Confederate Slave Impressment in the Upper South

Notes

187 Notes ABBREVIATIONS AGD Adjutant General’s Department, General Records, 1807–1950, North Carolina Department of Archives and History, Raleigh BSC Confederate States of America, Record Book of the Board of Slave Claims, Augusta State University Special Collections Library, Augusta, Georgia CSW Letters Received by the Confederate Secretary of War, 1861–1865, RG 109 M437, National Archives and Records Administration I, Washington, D.C. HTC Henry T. Clark Executive Papers, 1861–1862, North Carolina Department of Archives and History, Raleigh JLEP John Letcher Executive Papers, 1859–1863, Library of Virginia, Richmond LSEB Letters and Telegrams Sent by the Engineer Bureau of the Confederate War Department, 1861–1864, RG 109 M628, National Archives and Records Administration I, Washington, D.C. LVA Library of Virginia, Richmond NARA National Archives and Records Administration I, Washington, D.C. NCAH North Carolina Department of Archives and History, Raleigh OR The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901) UVA Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville VED Virginia Engineer Department, 1861–1865, Library of Virginia, Richmond VHS Virginia Historical Society, Richmond WSEP William Smith Executive Papers, 1863–1865, Library of Virginia, Richmond ZBV Zebulon Baird Vance Executive Papers, 1862–1865, North Carolina Department of Archives and History, Raleigh INTRODUCTION 1. “Slavery Tested,” Richmond Whig, February 6, 1864, p. 2, col. 3. 2. Anyone who watched Ken Burns’s massively popular documentary on the Civil War heard the “died of a theory” remark, as well as a strong indictment of Governors Joseph Brown and Zebulon Baird Vance for undermining the Confederate war effort by withholding food and supplies. This interpretation suffuses many histories of the Civil War, including those intended for academic, as opposed to popular, audiences. 188 / Notes to Pages 3–13 Owsley (State Rights in the Confederacy) and Beringer et al. (Why the South Lost the Civil War), for example, argue that strong state governors and local officials kept men out of the Confederate armies for militia duty, refused to send supplies that might reach soldiers from other states, and encouraged general discontent with the national government among their constituents. 3. McKinney, Zeb Vance; Mobley, “War Governor of the South.” 4. Escott, Confederacy, 113–15. Williams makes a similar argument in (among others ) Bitterly Divided. Robinson (Bitter Fruits of Bondage) and Tripp (Yankee Town) connect this class conflict more explicitly to nonslaveholders’ perception that state and local leaders failed to fully utilize slavery in support of the war effort. 5. Faust, for example, argues that planter women deserted the Confederacy when it failed to protect their interests, foreshadowing Escott’s point about the planter class as a whole (Mothers of Invention). Their earlier works also suggest that the planter class’s weak initial attachment to the Confederacy was eventually overridden by self-interest; see Escott, After Secession, and Faust, Creation of Confederate Nationalism. My approach is more heavily influenced by those who suggest that a strong sense of Confederate identity did exist and who focus primarily on external factors when explaining Confederate defeat. See, for example, Thomas, Confederate Nation; Blair, Virginia’s Private War; Gallagher, Confederate War; Campbell, When Sherman Marched North from the Sea; Rubin, Shattered Nation; and Sheehan-Dean, Why Confederates Fought. 6. Freehling, The South vs. The South. Bynum also explores discontented internal populations, primarily Unionists but also Quakers and Dunkers, in Free State of Jones and Long Shadow. 7. McCurry, Confederate Reckoning, 4–5. 8. For specific treatments of slave impressment and its relationship to insufficient Confederate nationalism among the planter class, see Trexler, “Opposition of Planters”; Nelson, “Confederate Slave Impressment Legislation”; and Robinson, Bitter Fruits of Bondage. 9. Constitution of the Confederate States of America, Preamble, Article VI, Section 3, The Avalon Project, Yale School of Law (accessed January 18, 2010). 10. Brasher, Peninsula Campaign. 11. Most notably, Freehling argues in his two-volume Road to Disunion that the decline in slaves as a percentage of state population in the Upper South signaled a declining commitment to protecting the institution, and he connects this decline to those states’ slower rate of secession. Other scholars have disagreed, insisting, as Ayers and Thomas do, that “slavery was slavery to the border,” remaining as intertwined in the economy, politics, and culture of the Upper South as it was in the Lower South (“Difference Slavery Made”). 12. Nichols’s Confederate Engineers contains detailed descriptions of state engineer forces, key officers in the Confederate...