The u.s. military made extensive use of Black chattel slaves before the civil war. Slaves were used to construct & staff military installations like forts. Slaves were also used as officers'personal servants. The military often used euphemistic language on records to cover it up.

A historian wrote in 1977: "The extensive reliance on slave rentals by the military has not been researched and written about before for several reasons. First, historians have not been in the habit of searching old military records for economic and social data.

Second, mention of slave rentals is dispersed throughout every type of record and a slave was often designated by some euphemism. Third, the military, especially the Navy, obscured the truth when questioned by Congress [in 1842].

Also, investigation completed, the military continued to rent slaves. Fourth, and most important, slave rentals to the military were almost always based upon 'gentlemen's agreements' which escaped normal legal contractual arrangements for goods and services.

Only when a problem arose did an officer in the field explain the terms of such agreements to hire slaves."

Here's a talk about the u.s. army's use of slaves in minnesota

"Slave owners were not just renting slaves seasonally, but had gone into long term understandings. Owners had no other uses for the slaves, and in some circumstances bought and held slaves in order to gain the highly profitable annual rent money from the military."

"Renting slaves may have had a special attraction to a benevolent master, because physical absence removed the slave from sight of the owner with a conscience pricked by doubts about the peculiar institution.

... Thus, the benefits of hiring out were conscience-saving as well as economic."

2010: "slave hiring was extensive & significant, & connected the importance of the practice to the expansion of slavery & the economy in [frontier towns like] Pensacola. slave 'rentals' represented a viable practice that encouraged a system of slave usage by the military"

should add that though i said "before the civil war" some parts of the military like the us army corps of engineers were renting slaves from slaveowners under multiple-year agreements right up to the emancipation proclamation

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