Posted on 07/10/2011 1:17:20 PM PDT by Colonel Kangaroo
On Thursday, July 14, at 10 a.m.. the Georgia Historical Society will be conducting a dedication service to unveil a marker commemorating Confederate Gen. Patrick R. Cleburne’s proposal to arm slaves in exchange for their freedom.
Cleburne’s plan was to provide manpower for the South to face the ever-increasing Federal Army which was beginning to recruit black soldiers and which continued to swell its ranks with immigrants, particularly from Germany and other parts of Europe.
It was becoming increasingly clear to Southern officers during the winter of 1863-64 that the South was fast running out of men to continue the war. After much thought and discussion among several like-minded junior officers, Cleburne wrote out his proposal while the Confederate Army of Tennessee remained in camps in and around Dalton. On Jan. 2, 1864, Cleburne presented it to Commanding Gen. Joseph E. Johnston and the Division and Corps Commanders of the Army of Tennessee during a meeting at Johnston’s headquarters, the Cook-Huff House at 314 N. Selvidge St.
This marker, along with Dalton’s key role in African-American Civil War history, provides tremendous irony. While the Confederate High Command in Richmond and in Dalton dismissed the proposal as outrageous, in 1864 U.S. armies were beginning to recruit and deploy black troops in mass. By the spring of 1864, Dalton had fallen into federal hands and, during the summer of 1864, many runaway slaves from Northwest Georgia found their way into Chattanooga to join the ranks of the 14th and 44th United States Colored Infantry.
Had Cleburne’s proposal been taken seriously and adopted in January 1864, it is possible that some of these men could have served for the South in exchange for their freedom. Instead, they fought for liberty on the side of the North for the liberation of all people, not solely for their personal freedom.
In August and October 1864, these two black regiments saw action in Dalton in two separate events, the only fighting in Georgia during the Civil War in which African-American troops were engaged. By war’s end, more than 200,000 African-Americans enlisted for the North.
Before the year was out, Gen. Johnston, who had commanded the Confederate forces in Dalton and who had dismissed the proposal, would be dismissed from command; Gen. Cleburne along with many of the persons who signed it, would be killed in combat; Gen. William Henry Talbot (W.H.T.) “Shot Pouch” Walker, who was the chief opponent of the proposal, along with many others who opposed it, would also be killed in combat, and a year later, and President Jefferson Davis, who was ultimately responsible for dismissing the proposal to free those in captivity in exchange for their Confederate service, was himself made captive (jailed) for two years for his Confederate service.
Ironically, the South eventually passed a bill to arm the slaves. In February 1865, Davis appointed Robert E. Lee as Commander of all Confederate Armies, not just those in Virginia, and Lee’s first act was to recommend Cleburne’s proposal to arm slaves in exchange for their freedom.
In March 1865, just weeks before the end of the War, the Confederate Congress passed legislation approving the use of slaves in the armies, but the bill did not promise freedom in exchange for service as had been recommended by Cleburne and Lee. While some have estimated the number of blacks who served in the Confederacy at 32,000, (a figure derived from post-war pension applications which likely included applications for servants and laborers as very few black Confederates were used in combat roles), it is clear that the decision to arm the slaves for the South came too little and too late and it failed to yield any measurable results for the Confederacy.
This article is part of a series of stories about Dalton and life in Dalton during the Civil War. The stories run on Sunday and are provided by the Dalton-Whitfield Civil War 150th Anniversary Committee. To find out more about the committee go to www.dalton 150th.com. If you have material that you would like to contribute for a future article contact Robert Jenkins at 706-259-4626 or robert.jenkins@robertdjenkins.com
But back to the topic at hand. Pat Cleburne wanted to emancipate slaves in exchange for military service. Do you think that was a good idea or bad? Do you think the slaves should have remained in captivity??
Yes the democrat controlled public school system has rewritten the facts, and your seem to have gone to school after they were rewritten. The north didn’t have slaves when the south succeeded from the union.
Northerners ran the underground railroad to hide the slaves from the southern bounty hunters. Southern bounty hunters came up here and stole free blacks and took them from their families in chains at gun point and stole them away to the south.
Strategically speaking, he had a good idea, but a poor application.
The only use for “questionable” troops is in the rear area, not in the front lines. However, because there is such a need for rear area personnel, they can displace more reliable rear area troops who can then go to the front lines. (Even the US did this in WWII).
