Slave Rentals and the Early Development of the Military Slave System at Mobile Point, 1812-1834

After the War of 1812 the United States examined its national security in view of continued threats from Great Britain and Spain. Born of that strategic review was the Third Defense System, a massive construction program of fortifications along the Gulf Coast from New Orleans to the Dry Tortugas. In 1815 Congress appropriated $8,500,000 for the construction of coastal fortifications, located primarily in remote and lightly populated southern sections of the country considered most vulnerable to invasion. A perpetual labor demand, coupled with the lack of raw materials and manufactured products, was created in these frontier areas and was ultimately solved by the introduction of a "military slave system." The military's systematic use of slave labor, the traditionally accepted southern labor force, was characterized by a rental relationship in which planters retained legal possession of their bondsmen while local military authorities utilized their labor for a fee.

Mobile Point and the construction of Fort Morgan between 1818 and 1834 illustrate the origins of the military slave system in the South. Superintending Engineers Col. James Gadsden (1818-1821), Col. Rene DeRussy (1821-1825), Lt. Cornelius Ogden (1825-1834), and Capt. William H. Chase (1834-1844) were all exposed to the practice of leasing slave labor from surrounding plantations while assigned to projects in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast and transferred the practice to Mobile Point while supervising the construction of Fort Morgan. During this period, the availability of defense contracts motivated people who had never before owned slaves to buy slaves in order to lease them to the military. Captain Chase expanded and implemented the practice in Pensacola, Florida. The military slave system, a variant of the industrial slavery that arose in parts of the South, resulted in a mobile and profitable pool of skilled slave labor that solved the military's labor problems in the remote areas of the country selected for fortifications and installations as part of the Third Defense System.¹

The existence of an established and profitable military slave system challenges the traditionally accepted characterization of the practice as a limited stopgap measure by slave owners to ensure profitability and full employment of their slaves' time throughout the plantation's agricultural cycle. Historian Ulrich B. Phillips described slave rentals as an attempt by plantation owners to make slavery profitable; to Phillips, the existence of slave rentals exposes the unprofitability of slavery.² The system dates from the American Revolution, when the military used slaves from surrounding plantations to build Fort Moultrie and buildings near Charleston, South Carolina, as well as at sites in Georgia. Slave labor built the fortifications around New Orleans for Andrew Jackson's famous defense of the city in the War of 1812. Furthermore, slaves were "hired" by the federal government from plantations in 1817 to complete structures in New Orleans, Charleston, and Fort Hawkins, Georgia.³

Later, the Augusta Arsenal "hired" slaves in 1825, 1830, and 1831.⁴ Fort Monroe, Virginia, used a labor force of more than one hundred slaves, some of whom were also sent to work at the Augusta Arsenal in 1839.⁵ In Pensacola the Navy "borrowed" the practice of using slave labor from Lieutenant Ogden at Mobile Point in an attempt to solve its labor demands. The Navy systematically used slave labor in the spasmodic construction of the navy yard and the Army Corps of Engineers successfully employed the military slave system in the construction of army fortifications—Forts Pickens, McRee, and Barrancas in Pensacola from 1829 to 1847—and other public works projects.⁶

The Army Corps of Engineers was given the task of surveying the area around Mobile in 1815. General Joseph Swift, Chief Engineer and Superintendent of the US Military Academy, sent Lt. Hipolite Dumas to the Mobile District to examine existing fortifications, make recommendations on the cost of repairs to those structures, and survey the area for possible locations for new fortifications in an effort to define American defense capabilities. In the same year Congress established a Board of Engineers for Fortifications, which...