The Confederate draft forced Southern troops to remain in the army against their will. Slaves were by definition compelled to serve, but in 1863, they too became conscripts of a sort. In March 1863, the Confederacy passed an impressment law giving commanders power to use slaves for military work. Impressment proved a controversial aspect of the Confederacy’s massive effort to use black workers to aid the war effort. From the war’s beginning, the army found itself in a power struggle with masters who did not want their property taken and commanders who needed slaves for military work. Impressment created tensions between two powerful segments of the Confederacy—planters and officers—who depended on slave labor. Far from revealing that Southerners were fatalistic about emancipation, impressment showed the military’s commitment to, and continued reliance upon, human bondage.
The Confederacy’s use of impressed slaves resulted from an increasingly serious military situation requiring the army to have reliable black labor. It was also a result of the government’s increasing centralization. “States’ rights ideology,” one historian has recently written, “eventually lost to a more expansive vision of the Confederate central state.”1 The Confederacy passed a white conscription law after the South had suffered defeats in early 1862. The army found black laborers invaluable, and by March 1863, the Confederate government had the power to impress them into service. The Rebel military became the greatest of masters, but many civilians did not like the army’s strong-arm tactics, which infringed upon their property rights. As a result, the Confederate army had to work hard to supply its camps with black workers, while at the same time not asking slaveholders to sacrifice too much.
After the war, some former Rebels complained about the Confederate government’s impressment policy and the disadvantage the South bore in trying to control its slave population. In his memoirs, Richard Taylor said, “It was a curious feature of the war that the Southern people would cheerfully send their sons to battle, but kept their slaves out of danger.2 Another Confederate noted that slavery “gave the Federal Government a great advantage in the prosecution of the war and imposed additional cares and responsibilities upon those charged with . . . military operations in the South.”3 Such sentiments, written after the war, tended to revise the important role slaves played in the Confederate army. During the war, white Southerners believed strongly in slavery’s advantages. Blacks made up the majority of agricultural and industrial workers in the South, enabling 80 percent of Southern white adult males to serve in the army. Slavery was a “tower of strength to the South,” wrote the Montgomery Advertiser in 1861, “really one of the most effective weapons employed against the union by the South.” With slaves freeing white men to fight, Confederate armies were two-thirds the size of Union ones.4 The advantages of slave labor were offset to some degree by the flight of thousands of slaves to the Union armies. Confederates, however, adapted to the realities of wartime. Confederate industry, for one, used slaves in innovative ways.5 As Edward Ayers has asserted, by 1863, when the Confederate Congress made impressment official practice, slavery “remained a crucial weapon of the Confederacy.” Ayers notes that slavery’s role “not only remained undiminished but actually grew as white Southerners saw their men killed, maimed, and lost in [battle].”6
Early in the war, Confederates realized that they must mobilize all their resources. As Capt. E. John Ellis wrote in March 1862, “Every man, woman or child, negro or dog in the South that wants to submit ought to be hung up to the nearest limb as soon as possible.”7 Southerners saw that they had to mobilize their slaves effectively to military advantage or Northerners would use them against them. The Confederate army employed blacks by the tens of thousands, to build and repair fortifications and railroads, and as haulers, teamsters, and ditch diggers. Slaves also served alongside medical workers. “I have all hands at work cleaning and whitewashing at the Hospital,” said a surgeon a few weeks before the battle of Chancellorsville. “Today the Medical Director sent me 12 negroes extra.”8 Slave labor made the Confederacy function, as it had the antebellum South.
Some historians, however, have argued that the Confederacy’s impressment policy failed because of the refusal of planters and state officials to provide blacks to the military. Confederates’ opposition to letting go of their slaves, they contend, created serious divisions within the South.9 The editors of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation concluded that impressment “divided [Confederates], exacerbating conflicts that pitted state officials against national officials, national officials against army officers, army officers against slaveholders, and slaveholders against nonslaveholders.”10 Impressment certainly caused divisions within the Confederacy, and as a logistical measure it was far from perfect. The Confederate army, nevertheless, received thousands of slaves from Southern masters who although often unhappy about the taking of their slaves, were not necessarily resistant to it.11 The relationship between the army and slaveholders was often tense, but planters and smaller slaveholders gave much support to the military. Their grumblings about impressment were similar to privates’ gripes about conscription: they did not always like the undemocratic nature of the army, but they feared that defeat and abolition would be far worse. Through impressment and obtaining of slaves by other means, the Confederacy was able to delay the advance of Federal armies.
A vital form of military labor involved the building of fortifications and entrenchments. The advantages of using earth and timber to stop bullets seems obvious, but early in the conflict, Southerners saw taking cover as unmanly. Robert E. Lee won the sobriquet “King of Spades” for digging in during the Seven Days Campaign.12 Men’s attitudes toward defensive tactics would change, and when they did, Rebel troops preferred that slaves do the digging. The vast majority of Confederates were farmers accustomed to hard labor, but troops felt that their duty was to fight rather than dig trenches or perform slavelike tasks.13 Writing near Jackson, Mississippi, shortly after Vicksburg fell, one soldier was plain about how he and his comrades occupied themselves while the slaves worked: “We layed around & took it easy.”14 Commanders tried to get their soldiers to work as hard as the slaves, but officers found that their men disliked anything approaching “Negro work.” Whites would apparently do hard labor only if coerced. The Louisiana infantryman Robert H. Miller wrote that he had overseen black workers, “but never yet did I see anything work like white men when the fear of the guard house is before their eyes.”15
Generations of involuntary servitude, Rebel troops believed, made blacks ideal for doing the labor required to fortify towns and strengthen defenses. And as their officers reasoned, why suffer soldiers’ complaints when black laborers could take their place putting up sandbags and constructing earthworks? Blacks, they believed, were more manageable and efficient, more used to difficult conditions and white supervision. Also, they were not only better workers, Confederates claimed, they were more expendable. Masters, who expected compensation for slaves who died from overwork, were unhappy when they lost valuable property. But most Confederates did not own slaves. For them, a dead black worker was better than a dead white one. One South Carolinian was blunt: “If the negro men had been enlisted to do all this hard manual labor, there would have been more white soldiers living at the close of the war, and fewer negro men to vote the radical ticket.”16
Slaves were used to build fortifications at such vital strongholds as Richmond, Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, Island No. 10, Vicksburg, Port Hudson, Wilmington, and Mobile. The government did not authorize the impressment of slaves until the middle of the war, but even before then, officers had forced thousands of black workers into service. Often, the work they performed was on a much larger scale than the work at any antebellum plantation. Few masters owned more than fifty or a hundred slaves, but in September 1862, P. G. T. Beauregard, then commanding coastal defenses in South Carolina and Georgia, wrote of fourteen hundred slaves working on the defenses at Savannah. Other areas could also boast of massive work projects. That May, an officer wrote to Joseph E. Johnston, saying that he had seventy-five hundred slaves at work at Mobile—so many slaves that he could not feed them all. Richmond, furthermore, was the scene of constant fortification projects. In late May 1862, one soldier wrote of three thousand slaves at work throwing up breastworks, and in the spring of 1863, W. C. Corsan, an English traveler, estimated that between four and six thousand slaves were at work on the railways running into the Rebel capital.17
