Confederate Slave Impressment in the Upper South

3 Provisions Are Needed Worse Than Fortifications: Slave Impressment and Confederate Agriculture

71 CHAPTER THREE Provisions Are Needed Worse Than Fortifications Slave Impressment and Confederate Agriculture In December 1863, Francis McFarland faced a serious potential labor shortage. An elderly minister from Augusta County, Virginia, McFarland had depended on the labor of his sons and a hired slave to maintain his small farm before the war. By 1863, though, all three of McFarland’s sons had joined the Army of Northern Virginia, forcing him to rely more heavily on the efforts of his hired slave, Moses. McFarland had hired Moses the previous December, paying $100 for the year, “with the reserve that if he goes to work for the Govt. a reduction must be made, or if he returns unfit for service.” At the end of 1863, however, Moses’s owner refused to hire him again on such easy terms.1 The slave impressment calls in late 1862 and throughout 1863 disrupted a profitable market for hired agricultural slaves in both Virginia and North Carolina. Farmers generally began negotiating in December to hire field hands for the next year, and the male laborers sought by the Engineer Bureau were also the most valuable in the hiring market. Some slaveholders caused further confusion by hiring slaves to meet their requisitions rather than sending their own workers. Jedediah Hotchkiss wrote to his wife, Sara, in January 1863 that he had been unable to hire a camp servant for the coming year because dozens of slaveholders in the Staunton, Virginia , area had hired male slaves to fill their impressment quotas.2 Other slaveholders, like John Claiborne of Petersburg, simply hired their slaves directly to the Confederate government for a yearly wage. As Claiborne 72 / Provisions Are Needed explained to his wife, “If I hire them to private individuals, the Government through its regular impressments will probably get some or all of them during the year—and work them I cannot tell where.”3 Hiring slaves to Confederate departments offered slaveholders some measure of control over their human property and often carried with it the promise that the owner would be shielded from future impressment quotas.4 Between hiring and impressment, the Richmond Examiner noted, the Confederate army quickly became “the monopolist of the market for male negroes,” limiting the number of male slaves left to do farmwork, especially in Virginia.5 In a testament to the centrality of this annual hiring ritual to the Upper South economy, newspaper editors frequently pondered the impact of slave impressment on the market for hired field hands. The editor of the Republican Vindicator, in Staunton, feared that the prices for agricultural produce would rise in the coming year due to the government’s impressments of both food and slaves.6 The editor of the Lexington Gazette concurred, noting, “Our impression is, that men will be more in demand than usual, because of the high price of the products of their labor.” Furthermore , “the withdrawal of so much labor from the country by the army” had increased the importance of enslaved men in the local labor market. Slave impressment exacerbated labor shortages prompted by enlistment and conscription; it also exacerbated conflicts over who should contribute most heavily to the war effort.7 With each requisition, Confederate, state, and local officials sought to balance the country’s need for food with its need for fortifications, and this balancing act was not always successful. The requisitions for over 13,000 male slaves between October 1862 and January 1863 obviously had an impact on agriculture in Virginia, even if each county failed to meet its full quota. While impressment quotas were initially much lower in North Carolina , the need to fortify Wilmington removed at least 2,000 slaves from the farms during the same four-month period. Tasks traditionally performed by male slaves during these months would have included slaughtering pigs, harvesting and threshing winter wheat, and then hauling that wheat to the mills; in March, male slaves would begin plowing land for corn and spring wheat. In the short term, then, slaveholders faced a labor shortage while they were preparing key food products. They also worried about the potential long-term implications of these slave impressments on the two states’ agricultural economy. All of their concerns highlighted the necessity of slave labor for the growth and production of food in Virginia and North Carolina, suggesting that the states’ governors might have to choose between fortifications and sustenance. Provisions Are Needed / 73...