by James Oakes
In South Carolina the Manigaults, one of the wealthiest planter families in the South, succeeded in keeping their slaves from escaping to nearby Union troops through four years of war. In January of 1861, three months before the fighting began, the slaves on the various Manigault plantations were already becoming restless. “They have very generally got the idea of being emancipated when ‘Lincon’ comes in,” Charles Manigault wrote. Reports of runaways were spreading throughout the Georgia and South Carolina low country, and Manigault warned that “no overseer, or Planter should speak on such subjects even before a small house boy, or girl, as they communicate all that they hear to others.” Dogs were no longer adequate to track down runaways. “It is absolutely necessary to go armed with a double barreled gun loaded with duck shot,” Gabriel Manigault explained, “with the intention of shooting in the leg, or in a vital part if necessary, any negro who attempts to resist or escape after being caught.” With those extra precautions in place, the family’s Savannah River plantation, Gowrie, remained calm until the Union invasion and occupation of the nearby Sea Islands in November of 1861. “Then at once was a change discerned amongst the Negroes.” Throughout the area “great numbers of Negroes were running away.”19 Not surprisingly “great consternation spread” among the planters and their families.
They may have overreacted however. Although the Union occupation advanced down the coast, it did not penetrate into the interior. Charleston proved impregnable to the Yankees and their passage up the Savannah River was blocked. “I think those persons who have, or intend to move their Negroes,” Louis Manigault reported in late 1861, “have acted too hastily.” And so within six months Charles reported that “we have very much fortified ourselves.”20
The Manigaults’ success in keeping their slaves “Safe” did not mean that their slaves could be trusted. “This war has taught us the perfect impossibility of placing the least confidence in any Negro,” Charles admitted in the second year of the war. Rather than remove all of his slaves from areas too close for comfort to Union lines, Manigault and his overseer selected “[t]en of the men . . . we deemed most likely would cause trouble” and moved them to Silk Hope, another of the family plantations farther inland. When Yankee gunboats moved up the Savannah River still more slaves, “a Total of Twenty Three of our primest Savannah River Hands,” were sent to Silk Hope, “where they are to remain until Savannah is no longer threatened by the Yankees.” In case Union soldiers threatened the slaves who remained behind, “every preparation has been made to decamp at a moment’s notice.”21
Precautions and severe recriminations worked to keep the Manigault slaves in place until the closing months of the war. William Capers, the overseer at Gowrie, reported several failed escape attempts in late 1861. In one case two slaves were caught when they were betrayed by a third. In another case Driver John captured one slave attempting to escape “in the small canoe.” When another slave tried to run off “in my presents,” he too was captured by Driver John. “I gave him 60 straps,” Capers reported, in the “presents” of those who saw him run. One slave, Jack Savage, gave Manigault and Capers a great deal of trouble. Even before the war, Manigault wrote, he suspected Savage was capable of anything, including murder. He was not merely a “bad Negro,” Manigault wrote, he was “the worst Negro I have ever known.” Even after Savage was moved from Gowrie to Silk Hope he continued to cause trouble, threatening to run, hiding weapons, and the like. Finally, in January of 1862, after three months in “Dark Solitary Confinement” the slave seemed humbled. He expressed “Great Contrition” for his “misconduct,” acknowledged that he had “been bad,” and promised “never to give offense or trouble again.” How “easy it is to fix a bad Negro,” Manigault gloated, somewhat prematurely as it turned out. A short time later Savage ran away, along with another slave, Charles Lucas. Neither of them escaped to freedom, however. In August of 1863, after a year and a half of hiding out in the “dense Carolina Swamp,” Jack Savage “returned of his own accord to us . . . looking half starved and wretched in the extreme.” Jack let Manigault know where he had been hiding, and Lucas was soon captured. By then the planter had had enough. He sent Savage to the Savannah jail, where he waited to be sold—for eighteen hundred dollars to another slaveholder in Columbus, Georgia.22
Having isolated the most troublesome slaves and removed them to a plantation far from Union lines, having sold the “bad Negro” who caused the most trouble, Manigault and his overseer kept Gowrie working more or less smoothly for the remainder of the war. It would appear that not one of the dozens of slaves on the Manigault plantations—not even Jack Savage—ever succeeded in escaping to Union lines. To be sure, the war was hard on the planter and even harder on his slaves. The rice harvests were smaller, supplies were short, the Union blockade of Savannah made the city useless as a commercial port, and the high taxes Manigault had to pay to sustain the Confederate war effort threw his finances into disarray. Meat supplies were reduced because, fearful that the slaves would steal his beef cows, Manigault had all of them butchered and preserved in Savannah. To help support the war effort, the lead weights in the fishing nets were melted down to make bullets, so the slaves no longer had fish from the Savannah River. Reduced to an unvarying diet made up largely of rice, the slaves grew sickly and began to die. Conditions deteriorated even further when the Confederates impressed Manigault’s slaves to work on the fortifications around Savannah.
