I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction

by Kidada E. Williams

The “visit” was not Edward Crosby’s first encounter with hostile white Mississippians. Before the war, enslaved people outnumbered free people in Monroe County by about four thousand. The enslaving class had used extreme levels of violence to control the Black majority. Emancipation and Black male enfranchisement gave men like Edward the chance to create a more just world—a world they were ready to seize—and whites in Monroe County knew it. White landowners in the county collectively found ways to deny Black people’s freedom and power wherever they could, including by imposing the system of sharecropping and tenant farming. This economic violence rendered families like Edward’s vulnerable to retaliatory eviction; against organized white resistance, it would be hard for Edward to secure employment, shelter, and life’s necessities anywhere else in the county. And as if threats of being unhoused were not enough, paramilitary gangs like the Klan had massed across the region. Edward

At his polling place, Edward Crosby requested a Republican ballot, but he was told none were available. He waited, trying to figure out what to do and hoping an ally would show his face and give Edward the ballot he wanted to cast. None appeared. Edward hung around. Throughout the day, thirty to forty more Black men came to the polling place and asked to vote for the Republican ticket, all to be told the same thing.

defeated.6 Frustrated by having his rights violated, and petrified his landlord and other white men would make good on their threats and continue to pursue him, Edward began planning to relocate. He did not know whether the man who had held him in bondage would have him whipped, like other Black men had been in his community, or drive his family off the land. He knew that if he resisted, the white man and his associates would kill him. “All of us live a little in doubt,” Edward said of his social circle. “We didn’t hardly know what to be at times.”7

see. While acknowledging the significance of the “social revolution” taking place after slavery was abolished, in 1865, retired U.S. Army general Carl Schurz advised Americans against indulging “in any delusions” about the real state of affairs in the South. But some white northerners and westerners were content to be deluded: they were exhausted from the war, grateful for peace, and—not having experienced the obscenity of slavery themselves—ignorant of the true depths of enslavers’ capacity for depravity.8

Secessionists and their allies had accepted slavery’s end, but “the general spirit of violence” slavery fostered toward Black people had not dissipated, the general said.9

aspiring Black families. White men—like those who denied Edward Crosby his vote and rallied the Klan to punish him—mobilized around the belief that, although secessionists had surrendered the battlefield to United States forces, the war to maintain complete mastery over Black people was still on. U.S. Army officials, like General Thomas Kilby Smith, observed that these southern whites were “disloyal in their sentiments and hostile to what they call the United States”; they waited to be “restored to independence” and left to manage Black people just as they had before the war.11

equality than white southerners were. Many white Americans seemed to take it for granted that former Confederates would be outraged by defeat and abolition. The expected nature of white southerners’ reprisal against Black freedom allowed postbellum violence to remain normalized and institutionalized, just as it had been during slavery. But this was not merely a continuation; emancipation and Black people’s fight for legal equality changed everything, incentivizing the all-out war white southerners waged on freedom during the Reconstruction period.14

opened schools and churches. In March 1865, Congress authorized the establishment of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, which provided some aid to newly freed people and impoverished white southerners displaced by the war.32 Most agents working for the Freedmen’s Bureau, as it became known, were white military personnel; how they operated in the field reflected the spectrum of white attitudes toward Black people and emancipation—from progressives who distributed resources generously, to conservatives who were often embittered and withholding.

secure their future. By the summer, Andrew Johnson—a political and social conservative, opposed to any federal assistance to freed people—had ordered that all confiscated land be returned to Confederates who swore loyalty to the United States and promised to respect the Constitution. Outraged families on South Carolina’s Edisto Island registered their protest with the Freedmen’s Bureau. This “is not the condition of freemen,” the petitioners wrote of the decision to allow Confederates to return to the island. They knew the former enslavers were sure to evict them if they refused to submit to working and living conditions that were close to slavery.

were experiencing the lashing wrath of their enslavers. White vengeance in the South and white apathy in the White House were rendering Black southerners unhoused and hungry, even though through their stolen labor, as Childress put it, they had earned nearly “all this property” in the region. African Americans literally helped build “the South.” But every day they encountered members of the slaveholding apparatus, from the wealthy plantocracy to poorer whites, who all made clear they would do everything they could to keep Black people as close to bondage as possible. Childress

