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.
"Virtually no one recognized them. Had that happened, it would have turned out differently."
I doubt it would have turned out any differently at all.
The problem for the South was that to get any help, it would have to come into Southern ports.
And the problem with coming into Southern Ports was that they were blocked by about 300 Union ironclads. Ironclads were invincible against wooden ships. They chewed them up and spit them out like garbage. Wooden ships charging ironclads was like the Polish cavalry charging the German panzers: 100% certitude of defeat, absolutely no prospect whatsoever of victory.
There was one other navy in the world that had ironclads in the 1860s: the Confederate States Navy. They didn't have enough to break the Union blocade, or even to blunt it. The French and British navies had no ironclads, and certainly none they could get across the Atlantic to America.
So, had England and France both joined the war on the Confederate side, what would have happened? They would have put supplies and their armies onto rickety wooden boats and sailed them to America, where they would have been systematically blown out of the water at the mouths of Southern ports by Union Ironclads. The British Navy had nothing that could penetrate the hull of an ironclad. British wooden ships would have gone flaming to the bottom, by the hundreds, had they even attempted it, and the British Army would have gone to the bottom with them.
Adding more wooden ships, like the French Navy, would have been like adding more Polish cavalry to the charge agains the Panzers. No matter how many HMS Victories you send at USS Monitor and her 300 sisters, you lose all of the HMS Victories, and the Union loses no USS Monitors.
Net result: No British or French troops get ashore, and Grant still takes Richmond while Sherman burns Georgia. Meanwhile, Britannia doesn't rule the waves anymore, because her wooden ships have been pounded to driftwood by the American Monitors.
The British Admiralty knew full well, excruciatingly well, that they had nothing that could get past the Union ironclads. So did the French admirals. That's why the Admiralties of both countries opposed entering the war.
Had Britain and France entered on the side of the South, the outcome would have been the same, except that there would have been a lot of British and French ships sent to the bottom off of Southern ports too.
No matter how many horses you add to the charge, you can't penetrate the armor of a panzer with a lance.
No matter how many wooden ships of the line you add to the British battle line, smoothbore cannons could not penetrate the iron armor of the ironclad, but the ironclad's rifled guns would tear the wooden ships to pieces at the waterline, one after the other.
Also, the British sail of the line couldn't even get away if there was a bad wind. A monitor could outrun it.
So, the British and French could have stood off at sea, in deep water where the US Navy monitors dared not go. And at sea the British and French could do...precisely NOTHING to change the outcome of the war ashore.
After Gettysburg and Vicksburg, and the election of 1864, the South was doomed, and no collection of European allies could have changed the result, because they couldn't get past the Union ironclads.
I agree with you but, unfortunately, your counterfactual is totally implausible thus it is hard to take it seriously. If I play counterfactuals, I prefer ones that *could* have happened. The one your offer was pure fantasy in 1861.
Actually when I was in high school (class of '64) and earlier, it was called "The War Between the States." I think Civil War has only recently gained the upper hand.
ML/NJ
I am a Southerner, born in Old Hickory, Tenn., live in Ga. now.
The war was 1st and primarily about States Rights., and something that is not paid much attention to is Pres. Lincoln giving freedom to the slaves of the south, in his great speech. NOTE: he never gave freedom to the slaves of the north and other parts of the country!
Only one minor correction: The Confederacy was formed to preserve and 'extend' slavery. The Southern states wanted slavery to be acceptable practice in the new territories. The North was against this in general.
The problem for the South, the mostly agrarian section of the country, was that they were trying to defend and extend a dying institution at the beginning of the Industrial Age, and went to war with that portion of the country that was perfectly suited to embrace industrialization. Too much bombast when cooler heads should have prevaled.
There are more interesting (and more plausible) counterfactuals regarding slavery. For example, what if the Constitution (and its Fugitive slave clause) had never been ratified. What if Jefferson had insisted that the slavery be banned from the Louisiana Purchase (as he did with the Northwest Ordinance)? What if Texas had been been required to abolish slavery once it came in as a state?
Excuse me?!? You may want to do a little research into the northern Black Codes preceding the War of Southern Independence. Also note some of those northern Black Codes were not done away with immediately following the war. Some states in the north went as far as to ban blacks from even living in their states.
Yeah! I'm on page 432, just after the fall of Vicksburg and into Bragg and Longstreet's 'recommendations' on how to win the war.
While I enjoy Shelby Foote, I have a warm spot in my heart for his predecessor; Bruce Catton.
If Pat Cleburne had lived to assume higher command, then this proposal might have gone further.
Not immediately....but they were swept away by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
Please add me to Military History (MilHist)ping list.
"You're right, There would have been a War Between the States,Since 60% of the exports came from the South,thus taxes,most of the agriculture,and DC was screwing the South out of the Revenue,there would have still been War.Taxation Without Representation comes to mind."
I doubt it.
Without slavery, the South would have gotten as many immigrants as the North did (historically, immigrants went almost entirely into the North, because unskilled labor couldn't compete with FREE labor in the South), and there would have been the same economic forces driving Southern industrialization as the North. Free labor made Southern agricultural concerns extremely profitable...for their owners...but it held back the economic development of the whole region, forcing the South to import all of its manufactured goods. Without slavery, the factories would have been built in the South, as in the North, and immigration patterns would have been more even. Indeed, there probably would have been a lot more immigration into the temperate upper South than into the frigid upper Midwest.
But slavery polluted the pool. The immigrants went north, and the northern capital went into factories...which then wanted tarriffs to protect them. Southerners COULDN'T make anything, because skilled labor didn't go there, and capital there was all invested in slave agriculture.
Slavery set the South back by a century. The Civil War set it back by another century.
Without slavery, the South would have done in the 19th Century and early 20th Century, especially, what it is doing today: matching the North in industry and factory production. Slavery held the South back, and made the South dependent on importing manufactured goods. Without slavery, Southerners would have been making these goods too, and there wouldn't have been a tarriff issue.
The tarriff issue was caused by the warping of the economy by slavery. Slavery was utterly pernicious, it was America's birth defect. Thank England for it.
The South claimed that 'States Rights' was their reason for seceding. Well, the 'State Right' foremost in their mind was the preservation and extension of Slavery into the new territories. It's all semantics, folks.
The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments swept all of that aside, that is until the Supreme Court reinstated legal segregation with Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.
Done....welcome to the MilHist ping list, FReeper bcsco.
Stockholm syndrome. They were probably too terrified to do otherwise.
Had Fightin' Joe not received a severe knock on the head, which scrambled his wits for a bit, he would be known as a great general. After he recovered, (and was demoted) he was of noteworthy service to the Union.
The hooker etymology is composed of base canards. Has absolutely nothing to do with Fightin' Joe. Hookers are called "hookers," because they would "hook" elbows with prospective clients as they walked by.
The more one learns about Wesley Clark, the better Fightin' Joe Hooker looks. Just as the more one learns about Bill Clinton, the better Warren G. Harding appears in history.
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