AT FREEDOM’S DOOR
For eight days in July 1863, the Virginia slave Beverly was free. Long since denounced as “a rascal” by his owner, Beverly was hired out to a Confederate soldier and brought northward as part of Robert E. Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania. Amid the chaos and confusion of the retreat from Gettysburg, he seized the opportunity and ran away. Yet that freedom came at a terrible cost. Much like the thousands of other slaves accompanying the Army of Northern Virginia during its first foray onto free soil, Beverly faced an excruciating dilemma—escape and gain his freedom but perhaps never see his family again; or return south to bondage and all its horrors.
He steered clear of the Confederate columns for eight days, returning only as Lee’s army slipped across the Potomac River at Williamsport, Md., and back into Virginia. “He seemed to be really glad that he had got home again,” reported his slave-owning mistress Martha Twyman, who was unable to pry any more details out of her reticent bondsman. “I afterwards asked him about it, but he evaded my questions, and I could get nothing further from him, in relation to it.” For Beverly, the Gettysburg Campaign was another cruel reminder of the painful ironies and heartrending conditions of American slavery.
Slaves were ubiquitous in Confederate armies dating back to the war’s earliest days. Legions of enslaved people labored as servants, cooks, and teamsters, helping to free Southern whites to fight. In May 1861, an Alabama recruit’s first taste of camp life included winding his way through “throngs of negro cooks.” As they adjusted to army life, Confederate soldiers frequently wrote home, imploring relatives or acquaintances to “send me a negro boy.”
The presence of slaves allowed Lee’s soldiers to configure their camps as “small Southern communities,” in which bondsmen completed everyday tasks such as laundry, cooking, and caring for animals, while also seeing to their master’s personal comfort. While “a man do everything that a soldier has to do,” reasoned a Mississippian who later joined
