Living a Big War in a Small Place: Spartanburg, South Carolina, during the Confederacy

Four: Slavery during the War

4 slavery during the War Slavery had existed in Spartanburg from the time of the first settlements in the middle of the 18th century. By 1860 the district’s total population was about twenty-eight thousand, and the village population was about one thousand to one thousand two hundred. About one third of the district’s total population were slaves (there were about fifty free African Americans). Close to one-third of the white heads of households owned slaves. Close to one-half of the slave owners owned six or fewer slaves, and almost all owned under twenty slaves.1 During the war many Southerners, even in a small, relatively isolated village such as Spartanburg, worried about the behavior of their slaves. During the antebellum years Spartanburg’s slave owners had been concerned about revolts. Although white people continued to be in total control of society, the strains of war made them increasingly anxious about how their slaves might react under changing circumstances—such as the absence of a male master and the deprivations of food and other items caused by the war. Apprehension about slave revolts continued unabated during the war.2 Concerns about the activities of slaves grew from 1863 onward, as the news of the war became more dire. Slave owners worried about “negro-frolick[s]”; David Harris was asked to bring his gun and join a neighborhood posse to put an end to such a gathering. He decided to participate: “I went according to request (but without my gun) and bravly charged upon the house. But it was dark, silent & quiet, so we charged home again.”3 Obviously David had not taken this particular threat seriously. By 1864 and early 1865, when he was off in the lowcountry fighting for his country, his wife, Emily, began to have the same concerns as her neighbors. She came to share those worries not only because she had been left alone to manage her work force, but more important because she discovered some of her hogs butchered or stolen. She came to believe that “our hogs are killed for revenge as well as gain. We have insulted a negro who is too smart to be detected in his villainy.” She found one of her slaves Slavery during the War 45 stealing from her: “He steals and lies and disobeys all laws with the utmost impunity ” and she learned that her slaves were harboring escaped Yankee prisoners. Finally she decided to whip one of her field hands. She grew afraid of her slaves as they became increasingly unruly, a result of their growing awareness that the end of the war meant their eventual freedom.4 There was reason for concern. Spartanburg’s slaves had, for the most part, been docile and obedient during the antebellum period, but as the records of the Magistrates and Freeholders’ Court demonstrate there were times when slaves lost control over themselves and acted contrary to expectations. These unexpected events had raised concerns over potential slave behaviors, which ranged from slaves openly flouting laws or traditional rules of conduct, to refusing to take or promptly obey orders, to violence toward white people.5 The war caused those anxieties to become even more common. To make matters increasingly worse, the discovery of a plot (admittedly amorphous and perhaps apocryphal) for an insurrection in late 1859 and early 1860 had shaken at least the leaders of the community to a state of anxious watchfulness way beyond the norm of Spartanburg’s antebellum past.6 The following reviews the normal functioning of Spartanburg’s slave system during the antebellum years as people tried to control slave behavior and in turn slaves tried to establish lives of their own. The changes in the control and daily routine of the slave system caused by the war may be judged against this background . Having worried about slave revolts during peacetime, Spartanburg slave owners could not help but be concerned about what their slaves might do when society was under great strain. African Americans picking cotton, the district’s major staple crop. Photograph courtesy of the Herald-Journal Willis Collection, Spartanburg County Public Libraries. 46 The District Slavery was an integral part of the antebellum society of upstate South Carolina just as it was throughout the South. The everyday functioning of the institution did not change immediately, but as the war years passed, elements of the slave system, and the rest of...