Download Noncombatant Military Laborers in the Civil War

Thavolia Glymph
Noncombatant Military Laborers
in the Civil War
R
ejected for command of a
unloaded millions of tons of quarvolunteer regiment on the
termaster, ordnance, medical, and
grounds that his service as
other supplies from boats and
an engineer was needed more,
barges, mules and wagons. Some
Henry L. Abbot never forgot the
410,000 horses and 125,000 mules
perceived slight. Though conwere loaded and unloaded on rail
stantly in the field and once
lines in the last year of the war alone.
wounded, he had been forced to
An army of 800,000 could easily
“suffer for two years the hardship
employ 100,000 such laborers (4).
of remaining a subaltern,” he wrote
Their ranks included workers
years later. For Abbot, as for most
skilled in building and repairing
Civil War soldiers, the gun not the
wagons, saddles and caissons, and
shovel, represented the “ultimate
engineers for roads (5). And, like
of soldiering” (1). The inferior,
combat soldiers, many lost their
dependent, and subordinate status
lives on the battlefield.
that Abbot associated with nonAs the Civil War dragged on
combat military labor resonated
longer than anyone had anticipated
in the complaints of black Union
and trench warfare expanded, the
soldiers. “Instead of the musket,”
need for noncombatant labor
they were forced to wield “the
grew. Both armies and their governFigure 1. African Americans laborers work on a railroad in northern Virginia as
spad and the Wheelbarrow and the
ments competed fiercely over access
part of the Union army’s military operations between 1862 and 1863. Though
Axe” (2).
rarely highlighted in popular Civil War history, noncombatant military laborers not only to black labor but the
Yet the defeat of the Confeder- were crucial to the outcome of the war. Both armies sought to secure a consis- labor of white men as well. Neiacy was due in no small measure to tent source of hands capable of building and repairing roads, bridges, and rail- ther side had anticipated this outthe men and women who wielded road tracks, as well as fortifications and transport wagons. As the war dragged come. In 1861, the South assumed
spades, wheelbarrows, axes, pots, on, it became clear to both sides that African American labor was critical to the labor of slaves would be a
and needles. Though rarely acknowl- winning the war. (Courtesy of Library of Congress)
resource it could control and access
edged, much less celebrated, the
as needed, and the North deemed
work of hundreds of thousands of noncombatant military laborers—
slave labor irrelevant to the war it intended to wage. In the end, the
men and women who never or rarely picked up a rifle or fired a cannon—
Union won the contest in significant measure because it won the battle
could make or break a campaign as Grant famously discovered in the
for the labor of African Americans.
Mississippi Valley. By the end of the war, former slaves constituted a
large proportion of the men and women who shouldered this work,
The Issue of Black Labor
and, unlike Abbot, most welcomed noncombatant labor despite the
Insisting that the war had one aim—the preservation of the Union—
hardships and insults it so often entailed. For them, it was an opportuPresident Lincoln and the vast majority of white Northerners initially
nity to work for their own freedom and for Union victory. When Union
envisioned no place for free black people or slaves; certainly black men
soldiers arrived at the plantation in Alabama where Ann Lewis was
would not be called to fight for Union. In the face of military necessity
enslaved, for example, she immediately hired herself out as a cook (3).
and the determination of enslaved people to put their freedom on
Soldiers, guns, and generals won battles but did so on the backs of
the war’s agenda, the North assented to the enlistment of black
thousands of noncombatant laborers. Behind the lines, in quartermassoldiers. Still, many Northerners hoped that black soldiers would either
ter, medical and commissary departments, they built forts, breastworks,
take the bullets before white men did or do the grunt work that would
and other fortifications and destroyed the enemy’s. They built long
let white men do the manly work of fighting. Black soldiers would,
stretches of log roads and bridges over swamps, cane breaks, and
indeed, spend more time digging and building fortifications than
lagoons; built and cleared canals to enable the movement of
engaged in armed combat.
