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.
We should never put ourselves in the position of defending Democrat history.
It is true that what we would now consider racism was endemic throughout the country. That only makes the birth of the aboltion movement that much more remarkable. It also makes the birth of the Republican Party that much more remarkable, they were definitely swimming against the tide.
And yet the time line is very short. A handful of Christians tired of the mainstream parties and their unwillingness to confront slavery as an issue. They withdrew, and formed a new party, very much a minority party, which ought to have had no chance. And yet with that action, the Whigs imploded, and had no place to go except the openly abolitionist Republican Party.
Still, as others have pointed out, slavery as an issue wasn't worth fighting about for most people, so the people joining the party could not expect to win elections, and yet they did. Lincoln running as an abolitionist ought to have had no chance, but he wound up in office thanks to a flukey series of events that no one could have expected.
Once in office, he was willing to compromise on slavery in order to preserve the union (although he was unwilling to compromise in the western states) and yet he wound up overseeing the complete overthrow of the slave system.
From start to finish, from the decision by a few Christians to form their own party, to the time slavery was abolished, about 10 years. Its amazing, if you think about it. The more you remind people how endemic was racism in those days, the more remarkable it becomes.
Thats our legacy. Democrat legacy is the reverse. They fought all the way to support and preserve slavery, the were the authors of the attempted breakup of the US, they are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of good people who died during that war. They gave birth to the Ku Klux Klan, they gave birth to Jim Crow repression, they are the party of lynchings, and firehoses, church bombings and cross burning, and right up until the present time they are still the party of racial division.
There was never a more evil party.
Thats their legacy. Let them defend it. We should never put ourselves in the position of defending Democrat history. Let them defend it.
I believe another poster has already corrected your assertion that somehow, the Union magically had 300 ironclads at its disposal. As you'll recall, such ships were not even invented until late in the war. The Naval blockade was surely performed by mere wooden cutters, with as few as 5 and as many as 40 guns. It was also far from complete—there were vast portions of the Southern coast unpatrolled by any Union vessel.
The actual issue which the North faced in the recognition of the Confederacy as a nation, was that the CSA Navy and private ships commissioned by the CSA Government had proven to be extremely efficient at disrupting Union commerce by capturing ships at sea, but because they were unable to bring their bounty into a friendly port to sell in Admiralty Court, they often would either parole the ship, or would offload the passengers and scuttle it in the middle of the Atlantic. This activity, by all records, had a fairly devastating effect on the Union's international commerce.
The Union absolutely could not afford to have this activity be granted official recognition, nor to have the CSA be able to financially gain from these activities (which were absolutely acceptable under the norms of Western warfare, and were carried out by the South in the most peaceable of manners!) It was this consideration, and this consideration alone, which led to such a dramatic shift in the Union's message via the diplomatic channels overseas (from a message of them fighting an insurrection—an understandable offense in European law, but not in the American system—to a message of emancipating the slaves.)
I hope this helps clarify the reality of the situation for you.
Regards,
~dt~
go to http://www.civilwar.si.edu/lincoln_first_reading.html
Sorry do not know how to post links, etc. This is from the Smithsonian.
Unfortunately that's a way a lot of wars have started....
And two of them ended slavery on their own, without waiting for the 13th amendment. In Delware the point was almost moot, since there were only a couple of hundred slaves left in the state by war's end.
well well, it did it and I did not even know how.
Isn't 300 ironclads a BIT high of a number? Like by about 298???
The Brits and the French could have made the North's life a LOT harder. Not only via oceanic commerce, but also with a military presence and threat via Canada (The British) and Mexico (the French).
They didn't win the war, hence they didn't get into nationhood.
Big difference.
Homicidal rampage? Now....Brown's forces did commit atrocities in Kansas (though he was piker compared to lincoln and Davis on atrocities) but I've never seen any evidence that he was accused of same at Harpers Ferry.
Speaking of homicide, of course, as an advocate of individual rights, I think slaves had a perfect right to kill their owners to defend their liberty.
The fact that Lincoln was a tyrant and hypocrite doesn't excuse the CSA in the least. Let me also not that the Confederate Constitution did not give members the right to secede. Also, unlike the U.S. Constitution, it gave *national* protection to the right of individuals to own slaves. So much for the CSA's belief in "states rights." BTW, I believe local control trumps states rights.....thus blacks had the right to seize their plantations and run them as they saw fit.
If you cut and paste a URL into the FR "Your reply" box, it should create the hyperlink automatically.
Good job, rose.
New England merchants DID see a lot of their profits sink. The Confederate commerce raiders were deadly in their effectiveness.
There is also a problem of size. By the middle of the war, the Union and Confederate Armies were enormous. The British Army was puny in comparison. The British were afraid for Canada, because the Union had such huge armies it could have pushed up there at will.