According to one Freedmen’s Bureau agent, problems generally arose when white men could not “throw aside the dogma” of mastery and accept the “unpalatable truth” of slavery’s end and Black people being able to reap the rewards of free labor.84 Whites sabotaged the transition to free labor whenever they could with the hope of “embarrassing” the United States and compelling Congress to “revive slavery,” the agent observed.85 In the new contract and sharecropping systems that emerged, the planter class found their opening to deny families economic freedom and sovereignty. Employers and laborers wrestled over the terms of the work people performed. Enslavers-turned-employers who had their finances disrupted by the war rarely had cash on hand, so they agreed to pay laborers like Edward Crosby’s family in shares of the crop. Some attracted workers by offering large parcels of land, only to reduce the promised acreage within a year, using the threat of violence to force families to accept the new terms or move with nothing to show for it.

The former enslaving class tried to limit the amount of time families spent tending to their own crops or gardens, constraining their economic possibilities. Enslavers went to extreme lengths to restrict freed people’s leisure time and their right, as one woman put it, “to ’joy” their freedom, including by playing, dancing, and drinking in their own time.86 Planters tried to shut down venues and business establishments that catered to Black people looking to have a good time.87 Enslavers resisted the end of the corporal punishments that were the linchpin to slavery.

Land-hungry families encountered whites who refused to sell or lease land to them. Landless whites in their communities were vehemently opposed to African Americans obtaining land before they did. Property-owning whites tried to stop Black people from buying land, especially if they wanted more than the bare minimum for subsistence farming. Black mechanics, one Vicksburg bureau agent reported, “who have made several thousand dollars during the last two years, find it impossible to buy even land enough to put up a house,” yet white men could purchase any amount of land they wanted. As the agent noted, whites knew that if they could deny Black people property or land ownership, then these freed people would be bound to return to the former slave labor camps and work for wages that barely supported themselves and their families. These whites reasoned that “this kind of slavery will be better than none at all,” the agent observed.98

White opposition to Black landownership was so intense that, as one freed woman recalled, if Black landowners “didn’t watch their steps mighty careful, the white folks would find a way” to snatch the land.99 Hannah and Samuel Tutson had barely gotten on their homestead before their white neighbors started menacing them. “In

fight any new incarnations of white supremacy. Some freedom-making families repurposed the housing structures they had occupied during slavery. Many of these were single-family-size log cabins and wood-framed shotgun homes that were at least a story and a half high. Ground floors were made of planks of wood set up on blocks that lifted two feet above ground.103 Subfloors provided storage space. First and main floors usually included rooms for sleeping, and a kitchen. Upper half-stories provided space for storing goods and, sometimes, extra sleeping space. Families who could do so lived in housing akin to contemporary two-family duplexes, which supported multigenerational needs and could accommodate kin displaced by evictions, floods, or fires.104 Families fenced off their dwellings to demonstrate ownership and provide a degree of protection. They also acquired dogs, for hunting and another layer of protection against intruders.

At the same time, white southerners’ belief in their right to use extreme violence on African Americans flowed naturally from slavery to freedom like the current of the Mississippi, unyielding in its drive south to the Gulf. In

Sometimes, white loathing only lingered at the edges of social life, in the exchange of looks between one man who had hitched his future to perpetual slavery and another man who bet on emancipation. But white rage boiled as poor, landless whites seethed watching Black families transcend the hard struggle—wives like Eliza Lyon retreating from fields; children like her William, Ella, and Annie attending school; people enjoying leisure time and building thriving institutions like Robert Meacham’s church; men acquiring land like Samuel Tutson did; men like Abe Lyon starting businesses; men running for office like Abram Colby. Other times that rage crashed through the center of daily life, when whites—possessed by a desire to maintain their power—forgot themselves and the expectations of the new order and presumed the right to continue violently attacking Black people as they had done under slavery.126 When outraged and jealous whites strove to undermine Black people’s self-determination and their sense of security, they intentionally targeted these people’s homes, and the places and spheres surrounding them. The very spaces African Americans created to serve as the foundation for their liberation became the primary theaters in the war against their freedom.127

The thunder of hooves broke the silence of the night, jarring Caroline Benson awake in White County, Georgia, and alerting her that white men were coming and that she and her family were in imminent danger. For one man, of Spartanburg County, South Carolina, it was the barking of his dogs; for another man in the same locale, it was the sound of white men’s bodies crashing into his door. For others, it was the whoop of the rebel yell, high-pitched hoots of whistles or bugles, or screams coming from neighbors’ yards. What these families heard was a shadow army of white men in their communities: it sounded like death was coming.