Not until Sherman’s army actually occupied the plantation in the closing days of 1864 were the Manigault slaves finally liberated. Through four years of war the Manigault plantation journal recorded the peaceful workings of his slaves at Gowrie, despite the fact that it was located in one of the “rebel” areas covered by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. As “a general thing,” Manigault wrote in mid-1863, “the most perfect quietude has reigned upon all of the Plantations in the Savannah River Swamp.” As late as December in 1864, Louis Manigault visited Gowrie, where “the Negroes were all working well.” The harvest would be a good one, Manigault noted. The war had disrupted plantation routine at Gowrie, but slavery itself had not been undermined. If anything, the master’s control over the slaves became more severe than ever. “Suffice it to say we were working upon it to the very last,” Manigault later wrote, and “only the Yankee bayonets put a stop to our work.” Sherman’s troops arrived at Gowrie on Christmas Eve in 1864. They set fire to the mill and the houses, imprisoned the overseer, and freed the slaves.23
SLAVES WERE MORE LIKELY to be freed during the war by the arrival of the Union army than by escaping to it. Peter Bruner, the Kentucky slave, repeatedly tried and failed to reach the Union recruiting center at Camp Nelson on his own. Sometimes he simply got lost. “I always made a great mistake every time I ran away,” Bruner remembered. “I always took the wrong direction. Instead of going north to the free states I went farther and farther south, just the opposite direction from which I wanted to go.” On one occasion Bruner and another slave nearly made it to the Ohio River, having been assisted in their escape attempts by several whites, but were nabbed by a group of “Nigger Catchers,” jailed, and reclaimed by their owners. Chained and beaten, Bruner was dragged barefoot back to his owner’s place, where he was shackled in the barn. Bruner was freed during the war when, shortly after he had been recaptured, Union troops arrived on the plantation, where they found the slave in chains, ordered him freed, and jailed his master. When Bruner’s owner was released, he tried to persuade his former slave to stay on and work for wages, but Bruner instead made his way to Camp Nelson where, in July of 1864, he enlisted in the Union army.24
Countless slaves attempted to take advantage of the war but were unable to do so. Louis Hughes, for example, had been trying to escape from slavery for years before the Civil War began. Born in 1832 near Charlottesville, Virginia, Hughes had been separated from his family as a young boy and sold back and forth to several different masters before Edward McGehee bought him and marched the twelve-year-old,
along with sixty other slaves, halfway across the continent to a plantation in Mississippi, in 1844. Notwithstanding the special treatment he received at the hands of his owner—or perhaps because of it—Hughes grew discontented with his enslavement and by the time he reached his early twenties he made the first of several attempts to escape. He made his way to the docks in Memphis, hid himself away on a boat headed upriver, and jumped ashore at West Franklin, Indiana, but bounty hunters soon captured and returned him to his master. A few months later Hughes tried again but after three days of hiding in the hull of another boat, “despairing and hungry,” Hughes surrendered and was returned once again to his owner. Shortly afterward Hughes fell in love, started a family, and settled down, until the Civil War broke out and his hunger for freedom was revived.25
On Edward McGehee’s plantation, as on so many in the South, whites spoke so openly and with such violent emotion—about the election of Abraham Lincoln, secession, the formation of the Confederacy, and Fort Sumter—that it was impossible for Louis Hughes and his fellow slaves not to notice that something big was happening in the country, something that had very much to do with them and with the possibility of their freedom. Hughes recalled the slaves whispering, “[W]e will be free,” as they spoke among themselves about the likely consequence of a Union victory. “As the war continued,” Hughes wrote, the slaves would “now and then, hear of some slave of our neighborhood running away to the Yankees.” Hughes watched for opportunities, but it turned out to be harder than he hoped—even with Union forces nearby.
When Yankee troops began moving southward into the Mississippi Valley in the spring of 1862, McGehee moved his slaves out of the way, sending them to his father-in-law’s plantation in Panola, Mississippi. Not even the proximity of the Union army could guarantee an easy escape, however, for the simple reason that wherever there were large numbers of Union troops there were bound to be large numbers of Confederate troops. It was just about impossible for most slaves to get to Union lines if they first had to pass through Confederate lines. Hughes recalled one occasion when a Yankee boat made it all the way down the Mississippi River to Carson’s Landing, “right at Boss’s farm.” Immediately rebel soldiers stationed in the vicinity “put out pickets just above our farm, and allowed no one to pass, or stop to communicate with the boat. Every one that sought to pass was held prisoner.” No slaves got through. Hughes himself was ordered by Boss to stand on the veranda and keep a lookout for any vessels coming down the river, and the slave had little choice but to comply. “I kept a close watch the next morning until about eight o’clock,” Hughes explained, when he saw a boat and “ran into the house and told Boss.” When McGehee went to investigate he was taken prisoner by the Yankees.
The temptation was too much for Hughes—Boss was in prison, the Yankees were nearby. “I made up my mind that this would be a good chance for me to run away.” He went to the Panola farm, where his wife and children were living. From there he would “try to get to the Yankees.” He told his wife, Matilda, of his plan to run to the Union camps at Memphis, and they made their tearful good-byes. But Hughes could not get to the Union lines without passing through Confederate lines. He was captured by rebel soldiers who suspected him of spying for the Yankees. Returned to Panola, Hughes got “another flogging to satisfy the madam. I was never so lacerated before,” he remembered. “I could hardly walk.” It was the third time Hughes had tried to escape, and the third time he failed.
