Slavery and Freedom at Bull Run

Disunion

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

On the morning of Sunday, July 21, 1861, John Parker and three other men opened fire on Union forces. In the chaos of the Civil War’s first major battle, the group, which was operating a cannon, “couldn’t see the Yankees at all and only fired at random.”

Like so many men on both sides who experienced war for the first time that day, Parker was terrified. “The balls from the Yankee guns fell thick all around,” he later told a reporter. “In one battery a shell burst and killed 20, the rest ran. Thank the Lord! none were killed in our battery. I felt bad all the time, and thought every minute my time would come; I felt so excited that I hardly knew what I was about, and felt worse than dead.”

Parker and his comrades’ lives depended on their competence with the gun — but not in the usual way. All four men were slaves, ordered by their owners to fight for the Confederate cause. “We wish[ed] to our hearts that the Yankees would whip,” Parker recalled, “and we would have run over to their side but our officers would have shot us if we had made the attempt.”

Slavery rarely figures into accounts of the Battle of Bull Run. The confrontation, which occurred just 25 miles from Washington, is best known as a military defeat for the Union and a painful awakening to the horrors of real war. The two sides, Lincoln famously wrote, were “all green alike.”

But, as Parker’s experiences suggest, the war’s first major battle both loosened the bonds of slavery in Northern Virginia and revealed the importance of bondsmen as a Confederate military asset. In fact, the fight at Bull Run – and the coerced participation of men like John Parker – gave Congress critical momentum to pass its first law explicitly undermining slavery: the Confiscation Act of Aug. 6, 1861.

Northern Virginia was less dense with plantations and slaves than the state’s southeastern counties near Union-occupied Fortress Monroe. Still, slaves comprised between 26 percent and 30 percent of the population in Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William counties.

With the onset of hostilities, Parker’s master, like many Virginia slaveowners, immediately offered up some of his bondsmen to the Confederate cause. Parker was sent to build batteries and breastworks, first in Winchester and Fredericksburg and later, after the Confederate capital moved to Richmond, along the James River.

Parker was allowed to return home to his owner’s plantation — and to his own wife and children — after these early forays. But the war was transforming that place, too. His master and two sons “went away to the war,” leaving an overseer in charge. Soon the overseer himself departed. The disintegration of authority created opportunities for Parker and his peers, who “had good times then, and eat up everything we could get.” In due course Parker’s mistress and her two daughters also left, and the master ordered Parker and the other slaves to “stay” and shoot any “d—d Yankees” who “showed themselves in his absence.”

Parker’s owner may have given these orders with customary bravado or a sincere expectation that his slaves would comply, but he also had good reason to worry. All spring and summer, rumors of prospective slave insurrections kept white Virginians on edge. Runaways arriving in Pennsylvania described “things at a loose end” in Maryland and Virginia. Because of “the excitement,” they told a reporter, “the blacks are not half looked after,” and “they consequently escape with great facility.”

A Confederate battery, similar to the one manned by John Parker, preparing for the Battle of Bull Run Library of CongressA Confederate battery, similar to the one manned by John Parker, preparing for the Battle of Bull Run. CLICK TO ENLARGE

If the departure of slaveowners and overseers for Confederate service helped dissolve the lattice of power that upheld slavery, so too did the arrival of Union forces. Joseph Spears, for example, remained on his master’s Fairfax County farm even after the master had left for war. When he encountered Union pickets, however, he joined them immediately. Edward Parker, a slave of John A. Washington — a great-grandnephew of the first president and resident at Mount Vernon — was ordered to meet his master at Manassas Junction but instead stopped in occupied Alexandria, where he found work as a cook for Union troops.

Still, many Northern Virginia slaves had more encounters with Confederate forces than Union ones. In an official report on the engagement at Bull Run, Confederate General Pierre T. Beauregard praised “the patriotic gentlemen of Virginia” whose slaves had, by “gratuitous labor,” constructed the fortifications. The slaves’ work, Beauregard noted, had not only spared the white volunteers “from that laborious service” but also gave them more time to train as soldiers. This, of course, was the Confederate military ideal: A valiant army of white men supported by the uncompensated labor of enslaved African Americans.

In the wake of Bull Run, Northerners too had a new understanding of the importance of slave labor to the war. Soldiers reported that slaves “by the thousand” had labored for the Confederacy. And Congressman James Blaine realized that bondsmen had “seriously increased the available force of fighting men.” Since early July, Congress had been debating a law that would set the terms under which Confederate property could be confiscated. “The defeat at Bull Run, and the news that black men had been seen working on the Confederate side,” the historian Silvana Siddali has written, “now focused the discussion and kept it strictly on track.”

The law, which Lincoln signed on Aug. 6, provided that slaves whose owners intended to use them in the Confederate war effort could be confiscated by Union forces. Balancing a reluctance to confiscate private property with the realization that the war would not be easily won, lawmakers avoided the language of freedom or liberation. Nonetheless, the First Confiscation Act marked the beginning of a major shift in Union policy toward slavery.

Parker and others from his plantation remained near Manassas Junction for two weeks following the battle, stripping the Union soldiers of arms and other valuables and burying the soldiers of both armies. Then they returned home to their master’s plantation. Rejoining his wife, who lived on a neighboring farm, Parker discovered “all the cattle and mules gone, and corn all grownup with weeds.” “We didn’t care for that,” he said. “All we wanted was a chance to escape.”

Neo-Confederate writers have quoted selectively from John Parker’s story to argue that African Americans willingly fought for the Confederacy. But Parker and his comrades never doubted which side they were on. “Our masters tried all they could to make us fight,” he recounted. “They promised to give us our freedom and money besides, but none of us believed them; we only fought because we had to.”

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Parker and his family made plans to escape. He told a newspaper reporter he met in Pennsylvania that he had received passes from Union soldiers at Alexandria, but when his wife did not arrive at the appointed meeting place near Chain Bridge along the Potomac River, he headed north alone. Union soldiers in Maryland gave him a letter of introduction to the famed Brooklyn minister Henry Ward Beecher. He was en route to New York, he said, hoping to meet his wife and two daughters and continue on to Canada. Their son remained in captivity, shipped south to Louisiana.

The Pennsylvania newsman was not alone in finding Parker’s story compelling. When he arrived in New York City at the end of January, Parker gave another lengthy interview to a reporter who sought information about the strength of Confederate forces — and the magnitude of losses — at Bull Run. Parker was still looking for his wife and children, whom he had reason to believe had made it to the city. He hoped to never “see another battle,” he said, and just wanted to settle down with his family, practice his trade as a carpenter and live “the reminder of his life in freedom.”

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Sources: “A Contraband’s Story,” Douglass’ Monthly, March 1862; Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, ser. 1., vol. 2; National Anti-Slavery Standard; Ira Berlin et al., eds., “The Destruction of Slavery”; Silvana Siddali, “From Property to Person”; Stephanie McCurry, “Confederate Reckoning”; Bruce Levine, “In Search of a Usable Past: Neo-Confederates and Black Confederates,” in James Oliver and Lois E. Horton, eds., “Slavery and Public History.”


Kate Masur

Kate Masur is a professor of history at Northwestern and the author of “An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C.