Early in the war, appealing to patriotism and volunteerism had been enough to get Confederates to turn over their slaves. In January 1861, Hugh Mercer, commanding the Georgia militia, noted that “patriotic planters” in Savannah had provided Confederates with a large force of slaves.18 As other Southern states prepared for war, they too used black laborers. In April 1861, the North Carolina overseer and soldier Roderick McMillan wrote of the excitement that ensued when black workers were sent to Forts Johnston and Caswell—part of the Wilmington defenses. Fifty African Americans had already gone and more were to follow. McMillan said he never expected to see “negroes Volunteering their services in defence of the country.” His employer, a physician, had called for volunteers, and two of his “best hands” had stepped forward. The scene, McMillan concluded, was enough “to make the stoutest heart shrink.”19
Once it became clear that the Rebel victories in the summer of 1861 would not end the war, the Confederacy took more serious measures to use slaves to protect its citizens. In January 1862, the South Carolina soldier William Grimball wrote that the generals agreed that planters should remove their slaves from threatened areas to designated safety zones.20 Planters expected protection, but military officials also wanted slaveholders’ cooperation in helping fight the war. Officers learned that slaveholders were not always quick to fill their quotas for black workers. In December 1861, in Tennessee, Jeremy Francis Gilmer, an engineering officer, complained to his superiors that he had not obtained enough laborers around Nashville.21 Local citizens had contracted many black workers until the end of the year, which impeded progress in building defenses.
Just as masters could not necessarily obtain the laborers they needed, Confederates also discovered that slaves were not always available. In late December 1861, Isham Harris, who would serve in the army after his term ended, complained that his agents had not obtained enough black laborers. Harris wrote Western Department commander Albert Sidney Johnston to say that he had obtained two hundred slaves but that he wanted three times that many.22
In Virginia, commanders also were experiencing shortages. In May 1861, John B. Magruder, then a colonel, had his forces building fortifications to stop the Federal approach to Richmond, but he had to send slaves back to their masters, as promised.23 Magruder was not alone in suffering labor shortages. In Virginia, in response to hesitant slaveholders, George B. Cosby, an engineer serving in Williamsburg, reassured planters that the military would treat their slaves well, provide them with rations, and pay their masters fifty cents a day. Despite his efforts, problems continued. And without black workers, Cosby was unable to place his heavy guns in position. He complained about having to dismiss some slaves whose term of service had expired, and decided to exert more pressure on the planters. In addition to using slaves, Cosby also wanted to force free blacks into service to deepen ditches, thicken parapets, and put up traverses. With only a few hundred additional men, he hoped he could complete the work at Williamsburg in a few days.24
In August 1861, a soldier encamped near Richmond noticed that the only laborers he saw throwing up breastworks were black.25 The use of so many black laborers denuded the plantations, making harvesting and planting more difficult for masters. In late January 1862, John Magruder—by then promoted to major general for his performance at Big Bethel the previous June, and now defending Yorktown—said he had impressed nearby slaves repeatedly, which he thought too much of a strain on local slaveholders. Were he to impress slaves again, he worried about complaints flooding the War Department. Magruder—aware of the resistance of some planters, who were cognizant of the delays in collecting black workers, and realizing Congress’s inability to pay for lost slaves—advised against ordering slave impressments in the local counties. Furthermore, Magruder did not want the authorities to appear heavy-handed, thus offending those citizens who held only tepid Confederate loyalties. Despite unhappiness among some planters, Magruder believed that Virginians approved of the impressment policy.26
Why? Patriotism was a factor. Some masters thought giving up slaves, even involuntarily, helped their country. The answer also lay in slaveholders’ financial worries. When commanders hired out slaves, masters incurred any attendant losses. But if the slaves were impressed, the army had to compensate slaveholders. Thus, some planters saw the financial wisdom in the army taking much-needed African Americans. Given the support among officers and planters for impressment, in February 1862, the army gave Magruder—still at Yorktown—authority to seize slaves for work on fortifications on the peninsula between the James and York Rivers. The army also subjected free workers to impressment.27
Some Confederates, uncomfortable with measures that threatened their property, complained. John Tyler Jr., the son of the ex-president and a congressman himself, and Col. Hill Carter of the Fifty-Second Virginia Militia, wanted greater assurances “against possible contingencies of loss,” since some impressed slaves never returned home.28 The problem was not unique to Virginia. In November 1862, James C. Marcom, serving in North Carolina, found nothing much new to write about except “the death of a little negro—one of the conscripts Negroes.”29
Despite imperfections with the impressment system, Confederates saw it as not just attractive, but necessary. With Yankee armies on the offensive, the Rebels needed all the workers they could get. By April, Ulysses S. Grant was rolling through Tennessee and George McClellan was moving his massive army across eastern Virginia. Both John Magruder and D. H. Hill—serving with Magruder’s troops—wrote to their superiors for more black workers. Hill complained of his men’s exhaustion. They had worked too hard to supply the army with guns, forage, and commissary stores. Hill had drawn slaves from the outworks in order to relieve his troops, but he needed more. Many had reported sick and were of no use to him.30
Some Confederates were unhappy with impressment measures. In March 1862, writing from South Carolina, a pessimistic John C. Pemberton, then commander of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, spoke of the uncertain cooperation between civilians and the military. Pemberton knew he could not exclusively rely on slaveholders to furnish chattels voluntarily. Too many masters, he said, had acted according to their “individual interest.”31 In April 1862, Pemberton saw the Confederates lose Fort Pulaski, which guarded the sea approaches to Savannah. The Georgia soldier Augustus Adamson complained that his commanders had bungled the fight for Pulaski. He thought they could have better used their men and their slave laborers. Adamson chided the commander at Pulaski, Alexander R. Lawton—a South Carolinian who had studied at Harvard Law School before the war—as an “Abolitionist.” Lawton, he asserted, “could have had five hundred Negroes fortifying the Fort,” but had chosen otherwise, with poor results.32
In May 1862, Pemberton—stationed in his headquarters in Charleston and not wanting to repeat the loss of Pulaski—directed planters to furnish slaves “free of charge” for coastal defenses. A few weeks later, he worried that the work on Fort Jackson would stop without additional slave laborers. Masters were understandably hesitant to give up their slaves, thinking their chattels might fall into Federal hands or die from Confederate mistreatment. In July, Pemberton nevertheless believed he should put 1,600 slaves to work at Charleston and elsewhere for at least two months.33
The South Carolina diarist Mary Chesnut wrote of the tensions between military officials and civilians along the coastal regions: “Every man is in Virginia and the eastern part of South Carolina in revolt because old men and boys are ordered out as a reserve corps—and worst of all, sacred property, that is, negroes, seized and sent to work on fortifications along the coastline.”34 Problems existed, but neither Virginia nor South Carolina was “in revolt.” Despite the difficulties they had in dealing with masters, commanders continued taking slaveholders’ black labor. After the fall of Forts Henry and Donelson, Gen. William Withers, writing from Richmond, said the only way to resist further advances out west was “by the surplus slave labor of the South.” If the government used slaves, he continued, “immense results could be surely and speedily accomplished.” In the Mississippi Valley, he believed slavery was losing its “patriarchal character.”35 The army must exploit its slave population for the peculiar institution and the Confederacy to survive.