the pained wails of their surviving kin.1 Like Edward Crosby—who saw white men on horseback descending on his home in the dark of night—James Alston, of York, South Carolina, saw death coming for him in the form of disguised white men with guns in their hands.

a bridge to visit his property in Tuskegee, Alabama. Still another looked outside and saw his yard, in Chatham County, North Carolina, full of armed white men. A Florida couple’s young children sat watching from the woods as white men whipped and assaulted both their parents. A father also watched, in stunned silence, as a gang beat and repeatedly stabbed his son, in Limestone County, Alabama. A wife watched, too, as her husband lay dying on the family’s cabin floor near Glenn Springs, South Carolina. The things targeted people saw when they thought death was coming for them stuck with them for the rest of their lives.2

When Black families were awakened in the middle of the night, when death was in their yards or at their doorsteps, they understood the white men outside their homes were part of a larger enterprise intent on denying Black people their freedom. These groups of men included enslavers, Confederate soldiers, and other whites who rejected a post–Civil War world in which Black Americans could be free and coexist peacefully with whites under the auspices of the federal government.

people. Although the Confederate army surrendered the battlefield to U.S. forces, these vigilantes made clear that the southern white man’s war for domination over Black people was still on. Having failed in their fight to leave the United States, insurrectionists sought instead to remake the republic in their image.4 Their most significant tactic was violence. Some of this was reflexive outbursts. But the war on Black people’s freedom during Reconstruction could not be sustained by rage alone; it required organization and extensive planning. In much of the American imagination, “visits” like the ones Edward Crosby, Caroline Benson, and James Alston experienced were spontaneous reprisals—or even harmless antics. This misconception arose because Confederates and white conservative apologists deliberately crafted a mythology about Reconstruction violence, then kept that myth alive over the century and a half since. One component of this tale was to deny that any atrocities took place during “visits.” Another was for perpetrators and bystanders to downplay the acts of savagery—as one resentful Freedmen’s Bureau agent did when he described an attempted killing as a “rough frolic.”5 Dismissing white southerners’ murderous assaults on Black people as random, or merely as the result of Confederates’ understandable hurt feelings at defeat, perpetrators and their defenders legitimized a war on freedom and normalized atrocities. White disbelief encouraged what became the genocidal-l...

6 The UN’s definition requires both evidence of intent—verifiable proof of deliberate targeting that can stand up in an international court of law—and action to bring about the destruction.7

policies that would sustain Black people’s subjugation. There does not appear to be evidence that Confederates coordinated across a state or even the former slaveholding region. That is why it is best to think of white extremists’ actions as akin to what Scheper-Hughes has called a “small war”—wars that aren’t formally declared and don’t involve official military engagements.12 Unlike a “big war,” whose military engagements are official and unmistakable, individual assaults in a “small” one may seem so inconsequential that they become normalized. But the cumulative effect of incessant attacks makes the scale of violence and suffering more visible.13

Postbellum attacks were less a new development than they were an extension of wartime reprisal violence. During the war, especially after the Emancipation Proclamation, white southerners had used shocking amounts of force to try to stem the tide of Black people escaping slavery; enslavers had ramped up the slave patrol systems and organized militias to halt Black people’s flight to freedom. They also attacked refugee camps, dragged self-emancipated people back to slavery, or massacred them.14

dignity. But limiting Black men’s authority in southern and national governance and stopping Black people from exercising any of the new rights they acquired remained a priority. If belligerents could not subjugate their targets, killing them was the next logical step. Indeed, for some extremists, wanton slaughter of Black people was the primary objective.

gang to conduct raids on the Black tenants. Strikes gave white men, even those who never had held people in bondage, a chance to personally experience the power of dominating Black people. In the group of seven Ku Klux who attacked Henry Latham’s family in York, South Carolina, five of the gang were given the chance to hit him six or seven times each.70 In October 1870, men in Limestone Springs, South Carolina, took turns whipping Clem Bowden; he later said of the attack, “my wounds had become such a misery to me” that he lost control of his senses. One of the men even took a piece of Clem’s left ear as a trophy.71 The whippings and the cutting might have been a way to reenact slavery or give those

Even as the tenor of reports changed, some people misinterpreted the situation and assumed they were in no danger.120 Once people accepted the veracity of the stories they heard, they shifted to rationalizing attacks. They persuaded themselves they would not become victims, assuring themselves night riders only hit people who deserved it. By the time people reasoned they needed to take precautions, it was too late.

