The memory of the Civil War looms large in Virginia. As the site of many of the war’s major battles, monumental events at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, and the eventual surrender of General Robert E. Lee’s army at Appomattox, there are few areas unaffected by the bloodiest war ever fought on American soil. Intrinsically related to the Civil War, of course, is the issue of slavery. While many are familiar with slavery’s connection to starting the war, few are educated on slavery during the period between the outbreak of war and emancipation, which was much more complicated than any sort of instantaneous end brought about by the Emancipation Proclamation.
To elaborate on this complex matter, Robert Colby, professor of American history at the University of Mississippi, gave a talk this Wednesday on his recently published book, Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South. The book deals with an often-overlooked component of the Civil War: the continued buying and selling of slaves as the war raged on.
Colby began with a story of an enslaved man who lived not far away from Charlottesville who decided to run away from his owner. He, like many other slaves attempting to flee behind Union lines to escape bondage, was eventually recaptured. The enslaved man’s owner, on regaining possession of him, decided not to keep him, but rather sell him at a slave market in Richmond. This was a common practice among the owners of runaway slaves, especially during the war, as owners felt them to be untrustworthy or even potential sources of revolt.
The story of this one enslaved man was not unique. The slave trade, as Colby emphasizes, did not go away during wartime, it simply changed. Before the war, enslaved people were generally sold from their homes in “Old South” states such as Virginia and South Carolina to “New South” states such as Mississippi and Louisiana to feed the growing cotton industry. During the war, these routes changed slightly. While slavery remained legal in the Union-aligned border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware, their trade connections with the rest of the South were cut off. Areas occupied by the Union not specifically exempted by the Emancipation Proclamation saw an outright end to slavery itself. As such, many Southern slaveholders decided to continue moving slaves further south and west, away from Union advances. Many were sent to Texas in particular, with upwards of tens of thousands of enslaved people eventually being forcibly resettled in the state.
While enslavers attempted to use the threat of capture and relocation to deter slaves from fleeing, many still did, often helping the Union in its war effort along the way. Colby pointed, for instance, to William Andrew Jackson, an enslaved man who served as a coachman for Jefferson Davis’s carriage during the war. After his master died, he escaped to Union lines, and served as a spy for Union forces. Colby also mentioned the example of another slave who escaped to freedom and helped direct Union soldiers across a river, only to be captured by Confederate forces and sold back into slavery. Choosing to flee came with risks, and did not always guarantee success.
Colby called attention to the fact that the slave trade was present in the Union during the war as well. While Union soldiers were certainly crucial to the process of emancipation, there were instances in which soldiers in states such as Kentucky returned escaped slaves to their former owners to collect a payment. Emancipation was not necessarily a linear process, and it certainly did not have universal support.
Indeed, one of the key emphases of Colby’s presentation was that we are sometimes too quick to look back on the Civil War through our own retrospective view without considering those of the people who lived during the actual war. People who lived through the Civil War did not know that it would result in a Union victory – at many times, it appeared that the Confederates had the upper hand. As such, many slaveowning Southerners actually invested in enslaved people, believing that following a Confederate victory, slavery would be secure in perpetuity, and the value of an enslaved person would go up.
This manifested itself, Colby noted, in a grotesque form of “human investment capital.” During the war, slaveowners often prioritized buying enslaved couples, believing that they would reap dividends after the war, as the number of slaves in their possession would naturally go up. It was not until the very final weeks of the war (especially in remote areas of the Confederacy, such as Texas, where communication was difficult) that slaveowners – and slaves – realized that they were free.
The benefits of looking at history through the lens of the people who actually experienced it rather than in hindsight apply not just to the Civil War. If we understand how people worked to deal with their present reality, we might better understand how the mistakes and successes of the future worked out. Furthermore, it helps us better appreciate the bravery with which many, such as the runaway slaves who risked resale to a distant land or even death for their freedom, have challenged the present reality they faced.
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