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By Root 1062 0

in Wake County, North Carolina, could easily sense the change that had come over the plantation on which she resided. “Missus and marster began to walk around and act queer. The grown slaves were whisperin’ to each other. Sometimes they gathered in little gangs in the grove.” In the next several days, the noise of distant gunfire grew louder, everybody “seemed to be disturbed,” the slaves walked about aimlessly, nobody was working, “and marster and missus were crying.” Finally, the word went out for every slave to assemble in front of “the great house.” Sam and Evaline Brodie came out on the porch and stood side by side facing their more than 150 slaves. “You could hear a pin drop,” Mary recalled, “everything was so quiet.” After greeting them, the master explained why he had called them together. “Men, women and children, you are free. You are no longer my slaves. The Yankees will soon be here.” There was no more to be said. The master and mistress went back into the house, picked up two large armchairs, placed them on the porch facing the road, and sat down to wait. “In about an hour,” Mary recalled, “there was one of the blackest clouds coming up the avenue from the main road. It was the Yankee soldiers.”28

When Union gunboats were sighted coming up the Combahee River in South Carolina, the overseer frantically assembled the slaves. “The Yankees are coming!” he told them. “You must all keep out of sight. Don’t let them see you. If they land near here, cut and run and hide where nobody can find you. I tell you them Yanks are the very devil! If they catch you they will sell you to New Orleans or Cuba!” The slaves assured the overseer that they would run so fast “de Debil hisself” would be unable to catch them. “Don’t you worry, Massa Jim,” the old slave cook added. “We all hear ’bout dem Yankees. Folks tell we they has horns an’ a tail. I is mighty skeery myself, an’ I has all my t’ings pick up, an’ w’en I see dem coming I shall run like all possess.” Reassured, the overseer announced that he was going to the mainland and would leave everything in their care. The slaves gathered to watch him ride off. “Good-by, ole man, good-by,” they shouted as he disappeared down the road. “That’s right. Skedaddle as fas’ as you kin. When you cotch we ag’in, I ’specs you’ll know it. We’s gwine to run sure enough; but we knows the Yankees, an’ we runs that way.” And so they did, directly toward the Union gunboats.29

When former slaves recalled the war years, what remained most vivid in their memories—“just as good as it had been dis day right here”—was that moment when freedom from bondage suddenly became a distinct possibility in their own lifetimes. The first slaves who experienced that sensation were usually those whose homes lay in the path of the Union Army. “We hear’d ’bout de Yankees fightin’ to free us,” remembered Berry Smith of Mississippi, “but we didn’ b’lieve it ’til we hear’d ’bout de fightin’ at Vicksburg.” When the “freedom gun” was fired, and Sherman’s troops came through the plantation, Susan Hamilton was scrubbing the floors. “Dey tell me I wus free but I didn’t b’lieve it.” While driving the cows to pasture, Rilla Pool, a North Carolina slave, glanced down the railroad tracks and “everything was blue”; she ran home to tell the others, and heard her grandmother exclaim, “Well I has been prayin’ long enough for ’em [and] now dey is here.” Hester Hunter, a South Carolina slave, recalled the day her grandmother ran into the house with news that the Yankees were on their way, after which the mistress screamed, fetched her valuables, and told the slave to sew them up in the feather bed. Still another South Carolina slave was about to be whipped by his master for misconduct when they heard the shout that Union gunboats were coming up the river; both fled, but in opposite directions.30

Uncertainty, skepticism, and fear marked the initial reaction of many slaves to the Yankee invaders. The first impulse was often to hide. “I done what all of de rest o’ de slaves done,” recalled a former slave who had fled to the nearby woods.