The Confederate Negro: Virginia's Craftsmen and Military Laborers, 1861-1865 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Confederate Negro: Virginia's Craftsmen and Military Laborers, 1861-1865. By James H. Brewer. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1969. Pp. xviii, 212. $6.00.) Since the publication of Bell I. Wiley's Southern Negroes, 1681-1865 in 1938, students of the Civil War have been aware of the wide range of critical tasks performed by the Confederacy's black artisans and laborers. As cooks, teamsters, stretcher bearers, ambulance drivers, nurses, iron workers, miners, tanners, boatmen, railroad hands, and fortification laborers, slave and free Negro workers contributed vitally to the war effort and helped the South sustain a grinding war of attrition much longer than most observers believed possible. Although we have had a general outline of black military and industrial activity in the wartime South, we have lacked detailed information on the full extent of their employment in nonagricultural occupations. The picture is still incomplete, but James H. Brewer's study of Virginia's black craftsmen and military laborers fills in some of the missing pieces and, in the process, broadens our knowledge of the role of the southern Negro in the Civil War. After an introductory chapter outlining the various Virginia and Confederate statutes that dealt with the mobilization of Negro labor, Professor Brewer devotes his remaining five chapters to a description of the use of blacks as quartermaster and commissary employees, workers in naval and ordnance operations, transportation laborers, hospital attendants, and construction workers on fortifications. By digging deeply into little used primary sources, particularly materials in the National Archives' War Department Collection of Confederate Records, the author uncovered a wealth of information on the types of positions held in Virginia and the large number of blacks employed, ranging from a handful of firemen and deck hands on Confederate warships to some 35,000 fortification laborers. Numerous tables summarize the findings presented in the text. Despite the new material Professor Brewer has discovered, the book still has serious shortcomings. Perhaps it was inevitable that a study of this type would be largely descriptive, but there is no reason why chapters should read like a string of research notes, as these frequently do. We .now know more about the variety of jobs and the number of black men and women involved, but the next level of analysis remains largely untouched. What sort of daily Uves did these war workers lead? Were the Jim Crow practices that Richard C. Wade found in some 169 170CIVIL WAR history antebellum southern cities carried over into the Confederate era, or did urban segregation lessen as a result of mushrooming population growth or the wartime movement to ameliorate the treatment of slaves? How efficient were Negro artisans? Was their labor given willingly or grudgingly, and if morale problems existed, how successfully did employers cope with them? These are admittedly difficult questions, but we need the answers if we are to understand fully the history of the Confederate Negro. In the few places where Professor Brewer makes an interpretative statement concerning morale and efficiency, he claims that most blacks worked diligently and on the whole rendered faithful service to the southern cause. He states in a footnote (fn. 20, p. 170) that the key "desertion problem" lies outside the scope of his study, but he nevertheless maintains that "there is. . . . little evidence to sustain the position that Virginia Negroes, free or slave, showed an appreciable disposition to desert or to impair the war effort." Yet considerable evidence exists that Virginia's black industrial workers did flee in sufficient numbers to damage war production. The proprietors of the Tredegar Iron Works noted in June, 1863, that "the demoralization among the negroes here and at our [blast] furnaces is a source of much disquietude to us. . . . ," and they reported near the end of the war that 1864 had been "a rather disastrous year for the hirers and owners of slaves, so many having run off to the Yankees, a large portion from within the fortifications of this city [Richmond]." Professor Brewer has worked the Tredegar Papers, so one assumes he either missed or chose to ignore these statements. The most logical explanation for the apparent willingness of many slave artisans to labor for the...