gunboats; dug ditches; dragged guns through stinking and infested
White Southerners were far less naive about the significance of
bayous; washed and cooked for soldiers; nursed them; and buried their
black labor from the start. As they contemplated the logistical requirebodies when death came (Figure 1). They drove thousands of transport
ments entailed in raising a nation state and an army simultaneously,
wagons, artillery carriages, and caissons to haul artillery, and cared
white Southerners envisioned a central role for the enslaved. Slave
for the hundreds of thousands of horses and mules that braced the
labor would continue to grow the cash crops of cotton, sugar, and
movement of armies. Additional thousands of men loaded and
rice necessary to feed the people, fund the proslavery nation-state
OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 25–29
doi: 10.1093/oahmag/oas007
© The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians.
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enterprise, and secure diplomatic alliances abroad. With slavery as its
“tower of strength,” the Montgomery Advertiser boasted in 1861, the
South could field an army of hundreds of thousands of white men,
“and still not leave the material interests of the country in a suffering
condition” (6).
Black men and women, we know, viewed the matter differently,
declining to be the “cornerstone” of a Confederate nation or spectators
to a war for the Union. From the onset, they grasped a revolutionary
struggle in the making, that Union and emancipation might emerge
victorious. Their flight to Northern lines forced the Union and Confederate
governments to reconsider the premises upon which they had gone to
war and to compete for the labor of enslaved and freed people. That
competition had its historic collision on May 23, 1861 when three
enslaved men made their way to Union lines at Fortress Monroe,
Virginia. Learning that the men were part of a detachment of slaves
who had been put to work building a nearby Confederate battery, General
Benjamin F. Butler famously declared them “contraband of war” and
put them to work as laborers for the Union army (7) (Figure 2). It was
but one of many ruptures to come in the phalanx of Northern opinion.
As Union troops entered the Confederate South with orders not
to interfere with slavery, officers eagerly took on escaped slaves as
personal servants. Quartermasters embraced their labor, putting them
to work loading and unloading vessels and building fortifications,
bridges, and docks (8). Within a year Congress had passed the Militia
Act of 1862 authorizing the employment of African Americans as
laborers by federal forces (Figure 3). By the end of the war, an estimated
500,000 to one million slaves had fled to Union lines, some 200,000–
300,000 of whom would serve as noncombatant laborers, more than
twice the number of enslaved men who became soldiers in the Union
army (9). While black laborers played a vital role in both armies, the
debate over whether they should be used at all lasted for the duration of
the war.
Diversity of Noncombatant Labor
Noncombatant laborers constituted a diverse class of men and
women—white, black, and Native American—who entered, some
willingly and others unwillingly, the ranks of military labor. White
enlisted men detailed to noncombatant work often served alongside
African American and Irish men and women hired specifically as noncombatant workers. Enlisted men drove regimental trains and served
in pioneer battalions that cut roads and built and repaired bridges, railroads, and fortifications. Indeed, by the end of the war, one Union soldier
recalled, it had become “a principle with us to fight with moveable breastworks,” with “every man . . . to some extent his own engineer” (10). Many
Figure 2. In January 1863, Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant renewed an ultimately unsuccessful effort begun in 1862 to build a canal to connect Lake Providence, Louisiana
to the Mississippi River. Grant hoped to use the canal to carry gunboats, transports, and supply vessels around the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg. As depicted
in this sketch from the March 28, 1863 issue of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Union soldiers as well as former slaves performed this essential noncombatant
labor. (Courtesy of Library of Congress)
26 OAH Magazine of History • April 2012
soldiers, however, resented and pronecessary field works, as the soltested such assignments.
diers of every other nation have
Like soldiers throughout hisalways done from the beginning of
tory, white soldiers in the Civil War
war” (15).
