Secession and Terror

You read this, and you come to appreciate just how sick and twisted the “Black Confederate” claims really are:

Already on edge from these neighboring rumblings, large fires in Natchez on Sept. 20 and 22 pushed the residents into an increasing state of alarm. “No one is safe,” confessed Louisa Lovell in a letter to her husband, a Confederate captain, stationed in Virginia. Responding to the fears, a planter-dominated vigilance committee rounded up slaves in the Second Creek neighborhood, where talk of a conspiracy first surfaced. Committee members believed that the slaves schemed not just to “kill their masters,” but to “ravish,” “ride” and “take the ladies for wives.” Ten slaves were hanged on Jacob Surget’s Cherry Grove plantation on Sept. 24.

But this swift retribution did little to assuage the panic. Many more slaves were arrested and subjected to torture in the weeks to come. “All testimony was extracted from the negroes by whipping,” reported one white correspondent. Based on these forced confessions, the vigilance committee believed that the conspiracy had spread from the plantations to the city. James Carter, a slave of a Natchez druggist, who was charged with “getting news from the battles and reading it to other colored people,” described how committee members used the lash to compel him to talk: “They would whip until I fainted and then stop and whip again. Dr. Harper sat by and would feel my pulse and told them when to stop and when to go on.” But Carter told them, “I knew nothing about it.” By the end of October, at least 27 slaves had been executed, another 13 by mid-1862 and, according to a postwar investigation by the abolitionist missionary Laura Haviland, another 168 by the time Union troops arrived in 1863…

Discussions about causes of the war led to further discussions about what could be done to help the Union armies. For George Selden and his brother, Burr, both plantation slaves, they determined after many conversations that they would “join the army … when the Union soldiers came.”

For slaveholders, planning to fight with the Union Army versus talk of insurrection may have been a difference without a much of a distinction. According to Laura Haviland’s investigation, the initial scare in September 1861 arose when whites heard slaves “repeating what their master said, that if Lincoln was elected he would free all the slaves.” Marshall Bates, a slave on an Adams County plantation who sought refuge with Union gunboats in 1863, told a somewhat similar story to a New York Times reporter. Early in the war, a fellow slave named Dennis, a bricklayer, was overheard “by some white man to express the wish that they would hurry up the war and bring the time of freedom to the slave.” Dennis was whipped to death for his statement. Over the course of the vigilance committee’s investigation, any talk “in favor of liberty, or of the Yankees … either in conversation or prayer,” wrote Haviland, was enough for slaves or free blacks to be arrested and executed. “A single word indicative of my feelings — known upon the street,” testified Robert W. Fitzhugh, a freeborn carpenter, “would have no doubt caused my death.”

The Confederacy, and really the antebellum South, was a police state enforced by terror. African-Americans were the most obvious targets of this terror, but of course white loyalists and draft evaders were also subjected to violence in service of “the Glorious Cause.”