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turbulencejust over the horizon. Refugees were a common sight, as were the temporary holding pens that sprang up to accommodate transiting enemy prisoners. To one observer the Yankees, many from Andersonville, were “altogether the most squalid gathering of humanity it has ever been my lot to look upon.”
    Savannah was a once-bustling seaport whose business had been dramatically curtailed by a Federal naval cordon to the occasional bold blockade runner. * Among those hurt by the loss of trade was Octavus Cohen, a merchant and cotton exporter. His twenty-four-year-old daughter, Fanny, would soon be moved by events to step from the shadows of anonymity by keeping a journal of the happenings in her city. Another daughter who would leave a record of this time was Frances Thomas Howard, whose father helped man Savannah’s defenses. A resident who feared the changes that were coming was Caro Lamar, who managed her household in the absence of her husband. She was especially suspicious of one of the family’s slaves, William, who she worried would betray them at the first opportunity.
    William became one of the few named members of a largely invisible community within the territory defined by the three railroads. Something around 150,000 African-Americans lived and labored on the plantations and in the households of the region. Theirs was a society kept in place by coercion and bound together by a diverse range of personal responses to their plight. Some slaves were docile—broken in spirit and resigned to their fate—while others actively fought their status with force and guile. In between these extremes was the majority—bound to the land because of extended family, or force of habit, or anxiety over dramatic change, or even a sense of obligation to their owners.
    Some lived lives of punishment and fear. The slaves working on the Farrar farm, six miles outside Eatonton, endured a hellish existence punctuated with floggings and tortures designed to increase the pain. They reserved a special hatred for the big red hound owned by Farrar’s neighbor that was used to hunt down escaped blacks. A sentiment shared but never spoken out loud was one of vengeance against the damned dog.
    The touchstone for all Georgia slaves was freedom. This desperate longing was something they could never admit or show to the whites who controlled their lives, but which they would not deny among themselves. The social observer and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted traveled through Georgia in the years before the Civil War. Talking to a slave, Olmsted related that he had been given to understand from the whites he had met that blacks did not want to be free. “His only answer,” noted Olmsted, “was a short, contemptuous laugh.” According to George Womble, a slave on a plantation near Clinton, a common saying among the blacks was, “I know that some day we’ll be free and if we die before that time our children will live to see it.”
    The outbreak of the Civil War had greatly weakened the forces controlling slave life in Georgia. While whites often thought of their slaves as childlike, they also feared them. Many of the white men who had managed the black labor force and policed the coercive laws that kept them in their places had been called up for military service, leaving wives, mothers, and elders to maintain the social order. Propaganda replaced brute force as the slaves were told tales of the ill treatment they could expect in Yankee hands. In some cases the stories were embellished to a degree that verged on absurdity. A widow living near Lithonia told her slaves that the Federals “shot, burned and drowned negroes, old and young, drove men into houses and burned them.” Most blacks saw through the subterfuge. Said one, as recorded in dialect by a white Union officer, “Massa hates de Yankees, and he’s no fren’ter we; so we am de Yankee bi’s fren’s.”
    This was the double edge of the slave system. On the one hand it