Not all Confederate officers supported impressment. Gen. Howell Cobb of Georgia, one of the foremost proponents of the racial status quo, did not object outright to the use of black laborers (he thought slaves best served as gatherers of corn and fodder), but he did not want the Confederacy to make impressment official policy.36 In August 1862, Cobb, an experienced politician sensitive to the complaints of his constituents, complained to the secretary of war about soldiers seizing slaves in Georgia. Citizens were “willing to make any and all sacrifices, but they like to see reason and common sense in the officials of Government,” he noted.37 Cobb’s Confederate credentials are beyond question—he was the president of the Confederate Constitutional Convention—but he was at times critical of his government upsetting the usual workings of slavery. Cobb’s conservatism would remain consistent. He was not only reluctant to see the army impress slaves, later in the war he would oppose the enlistment of black troops. Cobb worried that greater slave impressments would upset long-held Southern white property rights.
Cobb opposed impressment on principle, but most commanders did not. For them, military urgency trumped individual property rights. In late April 1862, stationed in Corinth, Mississippi, General Beauregard gave David Bullock Harris, then commander at Vicksburg, power to seize slaves to help with fortifications.38 And far out west in Arkansas, Col. William H. Parsons of the Twelfth Texas Cavalry issued his Special Orders No. 65, allowing officers to obtain “by impressment if necessary a sufficient no. of negroes” to fix a bridge at Bayou De View between Little Rock and Memphis.39
In contrast to Howell Cobb, Confederate civilians had concerns, not about the principle of impressment, but its practice. Catherine Edmondston, a diarist and the wife of a prominent North Carolina planter, complained of slaves being impressed in Petersburg, Virginia. Writing from Raleigh, she said there were “negroes enough on James River whom their owners would be glad to employ & keep from the domination of the Yankees.” Edmondston feared Confederates might take slaves near her home, where they were needed to gather crops, but she saw the sensibility of putting slaves under the care of the army rather than let the Yankees seize them.40 Commanders, Edmondston believed, needed to pursue impressment sensibly.
In February 1863, writing from Richmond, where there were roughly ten thousand slaves at work, the North Carolina engineer Jeremy Francis Gilmer wanted to stop the “onerous requisitions for labor.” He knew slaves were needed to make Lee’s army and the city of Richmond secure, but he did not want to interfere with the harvest. In the future, he wrote, he wanted “such calls as light as possible.”41 Gilmer clearly sought to avoid problems with planters and farmers. The Confederate army, however, did not always arouse slaveholder opposition. In August 1862, Hugh Mercer wrote from Savannah about masters who “cheerfully” provided workers to the military, even if there were also “selfish individuals” who had “made all sorts of frivolous objections.” Some masters had refused outright to furnish any workers. Even so, slave owners were not seriously undermining the military’s efforts.42 In November 1862, General Beauregard wrote South Carolina governor Francis Pickens to say that planters had “done nobly” in providing the army with slaves. Beauregard noted, however, that “they must not stop three-quarters of the way.” In his view, were the army to succeed, Confederates must wholly support the war effort, and apparently white soldiers were not working hard enough. Slave laborers, Beauregard said, “would leave the troops to attend to their legitimate duties of drill and guard.” His men, he lamented, “object most strenuously to work with spades and shovels; they will do it in very pressing emergencies, but on ordinary occasions do more grumbling than work.”43
Confederate officers needed the help of black laborers. In February 1863, a month before Congress passed the impressment law, Thomas Jordan, serving on Beauregard’s staff, praised the slaveholders who “have ever been found alive to the impulses of duty.” Such words softened the blow when he asked in the same sentence for three thousand additional slaves.44 In North Carolina, in March 1863, Leonidas L. Polk (not to be confused with his more famous uncle, Bishop Polk) noted that the “people very generously responded to the call.” Some slaveholders gave their workers to the army understanding that the slaves were to be returned in four weeks. Polk, however, was disappointed that many of the larger slave owners had sent no workers.45
Masters made concerted efforts to help the army, but commanders wanted and needed more men, black and white. In late November 1862, Gen. Gustavus W. Smith—commanding between the Rappahannock and Cape Fear Rivers—complained to Robert E. Lee that he had obtained only 3,330 of the 4,500 black workers that had been promised him for work at Wilmington. Though he was writing from Richmond, not Wilmington, Smith wanted more troops as well as 5,000 additional black workers. Despite his complaints, Smith had received about 75 percent of the workers he had asked for, which was close to the percentage of white men who enlisted in the Confederacy during the war.46
The Confederate military could not have achieved such results without coercion. In April 1862, it instituted a draft. In October, it issued another. The army tried to persuade slaveholders to provide chattels voluntarily and temporarily, and some argued that slaves were safer in camp than elsewhere. The Confederacy’s appeals were not free of threats. “If owners shall fail or refuse to comply with this request,” warned Gideon Pillow in reference to Alabama planters in March 1863, “they need not complain . . . if they should be robbed of their negro property.”47 Some politicians did not appreciate commanders acting as if they were the ultimate authority. In South Carolina, Governor Francis Pickens wrote to General Beauregard in November 1862 concerning black workers who were not “assigned to the control or command of practical men.” As did other politicians, Pickens complained that the military had unequally drained slaves from districts, and that they had been kept them longer than expected, which led to “derangement” in gathering crops.48 Beauregard lamented having to mediate between state authorities and the Confederate government, a problem that would test the diplomatic skills of officers for the rest of the war.49
On 26 March 1863, because of white soldiers’ refusal to do menial labor, the inconsistent efforts on the part of masters and governors to furnish slaves, and the general labor shortages and stresses of war, the Confederate Congress passed a slave impressment law. The Confederacy knew that most Southern states had no statutes concerning impressment. Congress hoped the bill would enable the war effort to run more efficiently. By March 1863, the Confederate government rightly understood that it had to keep its priorities in order: use its enlisted men to hold key positions rather than waste them in building fortifications or trenches, work that blacks could do, or acquiesce to the masters or state officials who did not want to give up black workers to the Rebel army.
