On October 2, 1861 readers of The New York Herald learned about two enslaved men, who had escaped to Union lines in Virginia:
Two negroes reached here this afternoon from the rebel army. One of them belonged to Chancellor Nicholas of Dumfries, who is now a captain in the rebel army. He is quite intelligent, says he has been driving a wagon with the army about three months, and has worked some in the trenches—that he has been worked very hard. He has attended upon Captain Nicholas and other officers at meals, and has heard them say that Gen. Beauregard would not attack Gen. McClellan in his fortifications; that he had done his best to call the latter outside of them into another masked battery Bull run affair, and being satisfied that he would not come Gen. Beauregard and his army had fallen back.
The second enslaved individual to cross into Union lines served as the body servant of a surgeon in a Georgia regiment.
These notices were quite common at this early stage of the war. Their frequency would increase into 1862, especially during the Peninsula Campaign, when the two armies were in close proximity to one another. Together, they point to the thousands of enslaved laborers utilized by the Confederate army and the vital work that they did in support of its military efforts.
Reading through this particular report, I am struck by what we learn about these two men.
Both men were anything but passive observers of their surroundings. They were constantly collecting information, not only through observation, but by listening closely to those around them. The first man “had heard the estimate frequently made that there were about one hundred thousand men in the rebel army of the Potomac” while the second man “had heard his master, the surgeon, say…that the fortifications on the river below Washington was very extensive.”
These men acted with intent, likely planning their escapes for some time and bringing whatever information they could to an army they perceived as liberators. In their own ways, they had calculated that this war could undercut slavery and change the course of their lives.
Slavery, among many other things, was a system of control.
Enslavers relied on a wide range of methods, including torture, to secure complete obedience from their chattel. Reports like the one above suggest that slaveholder control was beginning to slip just months into the war.
No one should have been surprised. The Confederacy was forced to draw on as much of its enslaved population as possible, and the transition to wartime placed serious strain on the master-slave relationship, a strain that enslaved people exploited without delay.
These challenges were especially acute while armies were on the move. Enslaved laborers numbered in the thousands in Confederate armies throughout much of the war, though for most of that time, with few exceptions, those armies operated inside the Confederacy. For the Army of Northern Virginia those exceptions included the brief foray into Maryland in September 1862, which culminated in the battle of Antietam on September 17, and the more extensive invasion of Pennsylvania in late June and early July of 1863, which included the three days of fighting at Gettysburg.
The most important difference between these two campaigns, at least for the thousands of enslaved laborers attached to the Confederate army, was that the latter carried them through extended time in the free state of Pennsylvania. It is impossible to put a number on it, but it is likely that hundreds of enslaved men escaped to freedom from the Confederate army during this campaign.
I’ve given a great deal of thought to how to contextualize the experience of these men during the Gettysburg Campaign in my current book project. Their exodus throughout the campaign should come as no surprise set alongside the countless stories of enslaved men who had made similar decisions earlier in the war, but what raises a further question, how these stories connect back to the antebellum period.
Historian Susan Eva O’Donovan’s brand new book, * Marching Toward Freedom: The Political Education of Enslaved Americans*, has been a complete game changer in my thinking about all of this.
Rather than treating slavery as static, or confined mainly to the farm and the plantation, O’Donovan emphasizes how its expansion, and at times its contraction, put enslaved people into motion, bringing them into contact with places, people, and ideas that threatened enslavers’ control over their property.
Enslaved men and women lined the backcountry roads and waterways that carried agricultural good to market. Thousands were hired to work the steamboats plying Mississippi. Through the 1850s, growing numbers of enslaved laborers built and maintained the thousands of miles of new rail lines spreading across the South.
Servants accompanied their masters to northern cities, while others made the dangerous overland journey to California during the gold rush of the late 1840s. When enslavers fell behind on debts, their human property sometimes ended up sitting for long stretches in local jails.
In all of these cases, enslaved people operated out from under the watchful gaze of their masters. They learned from and probed complete strangers from places far and wide. Slave’s understanding of their broader surroundings deepened and, in many cases, sparked a desire for freedom.
In each of these situations, enslaved people moved out from under the watchful eye of their masters. They learned from strangers who came from places far beyond the plantation, and that widening view of the world deepened their understanding of their own condition and, in many cases, kindled a desire for freedom. A full accounting of O’Donovan’s findings isn’t possible here, but it is worth underscoring the continuity between the stories that fill her book and the accounts of escaped slaves, like the one above, that so quickly came to dominate northern newspapers once the war began.
The unraveling of slavery that played out so visibly in the summer of 1863 had roots stretching back decades. O’Donovan frames it as an education for thousands of enslaved men and women, one that reminded them they did not have to simply watch events unfold around them.
They could help shape those events themselves.
