The US Army as a Slaveholding Institution

Officers of the army of the new American republic demanded servants as a mark of their rank and privilege, a custom inherited from European armies and the Continental Army. But the US Army, established after the Revolution in 1784, was avowedly republican: the use of soldiers as servants came under criticism by soldiers and civilians alike. Men enlisted to be soldiers not orderlies, waiters, or body servants. The solution, at least for the officers, explains historian Yoav Hamdani, was slavery.

“Facing public criticism over officers’ abuse of soldiers’ labor, the army gradually ‘outsourced’ officers’ servants through a dual process of privatization and racialization of military work,” Hamdani writes, “differentiating between ‘public’ and ‘private’ service; between free, white solders and enslaved, Black servants.”

“A soldier by voluntary compact, becomes the servant of the state, but not the servant of an individual,” decreed the War Department’s General Orders of 1797. It was precisely soldiers’ whiteness that should have prevented them from becoming servants. (Hamdani notes that Democratic-Republicans “argued against the very existence of a standing army” claiming it was “degrading to free white men.” Their anti-army rhetoric was a winning stance in the elections of 1800, but as president, Thomas Jefferson essentially developed the army per earlier Federalist plans.)

About 120 Black militiamen took part on the rebel American side in the battle at Bunker Hill in April, 1775. It wasn’t until the following year that free or enslaved Blacks would be allowed to enlist in the Continental Army itself, however. Hundreds did so—even as the British promised freedom to those who stayed loyal or fought for them. These multiracial beginnings would, however, be squelched after the war as the new republic began to define “freedom” and “liberty,” the rallying cries of the Revolution, with whiteness. As the Secretary of War James McHenry put it in a communication in 1797, “No negro, mulatto or Indian is to be inlisted (sic).”

White liberty was thus constructed as something supported by Black slavery. The Army didn’t prohibit slavery. In 1814, Congress prevented the use of soldiers—all white because of the color bar—from serving as officers’ servants. And after 1816, military slavery would be subsidized by the public. Congress authorized payment of allowances, rations, and clothing costs for officer’s enslaved servants, formalizing subsidies adopted during the War of 1812.

Hamdani writes that the “circumstances leading to military slavery are rooted in officer’s habits of keeping personal servants at the public’s expense.” The 1816 law “incentivized officers to force thousands of enslaved men, women, and children into military servitude.”

Until the Civil War, Army officers even had enslaved servants while serving in “free states.” Three-quarters of officers, from both the northern and southern parts of the US, used enslaved servants during their military careers, with southern slavers especially determined to expand slavery within the Army (as elsewhere). Records show that over 9,000 enslaved people were forced to work for Army officers, a number three times larger than the number of officers.

The Army benefited from slavery directly in terms of its officer class. The Army was, as well, the literal force of slavery’s territorial expansion. These two facets of the Army’s vital role in the “slaveholding republic” came together in the person of York, enslaved by Lieutenant William Clark as his servant during the Corps of Discovery exploration of the territory of the Louisiana Purchase. After the expedition, York disappeared from the record, with Clark’s later claim that he freed him discounted by most historians.

More notable of all enslaved military servants were Dred and Harriet Scott, who were legally “owned” by a US Army surgeon. Unlike York, their fate is too well known: in 1857, seven of nine Supreme Court judges, four of them slaveholders, decreed that Dred Scott, and every other person of African descent, was not and could not be a citizen of the US. Scott’s freedom lawsuit, based on years living in free states as an enslaved servant in the Army, wasn’t allowed standing in federal court.

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