Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

Stories of slave uprisings that followed the visits of mysterious Yankee strangers, reports of arson and rapes and poisonings by slaves crowded the southern press. Somehow these horrors never seemed to happen in one’s own neighborhood. Many of them, in fact, were reported from faraway Texas. And curiously, only those newspapers backing Breckin-ridge for president seemed to carry such stories. Bell and Douglas newspapers even had the effrontery to accuse Breckinridge Democrats of getting up “false-hoods and sensation tales” to “arouse the passions of the people and drive them into the Southern Disunion movement.”54 But this accusation must have been wrong. No less a personage than R. S. Holt, a wealthy Mississippi planter and brother of the U.S. postmaster general, reported that “we have constantly a foretaste of what Northern brother-hood means, in almost daily conflagrations & in discovery of poison, knives & pistols distributed among our slaves by emissaries sent out for that purpose. . . . There cannot be found in all the planting States a territory ten miles square in which the foot prints of one or more of these miscreants have not been discovered.” Fortunately, Holt added, “Miracles & Providence” had prevented the accomplishment of their “hellish” designs. But Congressman Lawrence M. Keitt of South Carolina was not willing to trust to Providence. “I see poison in the wells in Texas—and fire for the houses in Alabama,” he wrote. “How can we stand it? . . . It is enoug...