ABSTRACT
Slaveholders were no different from other people of power. During the Civil War they were mystified by the breakdown of the labour system. The collapse of human bondage would have been intellectually intelligible if southern whites had been able to see their slaves as autonomous humans, capable of independent thought and action. The inability of slaveholders to see that African-Americans acted upon their own interests was not the result of mental obtuseness. From an early age, they absorbed the Victorian notion that people fitted into two classifications: civilized or savage. When slaves stepped outside their prescribed boundaries, they were condemned for violating a sacred division between order and moral chaos, despite the many poetic protests by freed people that they were asserting their right to liberation. The message of this song was simple: African-Americans were receiving a hard lesson for leaving the material comforts of Dixie for the heardess North.
