![]() The battle that commenced west and north of Gettysburg on July 1, 1863, expanded gradually as the two armies shifted units along the roads leading to the small town. While no known evidence exists that the army’s slaves assisted in kidnapping of roughly 100 men from towns such as Chambersburg, McConnellsburg, Mercersburg and Greencastle on the eve of the famous battle, it is very likely that those ensnared and led south would have passed camp servants and other slaves whose essential presence in the army helped to make their capture possible. Free African-Americans and fugitive slaves in Adams County (including Gettysburg) and surrounding counties fled with the news of Lee’s advance. “Hidden property” served as a reference to the escaped slaves already living in southern Pennsylvania orders had been handed down throughout the Confederate army to capture and return this “property” to the South. “Joe enters into the invasion with much gusto,” he noted, “and is quite active in looking up hidden property.” 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. 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. When Lee’s three corps of infantry, numbering roughly 70,000, crossed the Mason-Dixon Line into Pennsylvania, they encountered clear signs that they were no longer in friendly territory. 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. Conversely, the Proclamation highlighted even further the degree to which the Confederate Army represented a force of enslavement. 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. The news quickly filtered through Confederate ranks and was certainly discussed among the army’s enslaved servants. ![]() 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. Levin argues in this carefully researched book, such claims would have shocked anyone who served in the army during the war itself. More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, scores of websites, articles, and organizations repeat claims that anywhere between 500 and 100,000 free and enslaved African Americans fought willingly as soldiers in the Confederate army. Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth (Civil War America) 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. These men performed a wide range of roles for their owners, including cooking, cleaning, foraging and sending messages to families back home. 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. 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.Īnywhere between 6,000 and 10,000 enslaved people supported in various capacities Lee’s army in the summer of 1863. 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.Įnslaved workers constituted the backbone of the Confederate war effort. For many tourists, no visit to Gettysburg is complete without retracing the steps General Robert E. 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.
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