Although the Civil War seriously disrupted the domestic slave trade, it also created new opportunities for buying and selling human beings. Enslaved workers, Colby writes, “became critical cogs in the Confederacy’s war-making machine.” Railroads purchased hundreds of enslaved men in a desperate effort to shore up the collapsing Confederate rail system. Various war industries hired or purchased thousands of slaves. It was relatively easy for businesses to adapt to downturns by selling off enslaved workers. “The Confederacy’s industrializing efforts encouraged the purchase of people,” Colby writes, “but the agricultural sector’s failings often incentivized their sale.” Whether the war machine expanded or agriculture foundered, the slave trade adapted.
Human property had still other uses in the Confederacy. Draftees sometimes purchased substitutes with slaves rather than cash. The so-called Twenty Negro Law exempted from military service planters who owned twenty or more slaves. Owners of eighteen or nineteen sometimes scrambled to purchase one or two more to qualify for the exemption. Wartime shortages forced some owners to sell slaves to purchase food and other necessities. In these and other ways the insecurity that the slave trade always imposed on the lives of the enslaved was multiplied by the upheavals of war.
Amid such profound disruption the slave trade also managed to persist in familiar ways. Sheriffs continued to confiscate and sell slaves owned by Southerners unable to pay their debts. Courts continued to destroy slave families as they divided up the estates of deceased owners. Planters still shed crocodile tears whenever they were “forced” to sell some of their slaves, except now the disruptions of war or the approach of the Union Army prompted those decisions more often. When several of John Berkley Grimball’s slaves escaped to the Union Army, he decided to sell those who had remained loyal. One of them, Nelly, opposed his plans, and another, Alfred, begged Grimball not to separate him from his family. But he disregarded their requests, shattered their families, and then claimed that he had just concluded a “sickening business.”
As the war progressed and Union armies penetrated farther into the Confederacy, slaves found more opportunities to escape to federal lines. Slaveholders responded, often in panic, by hurriedly selling slaves most likely to run off. Sometimes individual slaves suspected of rebellious behavior were sold to traders. At other times planters, fearing the approach of Union troops, divested themselves of all their slaves. Colby detects widespread ambivalence about the future of slavery, even as the end of the war approached and Confederate defeat was clearly inevitable. Plenty of owners sold out rather than risk the likelihood of uncompensated emancipation, but there were always traders who could find buyers optimistic about the fate of the Confederacy and willing to pay fire-sale prices for slaves.