Once more than one strike occurred or when victims started to include people with high standing or those whose activities should not have offended whites, fear circulated and intensified. Residents worried constantly about being attacked. A Georgian man fled his home at night after a white band in Pike County asked about him and his whereabouts. One night, he unknowingly passed his pursuers on the road as he was returning home from preaching. By the time the men returned for the Georgian two days later, he had fled his community for Griffin.121 Unhappy that they could not get their target, the terrorists shifted their attention to another man, whom they killed. No family was safe when night riders came to town.

chimney!” one man yelled when he saw Columbus. Columbus hollered for the men to stop, thinking they would kill him if they lit a fire or started shooting. He said he thought surrendering “would be better than to allow them to kill my wife and children.”65 Columbus’s employer, who was in the gang terrorizing the family, wanted to punish Aury for lying about Columbus’s whereabouts. He charged at Aury, calling her a “damned bitch.” When Columbus moved to intervene, the white men tried to cut him with a knife. “If you cut me with that knife,” Columbus told the man, “I will hit you with this stick.” The man lowered the knife but still threatened to kill Columbus.66 The attackers dragged Columbus outside while he begged, “Master, don’t kill me,” hoping to calm the men and escape death with submissive behavior. They blindfolded Columbus with an apron and took him to a tree, where they tried to tie him up, but he escaped only to be shot as he fled. Columbus was able to run far enough away to avoid being shot at close range, which saved his life.67 During the raid, Columbus remained acutely alert to the presence and absence of opportunities to submit, resist, and escape.

people. Anderson Ferrell had two weapons but determined it was not wise to use them with so many men crowded into his home. Mitchell Reed, who was twenty-two years old, was “sort of expecting” the Jackson County, Georgia, vigilantes to come for him, because “he had heard they put out threats,” but he took no preparations to defend himself, which made it easy for them to get the better of him when they struck and whipped him in April 1871.76 Men like Robin Westbrook and Alfred Richardson had to face attackers on their own. But some communities rallied to defend themselves collectively. In 1871, George Fleimster organized a group of men in Morgan County, Georgia, with what he said was “all the arms we could get” to guard the jail and protect another Black man who was accused of sexual assault. The Black men stood sentry over the jail until white merchants refused to supply them the gunpowder and shot they needed to defend the accused man and themselves from any whites coming to the jail to lynch him. “They would not let us have the first bit in the world,” George said. During the standoff, George, who was twenty-seven years old, informed the mayor “they were sure to kill that man … They did not put him back in jail for anything else but to kill him.” The mayor told George not to worry, and that the Black men needed to withdraw from the jail. But George countered, “Somebody ought to do it; it is your business to have somebody guard it; you are the mayor of the town.”77 The au...

Targets of night riding were all vulnerable to harm, but people bore the burden in different ways. Sex, age, health, and physical and mental vulnerability shaped both how targets experienced violence and what culprits did.76 In the immediate aftermath of raids, attacked people began the process of trying to account for what had happened to them and to heal their physical and psychological injuries. In orchestrating harrowing raids, night riders forced people they held captive to literally fight for their lives. White men’s decision to strike families multiplied the disorder and further complicated targeted people’s endless calculations to survive. Any decision an individual made—to protect themselves or a loved one—in mayhem involving torture, rape, whipping, and killing had a ripple effect with literal flesh-and-blood consequences for everyone. The sheer terror some captives felt drained them of any semblance of free will, which is exactly what their attackers intended. These diabolical choices night riders forced on households strained familial bonds, which added to the many physical and psychological harms victims endured. Strikes were unbelievable: victims’ minds struggled to make sense of what was happening. The events undid many individuals and families. And survivors faced no end of existential questions: Would they live through a raid? How could this have happened? Were they safe? If so, for how long? What could they do to prevent further attacks? Would they stay i...

