#oh no did you accidentally enshrine into your constitution

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

"The sacrosanctity of slave property in this war has operated most injuriously to the Confederacy," the assistant secretary of war said bluntly in July 1863. And so it had. "The planter is more ready to contribute his sons than his slaves to the war," the Mobile Register declared in outrage during one impressment campaign. It was a damning accusation, and one that at this distance seems palpably true. Slaveholders offered more opposition to slave impressment than to conscription. F. S. Blount, chief impressment agent in the Department of Alabama, Mississippi, and East Louisiana, talked of his failures to get enough slaves "to complete a road so vitally important to the protection of the very individuals, whose highest patriotic impulses never ascend above their own Petty ... schemes for the accumulation of wealth." "You cheerfully yield your children to your country, how you refuse your servants?" one broadside blasted. Slavery, as it turned out, was a form of property that dangerously attenuated citizens' allegiance to the state and submission to its authority. Planters colluded with their slaves in thwarting impressment agents, giving them passes or running them into the woods at the first approach of government agents. They took oaths of allegiance in occupied territory to hold onto their slaves and guided Yankee detachments back to their plantations to repossess their worldly wealth in cotton and slaves. They attacked military commanders who did not make it a priority to protect their property or prevent its escape, and they demanded that politicians represent their interests against the demands of the War Department and the Davis administration. For some, any state would do--Union, Confederate, Brazilian--if it adequately protected their property in slaves.

Slaveholders, it seems, were more concerned with property than nation. Do historians' robust assertions of the strength and endurance of Confederate nationalism take that into account? How else are we to explain the actions of a group insane enough to take a region and all its people into a perilous war, but not patriotic enough to do what it took to fight it? Everywhere in the C.S.A. the policy on slave impressment was resisted. In some places that resistance reached a scale that could only be called massive civil disobedience. In Georgia and North Carolina, legislatures battled the tyranny of the federal government on behalf of slaveholders' inalienable rights of property in slaves. In South Carolina, that struggle went to extremes as planters who had long been "ready with excuses for not furnishing labor to defend Charleston" stacked the legislature with their own and then wrote legislation designed, as Brigadier General John S. Preston charged, "as an explicit declaration that this State does not intend to contribute another slave or soldier to the public defense." As chief of the Bureau of Conscription, Preston, himself a Carolinian, had been out trying to procure "men and labor for the public defense." But there was no military situation so dire as to prevent quibbling. In 1863 Preston had managed to get only 450 of the 2,500 slaves requisitioned by the Engineer's Department, while the governor and legislature ignored the War Department's urging to pass relevant legislation. And again in 1864, even as General Sherman advanced toward Charleston, he could not get the 2,500 men called for. Then in late 1864, with Sherman's legions virtually at the gates, the legislature of South Carolina passed two acts--one asserting ultimate state authority over conscription and another over impressment--so in conflict with the instructions of the War Department that Preston denounced them as "treason to the Confederate States." "May you be endowed with strength and wisdom to overcome enemies stronger than yankee armies--the folly and wickedness of our own people," Preston wrote his president. Planters would not sacrifice the very property they had created the government to protect.

stephanie mccurry, confederate reckoning: power and politics in the civil war south; bolding mine bc ijbol 😂😂😂😂😂