The impressment of slaves raised the question of whether Confederates could legally seize free blacks, who numbered about 260,000 in the South in 1860. Free blacks had always lived in something of a limbo in the South. They were not slaves, but they did not have the legal rights or economic opportunities whites possessed. Southern whites never seemed to know what to do with them. The same proved true in wartime. Free blacks, because of their skin color, never became Confederate troops, with the brief exception in 1861 of the Louisiana Native Guards (who never served in combat for the Confederacy, which failed to provide the regiment with muskets or uniforms).50
Virginia had the largest free black population in the Confederacy, numbering roughly 58,000 people. Its legislature dealt with the issue of free black labor versus slave labor by passing three laws. The first subjected free black men to the Confederate draft (though they would serve in noncombat roles only); the second placed limits on the number of slaves authorities could impress; and the third law exempted enslaved agricultural laborers. By March 1863, commanders in Virginia had the power to force both free and enslaved workers into service.51 The day before the Confederate Congress passed its slave impressment law, Robert E. Lee had written the secretary of war, James Seddon, to argue that both free and enslaved workers were needed on fortifications and railroads, which would allow him to deploy more soldiers.52 Neither Lee nor other Confederate commanders, however, used many free blacks on military work projects.
One of the problems was logistical. Of the 28,000 free black males in Virginia, only 5,000 were of military age. By the time the Confederacy passed its impressment law, half of these men were already engaged in military-related tasks, from mining to hospital work. That left a relatively small number of free black workers that authorities could draw upon. Another problem was legal. The Confederate impressment act applied only to “property,” and since free blacks were not property, Southern armies could not impress them into service.53
Free blacks were far fewer in number than enslaved African Americans, but some Confederates believed they were an underutilized labor source. In November 1863, with whites conscripted and slaves impressed into service, Francis Parker, a provost marshal in Georgetown, South Carolina, wondered why the “free man of color . . . enjoys the increased profits of his business and makes money, whilst the white man does the hard work of the day.” He decried such “inequality and injustice,” asking that free blacks do “menial and much of the mechanical service” for the army. They should serve as cooks, cobblers, teamsters, and nurses, all for a “moderate rate of wages,” the kinds of work white men did not like to do.54
The use of free blacks proved to be a lost opportunity for the Confederacy. Rebel leaders all too often liked to think of the Confederacy in terms of free white Southerners and enslaved African Americans. Free blacks enjoyed greater freedom than slaves, but they were not as free as whites. Confederate authorities would not let them fight in their armies, nor would they force them to work against their will. Very often, Confederates bent the proslavery ideology to meet the needs of the war effort. But when it came to the tens of thousands of free black males of military age, Rebel leaders were content to let them remain in limbo.
Strategically, the passage of the impressment law helped commanders gather much-needed workers. It also aroused more complaints than ever from masters. “I regret very much the impressment of your property,” wrote Claudius L. Goodwin, a South Carolinian serving on Wade Hampton’s staff, to an anxious Virginia master. An impressment officer “should satisfy himself that there is a ‘sufficiency for family and plantation use.’ ” Even so, Goodwin conceded that the officer “may have transcended his orders.” He enclosed a “certificate of protection” in order to ward off future problems.55
Complaints were not confined to civilians. From Jackson, Mississippi, in April 1863, one colonel wrote to John C. Pemberton—then commanding Mississippi, Tennessee, and eastern Louisiana—to note that crops were “so backward” that he thought officials should send slaves home to help with planting. He worried that cotton production would cease indefinitely, adding that he should not have to say that citizens needed corn.56 With the tax-in-kind taking effect in 1863, masters felt pressed enough without having to hand over slaves to the military. The army could not rely on the volunteering of slaves alone, but masters believed they had more of a right to keep their slaves than the military had to take them.
In addition to the demands of the harvest, masters had concerns for the health and safety of their slaves. Many planters complied with impressment, but the Confederacy’s promises of good treatment of slaves, or of compensatory payment, were not always kept. In May 1862, the Virginia slaveholder L. H. Minor complained of Confederate troops using his runaways on work projects. Federal forces were not the only soldiers who employed escaped slaves.57
Whether because of disease, flight, or capture by soldiers, many slaves never returned home, and it might take years before a master received compensation. The Virginia slaveholder James H. Evans waited until 1865 to see a $1,000 payment for the October 1862 loss of “Elijah,” a slave who had worked on fortifications.58 Confederates expected some slaves would undergo great danger in the service of the rebellion. In June 1862, the South Carolina soldier John J. Jefcoat heard of the shelling of black workers in Charleston by the Yankees.59
Impressed black workers, even more than normal field hands, endured harsh working conditions.60 Some officers tried to feed black workers adequately and care for their well-being. In September 1861, the Virginia staff officer Charles H. Dimmock complained to North Carolina governor Henry T. Clark of “needy & ragged Negroes, that demands prompt action.” He said his laborers were free blacks, not slaves, and that they had received neither salary nor clothing for months. They were a “miserable squalid set,” he wrote. “The alacrity with which these poor creatures work, & the sadness of their appearance, has weighed upon me like a night-mare.”61 No white man would have wanted to die in the place of a “Negro,” but that did not mean he always lacked sympathy for them. In Texas, in November 1863, for example, one officer complained his slaves needed better clothing.62
Confederate officers had good reason to care for their workers, but most slaves did not receive the care masters and conscientious commanders would have liked. One officer suggests why. In June 1863, David Harris, the chief engineer at Charleston, defended his department against accusations of slave mistreatment.63 He admitted that blacks were working overtime, but this was because agents were unable to gather enough of them. And slaves were not productive, he noted, after thirty days of labor. Strenuous work, limited diet, and homesickness had weakened them, and until the army furnished commanders with sufficient numbers, blacks would suffer. Harris wanted servants to be kept longer, up to sixty days, and he considered whether masters should have the option of substituting one worker for another.64 Early in the war, grumbling privates had complained that the army was turning them into slaves. Now, ironically, black laborers were becoming more like white soldiers. The army impressed some in a manner similar to conscription, substituted others, and kept them as long as the military required. Slaves were never impressed for the duration of the war, as were whites, but they too served for long periods in the army.
