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By Root 1159 0

slave named Susannah, valued as the family seamstress, refused to leave with her master and mistress despite their dire warnings about what would happen if she remained. Several days later, when her master’s son returned and ordered the slaves to destroy the cotton lest it fall into the hands of the Union Army, they refused to cooperate. “Why for we burn de cotton?” they asked. “Where we get money then for buy clo’ and shoes and salt?” Rather than burn the cotton, the slaves took turns guarding it, “the women keeping watch and the men ready to defend it when the watchers gave the alarm.” In some instances, however, slaves who resisted removal were shot down, even burned to death in the cotton houses. On Edisto Island, where a Confederate raiding party had tried to remove some blacks, “the women fought so violently when they were taking off the men,” a white Charlestonian wrote, “that they were obliged to shoot some of them.”18

Not only did the areas of comparative safety within the Confederacy shrink with the advance of the Union Army but there were more compelling reasons why most slaveholding families chose not to flee. To stay was to try to save their homes and plantations from destruction and to preserve their slaves from the fearful epidemic whites diagnosed as “demoralization.” By remaining at home, a Mississippi planter decided, he would be in a position to prevent his slaves “from denuding my place.” Henry W. Ravenel of South Carolina entertained more lofty thoughts. Still imbued with the old paternalism, he thought it wrong—morally as well as practically—to desert his slaves at this time. “We know that if left to themselves, they cannot maintain their happy condition. We must reward their fidelity to us by the same care & consideration we exercised when they were more useful.” Apart from economic considerations, slavery had long been defended as a necessary instrument of social control that benefited both races. And now, with the Yankees not far away, some slaveholders deemed it their duty to protect their blacks from vices that would inevitably accompany liberation and freedom.19

Whether the master and mistress chose to stay or flee, they might lecture the slaves on how to behave when the Yankees arrived. Although they were to avoid impertinence, that did not require them to welcome the invaders as they did most guests. Traditional plantation hospitality was to be extended most discriminately. “Dey ain’t our company,” a former North Carolina slave remembered being told. A Virginia master, after reciting the “barbarities” of the Yankees, threatened to punish anyone who suggested to the enemy that they had not been content as slaves. “Dey tol’ us to tell ’em how good dey been to us,” a former Alabama slave recalled, “an’ dat we liked to live wid ’em.” Rivana Boynton, who had been a house slave on a plantation near Savannah, remembered the day her mistress, Mollie Hoover, assembled the slaves and instructed them on what to tell the approaching Yankees. “If they ask you whether I’ve been good to you, you tell ’em ‘yes.’ If they ask you if we give you meat, you say ‘yes.’ ” Most of the slaves did not get any meat, the former servant recalled, “but I did, ’cause I worked in the house. So I didn’t tell a lie, for I did git meat.” Most importantly, the white family warned the slaves not to divulge where the valuables had been hidden, no matter what the Yankees told them. “We knowed enough to keep our mouths shut,” a former Georgia slave remarked. But a Tennessee slave, named Jule, who claimed not to fear the Union soldiers, had some different ideas. As the Yankees neared the plantation, the mistress commanded the slaves to remain loyal. “If they find that trunk o’ money or silver plate,” she asked Jule, “you’ll say it’s your’n, won’t you?” The slave stood there, obviously unmoved by her mistress’s plea. “Mistress,” she replied, “I can’t lie over that; you bo’t that silver plate when you sole my three children.”20

When the Union Army was nearby, slaves were quick to discern any changes in the disposition of their owners.