were expected to dig ditches, move
D.H. Hill, commander of the
supplies, and clear and build roads
Confederate post at Yorktown,
and bridges. For Union armies,
agreed. Men in his regiment, he
this expectation did not diminish
wrote, who had “never labored a
with the passage of the 1862 Militia
day in their lives,” had “without a
Act authorizing the use of black
murmur” performed backbreaklaborers in the Union army. During labor unloading schooners
ing the Vicksburg campaign, for
and as blacksmiths, teamsters,
example, General W.T. Sherman
and brick masons. Yet he also
put hundreds of men from two of
conceded, the matter was not so
his divisions to build canals and
straightforward. He had in fact
clear bayou channels. But Sherscoured the countryside to obtain
man, like other commanders, preslave labor with embarrassing
ferred to spare his men from Figure 3. In this 1862 photograph, four Union soldiers are waited on by a young results; the effort had returned
such chores and, equally, their use black servant at a military camp in Warrenton, Virginia. A year into the war, the only five men (16). Even as Hill
as hospital attendants and nurses. Northern government approved the Militia Act of 1862 allowing the use of black promoted the tradition of using
Such deployments, he wrote, were labor by Union forces. By the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of African soldiers to tote guns and axes, he
Americans, including some two hundred thousand former slaves, performed
“bad policy” (11).
had come face to face with the
valuable physical labor for the Union that went beyond traditional servile roles.
Initially, the North turned to (Courtesy of Library of Congress)
Confederacy’s Achilles’ heel—
immigrant groups like the Irish and
the disinclination and, more
Germans, but these efforts never
often, outright refusal of black
produced a sufficient number of laborers. Some Union commanders
men to labor for the Confederacy and their masters’ refusal to make
complained that the Irish, though paid nearly three times as much as
them. For its part, while officially acknowledging that soldiers someblack workers, were too “crabbed” and insisted on working only so
times had to do this kind of work, the Confederate War Department
many hours a day. Union efforts also came up increasingly against the
nonetheless cautioned against employing soldiers as laborers
fact that the war had made labor dear. Despite having a much larger
“except in cases of immediate necessity” (17). “The sanctity of slave
population upon which to draw, the North found it increasingly difficult
property in this war,” admitted Confederate Secretary of War James
to attract workers to the front, when jobs that paid more and came with
A. Seddon, “has operated most injuriously to the Confederacy,” a
lower risk to life and limb were available at home. Conscription also
reality General Robert E. Lee confronted with increasing dismay (18).
took a toll on the potential supply of noncombatant workers. Quartermasters were forced to turn to organize discharged enlisted men
The Confederacy and Noncombatant Slave Labor
into officered regiments to help supply the demand for mechanics,
Indeed, Lee hoped to see white men replaced by slaves everywhere posteamsters, and other noncombat labor (12). At Memphis, seven thousand
sible, in mines and factories and other non–War Department employsuch men entered the ranks (13).
ment, as well as on the battlefield.
In a society where enslaved
He wanted impressment “extended
people were viewed as the natural
far enough to provide a corps of
hewers of wood, some white
laborers for the army, to prevent
Southerners argued that putting
the necessity of those temporary
white men to such labor repredetails that are now made, to cut
sented a “diversion from the
wood, work on roads, etc.” But not
legitimate duties of a Volunteer
even the stature of Lee was suffiSoldier,” especially when there were
cient to move enough slaveholders
“negroes & hirelings enough to
to put their slaves on the line to
do the menial labor” (14). Former
save slavery, even though in going
Virginia Governor John M. Gregory
to war, they had already done so
had opposed the use of slaves as
(19). For his part, Lee got only two
noncombat military labor from the
thousand of the five thousand
start. Gregory argued that slave
laborers he requested, six hundred
labor “left on the plantations to
of whom immediately fled.