Concerning impressment, commanders preferred to deal with Confederate rather than state officials. In July 1863, Hugh Mercer, serving in Savannah, said his agents had gone as far as Mississippi to gather slaves. He appealed to Georgia governor Joseph E. Brown for more black workers. Not expecting success, he went over the head of the governor to obtain the needed labor. He wrote the secretary of war, James Seddon, saying that were he able to impress slaves, he could buy Savannah “at a cheap rate even if it cost them the labor of a thousand slaves yearly as long as the war may last.”65
When it came to providing the military with slaves, North Carolina’s governor Zebulon Vance—who, like Brown, had a reputation as an uncooperative Confederate—was caught between citizens who thought he impressed too many slaves and officers who thought he provided too few. In January 1863, the planter and politician William A. Smith complained to Vance about “the Governor with his bob tail malish demanding half of our able bodied slaves, which the Confeds have had for seven weeks.”66 A few weeks later, Secretary Seddon asked Vance for more black laborers for work on a railroad between Virginia and North Carolina. “Full hires shall be paid,” he promised, “and every care possible shall be taken to provide for the comfort and safety of the slaves.” Vance was slow in complying, saying he did not want to impress any slaves. He suggested that the government call upon free blacks. He told Seddon he would help collect workers, but his tone was uncooperative.67
In April 1863, Vance wrote to Seddon complaining of the “impossibility to prevent a famine” should Confederates take too many slaves. Vance was protecting the interests of North Carolina, but he created other problems. In May, he asked Gen. William Whiting, who was constructing works at Wilmington, to return impressed slaves to their owners. Vance and Whiting bickered with one another for months. Vance worried Whiting had used too many slaves, while Whiting feared a labor shortage would threaten Wilmington, a vital port. In June 1863, Whiting unburdened himself to D. H. Hill. “What little aid I can give I will,” he said, though he lamented, “I expect to need it sorely myself.” Vance, he wrote, was “calling in all the negro labor, which much embarrasses me.” Whiting was worried about an attack by land or sea, and said he did not have enough forces to hold off either.68 Wilmington, however, would hold out until February 1865.
As Federal threats mounted, slaveholders tried to move their slaves out of danger. Some took them from one town or neighborhood to another; others drove them across state lines. Writing from Petersburg, Virginia, in 1862, one soldier explained that “people are coming to town bringing negroes and other moveables at a rate you can form no idea of.”69 The reason, he said, was because the Yankees had been “plundering” nearby Garysville. Much further south, in Mississippi, another Confederate wrote his father, “I am at a loss what to do,” noting it would cost four or five hundred dollars to bring his slaves to Virginia. He was anxious about them catching measles or whooping cough “at the very worst season of the year.” He even thought of moving his slaves to Texas, but knew he could not attend to such a task himself.70
In North Carolina, Confederates noted the movement of slaves away from the coastal regions—which were most vulnerable to Federal invasion, and where there was a higher concentration of slaves—to the mountains, where slavery was thriving. An elderly civilian slaveholder and North Carolinian noted, “The yankies has been near tarborough and the People move their cotton and negroes from the lower Counties up the country.” As John Inscoe and Gordon McKinney have concluded, slavery in Appalachia “proved so resilient” that few Upcountry people believed it would die until the final weeks of the war.71
Some planters and governors opposed impressment, but the Confederate military remained committed to it, for officers believed blacks were better workers than white men. In April 1863, the chief engineer at Galveston noted how the slaves were sweating in the sawmills, cutting and carrying sod, and hauling timber and iron. “The work of soldiers,” he said, “amounts to very little, as the officers seem to have no control whatever over their men.” In his eyes, “The number of soldiers at work is about 100 men, whose work amount to 10 negroes’ work.”72 That an officer believed black labor was superior to white labor by a factor of ten was a damning indictment of Rebel soldiers, who apparently had internalized the racial hierarchy concerning work. Stationed at Secessionville in November 1863, a South Carolinian wrote that blacks working on fortifications “have done more in the last 3 months than all that ever has been done before.”73 Wherever they could find it, officers preferred using nonwhite labor. In May 1863, writing from Fort Brown, Texas, a quartermaster wanted to use not only black laborers for hauling cotton, he wanted Mexican teamsters, too.74
Not only were black men better workers than whites, Southerners saw that African Americans in Confederate camps were less likely to be taken or lured away by Federal forces than they were elsewhere. In July 1863, the Alabama slaveholder W. C. Bibb offered a quarter of his black workers to the army, thinking his slaves would be safer under the watch of soldiers than they were with him. Northerners, in his eyes, easily manipulated black people. Were slaves to come in contact with the enemy, the Federals might enlist them.75
In August 1863, during the Charleston campaign, one soldier wrote of the “picturesque sight at [Fort] Gregg: the grim bastions looming up, the lurid glare of camp fires lighting up the swarthy faces of our Southern soldiers, and an endless string of stalwart negroes busily carrying bags of sand.”76 Confederates, however, did not always get needed slave labor easily. In July 1863, James C. Marcom, serving in North Carolina, wrote of the poor turnout of black workers near Raleigh (which had 1,621 slaves and 466 free blacks in 1860), where “2 white men and 13 negroes were all that came.”77 Given such manpower shortages, and with the South’s military fortunes worsening with defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, some wanted the government to go further. In August 1863, the South Carolina planter A. P. Hayne submitted a plan to Jefferson Davis to place a hundred black workers, equal to a company, into each regiment.78 That same month, Jonathan Watson, a citizen of Meridian, Mississippi, urged that slaves replace white workers at hospitals and at railroads. They could also serve as wagon drivers, pioneers, sappers, and miners, he wrote. The Federals, he noted, were already using slaves against the Confederacy— at Memphis and Corinth, there were thousands taking drill. He wrote of the possibility of the slaves “being made pretty good soldiers,” and he thought it better to use blacks than allow the North to use them. “Under judicious treatment,” Watson believed, “the army is really the safest place for the negroes.”79 The Texan William H. Neblett would have agreed. After predicting that agents would take some of his slaves, he said, “It would be best to let Sam and Joe go.” Because they were likely to flee to the Yankees, he believed they would “probably be safer with the [Confederate] army than at home.”80
In November 1863, the South Carolina slaveholder and staff officer Samuel W. Melton emphasized the crucial role slavery still played in the war effort. In his eyes, slavery made “our 8,000,000 . . . equal to the 20,000,000 of the North.” One might question whether slavery gave the South parity with the Northern war machine, but Melton believed the Confederacy needed to expand its black labor force. For him, the problem lay in adapting “our peculiar system of labor . . . to relieve the fighting population from the obligations of production and manufacture.” Just as slaves had for generations saved many white Southerners from digging ditches, cleaning stables, making supper, splitting hands on cotton stalks, and getting tuberculosis in factories, they could now allow whites to do what Confederates saw as the noble work of war: the fighting.81 Realists such as Melton believed that the government must take on greater powers. From his hospital bed in 1864, one Texan argued that the army should use all nearby blacks to repair the Confederacy’s supply roads. But, he lamented, “the powers that be will wait a week or ten days & then do what they could as well do today.”82 Even Confederates who did not oppose the use of slaves in the army might worry about whether the Rebel government could or would use them effectively.
