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.
Huh? Are you claiming that a "black code" was enforced in Oregon until "a few years back." This is quite remarkable. Please provide a citatation to back up this strartling claim.
BTW, black codes were not simple segregation, they included bans on blacks owning property, blacks owning guns, and allowed employers to become "guardians" of their children.
Which, of course, occurred after the North made a gigantic fuss over the South's doctrine of "nullification," which was subsequently overturned by an increase in Federal power.
If it wasn't the right thing to do for the South to override Federal legislation, why was it the right thing to do for the North?
Legal segregation and the black codes were not the same thing.
Not, it's not... Just kept swept under the rug because this does not go well with the "reason" the Civil War was fought...
"But think of this way: If one subtracts the issue of slavery as the cause for the "irrepressible conflict," what ,then, forced the country to enter into its bloodiest conflict?"
The correct question would be "what anticipated consequence motivated Lincoln to send the Navy to Charleston in April of 1861?"
Northern take over of the federal government. Look at the battle in Kansas. The South simply didn't have enough whites to colonize the West. They had to bring their labor system with them. Nothing kept slavery from being introduced into Iowa except the opposition of the more numerous freesoilers.
The only way to mauntain the balance in the Senate was to break up Texas into five states, and Texans didn't want that.
Heh....I would have supported the right of the South to secede but I have no illusions about the pro-slavery nature of the CSA. I would have also supported John Brown's rebellion.
I always knew it wasn't a war over slavery. State's rights are an important issue. I think a problem we have today is state's cowering before the federal government and the feds not owning up to what is their job.
Has anyone told the NAACP or Al Sharpton yet?
On a somewhat related topic, didn't the City of Boston just recently repeal a law banning Indians from entering the city boundaries?
The North is nowhere near "innocent" on the terms of eglitarianism between the races, when viewed from modern eyes. In fact, I would propose that NO nation is! The times prior to the "civil rights" era were entirely different from today, and cannot possibly be qualified in a way which would look "appropriate" to our indoctrinated-with-political-correctness eyes.
It would help matters greatly if people would be able to step out of their modern prejudices and view history from within its proper context—namely, the context from which it occurred!
Just my two cents. Deo vindice!
~dt~
Pres. Lincoln in the Emancipation Proclamation, only freed the slaves in Confederate States. Slaves remaining in northern controlled states were not free. New Orleans may have been one that was controlled by the north, hence their slaves were not free. And the north was not bound by the Proclamation.
Our history states that free Blacks and some Cherokee Indian tribes owned slaves.
While I think you're fairly accurate on your portrayal of the economic implications of slavery versus immigration, I still think you'd see factories in roughly the same places they were built historically—Recall that there was no such thing as "air conditioning," and that summertime diseases such as cholera were fairly prevalent in the South, and it seems clear to me that manufacturing would still need a more moderate climate than the South offered.
Of course, the invention of the air conditioner changed everything... :)
Untrue, for lots of reasons. First, European states could have raided ocean going federal commerce and caused huge problems for the north. And those battles were fought more or less exclusively by wooden ships.
Then there's obviously Canada as a staging area to pressure the North, or Mexico.
And the problem with coming into Southern Ports was that they were blocked by about 300 Union ironclads.
There weren't 300 ironclads until very late in the war. There were none through 1861. A European fleet could have forced its way into any southern harbor it chose.
Plus, the vast majority of the union fleet, particularly the coastal blockade fleet, was made up of wooden ships. Ironclads were more common on the rivers because ironclads were crappy on the high seas.
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.
By what date do you consider every southern port to have been blockaded effectively by union ironclads? Because prior to that, wooden ships would have been very effectively, as demonstrated (in part) by the Union Navy's continued use of them throughout the war.
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.
What about before Gettysburg and Vicksburg -- more than two years? European intervention then could have been decisive because the blockade on the Atlantic coast was not a solid wall of iron, and union merchant shipping could have gotten hammered. Would the North really have kept fighting if 1) the south freed its slaves, 2) New England merchants were seeing their ships and profits sink, and 3) the war still looked like it a lot more fighting ahead?
"Legal segregation and the black codes were not the same thing."
Both were unconstitutional under the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments and the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1873.
I appreciate your support for the South's right to proper secession—but to suggest (and I'm not saying that you made that suggestion) that the General Government's unsatiable desire to subvert the State governments was somehow a pure-hearted desire to "free the slaves" is not supported by the slightest shred of truth, until later on in the conflict when the Union determined it needed to change the focus of its propaganda to prevent foreign nations from recognizing the Confederacy, which would have resulted in opening numerous ports to the CSA's prizes won on the high seas.
(I don't mean to pick nits, but Brown's rebellion was, by all of the accounts I've seen, not much more than a homicidal rampage. I don't think anything good could possibly come out of any such events, as good as the intentions might have been.)
Regards,
~dt~
Then the states that issued Declarations of Causes for secession probably shouldn't have mentioned slavery over and over again (with maybe a sidelong glance at tariffs, like Georgia, or Mexican bandits, like Texas) as the reason for leaving the Union. It's not like the north had a hard time convincing "outside parties" that the south was fighting to preserve slavery.
"After all, how could the war be about slavery if the Confederates were willing to sacrifice slavery in order to win the war?"Perhaps because, during one of Lee's forays into the north, his Army of Northern Virginia rounded up free black folks and sent them southward into slavery? Or because of the surviving editorials from southern newspapers, including op-eds which opposed this very policy? Or because references exist in the Ordinances of Secession?
Good one, PR, but the question is nearly moot in that South Carolina seceded in January, 1861. But yes, Lincoln was a clever man and he knew well what would happen if he tried to resupply Fort Sumter. But the spark for war certainly would have occurred somehow; if not in Charleston, then somewhere else.
Thanks for your very cogent post!
First of al, as you well know, the Emancipation Proclamation did not, in fact, free a single slave. Lincoln intended it that way.
Second, he is famously quoted as saying that if he could hold the Union together without freeing a single slave, by freeing some slaves, or by freeing all the slaves he would have done so. In fact, in his first inaugural address (before the Civil War began) Lincoln said he would not interfere with slavery in states where it existed.
For many who fought for the South, the war was about protecting their home from an invading army. Many Southerners were infuriated with high tariffs that benefited Northern businesses but placed a burden on Southerners who bought foreign goods. These tariffs also were used to fund federal projects primarily in the North.
In addition, black Southerners served in the Civil War as well, on the side of the South. Were these people fighting to defend an institution that amounted to genocide of their race? Or were there other reasons for this phenomenon?
Lincoln ran roughshod over the Consitution, started the first illegal income tax, and basically destroyed the founding concepts of this Union of States. He had a Congressman arrested for criticizing him.
Slavery was on the way out and had Lincoln and the Republicans left the institution alone it would have died a natural, peaceful death. While many in the South, notably Davis, wanted to educate tehm, Lincoln and the Radicals set them free with no education so they could use them (uneducated, ignorant people being much easier to manipulate) -- the exact same racist trick that the liberal Democrats use today, and in both cases, I believe they knew exactly what they were doing.
As for secession itself, the South was kept in the union by force. Jefferson Davis said, “A question settled by violence, or in disregard of law, must remain unsettled forever.” America is a constitutional republic. Our government is based not on the rule of a king, a president, a parliament or a legislature, but is based on a document created over 200 years ago. Our government is based on the rule of law, and a war cannot, and should not, “settle” a question of legality.
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.