Likewise, his pitch was wrong. Instead of speaking to the slaves, “fight with us and you will be freed”, it should have been directed at the slaveholders, “we will lease your slaves for our use, and their wages will buy manumission from you”. This is a more traditional technique for slaves to buy their freedom, going back to even the Roman Empire.
The appeal of this approach is that slaveholders had a substantial investment in an adult male slave, around $1000 each (comparable to a million dollars today). The government would have had to essentially seize their assets, then “turn around and give them away”. Not a fair deal at all.
Instead, the government would still take the slaves, but would pay the slaveholder their military wages, until their purchase price.
Slave *rental* in the South at the start of the war was about $30 a month, whereas the pay of a white private was only $11 a month, later going up to $18 a month. Properly speaking, was the government to take male slaves for this purpose, it would have to remit to their slave owner an amount closer to $30.
Thus the bottom line would be that slaves would “only” work for the South for about 2-1/2 years before earning their freedom. Slave owners would get their money back for the eminent domain. And there would be a lot more white troops sent to the front.
You didn’t answer DesertRhino’s question. Perhaps if you did you could dispel some of that distorted history you claim.
True, as the generally accepted dividing line between North and South was precisely the presence or absence of the Peculiar Institution.
However, four southern border states stayed in the Union (MO, KY MD and DE) and of course WV split off from VA during the course of the war. So there were indeed Union, if not Northern, slaves in 1860 and for the entire course of the war.
In fact, the last slaves to be legally freed were in Union states, specifically in KY (about 75,000 if I remember correctly) and a couple hundred in DE. They were freed when the 13th Amendment went into effect in December, 1865.
All other slaves in the USA had previously been legally freed either by state action or by the Emancipation Proclamation.
Davis should have listened to Cleburne in 1862. Instead they marginalized one of the best commanders in the war. Dumb. Made it easier for the Union to win in the West
Didn't the Soviet Union send it's most questionable troops to the front lines?
> “North didn’t have slavery in 1860. Thats a southern fiction.” [DesertRhino]
> True, as the generally accepted dividing line between North and South was precisely the presence or absence of the Peculiar Institution. [Sherman Logan]
In the post that I’m about to address to DesertRhino (which I wrote before reading yours), I cited about the same facts that you did. I’d say false rather than true, though. In a Civil War context ‘North’ means the states that remained in the Union — north of the Confederacy, not north of the Mason-Dixon Line. It’s not 1860 but the Civil War years that are most relevant.
The border states, which were north of the Confederacy, as well as some particular Union-occupied parts of the South continued to have slavery not only at the beginning of the Civil War but even after the Emancipation Proclamation. When people say the “North” had slavery, that’s usually what they mean. That’s not a fiction.
> “North didn’t have slavery in 1860. Thats a southern fiction.”
“North” in a Civil War context means the Union, and 1860 isn’t the year to make a judgment about that. The Union did allow slavery at the start of the Civil War. Slavery had never been profitable in the more northern part of the country, but there were Union border states — part of the United States and not the Confederacy — where slavery was legal at the beginning of the Civil War: Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. The later Emancipation Proclamation didn’t apply to them either, and was limited to slaves in the rebelling states.
Also it left in slavery any slaves “in the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia” and some parts of Lousiana controlled by federal troops, including the City of New Orleans (”the Parishes of St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James Ascension, Assumption, Terrebonne, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the City of New Orleans”). Slaves were not freed in the Union (”North”) until later. That’s no fiction.
My reply was with regard to 1860.
In 1860 the border states were indeed usually counted as part of the South. Major efforts were made by locals and the CSA to bring each of them in. The CSA claimed both MO and KY as part of their nation.
I generally agree with you on the facts, but am unclear as to why you think this is particularly relevant. All the Union slave states except KY and DE voluntarily ended slavery, without compensation, by state action before the war ended.
The Emancipation Proclamation did not effectively end slavery in much of the South until the CSA surrendered. IOW, slavery ended, in a practical if not perhaps legal sense, earlier in most Union slave states than in much of the South.
The slaves you reference in WV and LA were also freed by state action before the end of the war and the effective application of the Emancipation Proclamation to much of the CSA’s territory.
“The north didn’t have slaves when the south succeeded from the union.”
You might want to read a little history and get the facts. How about you list each Union State and the date they each ended slavery. Go ahead. Educate yourself a little.
The next thing you’ll do is try to tell us Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves.
“North didn’t have slavery in 1860. Thats a southern fiction.”
You obviously haven’t paid attention to these threads, much less know anything about history.
“Thats a southern fiction.”