In June 1863, the Confederate government put John Magruder, commanding the District of Texas, in charge of an impressment bureau, designed to make sure that masters furnished more slaves to the army.83 Slaveholders might not like it, but the Confederate army believed it to be a necessary measure. For commanders, the alternatives—defeat and subjugation—were far worse. As the war became even more destructive, and thus threatened more and more households, some planters and smaller slaveholders hesitated to relinquish black workers. “Slavery is a most delicate question,” the Virginia staff officer Samuel S. Anderson, serving in Texas, wrote to Magruder, noting that in some parts of Texas, “the production is so varied that free labor is very profitable.” He believed it better that Magruder appeal to planter patriotism rather than resort to impressment. State elections were coming up in August and the army’s seizing of slaves would prove a controversial issue. Better to leave a touchy issue aside, Anderson reasoned, when trying to win over voters; otherwise, staunch Confederates might face defeat from the opponents of Jefferson Davis and his policies.84
In response to the impending loss of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, Magruder wanted to protect Texas against invasion. He appealed to planters for slaves to help with fortifications, assuring them that the army would not move them west of the San Antonio River.85 Magruder wanted to fortify Niblett’s Bluff, a port city on the Louisiana side of the Sabine River, which served as a roadway for Confederates traveling from Louisiana to Houston and other points in southeast Texas. Niblett’s Bluff technically was in Louisiana, but Magruder had authority there as well as in Texas.
Long after the war, the former staff officer A. G. Dickinson said of Magruder, “Texas owes him a debt of gratitude,” for he “saved the State from invasion, and therefore gave to it that prosperity which it now enjoys.” Near Niblett’s Bluff, Magruder wanted authorities to stop and put to work all black men in the area. He and his men had little luck in getting slaveholders to provide servants voluntarily. Magruder, who had experienced similar problems earlier in the war in Virginia, now had more to consider than planters’ hurt feelings. He feared Federal troops in northern Texas and western Louisiana would draw his own men from the coast, the defense of which was essential to keep slaves, cotton, railroads, and sugar in Confederate hands. He wanted to concentrate his forces, and he needed slaves to do it. Thankfully for Magruder, the Confederates thwarted a Union attack at Sabine Pass, where General Banks had hoped to gain a foothold in order to attack Niblett’s Bluff and later Beaumont and Houston.86
Confederate success in Texas underscored the benefits of a reliable supply of black labor. Yet, despite problems in Texas and elsewhere, masters were still supportive of the Confederacy. Said a War Department employee, Robert Kean, about Alabama: “Heretofore a negro could not be got for work connected with the army for any price. Now men are offering them and are proposing to use them as soldiers.” Kean was happy to see masters give slaves to the army, but he was dubious of black men becoming troops. He thought it “bad policy,” and he was hopeful the army could use blacks as teamsters, builders of fortifications, cooks, and at all other “menial offices of the army.”87 For white Confederates, African Americans were best kept at work and out of uniform.
In September 1863, Kirby Smith, commanding the trans-Mississippi region, received good news. He said Texas planters, understanding such calls would fall on masters equally, were cooperating with impressment officials. “The public-spirited man,” Smith said, “objects that his unpatriotic neighbor should receive the protection of the Government without adding his quota to its support.” Masters wanted men of equal means to furnish slaves at the same rate, and they hoped Confederate officials would practice impressment fairly. With the Federal threat ever increasing, Smith believed the idea that “slave property is uncertain has been gradually gaining ground in the public mind.” In his view, it was better that the army impress thousands of slaves in Texas rather than let them fall into enemy hands.88
John Magruder did not support Kirby Smith’s plan, which he thought put an unfair burden on Texas planters. Rather, he believed Texans and Louisianans should both furnish more slaves. Magruder noted that he had not lost many slaves in his Texas District, nor had he impressed many. To change the Confederacy’s policy to one based on impressment would result, he wrote in October 1863, in masters finding no “home for their slaves,” which would cause “great confusion.” Magruder believed the impressment bureau was working well for the first time, and he did not want Kirby Smith or “interested parties (planters from Louisiana or elsewhere)” to interfere. Magruder worried that if impressment was the sole policy for acquiring black laborers, it would anger masters, who might flee beyond the reach of Confederate authorities.89
Magruder’s efforts to control impressment in Texas were part of the Confederacy’s larger attempt to create a workable bureaucracy. In October 1863, Samuel Cooper, the highest-ranking general in the Confederacy and Jefferson Davis’s military advisor, issued a special order based on the Confederate Congress’s impressment law. Cooper said commanders could take slaves from plantations dedicated to the production of grain only “in cases of urgent necessity.” The order, however, put heavy demands on masters to furnish slaves when needed. Those who were slow in doing so, without reason, could have their slaves detained an extra month. Masters could send overseers to the army, but officers had the power to dismiss them for misconduct. In return, those who provided slaves on demand would receive $20 a month for each worker. Were a slave to die, “a board of experts” would decide his value, but a master could not hold the military responsible for slaves killed “by the act of God, or by disease existing when the slave is received by Confederate authorities.” Such measures underscored the fact that by 1863, the army had a contract with the states for black labor, the largest such contract in the history of American slavery. The Confederacy now had a board to determine a slave’s worth and was not responsible for a slave struck by lightning, washed away in a flood, or otherwise taken by Providence. If it were not obvious by then, slave owners now knew who came first: the owner, the state government, or the Confederate army.90 Confederates dealt the best they could with the new measures. Long before General Cooper issued new measures, the South Carolina soldier William Grimball wrote to his father about drawing up an affidavit concerning the loss of a slave named Henry. He wanted his father to use care, but he lamented “the tedious process of legislative compensation.”91
Confederate commanders not only ordered the impressment of slaves, they also demanded masters move chattels out of harm’s way. In December 1863, the Texas soldier Rudolf Coreth wrote of General Magruder forcing planters and their slaves to move seventy-five miles inland. Coreth worried about the loss of crops due to neglect, and of worried slaves consuming more than they were producing and eating provisions intended for the army.92
The Confederacy’s loss of Vicksburg, Port Hudson, and Chattanooga worsened an already difficult military situation. As the defeats mounted, the army demanded greater impressment power. In Mobile, in December 1863, local masters were angry that the army kept slaves at work for too long. However, Von Sheliha, an engineer, blamed the planters. Masters had hesitated to send slaves, he said, and then complained when they were not quickly returned. He also dismissed accusations that Rebel soldiers mistreated blacks. For Sheliha, the problem again lay with masters, whose overseers were “not always men who deserve the confidence of their employers.” The number of sick men under his command was not excessive, but he felt the Confederacy should placate worried masters by increasing slaves’ pay to $30 a month (with the planters providing rations). Sheliha’s plans, however, went further. He wanted the Confederacy to create a permanent force of black workers. “The advantages of such an organization,” he concluded in December 1863, “are too obvious for me to venture.”93 Sheliha would never see such a body created, but the Confederacy did take steps to create a permanent black labor force. In February 1864, the Congress passed a third draft bill, which allowed for the conscription of 20,000 slaves, effectively a corps, for use as teamsters and cooks. The Confederacy, however, never created an official corps of black workers.
