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No matter how the black soldier might perform in combat, the initial reaction of the Confederacy was to call for “sure and effective” retaliation. Since the North had determined to arm blacks and wage a war of extermination, there was little left for the white South to do but wage “a similar war in return.” Nor was there any reason to be overly scrupulous about this problem. Once the black man became a soldier, he was as much an outlaw as the men who trained and commanded him. And once black men, whether northern freedmen or southern slaves, were corrupted by military service, an Atlanta newspaper declared, they could “scarcely become useful and desirable servants among us.” The message was clear enough.56

But the Confederacy was never able to resolve this question in any consistent manner. When the North began to recruit black regiments in the Mississippi Valley, the Confederate Secretary of War informed the commanding officer at Vicksburg that captured black soldiers were not to be regarded as prisoners of war. The official position of the Confederate government, as stated on numerous occasions, was in no way ambiguous: captured black soldiers (usually designated as “slaves in arms”) and their commissioned officers had forfeited the rights and immunities enjoyed by other prisoners of war. Any officer who helped to drill, organize, or instruct slaves, with the intention of using them as soldiers, or who commanded Negro units, was defined as an “outlaw” and deemed guilty of inciting servile insurrection. Upon capture, he was to be executed “or otherwise punished at the discretion of the court.” But black captives were to be turned over to state authorities and treated in accordance with the laws of the state in which they had been taken prisoner. These laws invariably demanded their execution as incendiaries or insurrectionists.57

Although this official position was never repealed, authorities chose to modify its enforcement. Whatever the guidelines or legislation, most of the actual decisions were made in the field by unit commanders and lesser officers. How many blacks were held as captives was never easy to determine, largely because Confederate officials refused to report such captives as prisoners of war. Some black soldiers and military laborers were executed or sold into slavery, but most of them were held in close confinement, handed over to civilian authorities, or put to work on military fortifications. “After arriving at Mobile,” one black captive testified, “we were placed at work on the fortifications there, and impressed colored men who were at work when we arrived were released, we taking their places. We were kept at hard labor and inhumanly treated; if we lagged or faltered, or misunderstood an order, we were whipped and abused; some of our men being detailed to whip others.” In the aftermath of the assault on Fort Wagner, eighteen black soldiers were placed on trial under the insurrectionary laws of South Carolina but the state failed to win a conviction and the men were interned as prisoners of war. For many whites, including some of the highest-ranking Confederate officials, it was preferable to think that blacks, especially former slaves, who served in the Union Army had been duped. And since they were little more than “deluded victims of the hypocrisy and malignity of the enemy,” the Confederate Secretary of War advised, they should be treated with mercy and returned to their previous owners, “with whom, after their brief experience of Yankee humanity and the perils of the military service, they will be more content than ever …”58

The Confederate government refused to agree to any general exchange of black prisoners of war for prisoners held by the Union Army. This attitude reflected to some degree a distinction made by Confederate officials between free Negroes and slaves. That the North might employ its own black residents for military service seems to have been conceded; that is, the North had as much right to