Slavery, Race, and the Confederate Army, 1861-1865

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MARCHING MASTERS:

SLAVERY, RACE, AND THE CONFEDERATE ARMY, 1861-1865

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Faculty of the

Louisiana State University and

Agricultural and Mechanical College

in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in

The Department of History

by

Colin Edward Woodward

B.A., Trinity College, Hartford, 1997

M.A., Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, 1999

May 2005

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Since beginning this project, I have benefited from the advice, guidance, and

support of the history department at Louisiana State University. I am in great debt to

Charles Royster, who agreed to serve as my major professor back in 1998. Over the

years, he has given me excellent advice about how to become a better writer and

historian. He has set a high standard for research, writing, and thinking that I have tried to

live up to.

Dr. Royster’s hospitalization in February 2005 unfortunately did not allow him to

attend my dissertation defense. I am grateful that William J. Cooper agreed to serve as

my committee chairman in Dr. Royster’s place. I have also benefited from the help of my

other committee members. Gaines Foster has always been willing to read my work and

offer reassurance and valuable feedback. Mark Thompson has given me much

encouragement, advice, and provided welcome humor. David Culbert was gracious

enough to serve on my committee at the last minute and offered useful recommendations

about how to improve my dissertation.

Thanks also to other faculty and staff members at LSU for their patience,

guidance, and the occasional free lunch. I am also indebted to the department of history

for giving me financial support for the past seven years, especially the T. Harry Williams

fellowship, which allowed me much needed time to finish my dissertation. Thanks also to

the Virginia Historical Society and the Colonial Dames in New Orleans for additional

funding.

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Various people have made life in Baton Rouge tolerable at worst and very

enjoyable at best. Keith Finley and David Gauthier are two good friends and budding

scholars who always provided much needed humor, good conversation, and advice. They

were almost always willing to sit in front of Middleton Library or head to the Chimes for

a beer and an extended bull session, even if we knew our time was better spent on our

dissertations.

Ana Cabezas, now living in Chicago, gave me much love and support over the

last year and a half. She had faith in me (not to mention the World Champion Red Sox)

when I did not. More than anyone, she made the last few semesters at LSU good ones.

And last, but not least of all, I am thankful that my parents—who have suffered

my absence and repeatedly alleviated my financial woes—have always been proud and

supportive of me.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………….ii

ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………….....v

INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………...1

I. THE FIGHT FOR SLAVERY: SOUTHERN SOLDIERS AND THE

CONFEDERATE MISSION……………………………………………………...... 16

II. PLANTERS AND YEOMEN, OFFICERS AND PRIVATES: RACE, CLASS,

CONSCRIPTION, AND THE DEMANDS OF CONFEDERATE SERVICE…...... 60

III. PATERNALISM, PUNISHMENT, AND PROFIT: THE RELATIONSHIP

BETWEEN SLAVES AND SOLDIERS……………………………………...... 100

IV. “WE CRUSHED THEIR FREEDOM”: EMANCIPATION, BLACK LOYALTY,

AND THE ARMY’S STRUGGLE FOR RACIAL CONTROL……………...... ….153

V. NO QUARTER: THE CONFEDERACY’S OFFICIAL AND UNOFFICIAL

POLICY TOWARD BLACK UNION TROOPS…………………………...... ……204

VI. THE GREATEST OF MASTERS: THE CONFEDERATE ARMY AND THE

IMPRESSMENT OF BLACK LABOR…..………………………………...... …....259

VII. THE CONFEDERATE ARMY AND THE RELUCTANT ENLISTMENT OF

BLACK TROOPS, 1864-1865………………………………………………...... …298

VIII. RELICS OF THE ANTEBELLUM ERA: CONFEDERATE SOLDIERS AND

THE END OF SLAVERY………………………………………………...... ……...339

BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………...……372

VITA……………………………………………………………………………… ....440

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ABSTRACT

Many historians have examined the Civil War soldier, but few scholars have

explored the racial attitudes and policies of the Confederate army. Although Southern

men did not fight for slavery alone, the defense of the peculiar institution, and the racial

control they believed it assured, united rebels in their support of the Confederacy and the

war effort. Amid the destruction of the Civil War, slavery became more important than

ever for men battling Yankee armies.

The war, nevertheless, tested Confederate soldiers’ idealized view of human bondage. Federal armies wrecked havoc on masters’ farms and plantations, seized hundreds of thousands of slaves, and eventually armed African Americans. Rebel troops were not blind to the war’s negative effects on the peculiar institution. They noted black

people’s many disloyal actions, and some came to believe that slavery was not worth

holding onto if it would undermine the Southern war effort.