By February 1864, Richard Taylor, then commanding western Louisiana, grew fatalistic about slavery in his district. Taylor, a wealthy Louisiana sugar planter before the war, had no doubts about the goodness of slavery. But he understood firsthand how the war had weakened it. In 1863, the Yankees had plundered Taylor’s plantation, “Fashion,” making off with livestock and horses, hogsheads of sugar, and scores of slaves. Taylor knew the limits of slave loyalty, and when it came to impressing black workers, he also saw difficulties. On the one hand, to rely upon masters to volunteer their servants was to risk a labor shortage, and with it a weaker military that might lose more Confederate territory. On the other hand, if the army resorted to impressment, Taylor believed there would be a “general stampede” of masters to Texas, where they could find more lenient polices under Magruder’s leadership. Taylor, ultimately, thought impressment unwise. On this point, he differed with his superior, Kirby Smith. But then again, the men rarely agreed on anything.94
Taylor was nervous about his superior’s impressment policies, but disagreement over how to best deal with slaves did not suggest chaos within the command structure or inherent weaknesses in the Confederate army. As 1864 began, Southern forces were still formidable. That year perhaps proved to be the most decisive in the history of North American slavery, for it was in 1864 that the Confederate army would break under the pressure of Union offensives. Confederates, who faced ever greater shortages of troops and supplies, relied increasingly on impressment, and they had considerable success in getting needed slaves. Black workers did not fend off Grant’s huge armies directly, but they continued to help Confederates build forts and make entrenchments.
In February 1864, Virginia governor William “Extra Billy” Smith, formerly a Rebel general, used appeals and threats to assure citizens sent slaves to authorities. The “first duty of the citizen is to unite in the public defence,” he said to the people of Lunenburg County, reminding them that unlike other parts of his state, Lunenburg had not suffered from Yankees burning homes, food shortages, or slaves being taken. Now he hoped they would “cheerfully” respond to calls for black workers, but if they did not, he threatened that officials might “impress the necessary labour to insure the obligation.”95
Well into 1864, many Rebel soldiers remained optimistic about the survival of the Confederacy and the institution of slavery. For them, impressment was just another means of preserving slavery in the long run. The Louisiana colonel James C. Beard, who took part in the Red River campaign, was hopeful about his men’s chances against the Yankees. Even so, he advised his father-in-law to “send off” all of his male slaves, believing that the “safest thing” would be if they served as cooks and teamsters. Another Louisianan, the sugar planter Alfred Weeks, who did not serve in Confederate forces until very late in the war, moved his slaves to Texas. In May 1864, he still had confidence in the Rebel military. “I do not think . . . that we will lose our negroes,” he wrote. “The Confederate States must succeed and if we can keep [slaves] from the enemy we will save them. I feel hopeful & confident and know that we never can be subjugated.”96 Masters might have moved slaves out of the Union’s way, but it was not necessarily because they were contemptuous of authority or pessimistic about Southern independence.
Commanders continued shuffling thousands of needed black workers into the army. In January 1864, Gen. Leonidas Polk, commanding in Mississippi after his fallout with Braxton Bragg after the battle of Chickamauga, said he had sent five thousand slaves to Mobile. That summer, the North would capture Mobile Bay, though the city itself would remain in Confederate hands until after Lee’s surrender.97 Confederates in Mobile obtained thousands of slaves to bolster the city’s defenses, but in Polk’s theater of operations, all was not well. By 1864, Mississippi was “in a most deplorable condition.”98 Yet, that summer, the ever resourceful Nathan Bedford Forrest continued to gather slaves. In August, he planned on getting five hundred for the works around Grenada and Graysport.99 But as the year went on, officers had greater difficulty obtaining slave labor, and, for that matter, manpower in general.
Officers continued to make appeals to civilians, and they made it clear how impressed labor would help the war effort. “With the work of two hundred negroes I can in fifteen days strengthen the position as to hold it against any raiding party,” said Col. Benjamin Farinholt to the citizens of Charlotte and Halifax, Virginia. In a 4 July appeal, he said he needed slaves “at once,” for their work would “be the means of saving you[r] farms and homes from desolation and the foul presence of the enemy’s vandals.” He said farmers had no reason to refuse him—as they were between planting and harvesting season—and he wanted blacks to help citizens avoid the fate of others in Virginia.100
As Farinholt made calls on Virginians, William T. Sherman’s army moved into the heart of Georgia, where slaves had become part of the Confederate campaign to defend Atlanta. One soldier recalled how Gen. Joseph E. Johnston called for 12,000 blacks to act as teamsters and cooks. The need for such a large number underscored the dire state of the Confederate military and the limits of what the government could do. The impressment of 12,000 slaves was a fantastic number, constituting a small army of laborers. The Confederacy never furnished so many slaves at one time for any general, even Robert E. Lee, and such numbers were difficult to meet in 1864. Johnston never got his 12,000 slaves, but black laborers were an important part of the campaign. “We expect to make a stand of three or four days at this place,” wrote the Georgian Eugene Verdery on Independence Day 1864, “so as to enable the negro forces engaged in building our last line to do it effectively.”101
Once Sherman occupied Atlanta, he marched to the coast rather than finish off the limping Army of Tennessee. Coastal cities in Georgia and the Carolinas became vulnerable. The previous year, while commanding at Charleston, General Beauregard had complained that his “constant appeals” were not enough to obtain the 2,500 slaves per month he requested. Instead, he had only received an average of 330.102 In 1864, Beauregard was busy in Virginia holding off Butler’s and, later, Grant’s forces. Sam Jones, who had served in various theaters, succeeded him as commander of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Headquartered in Charleston in June 1864, Jones asked planters to send slaves to the military, provided it did not interfere with rice harvesting. Jones would not impress black workers, but rather hire them out, and he promised that the military would treat them well. His ranks were depleted of labor. Where 2,000 slaves were needed, his agents obtained only nine; where 200 were required, he had only a dozen. “I cannot order the impressment of negroes in those States which have taken action on this subject,” General Jones complained.103 As did many commanders, he had enough confidence in the survival and necessity of slavery to keep demanding black workers from local masters. But he did not always get the numbers of slaves he wanted.
