tension was by no means confined to the fields but entered the Big House