Posted on 02/21/2006 7:59:04 AM PST by stainlessbanner
Relatively few people are aware that during the Civil War, Confederate leaders put forth a proposal to arm slaves to fight against the Union in exchange for their freedom.
In his new book Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2006), UCSC history professor Bruce Levine examines the circumstances that led to this startling and provocative piece of American history. In the process, he sheds new light on a little-known but significant story of slavery, freedom, and race during the Civil War.
The idea for the book came to Levine in the late 1980s when he was teaching at the University of Cincinnati and working on another book about the origins of the Civil War.
"The more I read about this episode, the more I realized how important it was to our understanding of the war; it wasn’t just an interesting little footnote,” said Levine. "After all, how could the war be about slavery if the Confederates were willing to sacrifice slavery in order to win the war? And it turned out that there was a cornucopia of information on that and related subjects available in letters, government documents, and newspaper articles and editorials.”
Levine traveled throughout the South, combing through archives for newspaper accounts of the war, letters sent to Jefferson Davis and other Confederate leaders, diaries of officers and troops, and memoirs by and about former slaves. He spent time exploring the internal documents of the Confederate government, which were captured by the Union army and are now stored at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
Levine found that Confederate leaders had been receiving--and rejecting--letters from various Southerners suggesting that they arm the slaves since the very beginning of the war.
But it was only in November of 1864, after the Confederates were defeated at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and finally Atlanta, that Davis reversed himself and endorsed the proposal to arm the slaves. The result was a fierce public debate in newspapers, drawing rooms, army regiments, and slave quarters throughout the South.
The book shows how the idea was proposed out of desperation and military necessity--the Confederates were badly outnumbered, slaves were escaping and joining the Union armies, and the South was close to defeat and to the loss of slavery. But as Levine points out, "the opposition of slave owners was ferocious--even though they were facing defeat and the end of slavery, they would not face those realities. They would not give up their slaves, even to save the Confederate cause itself."
"Only a tiny handful of slaves responded to the Confederate proposal," Levine added. "They viewed it as an act of desperation and were skeptical of the sincerity of promises of emancipation. The reaction of the slaves generally was 'Why would we fight for the Confederacy; it's not our country? They were very well informed through the grapevine."
Levine noted that the book is designed to emphasize how important the slaves’ actions were during that period of history.
"The story of the Civil War is usually told as a story of two white armies and two white governments," Levine said. "The popular image is of passive, grateful slaves kneeling at the feet of Father Abraham. But in fact, the slaves were very active in shaping the war and its outcome.”
"There are a lot of revelations in this book," Levine added. "The proposals discussed here provided an early glimmering of how the white South would treat blacks for the next century."
Levine is the author, coauthor, or editor of six previous books, including Work and Society (1977), Who Built America? (two volumes, 1990, 1992), The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War (1992), and Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of Civil War (rev. ed. 2005). He has been a professor of history at UCSC since 1997.
The Book, Seeing The Elephant, was compiled using the letters and data from soldiers that fought at Shiloh. Frank and Reeves (Frank was a sociologist and statistician and Reeves the former head historian at Shiloh NMP) asked a question then applied sociological statistical methods to answer the question and if there were enough statements to make the answer statistically significant. Unlike the majority of historians who use one or two statements to justify their hypothesis or beliefs(McPherson and Sword for examples), this book used data (a treasure trove of letters and unpublished military records in the archives at Shiloh NMP)to statistically verify the truth of a statement.
I am happy that Non-sequitur with his superior intelligence and vast knowledge in every aspect of the Civil War can name the correct sequence of months of the year, especially place April before September.
Davis's refusal to promote Cleburne was another blunder by Davis. He was one of the South's best tacticians, probably as good as Stonewall, and he surely would have defended Atlanta better than Hood did. Most likely he would have delayed the capture of the city until after the November election, and McClellan might have been elected. With men like Cleburne in the foreground, and with slavery already in shambles, a separate peace might have occured. Who knows but that a form of reunion might not have afterwards ensured. Of course that would have left the problem of the negro race in North America unsolved and them without the legal status granted them in the 14th Amendment. IAC, contrafactual history tells us once again the differences that can be made by individuals and the decisions they make.