produce supplies for the army”
At the start of the war, some
constituted one of the South’s
slaveholders, caught up in the
“most potent elements of strength”
gloss of their own power—which
(Figure 4). He correctly foresaw Figure 4. On Smith’s Plantation in Beaufort, South Carolina, slaves pose for a in 1861 was quite substantial—had
that enlisting enslaved peoples as photographer in 1862. Confederate officials initially argued that slaves best volunteered their slaves to help
served the Southern cause by staying on the plantation. As few white Southerners
laborers gave the Union “a pre- volunteered for noncombatant military duty, however, the Confederate congress win the war for slavery. When the
text to interfere with them and to impressed the labor of free blacks and slaves in 1864, angering slaveholders. slaves they sent to the front returned
emancipate them.” “Let our sol- Slaves also resisted impressment, accelerating the Confederacy’s demise. ill or dead or not at all, their ardor
diers,” he concluded, “build all (Courtesy of Library of Congress)
for volunteering them diminished
OAH Magazine of History • April 2012 27
in proportion (20). With over one million slaves in Tennessee,
Alabama and Mississippi and nearly one hundred thousand within a
hundred miles of Nashville, for example, Confederate commanders
were only able to secure a fraction of the five hundred they requested
for the defense of the city in late December 1861. Even in the face of
enemy invasions, Confederate commanders often had to beg for
help or recalculate battlefield plans when governors, at the behest of
planters, recalled military laborers at harvest time. Planters howled
when Confederate commanders issued dragnet orders to take every
able-bodied slave man in the area of their operations, or when impressment agents made their own deals with enslaved men, further undermining the sovereignty of slaveholders (21).
The issue of slave property engendered a bewildering array of
alliances and estrangements. Private employers of slaves and free black
men—flour millers, coopers, and coal miners—vehemently protested
impressment polices that affected their business concerns (22). When
smallpox broke out in a Richmond hospital, the slaveholders demanded
the release of slaves they had hired out to the hospital. Some simply
went and took them (23). Confederate leaders bemoaned the slaveholders’ selfishness but, for most of the war, generally gave room.
Efforts by the Confederate Congress to secure the necessary labor while
simultaneously appeasing slaveholders and hirers of slaves did little to
stem the tide.
In 1862, the Confederate Congress formally authorized the use of
slaves and free black people and, the following year, sanctioned the
direct impressment of slaves (24). Yet neither this nor subsequent legislation on the subject produced the desired effect or muted the protests. Desperate by 1864, the Confederacy’s military leaders concluded
in near unison that only an “organized system of impressing the labor
of free negroes and slaves” would bring the desired result: “compulsion in some form would be necessary.” The April 12, 1862 law, while
providing for the use of slaves as cooks, teamsters, and for other tasks,
contained no provision for enforcement or actually procuring free
blacks or slaves. To the continued consternation of white Southerners,
black people did not “volunteer” their service, forcing the Confederacy
to use its armies “to remove them from the reach of the Union” (25).
While Confederates bickered, the Union policy of taking “their Negroes
and compel[ling] them to send back a portion of their whites to cultivate
their deserted plantations” or else “their armies will starve”gained
steam (26).
In the face of slave flight to Union lines, the enlistment of black
men as soldiers in the Union army, slaveholders’ resistance, white
men’s resistance to conscription, and soaring desertion rates that produced telling shortages in the number of white men available for duty,
the Confederate Congress acted again in 1864 “to increase the efficiency of the Army by the employment of free negroes and slaves.” Free
people of color (with some exceptions) between the ages of eighteen
and fifty were now subject to labor conscription with deficiencies to be
supplied by enslaved men (27). Ironically, just four years earlier, as the
South stood at the precipice, there had been numerous calls and legislation to either enslave free blacks or expel them in the name of presenting a consistent proslavery logic (28). With too few Southern white
men coming forth to supply themselves or their slaves, the employment of white men as teamsters now seemed a luxury, and the calls to
turn slaves and free black people into a military labor force grew louder
even as resistance deepened.