P.S. Just what Hell is a “southern fiction”? Can you possibly even describe that term?
“WE know the answer. They would lose their property,, after all, they bought those slaves fair and square.”
You got one right. That is correct. It had nothing to do with freeing of slaves and had everything to do with the slave owners not getting compensated for what they thought of as money spent.
> “My reply was with regard to 1860.”
But that’s not the relevant year. The title of this thread is “Cleburne’s proposal to arm, free slaves (for the Confederacy)” — it’s about slavery during the Civil War.
In that context it’s not a southern fiction that slavery still existed in the “North” (in the Union, north of the Confederacy), and continued to exist after the Emancipation Proclamation. Not in most states north of the Confederacy, of course, but in some. The point is that the Northern side in the Civil War did not not completely abolish slavery in all the territory that it controlled, even with the Emancipation Proclamation.
> “South Carolina doesn’t agree with you [CodeToad]. From their declaration of causes of secession...” [quotation that mentions slavery]
In an earlier post in another thread I mentioned myself that some southern states had made specific references to slavery in documents related to their secession, and said that I thought slavery was a root cause of secession. This does not mean, of course, that the war was not also about states’ rights, or that the average Confederate soldier was fighting to protect slavery. Also it’s important to note that at the beginning of the war Lincoln’s stated aim was to preserve the Union, and not to free the slaves. Quotation and my response in another thread:
> “Recent efforts to clarify the matter through research have led me to the unwanted conclusion, however, that it was very much fought over slavery...the war was about slavery, plain and simple...” [quotation from someone in the other thread]
I’m a Southerner myself, and would agree with you in not denying that slavery was a root cause of the Civil War (by deepening sectional divisions between the northern and southern states). It was an important reason why the southern states chose to assert their states’ rights and to try to win their independence (after Lincoln was elected without winning a single southern state). In some instances southern states made specific references to slavery in documents related to their secession. If you look at Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, though, you’ll see that his primary goal in confronting secession was to preserve the Union and not to end slavery.
There’s a major difference between slavery being a root cause of the war — perhaps the root cause — and people fighting to defend or end slavery. I don’t believe that the average Confederate soldier was undergoing all that hardship and risking his life to defend slavery. He was fighting for his state’s independence and to protect his home and loved ones — along with a host of other motives that would vary from individual to individual. It wasn’t a simple “black-white” matter, either in the racial sense or in the sense of reducing many complex factors to one simple division.
Actually, New Jersey did have slavery, a grand total of 18 in 1860, all old retainers.
The key legal enabler for slavery was for the owner to be immunized from the normal rules of assault and battery when he injured his slaves. When that legal immunity went away in the northern states, slavery was practically dead.
The US had previously given freedom to slaves in return for military service. As many as 1/3rd of the soldiers of the continental army were slaves performing militia service serving in place of their owners (often their fathers). After the revolution, some southern states went back on their word. Others kept their word, but ruled that the freed slaves would have to leave their state, to include leaving their families.
I recommend that persons with more than a passing interest in this topic look at the entire document “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union” from which your quotation is derived. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp
Few persons nowadays would try to justify slavery itself. I believe it was undeniably an evil institution. A considerable number of Southerners from Thomas Jefferson on have agreed that it was. The legal justification for secession, though — if not of the prudence of attempting it — was considerably stronger.
The point this document makes is that slavery was legal, explicitly recognized by the Constitution, and when some Northern states defied demands that fugitive slaves be returned, they were breaking the pact under which the Union had been formed. Therefore South Carolina and other slaveholding states were no longer obliged to remain a part of that Union.
Of course, most of us nowadays would consider the forcible return of an escaped slave (who, in some instances, had made a long and arduous journey to reach what he hoped would be freedom) a cruel act, downright evil. At that time, though, that’s what the fourth Article of the Constitution required (”No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”)
Soviet practice equipped East German infantry and tank divisions with sappers/engineers with mine clearing equipment, while Soviet infantry and tank divisions had pioneer/engineers with bridging equipment.
Our conclusion was that East German units would hit the inter-border first, and the second or third echelon would be Soviet units, ready to use their bridging equipment to cross the Main, Kinzig, and Rhine rivers.
Hell for the Soviets would be for their combat divisions to have West Germans in front of them and East German units behind them.
My favorite children’s book is “The Matchlock Gun” in which the father is off performing militia service, and his son has to shoot his grandfather’s matchlock gun to defend his mother from Indian raiders. It takes place in NY, and the slaves there were issued guns to help protect the settlement in the absence of the militia.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.