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  • Marching Masters: Slavery, Race, and the Confederate Army during the Civil War by Colin Edward Woodward
  • Jason Phillips (bio)
Marching Masters: Slavery, Race, and the Confederate Army during the Civil War. By Colin Edward Woodward. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014. Pp. 283. Cloth, $39.50.)

In Marching Masters, Colin Edward Woodward surveys the relationship between slavery and the Confederate army to explain how the institution shaped rebel identity and strategy. Despite its title, the book does not pinpoint Confederate troops who belonged to the slaveholding class. Nonslaveholders in the ranks receive attention as well as masters in gray. With strong primary evidence, Woodward shows how slavery motivated southerners to fight and clarified the stakes for them. Even rebels who did not belong to the master class understood the war was about slavery and believed that Confederate forces could sustain the institution. Moreover, Confederate strategy throughout the conflict illustrated the government’s reliance on slavery. Controversial actions, such as exempting overseers from conscription, impressing slaves, and murdering black Union prisoners, revealed how the Confederacy’s commitment to slavery defined its warfare.

In thematic chapters, the book considers important aspects of the Confederates’ relationship to slavery. After examining why Confederates fought, Woodward concludes, “Some had personal reasons for fighting, but their political reasons were firmly wedded to a proslavery ideology” (30). [End Page 323] Perhaps, but much of Woodward’s evidence shows how personal fears, not political principles, compelled rebels to fight. Pages detail southern paranoia of slave revolts, incendiary abolitionists, racial amalgamation, financial ruin caused by emancipation, black men raping white relatives, and racial equality. A history of emotion could unpack such motives and interpret them better than a study of ideology. The book’s stronger chapters explore the impressment of slaves, body servants in camp, and how Confederate soldiers experienced emancipation. Woodward insightfully shows how the Confederate government became “the greatest of masters,” an authority that not only compelled slaves to work but forced slave owners to surrender their property (55). While Emory Thomas has argued that policies like slave impressment expose revolutionary paradoxes in the Confederate experience, Woodward contends that the Confederacy’s reliance on slave labor was a controversial but natural extension of proslavery ideology. A government founded on racial slavery used it to assert sovereignty to the bitter end.

The chapters on body servants and emancipation from the rebels’ perspective uncover complexities and inconsistencies at the heart of Confederates’ relationship to slaves and slavery. Camp servants washed, cooked, cleaned, and cared for animals, but not all of them were slaves. Some were free blacks who expected pay. Woodward refutes the persistent myth that these black Confederates fought for the Confederacy, but he admits that the war experience could forge strong feelings between soldiers and servants. When emancipation swept the South, rebels insisted that blacks were more loyal to the Confederacy than to the Union and claimed that Yankees lured slaves to freedom or kidnapped them. Confederates were quick to stress the deplorable conditions of contraband camps but slow to realize that blacks preferred such squalor to a better material life in bondage. Woodward contrasts rebels’ wartime perceptions and postwar memories of body servants and emancipation by placing evidence from the eras side by side to great effect.

A similar counterpoint would have been valuable throughout the book for comparing masters and nonslaveholders in the army. Woodward admits that “many slave-owners had little or nothing to say about slavery, while many non-slaveholders did,” but he seldom contrasts what each group said about the institution (9). A few examples illustrate how valuable this analysis could be. Instead of asserting that many Confederates opposed the Twenty-Slave Law, the book could have compared how masters and non-slaveholders thought about the policy. An issue worthy of similar analysis is General Orders No. 28, which limited commissioned officers to the same [End Page 324] rations as enlisted men and made no provision for feeding body servants. Woodward shares how commanders protested the order, but the reader is left to wonder how nonslaveholders in the ranks received the news. Woodward offers some fascinating evidence of Confederates equating soldiering to slavery, but it is seldom clear if masters...

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