The Confederate effort to deploy black men and women as
nonmilitary laborers essentially arrived dead in the water and exposed
the larger Confederate project in all its contradictions. Slaves fought
impressment by hiding or fleeing. Sent to the front, they deserted or
returned armed with new weapons to defeat slavery from within,
prompting more criticism of the use of slaves in noncombatant positions
28 OAH Magazine of History • April 2012
(29). The Confederacy’s resort to black labor to win its independence
produced just one more current of internal dissension, arguably the
most demoralizing, that redounded to the Union’s benefit. Union commanders facing breastworks or fortifications built by slave labor were
increasingly eager to accommodate slaves fleeing Confederate slave
labor impressments (30).
Even so, the Union, too, struggled to fill the ranks of its noncombatant
forces, including a failure to meet requisitions for black laborers.
A standing requisition for five thousand laborers at New Berne, N.C.
drew fewer than two thousand (31). Union soldiers continued to be
detailed from the ranks as pioneers to cut roads and bridges and in
other services for the quartermaster and commissary. In the Army of
the Potomac in 1863, over ten thousand white soldiers were assigned to
garrison duty, ambulance corps and hospitals, and the construction of
entrenchments and fortifications. Substituting black laborers, the quartermaster reported, would increase the strength of the army fully by
one-eighth, or by one hundred thousand men (32). Freedmen “employed
as military laborers into brigades, with badges around their hats
labeled U.S. service” were major Union assets; and, so too were those
men and women who wore no emblems of U.S. service (33).
Women as Noncombatant Laborers
Though they played a vital role in the prosecution of the war, women—
non-elite women particularly—were the least acknowledged of Union
and Confederate military assets. After much controversy, the Confederate
Congress authorized the hiring of female nurses in September 1862 to
supplement the work of soldiers, especially convalescent soldiers
detailed as hospital workers. They came for the most part from the
ranks of working-class, and enslaved and immigrant women (34). In
addition to nursing, they worked as camp cooks, chambermaids, laundresses, and seamstresses. Many of these women never appeared on
military payrolls, and abuses were rampant. Soldiers sometimes
refused to pay them or were ordered elsewhere before paying them.
Women who followed husbands to the front, like several Irish wives
of men of the 132nd New York Infantry, worked as brigade cooks and
seamstresses, presumably for free (35). Enslaved women, as Drew
Faust writes, were seen as “fitted by both race and gender to subservience and menial labor as well as to the particularly female work of
caregiving.” Northern women also served as hospital nurses and
attendants. Sister Angela Gillespie, for example, took charge of Union
hospitals at Cairo and Memphis in 1863 under Grant.
Conclusion
In the end, the South lost the very thing it had gone to war to protect:
slavery (36). There were many paths to Confederate defeat, from losses
on the battlefield to deepening disaffection and resentment of the
intrusion of the heavy hand of the government in affairs deemed
private and local. None, perhaps, proved more painful or fatal than
the failure of the enslaved to justify the faith of slaveholders that
they would constitute a second front on the side of the Confederacy.
Instead, by the hundreds of thousands, black people gave their labor
and allegiance to the Union. By the end, slaveholders were begging
Confederate commanders to take their slaves to prevent them from
running away to work for the Yankees and their own freedom.
The war had also proven defective and untenable the idea that the
Union could fight a war against the Confederacy while holding slave
property sacrosanct. His ultimate objective in waging war, Lincoln continued to insist as late as August 1864, was the preservation of the
Union. “So long as I am President,” he stated, “it shall be carried on for
the sole purpose of restoring the union.” Yet, he admitted, “no human
power can subdue this rebellion without the use of emancipation policy, and every other policy calculated to weaken the moral and physical
forces of the rebellion” (37). It was a telling recognition of the role the
enslaved and freed people now played in Union calculations.
By the end of the Civil War, over two million men had served in the
Union forces and an estimated 850,000 in Confederate armies. Mounting
casualties and dampened enthusiasm for enlisting had decimated the
ranks of both armies, fueling the growing reliance on noncombatant
military labor to augment their fighting capacities and boost morale (38).
