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By Root 1047 0

difficult. Although planters and overseers tried to maintain business as usual, and some succeeded, the reported approach of the Union Army tended to undermine slave discipline and in some places it brought work to a complete standstill. From the moment Yankee soldiers were sighted in the vicinity, John H. Bills, a Tennessee planter, found he could exert little authority over his slaves. “My people seem Contented & happy, but not inclined to work. They say ‘it is no use’ the Yankeys will take it all.” Moble Hopson, who had been a slave in Virginia, recalled how they had paid little attention to the war until the day they reported to the field and found no one there to supervise them. “An’ dey stand ’round an’ laugh an’ dey get down an’ wait, but dey don’ leave dat field all de mawning. An’ den de word cum dat de Yankees was a comin’, an’ all dem blacks start tuh hoopin’ an’ holl’rin’, an’ den dey go on down to deer shacks an’ dey don’ do no work at all dat day.”10

The approach of the Union Army forced planters and slaves alike into a flurry of last-minute activity. “ ’Fore they come,” a former Georgia slave recalled, “the white folks had all the niggers busy hidin’ everything they could.” On the assumption, which proved to be incorrect, that the Yankees would not disturb the slaves’ possessions, many white families secreted their valuables in or under the slave cabins or on the very persons of the slaves. “Miss Gusta calls me and wrops my hair in front and puts her jewelry in under the plaits and pulls them back and pins them down so you couldn’t see nothin’.” With Union troops sighted nearby, a South Carolina planter moved some of his house furniture into the cabin belonging to Abram Brown, the driver and headman on the plantation, and told him to claim ownership if the Yankees asked any questions. To the Union soldiers, it must have looked like the best-furnished slave cabin in the South, and they refused to believe Brown’s story. Knowing the risks, some slaves simply refused to accept such responsibilities, using time-honored devices. “Mamma Maria was too nervous,” her mistress wrote, “and cried too much to have any responsibility put on her.”11

During those tense, anxious days of waiting, there were slaves who provided whatever encouragement and support they could muster for their masters and mistresses. With the Yankees expected any moment, Emma LeConte, the daughter of a prominent South Carolinian, found great comfort in the declaration of her servant, Henry, that he would stand by the family, whatever the consequences. “I believe he means it, but do not know how he will hold on.” On the day the Union Army entered Columbia, the LeConte servants (including Henry) returned from the center of town laden with looted provisions which they then shared with the white family. “How times change!” a grateful Emma LeConte wrote in her diary that night. “Those whom we have so long fed and cared for now help us.” Where the mistress and her daughters were the only remaining whites on the plantation, the slave women sometimes reversed paternalistic roles and insisted upon moving into the Big House, even into the same room, to afford them a greater degree of security. And with so many strangers prowling through the neighborhood, including Confederate Army stragglers and deserters, the slaves often treated with apprehension anyone who approached the plantation. On one Georgia plantation, a “suspicious-looking character” asked for food, only to be told by the servants that the master was not at home. But the mistress, who remained upstairs at the insistence of the servants, sent word to them to feed the stranger. “They made him sit in the piazza,” she wrote her son afterwards, “and when he attempted to come into the house (as he said, ‘to see how it looked’) Flora and Tom barred the front door. I could see him from the balcony, and when his dinner was ready they … would not even trust him with a knife or fork, but gave him only an iron spoon.”12

Not only did some slaves vow to protect their “white folks,” as though the imminent arrival