But despite occasional worries about rebellious black people, Southern troops

understood that slavery was vital to their cause. The Confederate military became the

greatest of masters—an institution that rebels believed would assure the survival of

human bondage and white supremacy. The army granted exemptions to slaveholders and

overseers, invaded the Border States in order to acquire more slave territory, and

impressed black workers to build fortifications and perform menial tasks. When rebels

confronted black Federal troops—as at Fort Pillow and the Crater—they showed no

quarter to men they believed were slaves in rebellion against their white masters.

Only with the Federal government’s triumph did Southerners accept the end of

slavery. After Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, former Confederate soldiers lived in a new

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world. They could not reinstate slavery, but they were still committed to white supremacy

and looked with fondness on the Old South.

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INTRODUCTION

In the past thirty years, historians have written many works—whether focusing on

white or black Southerners—about slavery in the Old South.1 Their studies usually

conclude in 1860, the year before the Civil War broke out. Fewer scholars have devoted

entire works to the subjects of slavery and race relations in the Confederate States of

America,2 and fewer still to the specific topic of their importance in the mind of the rebel

1 Listing all the works from the past thirty years would prove a formidable task; some of the more

important and influential include, William J. Cooper, Liberty and Slavery: Southern Politics to 1860

(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000 [1983]); Sharla Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health

and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Robert

William Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery

(New York: W. W. Norton, 1989 [1974]); Lacy Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina

Upcountry, 1800-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); John Hope Franklin, Runaway Slaves:

Rebels on the Plantation, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Eugene D. Genovese,

Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974); Elizabeth Fox-

Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom

(New York: Pantheon Books, 1976); Larry E. Hudson, To Have and to Hold: Slave Work and Family Life

in Antebellum South Carolina (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995); Charles Joyner, Down by the

Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984); Peter Kolchin,

American Slavery, 1619-1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and

Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1977); Ann Patton Malone, Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in

Nineteenth-Century Louisiana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Stephanie

McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeomen Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of

Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); John Hebron Moore,

The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest: Mississippi, 1770-1860 (Baton Rouge:

Louisiana State University Press, 1988); James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American

Slaveholders (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982); Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery:

Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,

2000); Steven M. Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); J. Mills Thornton, Politics and Power in a Slave

Society: Alabama, 1800-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977); Jeffrey Young,

Domesticating Slavery: The Master Class in Georgia and South Carolina, 1670-1837 (Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 1999); on the historiography of slavery, see Robert William Fogel, The

Slavery Debates, 1952-1990 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003); Peter Parish, Slavery:

History and Historians (New York: Harper and Row, 1989).

2 Examples of such works include, Stephen Ash, Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 1860-1870: War

and Peace in the Upper South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988); James Brewer, The

Confederate Negro: Virginia’s Craftsmen and Military Laborers, 1861-1865 (Durham: Duke University

Press, 1969); John Cimprich, Slavery’s End in Tennessee, 1861-1865 (University, AL: University of

Alabama Press, 1985); Robert F. Durden, The Gray and the Black: The Confederate Debate on

Emancipation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972); Ervin L. Jordan, Jr., Black

Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995);

Winthrop D. Jordan, Silence and Tumult at Second Creek: An Inquiry Into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy

(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993); Clarence Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986); James L. Roark,

Masters without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: W. W. Norton,

1977); Armstead L. Robinson, Bitter Fruits of Bondage: The Demise of Slavery and the Collapse of the

Confederacy, 1861-1865 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2004); Brian Steel Wills, The War

Hits Home: The Civil War in Southeastern Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001).

On a historiographical essay on slavery in the Confederacy, see Peter Kolchin, “Slavery and Freedom in the

Civil War South,” in James M. McPherson and William J. Cooper, eds., Writing the Civil War: The Quest

to Understand (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 241-60.

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soldier. The ideology of Civil War soldiers remains a popular subject. Yet, most

historians of the period continue to focus on battles and leaders. Although this

dissertation does not ignore the campaigns in which the rebel armies fought, it goes

beyond the scope of conventional military histories by examining Southern ideology and

racial thinking. It adds not just to the literature on slavery and the Civil War, but to works

that have explored the racial views of nineteenth century Southerners.3 For rebel troops,

the Confederacy was a great and bloody gamble to keep the South wedded to the

economic prosperity and racial caste system that slavery made possible.4 Confederate

soldiers’ views provide much insight into the mind of the master class during the last

years of human bondage in America.