The Confederate broadsheet of 1862 whose headline screamed, “Wanted!
200 Negroes,” appears today as surreal as it must have appeared to
people at the time. It conveyed the order of Confederate Lieut. General
J.C. Pemberton, Commanding Department of Mississippi and East
Louisiana, to planters in Lowndes and adjacent counties to supply slaves
for work on fortifications and promising to pay $1.25 per day to their
masters. Pemberton’s order was just one of many markers of the Confederacy at war with itself that would proliferate in the years to come as
“uniformed labor” took its place in this revolutionary struggle (39). q
Endnotes
1. Maj. General Henry L. Abbot to Ulysses S. Grant, Jan. 18, 1875 in The Papers
of Ulysses S. Grant, ed. John Y. Simon, Vol. 26: 1875 (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 2003), 443.
2. Ira Berlin et al., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867:
The Black Military Experience, Ser. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982), see especially Part 3, quote at 501.
3. George Rawick, et al, The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography,
Supplement Ser. 1, Vol. 10, Pt. 5, (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Company,
1977), 2043.
4. Allan Nevins, The War for the Union: The Organized War, 1863–1864 (New York:
Konecky & Konecky, 1971), 301. United States, War Department, War of the
Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate
Armies, Ser. 3, Vol. 4 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901)
888, 893 [Hereafter cited as War Dept., OR]. James M. McPherson, The
Negro’s Civil War (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991) 148–49; Bell Irvin Wiley,
The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1995), 66.
5. On former slaves in the U.S. navies, see, for example, William B. Gould,
Diary of a Contraband: The Civil War Passage of a Black Sailor (Stanford:
Stanford University Press 2002). Unlike Black soldiers, Native Americans
who served in Union and Confederate forces seem to have been mainly
employed as combat soldiers. See, for example, Laurence M. Hauptman,
The Iroquois in the Civil War: From Battlefield to Reservation (Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press, 1993).
6. Quoted in Joseph T. Wilson, The Black Phalanx (New York: Da Capo, 1994),
104; W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–80 (New York:
Atheneum, 1992 ed.), 58.
7. Benjamin F. Butler, Butler’s Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences
(Boston: A.M. Thayer & Co., 1892), 256–59.
8. See, for example, John Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen: Reminiscences of the Civil War (New York: Negro University Press, 1969).
9. McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War, 144.
10. The Pioneer Corps, comprised of 1,700 men, was a specialized unit in the
Army of the Cumberland. See V.D.B., Correspondent of the Cincinnati
Commercial, “Rosecran’s Campaign with the Fourteenth Army Corps, Or
the Army of the Cumberland: A Narrative of Personal Observations, With
an Appendix, Consisting of Official Reports of the Battle of Stone River,”
1863; Henry Dwight, “How We Fight at Atlanta,” The Blue and the Gray: The
Story of the Civil War as Told by Participants, ed. Henry Steele Commager
(New York: Fairfax Press, 1982), 939–43, quote on 940.
11. William Tecumseh Sherman, Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman (New York:
Library of America, 1990), 297, 329–31.
12. Berlin, et al., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867:
The Destruction of Slavery, Ser. 1, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982) 1–82, 142–44, 174–76; Berlin, et al. Freedom, Ser. 1, Vol. 1, 1–83.
13. War Dept., OR, Ser. 3, Vol. 4, 892–93.
14. Ira Berlin et al., Freedom, Ser. 1, Vol. 1, 684–86, quotes on 685–86.
15. Berlin et al., Freedom, Ser. 1, Vol. 1, 748–49, 752.
16. Berlin et al., Freedom, Ser. 1, Vol. 1, 685.
17. C.S.A., War Department, Army Regulations Adopted for the Use of the Army of
the Confederate States (New Orleans: Bloomfield & Steel, 1861), 111, as
quoted in Berlin et al., Freedom, Ser. 1, Vol. 1, 685.
