Confederate Reckoning by Stephanie McCurry

Author:Stephanie McCurry [McCurry, Stephanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780674045897
Publisher: Harvard University Press

CHAPTER 7

“Our Open Enemies”

THE SLAVES’ WAR WITH their masters quickly overspilled the bounds of Confederate farms and plantations. The questions of loyalty, allegiance, and treason it raised radiated out from those initial sites of struggle into the theater of war. Excluded from political life as a matter of foundational principle, slaves’ politics registered profoundly nonetheless, not just in Union policy where we have been trained to look, but in Confederate policy, as state and federal officials attempted to make slaves count as labor for the cause.1 It shaped slave impressment, the deployment of military forces, and the conduct of the war more generally, and complicated every Confederate attempt to make slaves an element of strength.

In the C.S.A. slaves were legally construed as property. The state knew them, and had access to them, only as the property of their masters. It did not take long for that essential fact of Confederate political life, the slaves’ alienation from the state, to emerge as a military liability. For even as the states and central government attempted to draw on slave property to sustain the war, slave owners attempted to draw on the state to protect slave property in the war. The problem of mobilizing slaves as slaves proved intractable in the face of the linked resistance of slaves and masters both, and pushed Confederate officials onto rapidly shifting and dangerous terrain. Enslaved men and women’s efforts to destroy slavery and willing adherence to the enemy touched off a powerful struggle between slaveholders and Confederate officials: about rights of property and state access to slaves, slaves’ status as persons or property, and where sovereignty lay in the slaveholders’ nation. The struggle to make slaves material to the cause was deeply revealing of the structural problems faced by a slave regime at war. Long before Confederate officials contemplated the enlistment of slave men in the national army, they had faced the problem posed by slaves’ politics in attempts to harness their labor for the cause. As early as 1862 slaves had made their loyalty count and provoked intractable questions about allegiance and treason in the C.S.A.

It was an article of faith in the Confederacy that slavery would be a great element of strength in the war. “This it is which makes our 8 million of productive fighting material equal to the 20 m of the North,” Major Samuel W. Melton, assistant adjutant general, explained to James A. Seddon, Confederate secretary of war. Melton’s plan sounded reasonable enough: Southerners could counter the demographic power of the North by putting every eligible fighting man in the army and those “unfit for service by reason of servitude” to work at everything else. With 40 percent of the nation’s adult male population enslaved and ineligible for service, it was a salient consideration. “The problem which must be worked out,” Major Melton noted, “is so to adapt our peculiar system of labor as most effectually to relieve the fighting population” and place the burden on slaves where “it is our peculiar happiness to place it.

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