Also, by the middle of the war, the Union Armies were very experienced and had good weapons and supplies. The European Armies were not used to fighting this sort of thing. Bismarck and the Prussian General Staff learned a lot from watching the "armed mobs" in America fight. Everyone in Europe did.
Unit for unit, the Europeans were no match for the Union or Confederate Armies after 1862 anyway. And in terms of sheer size, the Union and Confederate Armies, with their million men, dwarfed the armed forces of old Europe. The Civil War was really the first think akin to a total war.
The Confederate Army was considerably larger than all of the forces on both sides of Napoleon's invasion of Russia.
Britain's Army in the 1860s, total, was in the 60,000 range. The Union Army was over a million. Europe would have had the upper hand in no sense here, and the Europeans knew it.
What you say about naval warfare is true. It's also true that the British admiralty wanted no part of a war with America. We can debate the relative merits of things, but they feared those ironclads. This was a quantum leap in naval technology which left everybody scrambling.
As far as counterfactual history, I do think the South could have won the Civil War, in 1861, immediately after First Manassas (Bull Run). The victorious Confederates could have advanced on Washington DC and probably would have taken the city at that point. The Union militia army had melted, and Union regulars were very few.
But the South didn't press that advantage at that instant. It would have taken balls of solid rock, and a different strategic vision to be sure, but had the Confederates surged north and Washington fallen, the Union government would have been in utter chaos. Maryland would have seceded, and Kentucky. Perhaps also Delaware. The whole balance of everything would have changed rather precipitously. In all of that political chaos, the Union would have had to have tried to reconstitute a government somewhere. And at THAT point, Britain and France may very well HAVE intervened, and that would have probably sealed the North's fate.
Which would mean that we would all probably be speaking German because without the USA, Germany would have almost certainly won the First World War.
Agreed.....but that does not change my point. They were not the same.
read later
As was the normal practice in the Western world's practice of war during the time period, as slaves were considered "private property," and were considered as such by the Army, which was forbidden from taking private property without some form of just compensation (something wantonly ignored by the Northern forces).
Or because of the surviving editorials from southern newspapers, including op-eds which opposed this very policy?
Not to mention letters from, for example, the Governor of Georgia; or, from the debates of the Legislature of the same? Of course slaveowners were opposed in general to the policy—They were frightened that the Confederacy would annex their private property in large mass without compensation: something which they already (rightfully so) feared the North would do as well. The fact of the matter, though, was that the policy would allow the slaves to purchase their own emancipation, much in the same way as freedom was promised to slaves (by both sides) who fought in the American Revolution.
The fact of the matter is, the War was closed and the South was defeated before this policy could even begin to have been put into effect, so conjecture on what might have happened had it been enacted is best left in the land of the Woulda's, in my opinion.
Regards,
~dt~
"As you'll recall, such ships were not even invented until late in the war."
As you may recall, the Monitor and Merrimack fought in 1862, early in the war.
By 1864, the blockade was very well established, with monitors, strangling the life out of the South. And the numbers just kept on getting worse.
Yes, the CSN was indeed extremely effective at disrupting Union commerce on the high seas, no question about that. But the United States is a continental power, and its military resources came from manpower, domestic coal and domestic iron. Commerce was good for the economy, but the Union had everything it needed to fight war in superabundance. The Confederate sea raiders damaged the finances of the shipping industry, but it didn't stop, or slow, the means of war from flowing out of Union factories. The Union was not importing its armaments or the raw materials to make them.
The South did not not have the industrial base to be able to fully support its army. It needed foreign trade to get them. That is why the blocade of the South was more damaging to the Southern war effort than the Confederate raiders were to the Northern. Yes, the Southerners cost the Northerners MONEY, but the Northerners could win broke, because they still had guns. The Southerners didn't have the guns and materiel for warfare. To be properly supplied they needed to get it from Europe. The Union blockade, from 1864, was effective, and had ironclads in front of most of the ports that were still Confederate, and the Confederacy couldn't make its own armaments in sufficient numbers to fight and win.
In the end, the Union blockade was more important that the Confederate raiders in determining the outcome of the war. The raiders were very annoying. The blocade was lethal.
You got the sequence exactly backwards. They got nationhood first and lost it later by the defeat in war.
And thats the truth.
Yes, the number 300 is an exaggeration.
42 is the correct number, with 76 laid down.
A couple per port was sufficient to block a port.
And, of course, the Union strategy consisted of taking ports.
"Agreed.....but that does not change my point. They were not the same."
Maybe they weren't the same, but it's a distinction without a difference if you're black and getting screwed by some racist law.
I've known this for a long time, but evidently it was a EUREKA! moment for the professor.
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.