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2 Slaves and the Great Deliverer Freedom and Friendship behind Union Lines in april 1865, not long after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, a ‘‘dispatch boat, with drooping flag shrouded in mourning’’ carried the news of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination to the massive Union colony of ex-slaves on Roanoke Island in North Carolina’s Albemarle Sound. The message ‘‘brings us down to the valley of humiliation,’’ a missionary on the island wrote. ‘‘Old and young were alike bowed down . . . moaning and weeping near my school house.’’ When the teacher reminded the ex-slaves that God would not ‘‘desert you in the wilderness,’’ one of them answered gloomily, ‘‘I knows it honey, but ’pears like I cant see de light anywhere. I cries might hard to de Good Lord, to have pity on us, now wese no friend on earth.’’ Across the South, Yankees described ex-slaves’ reaction to Lincoln’s death as a widespread panic that their rights had died with their president. At the end of June, the Union officer in charge of North Carolina ex-slaves reported that ‘‘bewildered’’ African Americans ‘‘scarcely’’ knew ‘‘whether they were or were not free,’’ in part because of ‘‘the untimely death of their great Deliverer, Abraham Lincoln.’’ For reassurance and protection , they flocked to Northern military officers, African American soldiers , kinsmen, teachers, and missionaries. This panic was not an idle fear. For those far from Union lines like Granville County–born Charity Austin, who lived on a southwest Georgia plantation during the war, Lincoln’s death in fact did temporarily forestall their freedom. ‘‘Boss tole us Abraham Lincoln wus dead and we are still slaves,’’ she remembered. ‘‘Our boss man brought black cloth and made us wear it for mourning for Abraham Lincoln and tole us that there would not be freedom. We stayed there another year [44] Freedom and Friendship behind Union Lines after freedom. A lot o’ de niggers knowed nothin’ ’cept what missus and marster tole us.’’∞ Lincoln’s death did not, of course, end emancipation, but the panic that followed his assassination casts light upon the way freedpeople understood politics. Their personalistic view of rights was something that Horace James, the Union Superintendent of Negro Affairs in North Carolina, counted as one of the war’s most significant, but also most troubling, outcomes. On New Year’s Day, 1865, months before Lincoln’s assassination, James described the seventeen thousand ex-slaves then under Union control as ‘‘hero worshippers .’’ Although, as James put it, they ‘‘strongly aspire to the common rights of citizens,’’ ex-slaves counted those rights in part as a gift from a distant patron. ‘‘The eternal progress of ideas they comprehend not, but Abraham Lincoln is to them the chiefest among ten thousand, and altogether lovely. They mingle his name with their prayers and their praises evermore.’’ James believed this ‘‘great reverence for the ‘head men’ and for all in authority’’ grew from freedpeople’s own limitations. Slavery and racial inferiority made them ‘‘simple children of nature’’; therefore, the federal government ‘‘should stand god-father . . . and throw the strong arm of its protection around them’’ until they had the knowledge to understand their world and the power to defend themselves.≤ James’s conclusion looks at first glance like simple racism. Freedpeople’s assertive political organizing belied James’s judgment of their capacities, but it did not always contradict his verdict about their attachment to patrons. Beyond his racist explanation, James’s account provides an entry into the complex question of how slaves made sense of a political world full of both promise and peril. On those terms, James’s story fits in easily with petitions and pleas from ex-slaves during the war and with stories told long after. Exslaves frequently made Lincoln a biblical saint, a savior, and a good king, a necessary patron in a world where rights seemed not abstract but embodied in particular leaders. This mythic Lincoln represented not what James considered the transition state between slavery and freedom but a series of judgments made by freedpeople about the capacities and limitations of the Union government. For North Carolina’s slaves, the Civil War represented both revolutionary possibilities and grave danger. Although some Northern orators proclaimed the war was an effort solely to save the Union, many slaves knew better. From the beginning, they understood that their freedom lay in the balance, and that their actions could help shift the outcome of the war to their advantage and...

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