At Gettysburg By
Kevin M. Levin
LINK:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/hist...als-role-enslaved-labor-gettysburg-180972538/
READ: the link for more details...
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.
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South Carolinians in Lieutenant General James Longstreet’s First Corps witnessed the women of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania,
appeal to their enslaved servants to run off and seize their freedom. If Confederate Major General William Dorsey Pender worried about his camp servant named Joe
, he Pender did not share it in what would prove to be his final letter home to his wife. “Joe enters into the invasion with much gusto,” he noted, “and is quite active in looking up hidden property.”
Very few accounts exist today of black men marching with Confederates in the heat of battle at Gettysburg. (The previous summer’s campaign on the Virginia Peninsula,
where the two armies were in close proximity to one another for an extended period of time, contains a wealth of such narratives.) These primary source accounts, in the form of letters and diaries, detail how camp slaves remained in the rear, prepared to perform various support roles. Historians can piece together what the battle was like by reviewing such documents and gather an understanding of how soldiers up and down the chain of command viewed their world, including the role of enslaved labor in their lives.
Snip... stories like is why we will never fully understand slavery in the south...
For one major from South Carolina, his war ended along the difficult retreat route from Gettysburg,
forcing his servant to take steps to properly bury the body. As retold by the family of the fallen officer after the war
, the servant eventually made his way home and remembered enough information about the burial site to escort family members there to disinter the body for transport home shortly after the war. Captain William McLeod of the 38th Georgia, meanwhile, died before the retreat,
but an enslaved worker named Moses took steps to bury McLeod on a farm nearby. Moses then followed a Confederate brigade back to Winchester, Virginia,
before heading home with his owner’s personal effects to Swainsboro, Georgia. In 1865, Moses made the long journey back to Gettysburg with McLeod’s brother-in-law to bring the body home.
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Camp slaves like Moses who, for whatever reason, were committed to their owners made do with the limited resources available and resigned themselves in the end to passing on their owners’ parting words to their grieving families. These men chose not to escape, and while there can be little doubt that
these stories convey evidence of strong bonds between owner and slave, the
tendency of Lost Causers to frame them around the narrow motif of unwavering loyalty fails to capture other factors that may have influenced their behavior. Some likely anticipated the brutal punishment that accompanied their recapture (or punishment that might be meted out to family members in their absence), while others worried about how they might be treated once behind Union lines. Some eagerly awaited reunion with their own families.
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The loss of Colonel Henry King Burgwyn Jr., killed on the first day of fighting at Gettysburg, was a devastating loss not only to the 26th North Carolina but also, as described by a fellow officer in the regiment
, to his servant Kincien, who “takes it bitterly enough.” Once Burgwyn’s body was given an appropriate burial, Kincien proposed transporting the young colonel’s personal items home along with information about his death that he knew his family craved. The regiment’s quartermaster reassured the family that the colonel’s items, including spyglasses, watch, toothbrush, and various memoranda books plus $59, were all safe under Kincien’s care.
“I never saw fidelity stronger in any one,” noted the quartermaster in a letter. Four years later Burgwyn’s body was reinterred in Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh, North Carolina.
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For many Confederate officers who were separated from their servants as a result of the battle or the confusion of the retreat, disappointment awaited them, as it did Captain Waddell of the 12th Virginia, who rejoined his unit on
July 8 only to learn that his servant Willis had run off with his personal baggage. These
heroic stories of abandonment were quickly supplanted by the extraordinary steps of fealty taken by enslaved men like Moses, Dave or Kincien and became the centerpiece of the Lost Cause movement, which stressed unwavering and unquestioning obedience of slaves to their masters.
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Today some of these stories pulled from the historical record can be found on hundreds of websites, not as the stories of enslaved men, but as black Confederate soldiers. This mythical narrative, which dates only to the mid-1970s, would be completely unrecognizable to the enlisted men and officers in the Army of Northern Virginia.
For real Confederates from Robert E. Lee on down, camp slaves and other enslaved workers—the entire institution of slavery, really—were crucial to the ultimate success of the army in the field and the Confederate insurgency as a whole