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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. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] 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 The Making of a Confederate Walter Lenoir’s Civil War WILLIAM L. BARNEY “In this fascinating and beautifully written portrait . . . William L. Barney breathes life into many key aspects of the Civil War era as it was experienced in the Upper South. A major achievement.” —Bruce Levine, author of Confederate Emancipation (New Narratives in American History) 2008 Paperback $17.95 The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Civil War WILLIAM L. BARNEY W “T ““The T best one-volume encyclopedia of tth h period currently available. Remarkably this ccomprehensive and clearly written.... PProfusely illustrated with photos, drawings, ilill l illustrations from contemporary sources, aand paintings. Recommended.” —CHOICE 2011 Paperback 2 $18.95 CELEBRATE THE SESQUICENTENNIAL WITH THE tWinner of the Lincoln Prizet For Cause an and Comrades Why Men Fought in W the th h Civil War JJAMES M. McPHERSON ““In “I I For Cause and Comrades tthe voices of the young men of the th North and South sing out to us clearly, N ccolorfully, compellingly, telling us what itt was like for them—the battles, the ccamps, the cold and hunger, the fear, the boredom, the despair, the triumph.” b —The Wall Street Journal — 1998 Paperback 1 $18.95 tNamed Best Confederate Study of 2011 by Civil War Memoryt Shifting Grounds Sh Nationalism and the N American South, 1848-1865 A P PAUL QUIGLEY “This masterful book makes sense of how “T th the South’s ambition for nationhood in the 1860s resonated with the shared th rresentments and common dreams re aalready embedded in its history and al cculture. Hundreds of books dwell on how this long, cruel war was fought; h Paul Quigley helps us understand why it was fought.” —Don H. Doyle, University of South Carolina 2011 Hardback $34.95 Prices are subject to change and apply only in the US. To order or for more information, visit our website at www.oup.com/us. 30 OAH Magazine of History • April 2012 tWinner of the Mary Lawton Hodges Prize in Southern Studies of the Institute for Southern Studiest Th The Road to Disunion V Volume II: Secessionists T Triumphant, 1854-1861 W WILLIAM W. FREEHLING “W “With much original insight, Freehling sskillfully sk k fuses impersonal economic aand political forces with the crucial ccontingencies that help to explain what ccan still be seen as the central event in American history.” A —David Brion Davis, author of Inhuman Bondage 2008 Paperback $24.95 Fateful Lightning Fa A New History of the Civil War aand Reconstruction ALLEN C. GUELZO A “With “W W his accustomed eloquence and eerudition, Allen C. Guelzo has produced a grand and sweeping account of the Civil War, vividly depicting its events, its C ccharacters, and, most of all, the ideas that ddrove them.” —Steven E. Woodworth, author of This Great Struggle 2012 Paperback $19.95 BEST IN CIVIL WAR PUBLISHING J V S Q OXFORD tWinner of the Fletcher Pratt Award of the Civil War Round Table of New Yorkt The Grand Design Th Strategy and the S U U.S. Civil War D DONALD STOKER “A superbly written, well-researched, aand detailed analysis of how the Union’s st strategy—simultaneous strikes at the C Confederacy’s critical points and at its ccenter of gravity its army—destroyed the SSouth’s capacity to fight and helped le lead to its defeat. Stoker’s first-rate study revives the role of strategy in the conversation on why the Union won the Civil War.” —Howard Jones, University of Alabama 2010 Hardback $27.95 Oxford Scholarship Online History Oxford Scholarship Online is the ultimate research resource, providing access to over 4,200 peer-reviewed titles across 18 disciplines. The History collection reflects the unparalleled breadth and depth of Oxford’s list, encompassing American, social, and ground-breaking Civil War history, and ranging from the most focused regional histories to the broadest transnational studies. For more information visit oxfordscholarship.com Delivered by University Press Scholarship Online www.universitypressscholarship.com 1 OAH Magazine of History • April 2012 31 Civil War podcasts the Become a Member Today! at organization of History Educator Member—$60: This category is designed especially for historians whose primary interest is teaching. History educators receive a choice of primary publication (either the Journal of American History or the OAH Magazine of History), online access to gated portions of the OAH Web site (including Recent Scholarship Online), four issues of OAH Outlook: A Membership Newsletter of the Organization of American Historians, a copy of the OAH Annual Meeting Program, reduced registration rates at the annual meeting, and discounts on books and services. Edward T. Linenthal Executive Editor, Journal of American History Listen to the OAH Civil War at 150 Podcasts During the Civil War sesquicentennial years (2011-2015), the Organization of American Historians will present conversations about Civil War history with leading scholars and public historians. The Civil War at 150 Podcasts offer a window onto evolving perceptions of the war and highlight how the OAH has long provided a forum for some of the most important Civil War scholarship. For additional Civil War sesquicentennial resources, and links to the podcasts, please visit us online at: http://www.oah.org/programs/civilwar/ organization of www.oah.org 812 . 8 55 . 7 311 32 OAH Magazine of History • April 2012 Associate Member—$60: Associate members are not professional historians or students of history but have an interest in the field. As an OAH associate member, you will receive all the benefits of individual membership and may choose either the Journal of American History or the OAH Magazine of History as your primary publication. Individual Member (rates vary by income): Individual members receive four printed issues of the Journal of American History as their primary publication, with searchable online access; four issues of OAH Outlook: A Membership Newsletter of the Organization of American Historians; a copy of the OAH Annual Meeting Program; reduced rates at the annual meeting; online access to gated portions of the OAH Web site, including Recent Scholarship Online, OAH publications, and OAH Career Center; and discounts on books and professional services. Rates: $60 (income under $40,000); $95 ($40,000–69,000); $150 ($70,000–99,000); and $200 ($100,000 and above). Retired Member—$60: Retirees receive the same benefits as individual members. Early Career Member—$60: This membership level is designed for professional historians who are in the first three years of their career. These members receive the same benefits as the individual professional historian member. (Please note that early career membership is limited to three years.) Student Member—$45: As a student member, you will receive all the benefits of individual membership but can choose either the Journal of American History or the OAH Magazine of History as your primary publication. (Please note, student membership is limited to five years.) For more information and to sign up for membership, visit: http://www.oah.org/membership/. www.oah.org 812 . 8 55 . 7 311