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.
slaves were considered "private property,"...and the people seized were not slaves, or escaped slaves. Just treated as if they were by the ANV.
The fact of the matter, though, was that the policy would allow the slaves to purchase their own emancipation...The fact of the matter, though, is that there was no such policy, it was entirely up to the slaveowner, and while not unheard of, was rare. Frederick Douglass escaped to freedom, and only later paid the $600 to purchase his freedom. $600 was a staggering sum for most people in the middle of the 19th century.
I would propose that the presence of a lawfully-organized Civil government implied the existence of a nation, yet it was a nation which did not receive full recognition by foreign nations, which would have elevated it to equal status in the Law of Nations.
Aside from that, though, your proposition is absolutely, 100% true, as the South was fighting a war for its independence, and lost. As a result, we remain mere vassals of the Federal power, subject to its sovereignty in no less manner than the serfs of old. I'd hardly hold that up as a shining example of American governance, but I'll gladly admit the reality of the situation.
Regards,
~dt~
Only in Jeff Davis' opium dreams. They were never close, even when the south offered to recognize France's puppet state in Mexico. The most they ever did was to recognize the Confederacy as a belligerent in a war, which meant they could sell them stuff. But it also meant that they would respect the Union blockade.
Here's a London Times editorial from Nov. 1860: "Can any sane man believe that England and France will consent, as is now suggested, to stultify the policy of half a century for the sake of an extended cotton trade, and to purchase the favors of Charleston and Milledgeville by recognizing what has been called the isothermal law, which impels African labor toward the tropics on the other side of the Atlantic?"
Here's another, from January 1861: ".. .we cannot disguise from ourselves that, apart from all political complications, there is a right and a wrong in this question, and that the right belongs, with all its advantages, to the States of the North."
Then the south, already aware that slavery presents a problem to them in diplomatic circles (but sure cotton will supercede any moral scruples), sends as their envoy to Britain William Yancey, such a slavery enthusiast that he'd noisily advocated reopening the African slave trade, a fact that he tried to deny when he met with the British.
But the Brits had plenty of cotton stockpiled, and the production in India and Egypt was rising. The United States also exported to Europe, sending grain, and that would have been threatened by recognition.
The biggest reason that Britain would recognized the south would have been to divide a rising rival on the world scene, but in the end that wasn't enough to convince them to risk it.
add me to your MilHist ping list too, please
never recognized.
That's the truth too.
"Relatively few people are aware that during the Civil War, Confederate l
eaders put forth a proposal to arm slaves to fight against the Union in
exchange for their freedom."
Yeah, because most schools do a crappy job teaching history.
My exhibit A is this excerpt from historian David McCullogh's
speech printed in "Imprimis"
Our Failure, Our Duty
We are raising a generation of young Americans who are by-and-large
historically illiterate. And it’s not their fault. There have been
innumerable studies, and there’s no denying it. I’ve experienced it
myself again and again. I had a young woman come up to me after a talk
one morning at the University of Missouri to tell me that she was glad
she came to hear me speak, and I said I was pleased she had shown up.
She said, “Yes, I’m very pleased, because until now I never understood
that all of the 13 colonies – the original 13 colonies – were on the
east coast.” Now you hear that and you think: What in the world have
we done? How could this young lady, this wonderful young American,
become a student at a fine university and not know that? I taught a
seminar at Dartmouth of seniors majoring in history, honor students,
25 of them. The first morning we sat down and I said, “How many of you
know who George Marshall was?” Not one. There was a long silence and
finally one young man asked, “Did he have, maybe, something to
do with the Marshall Plan?” And I said yes, he certainly did, and that’s
a good place to begin talking about George Marshall.
source:
http://www.hillsdale.edu/imprimis/2005/April/
Slavery set the South back by a century. The Civil War set it back by another century.
You're saying the South is 200 years behind the North.?
Pure Opinion.Though most I know can survive without a Grocery Store if need be.Fact is all the slaves that were brought to this country were on ships flying the American Flag or foreign flags not Southern Flags.Slavery was on its way out,and one more thing if you were to read interviews that were done with slaves by reporters at the turn of the century (archieved) you could get an insight as to what they thought.Interesting reads.
Sorry, I was referring to his actions in Kansas—and in the horror of servile insurrection in general. A look at how countries in the Carribean have ended up as a result of their servile insurrections is a clear enough indicator to me that such events don't generally end happily.
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.
Even if their act of murder robs their supposed owner of his life? I think that's a rather extreme position—wouldn't you?
While I won't begin to claim that slavery was an entirely pleasant institution, I think the fact that Southern slaveowning men who went off to war left their families (wives and children) in the care of their slaves speaks volumes to the reality of the intricate relationships which existed on the Southern plantation.
Let me also not that the Confederate Constitution did not give members the right to secede.
And the Members who ratified that Constitution interpreted it the same way which they interpreted the Constitution of 1787—They were withholding their absolute right of Secession, and would use it again if necessary. Towards the close of the War, the State of Georgia was coming close to executing that very same action—withdrawing themselves from the Confederacy.
Also, unlike the U.S. Constitution, it gave *national* protection to the right of individuals to own slaves.
Ah, but you forget that it explicitly outlawed the Slave trade with foreign nations (Sec 9.1-2), something which even the Federal constitution didn't do. And, if you'll recall the design of American governance, it did not "give national protection to the right of individuals to own slaves," but rather it forbade the General Government from legislating to that effect (Sec 9.4). While the difference between those two statements may not be obvious at first, I think you'll find that they do serve vastly different philosophies, both of which in contrast illustrate the actual grievances which led to the Civil War.
