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.
So did I. It was common knowledge among mainstream history courses, books and documentaries. Don't know what is so revolutionary about this news.
I guess so, but what about the Compromise of 1820, 1850, including the Fugitive Slave Act, the unsuccessful, but very controversial Wilmot Proviso, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, The Dred Scott Decision, et al. I simply cannot imagine anything else as compelling for war than the issue of slavery. Tariffs, sectional dislike for one another, sure. But without the issue of slavery, civil war might well have been averted.
It's fun to speculate, though.
Thanks for your note!
review
Exactly.
So the book which inflamed opinions on both sides before the war was "Uncle Tom's Customs House"? Slavery wasn't the sole reason, but it was the primary reason.
Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri were slaveholding states that technically stayed in the Union, under the Great Emancipator.
Then how come he did not execute it, since supposedly slavery had nothing to do with the war and there were already tens of thousands of slaves fighting unofficially for the Confederacy? BTW, I wonder if these tens of thousands of blacks serving in the Confederate army actually existed why that why wasn't that the primary argument for arming slaves?
interesting
Absolutely. Words have no meaning. If the winning side had said, "we are no longer 'Yankees,' we are '@ss clowns,' that would make just as much sense.
Without slavery, there wouldn't have been an American Civil War.
It is telling that, even at the bitter end, when the South was losing, the slaveowners were still ferociously opposing arming the slaves to fight for the South.
Probably for good reason. Arm the slaves to fight FOR the South, and the slaves might very well turn those arms on the South. That would have been the sensible thing to do, if you were in a slave regiment given arms. The slave owed the Southerner NOTHING, and having a regiment of slaves on a battlefield suddenly doing a right face and firing directly into the flank of another Confederate unit, would have been precisely the sort of treachery that Southern slaveowners could reasonably foresee, and fear.
Arm slaves, and you have an army of armed slaves. What makes anyone think that an army of armed slaves is going to obey some white officer with a sword telling them to fight the Yankees whom the slaves know will liberate them?
Bullet in the back, or the face, of the white officer, and you are a regiment of free, armed black men, equally capable of shooting down white Confederates as they are of shooting you down.
There's a good military reason why Southern slaveowners rejected the idea...in addition, of course, to their racism and refusal to even consider putting blacks on an equal footing with themselves.
England and France were quite close to recognizing the Confederate govt. The Emancipation Proclamation was, according to some historians, precisely designed to prevent the formal recognition from taking place. In other words, Lincoln used the moral basis of the EP masterfully to prevent political recognition of the Confederacy.
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