Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [30]
Appreciating the critical role of blacks in the economy, the white South, at the very outset of the war, pronounced slavery “a tower of strength” that would assure the ultimate triumph of independence. With enslaved workers providing the necessary labor at home, larger numbers of whites would be available for military service, thereby giving the slave South a decided advantage over the North. “The institution of slavery in the South,” a Montgomery, Alabama, newspaper boasted, “alone enables her to place in the field a force so much larger in proportion to her white population than the North, or indeed than any country which is dependent entirely on free labor.” Frederick Douglass, the leading black abolitionist, conceded as much when he called the black laborer “the key of the situation—the pivot upon which the whole rebellion turns.” Without the immense human resources made available by slavery, he thought it unlikely that the Confederacy could sustain any prolonged military effort. “Arrest that hoe in the hands of the negro,” Douglass advised early in the war, “and you smite rebellion in the very seat of its life.”78
Not only did slaves constitute the mainstay of the agricultural economy—“the very stomach of this rebellion,” said Douglass—but their services as military laborers more than justified the Union Army’s belated decision to treat runaway slaves as “contraband of war.” In the Confederate Army, slaves worked as cooks, teamsters, hospital attendants, musicians, and body servants; elsewhere, slaves were employed in a variety of skilled trades essential to the war effort. They labored in railroad construction and maintenance, in the extraction of raw materials, in the erection of fortifications, and in the manufacture of weapons of war. More than half the workers at the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond were blacks, as were nearly three fourths of the employees in the naval ordnance plant at Selma, Alabama.79
Early in the war, when patriotism was at its peak, numerous slaveholders volunteered their blacks without wages (the government furnishing quarters and rations) or contracted (hired) them out to military authorities; at the same time, some free blacks sought to establish their loyalty by offering their services to strengthen defensive works around the cities and towns. When volunteers failed to meet increasing military needs, the Confederate government authorized the impressment of slaves and agreed to compensate the owners (thirty dollars a month and the full value of the slave in case of his death). The new law quickly fell victim to the growing conflict between state and Confederate authorities and failed to supply the necessary laborers. With somewhat greater success, local authorities and military commanders met emergency situations by arbitrarily mobilizing the available black laborers—free and slave alike—in a threatened region and forcing them into service. That was the fate of many blacks in Richmond, for example, as Union troops neared the city.
The negroes were taken unaware on the street, at the market, from the shops, and at every point where they were found doing errands for themselves or their masters and mistresses.… In some cases the impressments agents acted with considerable indiscretion, snatching the negro from the marketing of his master, and leaving the marketing to take care of itself; taking the negro from his perch on the cart and leaving the cart driverless behind.80
The growing reluctance of planters to part with their slaves, even to sustain a war for the preservation of that property, compounded the problem of meeting military labor requisitions. “Have you ever noticed the strange conduct of our people during this war?” a Confederate congressman from Georgia asked. “They give up their sons, husbands, brothers & friends, and often without