Courtesy of Brian Rhinehart’s CivilWarRecords.com monthly newsletter dated 22-Aug-2025.
During the U.S. Civil War, the Confederate Army compelled enslavers to lease enslaved people to the military. Across the Confederacy, these individuals were forced into roles such as cooks, laundresses, nitrate miners for gunpowder, ordnance factory workers, and laborers digging defensive trenches around cities like Petersburg, Virginia.
To track this system, the Confederate Quartermaster Department created the record series now known as the Confederate Slave Payrolls. This collection—nearly 6,000 payrolls in total—is fully digitized and available in the National Archives Catalog.
These records provide remarkable detail, often listing the names and occupations of the enslaved, their place of service, length of employment, daily wages, and payments made to enslavers. For genealogists, the payrolls may reveal the names and home counties of African Americans who were forced into Confederate service, offering rare and invaluable insights into their lives during the war.
More details about the collection are described by NARA here.
Submitted by Robin McCarthy
