Confederate Reckoning

The exclusion of enslaved people from the politics of the Confederacy was “as close to a founding principle as the Confederacy had” (218). While white women were officially excluded from the political process, they were nonetheless entitled to the protection of the state. Enslaved people, by contrast, had no such protections. The institution of enslavement made them subordinate to their masters, but treated them as entirely outside the compass of the state. Traditionally, in societies where enslavement was a major economic, political, and social factor, enslavement strengthened individual enslaver households and weakened the state. This was also true for the United States and the CSA.

The CSA’s Constitution defined enslaved people as property, mandated that any new states have legalized enslavement, and prohibited the federal government from limiting enslavement. During the Civil War, because Confederates thought of enslaved people as “part of the nation’s natural resources” (223), they planned to use enslaved labor for military camps, military police, and engineers and builders. Given that enslaved people made up roughly 40% of the South’s population, there were even proposals for enslaved soldiers, though these proposals were rejected out of fear that arming enslaved people would lead to rebellion. Planters recognized the dangers the war posed for their control over enslaved people, increasing the number of patrols and asking for state support in providing protection. Even so, McCurry argues that Confederate leaders were largely oblivious to the problems enslavement posed for the war effort.

McCurry emphasizes that enslaved people actively resisted enslavement. One enslaved man, William Webb, founded an organization of enslaved people who hoped for the election of the anti-enslavement presidential candidate John C. Frémont in 1856. When Frémont was defeated, Webb’s group turned to trying to encourage rebellion. They developed networks including enslaved and formerly enslaved people along with anti-enslavement whites who could spread news across states and help enslaved people escape to Canada. Also, enslaved people developed maps to secret meeting places and remote hideouts. Despite the efforts of planters to suppress such information, they were further able to keep track of national and international news, especially presidential elections, emancipations in the Caribbean, and the existence of the Republic of Haiti, which was founded through a rebellion in which enslaved people overthrew their enslavers. Often, such information spread through “prophetic rumor” (231), with some enslaved people in Richmond believing they would be freed in two months after Lincoln’s election. Enslaved people developed their “own, directly adversarial interpretation of secession” (232), as the Civil War opened up the possibility that all enslaved people in the South would be emancipated.

News of Lincoln’s election spurred on resistance by enslaved people. In Georgia, the planter Charles Manigault had long been facing acts of resistance from his enslaved workers, and this resistance increased in the wake of Lincoln’s election. Manigault recognized that the enslaved people on his plantation had been galvanized by Union victories in the Civil War. As a result, he tried to get rid of the ringleaders of the resistance by sending them to workhouses, selling them, and moving them to more remote places. Lincoln’s election triggered such resistance on plantations and slaveholding farms across the Confederacy. “Slaveholders and local officials reported unprecedented levels of slave activity, discerning evidence of all sorts that slaves were poised for action” (239). Reports of enslaved insurrections came from rural areas across the South, and enslaved people fled, often in mass numbers, to cross Union lines. Union generals like Benjamin Butler justified freeing enslaved people who crossed Union lines as confiscating contraband property to undermine the Confederate war effort. At first, planters blamed escapes by large numbers of enslaved people on Union interference, but eventually they had to admit that the enslaved people themselves desired freedom.

The ways enslaved people resisted during the war varied by region. In Georgia’s low country and South Carolina, enslaved people could contact the Union navy for help with mass escapes from plantations. Because enslaved people were often spread across smaller farms in the Upper South, this was harder to arrange. Because places near the Confederate-United States border like Winchester, Virginia, were frequently occupied and reoccupied by the Union and the Confederacy, it was risky but also easier for enslaved people to find allies among Union forces. After the Emancipation Proclamation was passed in January of 1863, enslaved people, backed by Union soldiers, went to their old plantations with official orders to release their families. Some enslaved people remained, fearing that the war would turn and leave them at the mercy of the Confederacy again, not trusting Union officers, or fearing for their loved ones. In Winchester, enslaved people who were recaptured by the Confederacy were tried in a court-martial and, if found guilty, executed. Still, even in Confederate territory, planters found themselves losing their authority.

The situation was complicated in Louisiana and Mississippi, which “became a patchwork of Union and Confederate land” (245). Even Union military camps differed in whether they would accept or turn away fugitive enslaved people. In deference to Unionist planters, southern Louisiana was exempt from the Emancipation Proclamation, but even there some Union officers did accept enslaved people seeking protection. Meanwhile, the Union army refused to offer protection to a planter’s wife, Mrs. Bragg, who requested protection from her enslaved workers. Since many Confederate politicians were enslavers, their politics were mixed up with their priorities in protecting their own plantations. President Davis had his family and its enslaved workers moved from New Orleans to Alabama, even as he tried to convince the Confederate general Van Dorn to liberate his plantations at Davis Bend, Mississippi. Some of the people Davis had enslaved escaped with the Union army. Others were recaptured, although they fought back. People formerly enslaved by Davis led Union soldiers to where his private property was hidden and looted it. Still, President Davis clung to the “orthodox view of slaves as loyal to their masters” (258), blaming enslaved resistance on manipulations by the Union such as the Emancipation Proclamation. On the other hand, actual planters believed they faced rebellion by enslaved people. In Louisiana, both planters and Union officers invoked the historical memory of the Haitian Revolution. McCurry reframes the Civil War as in part “a massive rebellion of the Confederacy’s slaves” (262).