Clem and Minerva Bowden had to make their way home after night riders abducted them on a wintry night in the Upcountry region of South Carolina and viciously assaulted them in October 1870. “When we got home,” Clem said, “we could not kindle up a fire to warm ourselves by, if our children had not been there to kindle it for us.” Minerva was whipped “until she was helpless,” so grievously injured that “she could not get up the next morning.”8 Clem added, “I was severely hurt. I don’t ever expect in this life to get over it.”9

unscathed. Statements like Andrew Cathcart’s, and Clem Bowden’s concern about “never getting over” what had happened, were not just turns of phrase. The similar language reveals the shared nature of survivors’ understanding of their experiences, and of their shared need to communicate a dark, often ignored, truth: night-riding strikes were not neatly contained events that ended when white men left families’ homes and homesteads. Survivors were unmistakably clear about how these raids leached into the marrow of victims’ lives.10

Eliza Lyon had watched from a distance as white men killed her husband, Abe, after grabbing him while he was paralyzed by fright. She spent the night in the woods, in her bedclothes, hiding with her girls by her side, wondering what had happened to her son, William, who had disappeared during the raid. After their attackers finally left and she saw she could return without harm, Eliza went to survey the damage and confirm the gruesome details of her husband’s death.14 She was horrified by what she saw; a coroner later reported that Abe’s murderers had inflicted more than thirty bullet wounds and an attempted decapitation. Eliza sifted through the wreckage of her ransacked home, looking to salvage what she could, and went searching for William, finding the terrified boy safe, if not sound, at a neighbor’s home.15

Even as they buried their dead, targeted families had to determine whether the attacks they had endured were one-time events or if they were liable to be struck again, and if so, when, and what precautions they could take, if any. Lack of security denied those living in night-riding zones the time and space they needed to fully process what happened and begin to grieve their losses.

his “little plantation.” Children and adolescents would never again be kids in the same way after their families were attacked. They had to deal with a host of physical injuries that required attention. After one of the men attacking the Tutsons snatched their youngest child from Hannah’s arms and flung the infant across their home, the baby had a difficult time walking: when she put pressure on one of her legs, she screamed in pain, Hannah said. Henry Reed’s teenage son survived a blast of gunfire as he leapt through a window to escape, but his ear was grazed, leaving him injured and permanently scarred. “She has not been able to do much since,” Jane Surratt said of her daughter’s injuries from the whipping and beating she received during the attack. “I don’t believe she will ever get over it,” Jane added, echoing other survivors.20

In what would be the last fifty yards of Henry’s plight, he found the house of a Black woman and asked her to go get his wife. Henry’s son happened to be nearby, possibly searching for him, and he went looking for the same doctor Henry had visited for treatment. This time, the doctor answered. In a brutal irony, the reason the doctor had been absent before, Henry said, “was that he was off on this raid.”40 This realization compounded the moral injuries Henry suffered.

The accumulation of Black people’s traumatic injuries could make strikes all the more soul-crushing. Moral injuries from being attacked could damage victims’ psyches. Raids could hollow victims out, imperiling a person’s capacity for joy, compromising their ability to love, undermining their talents. The constellation of betrayal from raids’ many horrors could dismantle survivors’ sense of self and their assumptions about the world and their place in it. Spiritual distress isolated survivors from kin and community, and reduced their capacity to live fully in the world.43

“I was living under fears of being attacked again,” an Alabama survivor said. He felt this way despite being well known and generally liked by people in his community. “To tell the truth, I am not over it yet,” the man said of the strike, during which he had been shot. “I cannot rest satisfied, because I know how this ball felt in my neck,” he added. The man’s statement indicates the ways physical injuries were linked to emotional suffering. When asked if he still felt fear of being attacked again, despite no immediate threat, he answered, “[A] little doubt still seems to arise; I can’t help it to save my life; it will come up sometimes.”51 Witnesses also shared stories of people they believed had died due to the horrors they experienced.52 Speaking of his daughter, Amanda, Abram Colby said night riders had “frightened her to death”: “She never got over it until she died.”53 The fright the Colby girl endured from the man leveling his shotgun at her could have initiated her withdrawal from the world. Doctors in twenty-first-century conflict zones report instances of resignation syndrome, a disorder in which young victims give up on life.54 Such a condition could explain what Abram observed in his daughter before she died.

demise and John’s attributing it to the strike. Survivors were certain in their understanding that, even if a person did not succumb, living after a strike was not the same thing as being able to heal from it. “I have never got over it yet,” Abram Colby said. “They broke something inside of me, and the doctor has been attending to me for more than a year.”57 He reported having a hard time getting up each day. Abram’s injuries from his kidnapping were physical, but his statements indicate psychological wounds over the repeated raids and his daughter’s death, which was followed by that of his wife, Anna, shortly thereafter.

some cases, the right to life after slavery—was evident. Survivors often experienced the horror of learning their persecutors were white people they knew, even people they thought they had positive relationships with. They lived through the savagery of strikes only to endure the knowledge that their white neighbors were active participants in the attacks or would sit passively and offer them no assistance in their search for amends and answers.