In September 1864, Robert E. Lee, whose army lay pinned down at Petersburg, knew he must enlist black workers to an extent greater than Congress had authorized. In his eyes, the February draft bill, which had allowed for the use of 20,000 slaves in the army, had not proven effective. “It seems to me,” he wrote Jefferson Davis, “that we must choose between employing negroes ourselves or having them employed against us.” The general’s thinking foreshadowed that of early 1865, when he favored enlisting blacks into the army. Every slave that fled to Union lines took away a laborer from the Confederacy and added one to the Federals. In September 1864, Lee reported that he needed 5,000 black laborers for his army—and that meant 5,000 white troops could remain at the front. As Lee saw it, the February Conscription Act gave impressment power not to Secretary Seddon, but to commanding officers, and he wanted to use slaves not just for military work, but anywhere where they might free up white soldiers. Lee asked the Confederacy to create a corps of black workers to cut wood and perform roadwork, and he wanted them to be exclusively slaves: no free blacks or contract laborers. Late in the war, Lee saw that his army had to rely more than ever on slave labor.104
In late September 1864, Seddon said he would impress 20,000 slaves, as authorized by Congress, to help General Lee. “Many advantages,” Seddon believed “would result from this system in enabling us to preserve better order and exercise more care and supervision over the negroes so employed.” The machinery of war, however, was not working. In October, Lee told Seddon that the slaves he needed had not arrived. Were they not to come, he warned, “it will be very difficult for us to maintain ourselves.” Despite Lee’s desperate situation at Petersburg, Seddon complained of problems raising more white troops and an entire corps of impressed workers.105 In December, Lee further complained that only 2,000 of the 5,000 slaves he requested were in camp. It was a formidable number of workers, but Lee was not satisfied for he had not received enough men to replace his white teamsters. Instead, he had only enough to supply A. P. Hill’s Third Corps and part of a division. Lee was not alone in understanding what a lack of black laborers meant for Confederates. In late December 1864, James Longstreet worried that the army would have to abandon a line of defenses unless it put black workers on it.106
Lee, Longstreet, and others never received the slaves they requested. They made considerable efforts to get them, but by the fall of 1864, even the seemingly supernatural Nathan Bedford Forrest could no longer work miracles. Forrest reported his failure to provide all the slaves that Richard Taylor, then commanding eastern Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, needed in his theater of combat. Forrest had captured roughly 1,000 slaves, and he sent about 800 to Taylor.107 By then, however, the war was going badly for the Confederacy. Impressed slaves mattered little when Sherman’s forces were marching unopposed through Georgia.
Union victories meant not just the flight of slaves to Federal lines, but the flight of masters. In November 1864, writing from Lewisville, Arkansas, in the southwestern portion of that state, John Magruder estimated that slaveholders had taken 150,000 chattels from Missouri and Arkansas to Texas during the war. Given the vast number of slaves in his region, he wanted to impress more black workers, even though he worried it might alienate the planters. If slave owners fled to Texas, he reasoned, they were still within Confederate borders, and thus still under his control. Magruder had not lost faith in slave labor. “My judgment tells me the negroes are absolutely necessary,” he wrote in November 1864.108
In February 1865, Mississippi authorities ordered officers not to disturb slaves working on railroads used for military transportation.109 The Confederacy was in its death throes, but commanders were still making policy concerning the use of slaves in the army. In March, Nathan Bedford Forrest ordered that all wagon drivers in his forces were to be black. In addition, every ten men were to be allowed one black cook, and no officer could claim a slave that was not in his immediate service.110 Such orders had little importance given that the war would soon end, but they underscore the Confederate army’s continued reliance upon human bondage.
Until the end of the war, Confederates used as many slaves as possible for their defenses. In 1865, the campaign for Spanish Fort, which guarded Mobile, had little bearing on events elsewhere, but Federal forces spent much blood to take it. On 5 April, a worried Confederate officer complained that he needed “more heavy guns, more mortars, more axes, more negroes.”111 Spanish Fort surrendered three days later, a day before Lee capitulated at Appomattox.
The Confederacy’s decision to impress slaves was a natural and logical, albeit controversial, one. Thousands of slaves, doing the hard labor they had performed for generations, kept Confederate armies in the field. Rebels often considered blacks lazy, but the army knew that they had performed the most menial and difficult work in the South. In resorting to impressment, the Confederacy faced one of the many dilemmas it confronted during the war: how to use the South’s vast resources without violating individual property rights. It also questioned how Southerners could best govern slavery while defending Confederate strongholds.
Southerners faced not just ideological challenges, but logistical difficulties. Whether or not they worked slaves in the army, or kept them at home, they were merely transferring the labor force, not employing unused resources. Every slave used in the army allowed one soldier to serve at the front, but it also meant the absence of one more slave on the farm or plantation. Slaves were rarely idle. Their usefulness to the South depended on where and when they worked, not on whether or not they worked. When they were under white supervision, and even when they were not, blacks provided the main source of labor for the Confederacy. Rebel leaders understood that slaves were not a perfect means of labor, but they were an essential one. Without slaves, white men could not have fought in the numbers they did for the South.
Confederates applied antebellum laws and custom as much as possible to the contingencies of war, but the conflict led to the passage of new laws governing the peculiar institution. The authorities hoped that the people would understand that impressment was only a wartime measure. Confederate soldiers interfered with the usual workings of slavery, but they did not want to change the institution fundamentally. The issue of impressment did not lead Confederates to question the validity and practicality of human bondage, only how best to keep it alive without starving the war effort.