The idealistic fervor of young soldier boys marching off to war is contagious even for modern readers who cannot help but find something gallant in April 1861. But lurking beneath the surface of romantic scenes off the march to war is the realization that mobilizing for war would tax labor systems to their stretching point. In Confederate Richmond, mobilizing for war meant the increased exploitation of enslaved laborers and conscription of the labor of free African Americans. On the eve of the war, Richmond had nearly 12,000 slaves and 2,500 free blacks, all of whom would eventually be forced into wartime labor. In contrast to the plantation where the enslaved were owned by individuals, hundreds of blacks in Richmond were owned by the city government and by manufacturers, such as the Tredegar Iron Works. Incorporation of the labor of black men and women in the mobilization for war provides a fuller picture of the march to war in the spring and summer of 1861.
As the Confederate capitol rushed to prepare for war, many of its citizens and organizations rushed to acquire enslaved laborers. As a Southern transportation hub, Richmond had a sizable market for the buying and selling of the enslaved. One advertiser in the Richmond Enquirer was hoping to make a large business deal: “$15,000 worth of dry goods in exchange for Negroes.” Considering that the average sale price for the most in-demand category of a slave, young middle-aged men, was $792, this would be an extraordinarily large business deal. Even larger was the $30,000 appropriated by the Richmond municipal government for the purchase of enslaved laborers to maintain the municipal gas works. The black population had swelled during this period as the collapse of Virginia’s tobacco market made available thousands of enslaved laborers, while some slave-owners sent their slaves to Richmond for “safe-keeping.” As evidence of the extent of the demand for black labor, Tredegar Iron Works nearly doubled its black labor force from its prewar size of 80 to 135 by January 1862 – most of them enslaved men. Tredegar would be the single most valuable industrial plant in the Confederacy, producing 1,600 siege pieces, armor for ironclads, and hundreds of thousands of artillery shells. In the production of arms for the Confederacy, labor performed by African Americans would be invaluable.