Confederate Slave Impressment in the Upper South
By Jamie Amanda Martinez, University of North Carolina Press, 2014, $39.95 In his final annual message to the Confederate Congress in February 1864, President Jefferson Davis proposed that the government purchase 40,000 slaves to work mainly for the Engineer Bureau building fortifications. Upon the war’s end, they could receive their freedom in return for their service. This audacious idea provoked howls of opposition from slaveholders. But Davis was only recognizing two unpleasant realities. First, from the war’s beginning, the Confederacy suffered from a chronic shortage of unskilled labor needed to perform a variety of tasks. Second, Davis realized the country could no longer place individual property rights above the needs of the state. Slave impressment, previously conducted under a variety of local, county and state quota policies and regulations, had become a national imperative.
Jaime Amanda Martinez combines scrupulous data analysis with wide ranging anecdotal evidence to make her case that “the Confederate war effort would have failed long before April 1865 if these slave laborers had not freed white military-aged men for service as soldiers.” In addition, Martinez maintains that slave labor in service to the Confederate war effort “served as the justification for the U.S. Confiscation Acts, which paved the way toward the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment.” Finally, she uses the success of slave impressment policies in Virginia and North Carolina as illustrative of “the vast expansion of the Confederate state” into the realm of personal freedoms and “the impressive growth and great effectiveness of the Confederate government” in its attempts to become a centralized nation state.
By February 1865, the success of impressment programs and a critical shortage of manpower led Davis, Lee and others to consider using black men as soldiers “as a long-term plan for victory rather than the last gasp of a dying nation.” But, Martinez recognizes, “most white southerners recognized a substantial ideological difference between employing slaves as military laborers and arming them as soldiers.” In any event, it was too little too late. More studies like Martinez’s are needed to open unexplored avenues into Confederate economic and political history and, perhaps, lead to new interpretations of the relative strength of Confederate nationalism.
Originally published in the September 2014 issue of America’s Civil War. To subscribe, click here.
