Confederate Slave Payrolls
During the U.S. Civil War, the Confederate Army required enslavers to loan their enslaved people to the military. Throughout the Confederacy from Florida to Virginia, these enslaved people served as cooks and laundresses, labored in deadly conditions to mine potassium nitrate for creating gunpowder, dug the extensive defensive trench networks that defended cities such as Petersburg, and worked in ordnance factories.
To track this extensive network of thousands of enslaved people and the pay their white enslavers received for their lease, the Confederate Quartermaster Department created the record series now called the Confederate Slave Payrolls, which is available online in the National Archives Catalog. In addition to the wealth of genealogical information the documents contain relating to the names and home counties of African Americans, they are a boon for helping historic sites tell often-overlooked stories about the role African Americans played in the Civil War.
Emmanuel Dabney, museum curator at Petersburg National Battlefield, is one of the researchers who has been using these records to tell a more complete story of the Civil War. As Emmanuel writes, “Petersburg National Battlefield includes former plantations and farms that became wrapped up in a 9.5-month military campaign from June 1864 until April 1865. Many, though not all, of the buildings associated with some of these large plantations were destroyed. In the process of the refugee status for the landowners, many valuable records were lost documenting enslaved men, women, and children who lived and worked on these farms and plantations.”