No, I'm not claiming that the Confederate arms situation was that much better in 1865 than in 1863 or 1864. A book by an obscure Confederate colonel, written soon after the war, cites War Dept. figures as noting that the Confederacy had scarcely 5,000 modern arms in reserve. The shortage was such that state militia units (white) had to be armed with obsolete muskets, and troops in the Trans-MS never got properly armed. I doubt the Confederacy could have armed and supplied 200,000 black troops, even assuming that number came forth. And the withdrawal of 200,000 able bodied laborers would have crippled the already shaky Confederate logistics. As I pointed out earlier, there were always practical difficulties involved that made the raising of vast black Confederate units problematical, irrespective of whether black slaves would have fought for the Confederacy in such numbers.
The proposal would have been implemented earlier but for the opposition of one of the Cobbs. (I don't recall off the top of my head which one.) I did a quick Google, it appears that it was Howell Cobb who led the opposition.
Your point, then, is without merit. Lincoln always wanted to end slavery everywhere, if it was up to him. He only had the power to do so unilaterally, though, in the states under rebellion. Of the four slave states that stayed in the Union, two of them (Missouri and Maryland) acted to end slavery on their own in 1864. West Virginia, admitted to the Union as a slave state, moved rapidly to end it. Delaware waited, but only had a couple of hundred slaves left at war's end. So the Union slave states barely needed Lincoln issuing proclamations freeing their slaves.
What he did do, however, was get the House to pass the 13th Amendment (the Senate had passed it, at his urging, months before)). It was on his insistence that the measure was included in the 1864 Republican platform. He promptly signed it and it went to the states. He was murdered 10 weeks later, before enough states had passed it.
And after statehood, slavery really boomed in Texas. The 1850 census counted 58,161 slaves, the 1860 186,566. They were increasing as a percentage of population, too, from 10% at independence to 30% in 1860.
In terms of army commanders there were few who were worse than Hood. He was an excellent division commander and only a fair corps commander.
Besides the move to arm slaves came fairly late.
But Cleburne was advocating it in a written communication to Joe Johnston late in 1863, and got slapped down for it.
Talk is cheap, Stainless. When it came to crunch time and the confederate congress actually permitted black combat troops the congress choked and couldn't bring itself to promise freedom in return for service. Their true colors and real concerns came shining through, independence was not worth emancipation.
And your point is?
In fact, it is curious that the legislation did not demand (ie. conscript) all able-bodied slave men 18+ for military duty.
While it is true that the various confederate conscription laws kept expanding the age range that men could be drafted I believe that they kept the exemption for men owning more than a certain number of slaves to the very end.
Also, by this time in the war, most accepted the fact win or lose, slaves would be freed.
I would be very interested in hearing your source for that claim considering emancipation was still a large bone of contention at the Hampton Roads Peace Conference. But that statement still begs the question, if most southerners accepted that slaves would be freed then why couldn't they bring themselves to free them in return for service as a combat soldier in the army?
That is true of every armed conflict that has ever been and will be.
And in his last speech he noted with pride that among the first states to ratify the amendment was his own state of Illinois.
Not legally, and mostly in the minds of the southron supporters. Of all the southern blacks associated with the confederate army I doubt that more than a fraction of one percent served in combat roles.
So I am supposed to know what you meant and not go on what you all said? He claimed there were black regiments, not integrated ones. If he meant integrated ones then virtually every confederate regiment was integrated because virtually every one had blacks, free and slave, along to cook and clean and perform manual labor and take care of the livestock and what have you.
And another question. If the confederate ranks were as integrated as you claim in terms of combat soldiers, then why is it that once the confederate congress finally got around to authorizing black combat troops in March 1865 they were formed into all black units? Why didn't they recruit them and send them to existing regiments to fill out the ranks?
P.S. My question again, why not free ALL slaves?
They were "conscripted" because their owners would object. Also, especially by the end of the war, it was admitted by all they wouldn't fight unless they volunteered (after their owners freed them voluntarily of course).
New York, for example, abolished slavery when it was in the 20 percent range. Once the slave population gets much higher than 20 percent peaceful abolition is almost impossible. Please note that abolition was very much a live issue in Missouri and Maryland because the slave population was falling down to these percentages. The reason was that many owners were selling their slaves "down the river."
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