18. Berlin et al., Freedom, Ser. 1, Vol. 1, 705.
19. For cogent analyses of this point, see Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 55–83;
Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Business, 1863–1877 (New
York: Harper & Row, 1988), Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black
Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Depression
(Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2003), 65–115, and Stephanie McCurry, Confederate
Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2010).
20. Many scholars have dealt with this question. Among the most recent,
Stephanie McCurry in Confederate Reckoning, see especially 263–309.
21. Berlin et al., Freedom, Ser. 1, Vol. 1, 677–78; Armstead L. Robinson, Bitter
Fruits of Bondage: The Demise of Slavery and the Collapse of the Confederacy,
1861–1865 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2005), 106–09; Clarence
L. Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 121–26.
22. Berlin et al., Freedom, Ser. 1, Vol. 1, 723–25, 728–33.
23. Berlin et al., Freedom, Ser. 1, Vol. 1, 669, 703.
24. War Dept., OR, Ser. 4, Vol. 2, 469–72. The Confederate legislation gave
commanders in the field greater authority to take what slaveholders increasingly declined to volunteer. One of the best summaries of this struggle
may be found in Berlin et al., Freedom, Ser. 1, Vol. 1 663–82 and ibid., documents 257–331. On the use of black noncombat military labor see also, Berlin et al., Freedom, ser. 1, vol. 2.
25. War Dept., OR, Ser. 4, Vol. 2, 998–99.
26. Quoted in William T. Alexander, History of the Colored Race in America
(Kansas City, Mo.: Palmetto Publishing Co., 1890), 344–45.
27. War Dept., OR, Ser. 4, Vol. 3, 208.
28. Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 368–80. See also, McCurry, Confederate
Reckoning, 277–83.
29. See, for example, Berlin et al., Freedom, Ser. 1, Vol. 1, 733.
30. Sherman, Memoirs, 335–37.
31. United States, War Department, “American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission Preliminary Report, June 30, 1863,” War Dept., OR, Ser. 3, Vol. 3,
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901) 437–38.
32. War Dept. OR, Ser. 3, Vol. 4, 888, 893. McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War,
148; War Dept., OR, Ser. 3, Vol. 4.
33. War Dept. OR, Ser. 3, Vol. 3, 438.
34. For a detailed accounting of women nurses, cooks, laundresses and hospital matrons in both armies, see Jane E. Schultz, Women at the Front: Hospital
Workers in Civil War America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2004). See also, Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of
the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press 1996), 92; War Dept., OR, quote from 96—113.
35. Hauptman, The Iroquois in the Civil War, 32; Grant, Papers, 488–89.
36. See, for example, McCurry, Confederate Reckoning; Robinson, Bitter Fruits of
Bondage; and James L. Roark, Masters Without Slaves: Southern Planters in
the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: W.W. Norton and Company,
1977).
37. Abraham Lincoln, Interview with John T. Mills, August 1864, John G.
Nicolay and John Hay, eds., Abraham Lincoln, Complete Works: Comprising
his Speeches, Letters, State Papers, and Miscellaneous Writings, Vol. 2 (New
York: The New York Century Co., 1907), 562.
38. On the number of men who served and early signs of disaffection among
Confederate soldiers that grew with conscription, see James M. McPherson,
Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction, 2nd ed. (New York: McGrawHill, 1992), 184–86.
39. Berlin et al., Freedom, Ser. 1, Vol. 1, 702.
Thavolia Glymph is associate professor of African and African American
studies and history at Duke University. She is the author of Out of the
House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household
(Cambridge University Press, 2008), co-winner of the 2009 Philip Taft Book
Prize. She is co-editor of two volumes of Freedom: A Documentary History
of Emancipation (Cambridge University Press, 1985, 1990) and is currently
completing Women at War, a study of black women and children refugees in
the Civil War. Her next project is a book on white Civil War veterans who
served in the Egyptian Army in the 1870s.
OAH Magazine of History • April 2012 29
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