“On at least one Confederate soldier monument, that in Columbia, North Carolina (1912), one of the inscriptions included a statement ‘in appreciation of our faithful slaves.’ In the early 20th century several attempts were made to augment [such] localized efforts with a regional or even national monument to the ‘faithful old slaves’….But the more ambitious schemes never materialized….
“The Fort Mill [S.C.] monument remains unique as a representation of slavery, one that is deliberately comprehensive, including both house slavery and field slavery, female and male labor….”
— From “Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America” by
I don’t believe the fear of punishment can equate with the label ‘faithful’. While I’m sure that there might have been some, albeit a very few (in my opinion) that stayed out of a sense of something, I don’t believe faithfulness is the correct emotion to which it could have been attributed. Runaway slaves faced incredibly harsh treatments upon capture – whipping to within an inch of their lives, to name just one. And while the Underground Railroad was a huge instrument in moving people out of the South, it simply was NOT the “Negro miracle network” that it has been made out to be! Slavery was the scourge of the South and to intimate it was anything else is simply not true.