"How many Black soldiers served for the Confederacy in the War Between the States? Perhaps no one will ever know. Estimates run anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000. However, because the victors - the north - needed to give the world the impression the War was fought over slavery, a concerted scheme was put into motion to suppress the figures by destroying records, thus giving credence to heir 'the war was fought over slavery' mantra. While a large number of government records were distorted or destroyed, thousands of 'other' records in the form of letters and photos remain."
The significant numbers of Southern Unionists strike hard at the myth of a separate "Southern nation".
My point is the war was begin by the south, over slavery. It was won by the north for Union.
Ending slavery was a means to end for the north. Retaining slavery was the end for the south.
Once the south has to offer freedom to slaves, to get them to fight, there was no reason for the rebellion, and the south quickly folded their tents.
The capture of black troops, which occurred more frequently than their murder, led to the breakdown of the prisoner-of-war exchange cartel, which had been a system of returning prisoners rather than imprisoning them. This policy shift, inaugurated by the Confederates, which led to the horrors of Andersonville and Northern prisoner stockades late in the war, injured the South far more than the North, because captured Union soldiers could be otherwise replaced—often by blacks—while the Southern manpower pool was nearing exhaustion. The reason for the breakdown was the Confederate insistence that ex-slaves were not free and equal prisoners. If they had escaped from bondage to join the Union army, they would be returned to it when captured.
In the fall of 1864, Robert E. Lee articulated this policy in an exchange of letters with U. S. Grant. On October 1, Lee wrote grant that with a view of alleviating the sufferings of our soldiers, he proposed an exchange of prisoners to the two armies operating in Virginia, man for man … upon the basis established by the [prior] cartel. Grant immediately inquired about the status of black United States troops. Before further negotiations are had upon the subject I would ask if you propose delivering these men the same as white soldiers? Lee responded that I intended to include all captured soldiers of the United States of whatever nation or color. Deserters from our service and negroes belonging to our citizens are not considered subjects of exchange. Grant would not accept this, and he told Lee that the United States government is bound to secure to all persons received into her armies the rights due to soldiers. This being denied by you in the persons of such men as have escaped from Southern masters induces me to decline making the exchanges you ask. Grant then asked for further clarification from Southern legal officials, and soon Lee made it crystal clear: I have no objection to … exchanging prisoners, man for man, negroes included. Recaptured slaves of Confederate citizens will not be exchanged.
Grant insisted that by becoming Union soldiers, escaped slaves had become persons to be treated equally with all other captured troops. After he had been fully briefed by the Richmond authorities, Lee argued back to Grant, quite to the contrary, that Negro slaves who through compulsion, persuaion, or of their own accord leave their owners and are placed in the military … service of the United States [remain] a species of property. … The capture or abduction of a slave does not impair the right of the owner to such a slave, but that right … attaches to him immediately upon recapture [and] will be restored like other recaptured property to those entitled to them. Lee wrote that he would treat free black Union prisoners just like white men, thus asserting a kind of color blindness. However, as for escaped slaves, the rights of property—the nonpersonhood of black slaves—superseded any consideration of them as Union soldiers. This belief led Lee to employ captured ex-slave Union soldiers in digging trenches around Petersburg, to which Grant responded by putting white Confederate prisoners at the same risk reinforcing his trenches. While arguing that he had not exposed black prisoners to fire, which was not precisely true, Lee withdrew them, without abandoning the proposition that he had every right to use them this way.
In response, Grant then withdrew Confederate prisoners from such dangerous duty, and wrote Lee that
I shall always regret the necessity of retaliating for wrong done our soldiers, but regard it as my duty to protect all persons received into the army of the United States, regardless of color or nationality. … All prisoners of war falling into my hands shall receive the kindest possible treatment … unless I have good authority for believing that any number of our men are being treated otherwise. Then, painful as it may be to me, I shall inflict like treatment on an equal number of Confederate prisoners.