3 See Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White

Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper & Row,

1971); see also, his comparative history, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study of American and South

African History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Eugene Genovese, A Consuming Fire: The

Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South (Athens: University of Georgia Press,

1998); see also, his Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South

(New York: Vintage, 1965); The Slaveholder’s Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative

Thought (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992); The World the Slaveholders Made: Two

Essays in Interpretation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969); Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black:

American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968);

one should also consult White Over Black’s condensed version, The White Man’s Burden: Origins of

Historical Racism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).

4 On histories of the Confederacy “as a whole,” see E. Merton Coulter, The Confederate States of America,

1861-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1950); William C. Davis, Look Away! A

History of the Confederate States of America (New York: Free Press, 2002); Clement Eaton, A History of

the Southern Confederacy (New York: MacMillan, 1954); Charles P. Roland, The Confederacy (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1960); Emory Thomas, The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience

(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991 [1971]); Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation,

1861-1865 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979); Frank E. Vandiver, Their Tattered Flags: The Epic of the

Confederacy (New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1970).

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Amid the destruction of war, Confederate soldiers believed they must maintain

their grip on slavery and white supremacy. Although many planters took up arms for the

Confederacy, most rebel soldiers—as was the case with most Southerners—were not of

the elite.5 They were, nevertheless, defenders of slavery as important, if not more so, than

proslavery ideologues such as James Henry Hammond and George Fitzhugh. Rebel

troops defended Southern “rights and institutions”—among them the right to keep black

people in bondage—with their lives. After April 1862, Confederate men of military age

had no choice but to serve. Even so, the vast majority of them were devoted to the cause.

The army—and even more so, its leaders such as Robert E. Lee—came to symbolize

Confederate resistance. Politicians and civilians were important in keeping the war effort

alive, but Southern independence depended upon the Confederate army’s victories.

The racial views of rebel troops provide us with insight not only into the racial

mind of white Southerners, but also white Americans of the nineteenth century. In many

ways, Confederates soldiers’ racial attitudes were similar to those of Northerners. Men as

diverse as Ohio Congressman and abolitionist Benjamin Wade and General William T.

Sherman, for example, were known to utter racist language.6 And by today’s standards,

5 In the course of this dissertation, I use the terms “the South” and “the Confederacy” interchangeably, even

though I am aware that they are not synonymous. The Confederacy failed to include three Southern Border

States—Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland—and the Southern state of Delaware. Similarly, when I speak

of Southerners, I am referring to Confederates, even though there were many Southern men, such as

General George Thomas, who were defenders of the Union. And while it is perhaps offensive to some who

believe in the righteousness of the Confederate cause, I also use the term “rebel” to apply to those who took

up arms against the Union. To be fair, I often use the word “Yankee,” which for Southerners was a dirty

word, as a variation on “Northern.” I will also use “Union” and “Northern” interchangeably, even though

there were many Union supporters who were not from the North. A more accurate term for Union

supporters would be “Unionist,” but the term has usually applied to those in the South who opposed

Confederate authority.

6 On Wade, see Stephen B. Oates, With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York:

Harper & Row, 1977), 272; on Sherman, see Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh

Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York: Vintage, 1991), 126-28; William Freehling,

The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederates Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New

York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 151-53; on Northern racial attitudes in the antebellum period, see

Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780-1860

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the

Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); John Wood Sweet, Bodies

Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,

2003).

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one can label the vast majority of nineteenth century Northerners—even William Lloyd

Garrison or Abraham Lincoln, who were more radical than their contemporaries, but did

not profess a belief in black equality—as racist. For much of the war, most Northern

white troops were hostile toward blacks and ambivalent about, or even opposed to, the

abolition of slavery. But the views of Federal troops changed considerably over time. In

April 1861, few Northerners sought to make emancipation a war aim. By late 1862,

however, the Union, because of Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and

changing attitudes toward the liberation of blacks, began defining victory in terms of the

eradication of slavery as well as national reunion. And when it came to the enlistment of

black troops, Northerners eventually, if reluctantly, accepted that black men could fight.

By 1863 and 1864, Union soldiers realized that they could not restore the status quo

antebellum. The defeat of the South would require the destruction of slavery.7

In contrast to the North, the Confederacy made the maintenance of slavery a war

aim. Some Confederates, such as Jefferson Davis, always said that the war was about

Southern independence, not the defense of human bondage. And independence certainly

was what Confederates most wanted. But Davis did not have to say, even though Vice

President Alexander Stephens did, that a sovereign Confederacy would have slavery as