BTW, I believe local control trumps states rights.....thus blacks had the right to seize their plantations and run them as they saw fit.
Can local control trump states rights, if local governments are the creation of the States of which they're a member? That's the distinct difference between the State->Federal relationship and the Citizen->State relationship, wouldn't you agree?
(And, to continue picking nits, you seem to be clearly advocating the right of one class of people to steal property from another class, possibly with the loss of the latter's life. Wouldn't it be much more just for these people to act within their lawful State legislatures to bring about their emancipation?)
Regards,
~dt~
Gee, there's a real shocker, eh. LOL
While I've seen quite a few references to wooden ships counterfitted with iron plates (essentially just furnace plates hung off the side of the ship), I'm not aware that there were large numbers of "monitors" in the blockade. But, that point aside,
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.
And if it weren't for massive immigration (which provided cheap near-slave labor), or for the North recruiting for their Army in European countries (which provided for large numbers of merceneries with which they scoured the Southern countryside), none of the North's advantages would've existed at all, other than their slight advantage in manufacturing.
The Union was not importing its armaments or the raw materials to make them.
I believe you'll find that the Union did, in fact, import large quantities of arms from England. The Confederate States tried to do the same (as they definitely did not have the manufacturing base of which you spoke), but were prevented from doing so by the same "neutral" nations which sold arms to the Union.
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.
Agreed, though I would say that the South was more stymied in the diplomatic arena in procuring arms than they were by the blockade, which until the late days of the war was more "paper" than anything.
Yes, the Southerners cost the Northerners MONEY, but the Northerners could win broke, because they still had guns.
I'd argue that it's because the North had bodies. The Northern army was, by the close of the war, more than 4 times the size of the Southern, and as a result of this advantage, refused any attempt by the South to peaceably exchange prisoners of war in the same manners as were exhibited in past wars.
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 terms of 1864, perhaps you're correct—though I'll still say that the South's diplomatic losses cost them more than the blockade did. Perhaps I'm wrong—I'll gladly admit to that if that is the case. :)
Regards,
~dt~
I'm sure the Army had better things to do than spend the time verifying the freedom of each and every person they came across? What became of these freedmen that were shipped back behind Confederate lines?
The fact of the matter, though, is that there was no such policy, it was entirely up to the slaveowner, and while not unheard of, was rare.
How is my statement untrue? The promise was made as a part of the American Revolution, by both sides—Slaves who fought for (party x) would receive their freedom. I believe the same statements were made in the war of 1812.
Regards,
~dt~
And, as Mr. Davis has rightfully pointed out, a blockade can only be considered effective by neutral parties (and thus, recognized as a valid blockade) if it is literally covered by a full naval force. No such statement could hold true early in the war—The Union Navy did not have the ships to man the entire Southern coast, thus leading to the designation of the blockade as a "paper blockade." Never before had any nation attempted to blockade a coast as large as the North did, and from the looks of history, it would appear that the North's masterful propaganda worked wonders in the diplomatic courts of these European nations.
I don't think anyone will argue that the "King Cotton" diplomacy was the wisest choice of actions, of course. At least, I won't argue it. :)
Regards,
~dt~
But of course! You saw how dramatic the serfs in Holy Grail were, didn't you?
All kidding aside, I think that the extent to which the Supreme Court and Congress have assumed power for themselves speaks for itself. We don't live in the same nation which was created in 1787—only a slight facsimile thereof.
With all due respect, I'd recommend an ounce of caution there, friend! After all, while they have their Kennedys, we must still, sadly, suffer our Clintons and Carters. :)
Warmest regards,
~dt~
ping
That would have been nothing compared to what would have happened had the Royal Navy gotten involved in destroying commerce.
There is also a problem of size. By the middle of the war, the Union and Confederate Armies were enormous.
By the middle of the war, you might be right. But foreign intervention in 1961 and even in 1962 would have been huge, particularly before the expansion of the Union Navy.
The Confederate Army was considerably larger than all of the forces on both sides of Napoleon's invasion of Russia.
That's not true. The Napoleonic side alone had about 600k men when you add up all the allied contingents. Add in the Russians, and you're probably talking over a million total. And the most the Confederate War Department ever reported as total strength was something around 470k.
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.
I don't mind discussing this, but we're talking past each other. I'm talking about European intervention in 1861 or 1862. You keep talking about massive ironclad fleets and even more massive armies from later in the war. I'll grant you that by 1864 at the latest, the Brits wanted no piece of us.
But just take the situation after the Battle of Chancellorsville, before Lee invaded the North but after he'd kick the crap out of the Army of the Potomac. Southern emanicipation at that point may well have earned recognition by Britain, even without a victory in the North. Now if the slaves are freed, Lee is poised to invade, the Army of the Potomac has just gotten its clocked cleaned again, and the Royal Navy starts clamping down on U.S. shipping, how strong is the NOrth's desire for continued war?
General Forrest also had black combatants serve with him all during the war. Cleburne also encouraged and used black soldiers throughout the war but was passed over in rank for his beliefs.
The Henderson Scouts were a black cavalry organization from Mississippi that also served during the War on the side of the Confederacy. There is a monument to them at Canton, Mississippi.
This new book just coalesces a significant amount of information that has been published elsewhere since the Civil War.
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.