A first-hand account of the beginning of the American Civil War
The attack on Fort Sumter, which began in the early morning hours of April 12th, 1861, was the culminating point of decades of tension between the North and South over the future of slavery in the country. In this excerpt from Rebels in the Making: The Secession Crisis and the Birth of the Confederacy, William L. Barney looks at an intriguing first hand account of a slave owner who sent his enslaved servant home with news of the beginning of the war.
As the rumbling of cannon fire rolled down the Cape Fear River valley in the early hours of April 12, 1861, a carriage carrying two white men came to a stop. The men became noticeably pale and agitated. After proclaiming “It’s come,” one of them, Joseph Cowens, a merchant- planter from nearby Wilmington, North Carolina, hastily scribbled a note, placed it in a sealed envelope, and directed William, the young slave driving the carriage, to hurry directly back to his master’s Summer plantation and hand the message to Cowens’s wife.
William took a detour on his way back. He drove first to the Five- Mile plantation and gave the note to Tom, the black overseer who had taught William how to listen in on the conversations of the white folk in the main house. Tom could read and write and served as a source of information on the outside world for the other slaves. William had often brought him newspapers to examine and then carried them back to the house early the next morning before they were missed. When Tom opened the envelope, its message confirmed the hopes that had been aroused when those on the plantation had also heard the sound of cannon — the war over slavery anticipated by the slave owners was about to break out. Cowens wrote that the Confederates had fired on Fort Sumter and he likely would be leaving “to help whip the Yankees.” Cowens also instructed his wife to inform their white overseers to tighten up surveillance of the slaves and to prevent any private meetings among them.
After reading the note, Tom gave it back to William with directions on a round- about way to the Summer plantation that would take him by a large mud puddle in the middle of the road. Upon reaching that spot, William was to smear the envelope with wet mud so as to conceal that it had already been opened. The ruse worked. When William handed the envelope to his mistress with profuse apologies and tears for having accidentally dropped it into a muddy pool, she unsuspectedly tore it open in her rush to read its contents. To eliminate any signs of his deception, William picked up the envelope dropped by Mrs. Cowens as she hurried into the house. He tore it up, chewed it into a pulp, and stuffed it into a hole in a wall of the barn.
While his master rushed off to a war that would destroy slavery and in the process cost him his life, William acted on his own self- interest and that of his fellow slaves to learn more about the unfolding crisis that would ultimately free him.
Cowens came home that night and met with a group of men from Wilmington. William eavesdropped on their conversation and was overjoyed when he heard one of them heatedly say, “If the Yankees whipped [us], every negro would be free.” He was now certain, as he put it, that “the negro was the bone of contention and that the light of liberty was probably about to dawn.” When Cowens left for the war on the morning of April 15, he took William with him.
This interchange between a master and his slave laid bare the paternalist ethos based on the belief that the master understood the enslaved, whose affection and loyalty could be assumed. In fact, Cowens understood little of William’s thinking and likely actions. Cowens had assumed that his command to rush home with his message would be faithfully carried out. Instead, William took advantage of what openings the master– slave relationship offered him. While his master rushed off to a war that would destroy slavery and in the process cost him his life, William acted on his own self- interest and that of his fellow slaves to learn more about the unfolding crisis that would ultimately free him.
This firsthand account of how enslaved people reacted to hearing of the outbreak of the Civil War and how they interacted with masters is rare. What little we know usually has to be filtered through the accounts of whites. The great strength of William’s story is the immediacy it brings to a slave’s perspective on the climax of secession, the seminal event in Southern history.
William L. Barney is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Civil War (OUP, 2011);The Making of a Confederate: Walter Lenoir’s Civil War (OUP, 2007); and The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in 1860, among other titles.
