Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

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Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
efforts to supply most military garrisons and contraband camps. Only in eastern
Arkansas did the streams flow year round. 4
Across the Mississippi River from Arkansas lay the states of Mississippi and
Tennessee. Mississippi had followed South Carolina out of the Union on 9 January
1861. Some of its richest farmland, including the Yazoo River country, had belonged
to the Choctaw Indians as recently as 1834 and was becoming one of the nation’s
great cotton-producing regions. The so-called Yazoo Delta really consisted of soil
deposited by the Mississippi River during its annual floods, which planters sought to
mitigate by building levees. In the Yazoo country, black slaves outnumbered the region’s
white population by more than four to one. Farther south along the Mississippi
in Warren County, of which Vicksburg was the seat, the ratio was smaller, but still
more than three to one. As the land rose away from the river, the soil became too
poor to support cotton plantations. In the spring of 1862, a Union army entered the
state near Corinth, in the northeast corner. Opposing armies marching back and forth
quickly devastated Mississippi’s food crops, and problems of supply plagued Union
operations there throughout the war. 5
Tennessee was the last state to join the Confederacy, on 8 June 1861. Its agriculture
was more varied than that of regions farther south. Cotton plantations
and wealth characterized the region around Memphis in the southwest corner
of the state; but a dozen counties equally prosperous, with economies based on
corn, wheat, and livestock, spanned the middle of the state from north to south.
More typically Southern crops in middle Tennessee were tobacco, grown near
the Kentucky state line, and cotton, which thrived in the southern tier of counties.
The middle and western parts of Tennessee were home to 90 percent of the state’s
275,719 slaves. Few of them lived in the mountainous eastern region, although
a slightly higher percentage could be found in the valley formed by the upper
Tennessee and its tributaries, which connected Chattanooga with Knoxville and
Jonesborough in the far northeast corner of the state. Early in 1862, the capture of
Forts Henry and Donelson on the lower Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers gave
Union armies a precarious entry into the Confederacy’s heart that they struggled
for more than two years to hold. 6
Kentucky lay too far north for cotton to grow. In the Bluegrass Region
around Lexington, farmers produced corn, wheat, hemp, and livestock.
Tobacco growers tended to concentrate in the western part of the state. Most
of Kentucky’s 225,483 slaves lived in the Bluegrass Region or along the
Tennessee line west of Bowling Green. What distinguished Kentucky from
4 Donald P. McNeilly, The Old South Frontier: Cotton Plantations and the Formation of
Arkansas Society, 1819–1861 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000), pp. 19–20, 62, 112;
Carl H. Moneyhon, The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on Arkansas (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1994), pp. 14–29; Orville W. Taylor, Negro Slavery in Arkansas
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1958), pp. 257–58.
5 James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots
of Regional Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 3–8, 29–31; Census Bureau,
Population of the United States in 1860, pp. 270–71.
6 Stephen V. Ash, Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 1860–1870: War and Peace in the
Upper South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), pp. 2–12, 17–18; Winters,
Tennessee Farming, pp. 135–37; Census Bureau, Population of the United States in 1860, pp. 464–
67.