The Diaries Left Behind by Confederate Soldiers Reveal the True Role of Enslaved Labor at Gettysburg

[Judi Lynn]

Even as some enslaved men escaped North, the retreat by the Army of Northern Virginia would have been disastrous without the support of its camp servants

By Kevin M. Levin
smithsonian.com
July 2, 2019

Walking the Gettysburg battlefield today, it’s easy to imagine the Union and Confederate armies dueling for control of the Pennsylvania town and its surrounding picturesque fields and rocky hills for three days in July 1863. For many tourists, no visit to Gettysburg is complete without retracing the steps General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, those Confederates who crossed the open fields toward the Union line on Cemetery Ridge on July 3 in what is still popularly remembered as “Pickett’s Charge.” Once safe behind where the Union lines held strong, however, few turn around and acknowledge the hundreds of enslaved people who emerged from the woods to render assistance to the tattered remnants of the retreating men.


Enslaved workers constituted the backbone of the Confederate war effort. Although stories of these impressed workers and camp slaves have been erased from our popular memory of the war in favor of mythical accounts of black Confederate soldiers, their presence in the Confederate army constituted a visual reminder to every soldier —slaveowner and non-slaveowner alike—that their ultimate success in battle depended on the ownership of other human beings.

Anywhere between 6,000 and 10,000 enslaved people supported in various capacities Lee’s army in the summer of 1863. Many of them labored as cooks, butchers, blacksmiths and hospital attendants, and thousands of enslaved men accompanied Confederate officers as their camp slaves, or body servants. These men performed a wide range of roles for their owners, including cooking, cleaning, foraging and sending messages to families back home. Slave owners remained convinced that these men would remain fiercely loyal even in the face of opportunities to escape, but this conviction would be tested throughout the Gettysburg campaign.

On the first of the new year, Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which emancipated enslaved people in the states that seceded from the United States. The news quickly filtered through Confederate ranks and was certainly discussed among the army’s enslaved servants. The Proclamation, in effect, turned Union armies into armies of liberation, functioning as a funnel through which newly freed men could enlist in one of the black regiments that were filling up quickly throughout the North as well as in occupied parts of the Confederacy. Conversely, the Proclamation highlighted even further the degree to which the Confederate Army represented a force of enslavement. Lee’s decision to bring his army north into free states in early May, following his victory at Chancellorsville, was fraught with danger given the dramatic shift in Union policy; his soldiers’ rear guard, the support staff of enslaved labor, were at risk of emancipation.

Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/diaries-left-behind-confederate-soldiers-reveals-role-enslaved-labor-gettysburg-180972538/#ld8OZ3r1J46CiFvI.99

[Karadeniz]

1. A very good read. Thanks for sharing.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Thank you for taking the time to check it.

[DownriverDem]

2. Now servants

I've read where you can tour old plantations and slaves are now called servants.

[Judi Lynn]

4. Very dishonest of them, isn't it? Good grief.

One never has heard of beating "servants" or sending out armed men to find escaped servants to drag them back to receive branding, or whiplashes which nearly kill them.

[Aristus]

6. Calling them servants instead of slaves. Isn't that?......isn't that......political correctness?

And I thought they hated that sort of thing...

[Kind of Blue]

5. Thanks, Judi Lynn! This OP seemed very familiar until I checked the author's

name and saw I'd come across his blog a little while ago when his book was a proposal. The Smithsonian article is so good but his blog piece goes in great depth about the origin of the myth that was conjured in the 1970s specifically for one reason

"...to counter the growing acceptance that slavery was the cause of the Civil War; that emancipation was central to what it accomplished; and that former slaves and free blacks were instrumental in bringing about the Confederacy’s demise. However, if free and enslaved black men fought in Confederate ranks, alongside whites, neo-Confederates reasoned, the war could not have been fought to abolish slavery. More importantly, stories and images of armed black men made it easier for the descendants of Confederate soldiers and those who celebrate Confederate heritage to embrace and celebrate their cause unapologetically without running the risk of being viewed as racially insensitive or worse.

Reconstruction for white Southerners involved more than rebuilding their economy and regaining control of state governments. In a narrative that came to be called the “Lost Cause,” former Confederates insisted that they had not gone to war to protect slavery, that defeat was the result of overwhelming Northern resources rather than the result of inferior military and civilian leadership, and, most importantly, that their slaves remained loyal to the very end.

Taken together these stories and representations helped to create a mythic past as well as reinforce white supremacy in the Jim Crow South by offering a model of black compliance and submission.

Black Confederates now occupy a prominent place in this revisionist story alongside accounts of Asian, Mexican and Jewish Confederates, all of which are intended by proponents of this narrative to appeal to a more racially and ethnically diverse population and to assuage concerns that they harbor racist beliefs. That the Confederate heritage community continues to embrace these stories as a means to counter increasing challenges against the Lost Cause narrative should come as no surprise.

[Judi Lynn]

7. That's tremendous! They realize they have lost prestige (to put it mildly) among civilized people

because of their grotesque determination to steal the lives and hope of other human beings and force them to spend their entire lives making them wealthy, and looking after them.

It's wonderful to see people really spelling it out for future readers, isn't it?

Just in case you haven't heard, yet, and I discovered it unintentionally, there is a history of Southern slave owners who moved to Brazil so they could continue to own slaves. Here's a quick Wikipedia look:

The Confederados (Portuguese pronunciation: [kõfedeˈɾadus]) are descended from some 20,000 Confederates who immigrated to Brazil, chiefly to the area of the city of São Paulo, from the Southern United States after the American Civil War. Although many eventually returned to the United States, some remained and descendants of Confederados can be found in many cities throughout Brazil.



Photos taken of them at one of their celebrations, in which they all wear costumes designed to resemble the original clothes of the racist dirtbags from the US South:

Many more photos of the Brazilian spawn of these wealthy dirtbags at this google images link:

https://tinyurl.com/y3cfxcno


Thank you for your information. It's good when the truth surfaces.

[Kind of Blue]

8. Wow. Wow. Wow. It's hard to believe Confederados are a real thing.

I've been digging into this for about an hour. Depending on which article from your link, Thank You!, these descendants in a 2015 report are either innocent; all they know are certain words, songs from like Johnny Cash, the flag. Or they're in denial because some Confederados speak of the the War of Secession/the Lost Cause.

White Southern bitterness has melted into kitsch—or else denial, oblivion. Today, the Confederados are, for the most part, light-skinned upper-middle-class Brazilians, the legacy of the few Southerners who succeeded in preserving a simulacrum of their crumbling plantations. They celebrate a mythology that hardly contends with the past and keeps itself blind even to the present.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gq8ae9/welcome-to-americana-brazil-0000580-v22n2

But in a 2019 article, a dialogue between black activists and Confederados was held in 2017 and resolved nothing. Though this year

A week after the Confederate Party, at least 100 civil society groups from across the country had signed a manifesto criticizing the event’s use of "symbols that elevate white supremacy" – a sign of growing Brazilian awareness about the complicated, controversial history of the American Confederacy.

https://theconversation.com/brazils-long-strange-love-affair-with-the-confederacy-ignites-racial-tension-115548


"Activists from Brazil’s black rights movement protest the Confederate Party in Santa Bárbara d'Oeste, São Paulo state, April 28, 2019. Courtesy of UNEGRO, Author provided"

Thanks again, Judi Lynn, for this surprising aspect of the Civil War I thought was some lost white tribe/Fantasy Island dream.