At some point in Eliza and the children’s journey, they might have realized they were being chased. The family picked up their pace. Unencumbered by young children and personal belongings, the white men threatened to overtake the family, until, around ten o’clock in the morning, the sky opened up with a storm. The family’s trackers slowed, perhaps pausing to take shelter. But Eliza and the children kept racing toward the river, where they crossed to Tompkinsville.1 Eliza fled because she knew she and her family were no longer secure where they lived. But for those who survived harrowing night-riding attacks, “safety,” even in a new location, was a relative concept. In the poem “Home,” Warsan Shire writes of displacement by violence; the narrator notes that geographically and socially established people do not abandon the comfort and safety of their homes and all of their property for no reason. “No one leaves home, unless home is the mouth of a shark” or “the barrel of a gun.”2 Frantic escapes may be triggered by paramilitary violence upending a community, or by being marked as undesirables who must be cast out or slaughtered. People do not leave home, Shire’s poem explains, “unless home chases you,” breathing in your ear that any place else is safer than where you thought you belonged.3

Many victims made frantic escapes like that of Eliza and the children. A number of families made short-term decisions for individuals to leave immediately after they were attacked. Absconding saved lives and gave survivors a chance to report the violence to local and state authorities who might end it. But dislocation also deprived family members of the social and economic support they needed after a strike. Displacement put families in financial free fall. If the violence in their communities did not abate and authorities’ apathy forced them to lower their expectations for judicial redress, cast-out people had to accept the loss of everything they had achieved and make long-term relocation plans for entire families.

If night riders’ objectives were to drive some Black families out of their homes and off their land, they might give targets leave-or-die ultimatums. “They told me that they were coming again in six weeks,” said Daniel Lane, after a pack of men pistol-whipped him. “Now, if a man is warned of danger and he stays and is caught again, it’s his own fault.”4 Daniel was not a foolish man; he recognized the threat to his life and departed Morgan County, Georgia, with the quickness.

left. Survivors’ understanding of their abjection and resulting lack of security sparked their flights from home, stretching out the upheaval vigilantes brought. White neighbors, doctors, and law enforcement officials who provided little to no help revealed themselves, at best, as passive witnesses to survivors’ suffering or, at worst, accomplices or actual perpetrators, rendering night-riding victims’ worlds even less secure than they had previously imagined. “Nobody there seemed to have no use for us—[we had] no old friends,” one South Carolina man explained of the lack of patrons, particularly white people who might intervene on targeted people’s behalf or offer protection.10 The refusal of whites in their communities to assist them accentuated the depth and breadth of the marks outcast families bore.

In hard-liner strongholds, victims of raids were less likely to get fair hearings, if any hearings at all. Judges and juries were often vigilante sympathizers, if not perpetrators or abettors themselves.

Beyond a general sense that pursuing justice through formal means was futile, survivors who tried to file complaints were often thwarted along the way. One man filed a complaint in Colbert County, Alabama—after he was attacked following a dispute with his landlord—that made it to trial by a U.S. commissioner. But supporting witnesses failed to appear because they were afraid of retribution.18

Anderson Ferrell tried in vain to gain restitution after men invaded his home, robbed his family of their belongings, and killed his dog.

Smith Watley—having survived an attack alongside his wife, Caroline—then ignored his landlord’s command that he stay put, complete his work, and relocate only at the end of his current contract. Fearful of another attack and well outside the U.S. Army’s zone of security, Smith had to calculate the risks of heeding the white man’s advice or doing what he felt was necessary to survive. Smith said he reasoned, “they can’t do me any harm if I leave now.” The next day, he took his mule and fled to Montgomery, leaving Caroline and the rest of the family behind, presumably to follow once he could support them.