In effect, Lee had conceded that he would not use escaped black Union prisonrs as he used other slaves, but neither would he send them back as prisoners of war: things they had been; things they remained. Because of this impasse, the exchange cartel was never repaired and tens of thousands of prisoners of war, on both sides, mainly white, died of cholera and typhoid fever in hellish prison camps.
—Michael Fellman, The Making of Robert E. Lee (2000), pp. 203-208 http://feministblogs.org/tag/robert-e-lee/
Custis's will was probated on December 7, 1857. Although Robert Lee Randolph, Right Reverend William Meade, and George Washington Peter were named as executors along with Robert E. Lee, the other three men failed to qualify, leaving Lee with the sole responsibility of settling the estate, and with exclusive control over all of Custis's former slaves. Although the will provided for the slaves to be emancipated "in such a manner as to my executors may seem most expedient and proper", Lee found himself in need of funds, and decided to make money by hiring out the slaves to neighboring plantations and eastern Virginia during the five years that the will had granted him control of them. The decision caused dissatisfaction among Custis's slaves, who had been given to understand that they were to be made free as soon as Custis died. In 1859, a few of his slaves decided to leave and fled for the North; an 1859 letter to the New York Tribune records that they were captured a few miles from the Pennsylvania border and returned to Lee, who had them whipped and returned to his Arlington plantation, after which he hired them out in the area surrounding Richmond. The three slaves turned out to be a man named Wesley Norris, his sister Mary, and a cousin of theirs; in 1866, Norris recounted the incident in an interview:
My name is Wesley Norris; I was born a slave on the plantation of George Parke Custis; after the death of Mr. Custis, Gen. Lee, who had been made executor of the estate, assumed control of the slaves, in number about seventy; it was the general impression among the slaves of Mr. Custis that on his death they should be forever free; in fact this statement had been made to them by Mr. C. years before; at his death we were informed by Gen. Lee that by the conditions of the will we must remain slaves for five years; I remained with Gen. Lee for about seventeen months, when my sister Mary, a cousin of ours, and I determined to run away, which we did in the year 1859; we had already reached Westminster, in Maryland, on our way to the North, when we were apprehended and thrown into prison, and Gen. Lee notified of our arrest; we remained in prison fifteen days, when we were sent back to Arlington; we were immediately taken before Gen. Lee, who demanded the reason why we ran away; we frankly told him that we considered ourselves free; he then told us he would teach us a lesson we never would forget; he then ordered us to the barn, where, in his presence, we were tied firmly to posts by a Mr. Gwin, our overseer, who was ordered by Gen. Lee to strip us to the waist and give us fifty lashes each, excepting my sister, who received but twenty; we were accordingly stripped to the skin by the overseer, who, however, had sufficient humanity to decline whipping us; accordingly Dick Williams, a county constable, was called in, who gave us the number of lashes ordered; Gen. Lee, in the meantime, stood by, and frequently enjoined Williams to “lay it on well,” an injunction which he did not fail to heed; not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done. After this my cousin and myself were sent to Hanover. —Wesley Norris, interviewed 1866; reprinted in John W. Blassingame (ed.): Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, and Interviews, and Autobiographies. ISBN 0-8071-0273-3
There are no references in any of Lee's letters to slaves of his own and until the rediscovery of his will in the records of Rockbridge County, Virginia, it was not positively known that he held any servants in his own name. That document, written in 1846, showed that he then owned a Negro woman Nancy and her children, who were at the •White House plantation. He directed that after his death they be "liberated as soon as it can be done to their advantage and that of others" (Rockbridge County Will Books, 1870). http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/People/Robert_E_Lee/FREREL/1/21*.html
REL was a man of the south, with all its quirky mixtures of honor and cruelty. That is neither complement or disparagement. Just fact.
He surmounted victory at Chancellorsville by giving all the credit to Jackson. He surmounted defeat at Gettysburg by taking all the blame to himself. He fought hard and well, but the generous terms written out at the direction of Grant, could have been gained at any time before then, at great savings in money and lives. Lee recognized his responsibility.