I had hoped his article might shed light on a small puzzle I’ve pondered for some time. Levi Miller was one of six slaves owned by the McBride family in southwestern Virginia. He served through the war as body servant to Captain John J. McBride, my ancestor, in Company C of the Fifth Texas Regiment. In 1907 J. E. Anderson, who became captain of the company after McBride was wounded in the Wilderness, wrote to B. C. Shull, chairman of the Confederate Pension Board of Frederick County, Virginia, in support of Miller’s application for the pension he did receive:
He was in the Pennsylvania campaign and at New Castle and Chambersburg he met several negroes whom he knew (I think some of them were related to him) and who had run away from Virginia. They tried to get Levi to desert but he would not.
At first glance this strikes one as Confederate propaganda, and it is likely enough that Captain Anderson included this episode in his letter to emphasize Levi Miller’s commitment to the Confederate cause (or at least to the Confederate Army). That Anderson simply made up this story seems unlikely, however, for two reasons. One is the pride that shines through in his final paragraph:
My company was Company C, Fifth Texas Regiment, Texas Brigade, Hood’s Division, Longstreet’s Corps, Army of Northern Virginia. Out of a company of 142 men I had but nine left to surrender with me at Appomatox, Va.
The other reason for accepting Anderson’s sincerity is that Levi Miller presumably had a good case for a pension anyway. He had been active in Confederate veterans’ activities; we have a picture of him with the Turner Ashby Camp in 1895, a solitary black face among the eighty or so white ones.
Assuming then that Anderson’s description is of something that really happened, what can we make of it?
One immediate conclusion is that Levi Miller himself had to have been the source of Anderson’s knowledge of the event. If runaway slaves did indeed approach Miller to entice him to desert, they would scarcely have done so in the presence of Confederate soldiers. But the “zone of control” of Lee’s army marching through Pennsylvania could not have been much further than from the road to the nearest horizon or tree line – or perhaps a bit more for Confederate cavalry. One can imagine a body servant such as Miller carrying a dozen canteens down to a creek or across a field to a well, still within sight of his regiment but a hundred yards away, and “meeting” there some other blacks. And one can imagine the white soldiers of his company seeing this from afar and asking Miller who they were and what was going on. That Miller “met several negroes whom he knew” seems very unlikely, but it is perhaps the sort of story he might tell his company when questioned.
Anderson’s account indicates, moreover, that Miller met fellow blacks more than once (“at New Castle and Chambersburg”) and in numbers greater than two (“I think some of them were related to him”). And they “had run away from Virginia.” This surely does not sound like the fugitive slaves were trying very hard to avoid the Confederate column, which one would think they could easily have done. Nor does it sound like the Texans were making any effort to capture such fugitives.
Is it possible that there was some organized effort by abolitionists or Pennsylvania authorities or Federal agents to weaken Lee’s invading army by encouraging its black members to desert? Every black wagon driver or camp servant performed work that would otherwise have required a white soldier, and there were evidently thousands of such support troops with the Army of Northern Virginia. It would have been a daring deed to sneak close enough to the Confederate columns to have the kind of conversations that Anderson describes Miller having, but it seems a plausible tactic nonetheless. I have not been able to find any evidence that such attempts at suborning desertion occurred, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t.
It is hard to know what or how much to make of this episode. But it does seem to indicate, at the very least, that some parts of Lee’s army took no part in any “regular slave hunt.”