The fourth attempt, a few months later, would be more carefully thought out. It would be a group escape, planned with friends and including family members. It must have been around March in 1862. Union troops had entered Mississippi, beginning a military occupation that would not end until after the war was over. Hoping once again to make it to Union lines, Hughes’s group left the plantation one evening and spent the night walking twelve miles until they reached a swamp at daybreak. Traveling only when it was dark, unable to walk along roadways, the slaves had to make their way through briars, cornfields, wet grass, and marshes. By the second day their clothes were soaked and they were running out of food. On the third day they heard the dogs approaching. They tried to save their escape by scattering in all directions, but with fourteen hounds and several men chasing them the slaves had no hope. They were marched back to the plantation where “all of us were whipped.”
Meanwhile Hughes’s owner, Edward McGehee, was released by the Yankees and, unwilling to take any more chances, he moved one hundred slaves, house servants and field hands alike, to Demopolis, Alabama, where he hired most of them out to a Confederate salt works. McGehee made good money, and it gave him an even better idea. He sold his Mississippi plantation, mortgaged his Memphis home, bought himself an island in Mobile Bay, and began building a salt works of his own. “He was very enthusiastic over this scheme,” Hughes recalled, “claiming that he would make far more money by it than he was then receiving from hiring out his slaves.” Before he could realize his ambitious plans, though, McGehee contracted pneumonia and died on New Year’s Day in 1864. The slaves were hired out for another year, but Louis and Matilda Hughes, along with their newborn child, were sent back to the father-in-law’s plantation in Panola, Mississippi. When the war finally ended in 1865, Louis Hughes and his wife were still enslaved.
Escape was not easy, not even for a slave as knowledgeable and determined as Louis Hughes. Young unattached men were the most likely to escape to freedom during the war, just as they were the most likely to flee before the war. Men with wives and children were more reluctant to leave their families. Women with children, the elderly, and the disabled were least likely to make a run for it. The enticement policy instituted by the Emancipation Proclamation reinforced these demographic biases. Union recruiters went onto southern farms and plantations and announced that all the slaves had been freed, but they most actively recruited the able-bodied young men. After 1863, as large Union forces marched eastward from the Mississippi River, those biases diminished as entire slave families flocked to Union camps in huge numbers. But enticement agents thought their work was done if they left a plantation with a handful of young male recruits.
If it was clear that most slaves wanted to be free, it was not clear that freedom was easily achieved by simply packing up and walking off to the nearest Union camp. Like everybody else, slaves were driven by a complex mixture of incentives and calculations, and different people responded in different ways to the prospect of freedom—even though nearly all slaves found that prospect enticing. Union troops came and went. Who could be sure that the brutal uncertainties of life trailing an army on the march were preferable to the meager securities of life on a plantation? It cannot have been obvious to all slaves that they should quit their families, neighbors, or homes in exchange for a filthy, overcrowded contraband camp.26
Not even the offer of enlistment in the Union army—in some ways the most straightforward of all the options available to slaves—was all that straightforward. Masters sometimes threatened reprisals against the families of those young men who volunteered to fight for the Yankees. It was hard enough for any soldier, white or black, to leave behind a family and a community he might never see again, but for an enslaved husband and father there was the added fear that he was leaving his family at the mercy of an enraged master. Then, too, the Union army to which he was fleeing was not uniformly welcoming. Enticement was the official Union policy and so, for that matter, was the suppression of racial “prejudice” within the ranks. Until the last year of the war, however, it was also official Union policy to discriminate against black soldiers with lower pay and limits on promotion, and there were always some Union soldiers who treated slaves with contempt and abused their own black comrades-in-arms. Young black men had a powerful incentive to enlist, but they had plenty of reasons not to.27
Union officials sometimes noted the reluctance of slaves to claim their freedom. General Sherman, after accepting the proposition that “universal emancipation” was an effective way to “in
jure our enemy,” nevertheless doubted it would work. “Not one nigger in ten wants to run off,” he complained in September of 1862—before enticement began. He estimated that there were twenty-five thousand slaves within twenty miles of his base in Memphis. “[A]ll could escape & would receive protection here,” he wrote, “but we have only about 2000.” James Ayers had so much trouble recruiting slaves into the Union army that he grew frustrated with his assignment and eventually resigned.28 “I am heartily sick of coaxing niggers to be Soaldiers Any more,” Ayers complained. Some were unwilling to leave their wives; others were too sick for soldiering. “I would rather be A slave all my days than go to war,” one man said. Ayers, in turn, was ready to “throw up my papers and resign.” But most recruiters never reached most slaves. Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas reported to Secretary of War Stanton in late 1864 that his men were having trouble recruiting slaves from “the interior counties” of Kentucky. Those areas “abound with Southern sympathizers,” Thomas explained, “who adopt every means possible to prevent the negroes from proceeding to the Camps of Reception.”29