Confederate Slave Impressment in the Upper South

5 The President’s Mishap: From Engineer Laborers to Potential Confederate Soldiers, 1864–1865

132 CHAPTER FIVE The President’s Mishap From Engineer Laborers to Potential Confederate Soldiers, 1864–1865 On November 7, 1864, Jefferson Davis delivered what would be his final annual message to the Confederate Congress. After discussing the efficacy of the February 1864 slave impressment act, Davis contemplated what he called “a radical modification in the theory of the law.” Congress’s actions to date had considered slaves only as private property, Davis explained, limiting their term of service to the Confederacy out of respect for their masters’ property rights. He suggested that the country could no longer afford to place individual property rights above the needs of the state. Instead, Davis proposed that the Confederate government purchase approximately 40,000 slaves, who would be considered public property with the potential to become free persons, and put them to work for the Engineer Bureau and Medical Department. Slaves who served faithfully would receive their freedom after the eventual Confederate victory. At the same time, he cautioned, that “beyond this limit and these employments it does not seem to me desirable, under existing circumstances, to go.”1 The time was not yet right for the Confederacy to employ slaves as soldiers. Yet even this modest proposal, which promised no immediate transformation of slavery, provoked a firestorm of controversy. Congressman John B. Baldwin of Virginia told one of his constituents that “the President ’s negro mishap has caused much feeling against him in quarters very near him.” Not only were Davis’s friends turning against him, Baldwin argued, but slaves were escaping in droves because they had no interest in The President’s Mishap / 133 becoming the property of the state.2 In Raleigh, North Carolina Standard editor William Holden questioned, “How can Southern men and slaveholders , consistently with their oft-expressed opinions, regard manumission as a reward? We tell the world, what all experience justifies us in telling it, that the slave is far happier and better cared for, of better health and longer life, as a slave than as a freedman.” Moreover, he doubted the constitutionality of the president’s proposal.3 Finally, few observers drew a firm distinction between Davis’s proposal to purchase slaves as military laborers and the idea of arming them as soldiers, and the president received letters indicating that some newspaper editors had interpreted his speech as a call for black Confederate soldiers.4 Despite Davis’s assurances , white southerners feared the long-term implications of his suggestion that the central government pay less attention to their property rights as slaveholders. While in theory all slave impressment legislation prior to November 1864 had held those property rights sacrosanct, in practice slave impressment clearly eroded the master’s authority over his slaves, even those who were not subject to impressment. Congress created the Board of Slave Claims in April 1864 to protect slaveholders’ economic investments in their slaves, and thus reinforce their mastery, but even this important step did not repair the damage. By forcing slaves to serve on Confederate fortifications regardless of their masters’ objections, impressment shattered any illusion that the master held ultimate authority over his slaves. Secretary of War James A. Seddon put the February 1864 impressment law into widespread use in September 1864, when he issued a requisition for 20,000 laborers. From this point on, slave impressment in most areas of the Confederacy occurred through the Conscript Bureau rather than through state governments, although the December 1864 and March 1865 calls in Virginia would prove notable exceptions to the pattern. The increasing centralization of slave impressment between February 1864 and March 1865 thus dramatically reduced the master’s power over his human property because enrolling officers were less subject to political pressure from individual slaveholders than local elected officials had been. It also reduced—but did not eliminate—the governors’ role in disseminating and enforcing slave impressment quotas. Another key trend in slave impressment during the last few months of the war was that the governors (especially Governor William Smith of Virginia) demonstrated far less sympathy toward their slaveholding constituents than they had in the past. The final slave impressment calls in Virginia took place while Congress , meeting in secret sessions, debated the efficacy of enrolling slaves 134 / The President’s Mishap as soldiers as another means of averting a potentially disastrous defeat. Because Congress and many state legislatures had enacted specific provisions for collecting and organizing impressed laborers (as...