In his efforts to overwhelm the American South’s resistance, Grant ended prisoner exchanges with soldiers returning to the South’s ranks while those in blue went home. He knew the late war, poor-quality conscripts and diseased substitutes he received wouldn’t fight and would desert at the first opportunity. This reality accelerated the capture and removal of colored laborers who represented an important part of the Southern war effort.
The South’s Manpower Advantage
“The responsibility for effectively assembling Negro manpower became that of the Virginia lawmakers and the Confederate Congressmen. Speaking on this point, President Jefferson Davis stated, “much of our success was due to the much-abused institution of African servitude.”
This opinion was shared by General Ulysses S. Grant who was well-aware of the need to remove from the South her vast army of noncombatants. Grant said, “the 4,000,000 colored noncombatants are equal to more than three times their number in the North, age for age, sex for sex.” Both Grant and Davis early recognized that the mobilization of the Negro constituted an extremely valuable resource.
At the call to repel the Yankee invaders, for example, Virginia looked to its Negro population as a major source of civilian workers. [The majority] of Negroes employed by the quartermaster, ordnance, niter and mining bureaus, and military hospitals were hired through voluntary contracts with free Negroes and the owners of bondsmen.
In February 1862 the State legislature passed an act which required local courts to register all male free Negroes within their jurisdiction between the ages of 18 and 50. The selected free persons were not required to serve longer than 180 days without their consent, and entitled to compensation, rations, quarters and medical attention. Their pay, rations and allowances were borne by the Confederate States.
[In early 1863, and in response to Lincoln’s so-called emancipation decree,] the Richmond Examiner asserted that the North had discovered from this war the value of the slave to the South as a military laborer, and “Lincoln’s proclamation is designed to destroy this power in our hands.”
(The Confederate Negro: Virginia’s Craftsmen and Military Laborers, 1861-1865. James H. Brewer. University of Alabama Press, 1969, pp. 6-7; 14)