Finally, there was simple revenge. The Union army's shelling of
Fredericksburg several months before had been a particular sore point,
that festered for months as the Confederate army went into winter
quarters nearby. One officer, determined to fix the destruction there
in his mind's eye, made a special visit to that town one last time
before setting out on the road north into Maryland and Pennsylvania.
So when Lee's army finally marched north in June 1863, it was fully
infused with the intent to exact "full and ample retaliation" on Union
territory as it passed. Lee issued orders against the indiscriminate
destruction of civilian property, but made no mention of seizing
African Americans, whether free or former slaves. In his essay, Smith
points out that diaries, letters and even official reports from every
division in Lee's army mention Confederates rounding up African
Americans and holding them with the army. The practice was tolerated—when not actively encouraged—by officers at all levels of the army.
Some, in fact, saw it as not only justified, but a legitimate tactic to
meet the Confederacy's military objectives. Smith quotes a private
letter to his wife from Major General Lafayette McLaws,
whose division would bear the brunt of the action on the assault on the
Peach Orchard on the second day at Gettysburg. Marching north into
Maryland and Pennsylvania with his division, McLaws wrote:
It
is reported that our army will will not be allowed to plunder and rob
in Pennsylvania, which is all very well, but it would be better not to
publish it as we have received provocation enough to burn and take and
destroy, property of all kids and even the men, women & children
along out whole border.
In every instance where we have even
threatened retaliation, the enemy have given [way]—I am strongly in
favor of trying it the very first chance we get.
In
McLaws' view, the seizure of "even the men, women & children" was
both justified as moral retribution and as an intentional escalation of
tactics.
McLaws' corps commander was Longstreet, the most senior of Lee's officers and effectively the second-in-command of the Army of
Northern Virginia. Longstreet acknowledged the practice of seizing civilians and accommodated it. In
sending orders to George Pickett, whose corps was bringing up the rear
of the army, Longstreet, writing through his adjutant, G. Moxley Sorrel,
sent word on July 1—the day the two armies first engaged each other—to move his troops toward Gettysburg. In closing he added, "the captured contrabands had better be brought along with you for further disposition."
"Further disposition" here refers to imprisonment, auction,
enslavement, and (often) severe punishment at the hands of a
former-and-once-again master.
McLaws' letter and the thirteen words closing Longstreet's
order are
damning, in that they show full well that the seizure and abduction of
African Americans was, if not written policy, widely tolerated and
made allowance for, even at the highest levels of the Confederate
command structure. McLaws was a division commander, and Longstreet was
second-in-command; while their words do not prove Lee knew and approved
of this practice, it's hard to
imagine he was unaware of it, and there's no evidence that he publicly
objected to it, or made any effort to curtail it. My intent here is not
to single out either McLaws or Longstreet alone for condemnation—the de facto policy
did not originate with either—but to
demonstrate that the forcible abduction of free African Americans and
escaped slaves was known and tolerated throughout the Confederate army, from the lowest private to the
most senior generals.