The Great Confederate Debate

Bruce Levine. Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves During the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 272 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95.

On a frigid, sleety evening in January 1864, in the hills of north Georgia where the Confederate Army of Tennessee was encamped for the winter, the highest-ranking officers of the army convened for a meeting. It had been called at the behest of Maj. Gen. Patrick R. Cleburne. Before his fellow officers, Cleburne read a lengthy prepared statement putting forth a startling recommendation. Given the desperate military predicament of the Confederacy, he said, and particularly the enemy's preponderance of numbers, the Rebel army should enlist slaves to fight in its ranks.

The reactions of the assembled generals ranged from enthusiastic assent to incredulity and outrage. When word of the meeting and the proposal reached Richmond, President Jefferson Davis not only rejected the idea but also ordered that the subject be dropped and never discussed again in the army. Ten months later, however, with the Confederacy's prospects looking even bleaker, Davis himself resurrected the proposal and put it before the Confederate people and Congress. For the next few months, as the Rebel nation tottered toward defeat, the question of arming slaves to fight for the Confederacy dominated that nation's public discourse. Politicians, newspaper editors, soldiers of all ranks, and civilians of all stations debated it earnestly and often heatedly.

This episode is well known to Civil War historians, but until now it has not been fully explored. What Bruce Levine offers is the first investigation of this complex and fascinating subject that thoroughly considers its genesis, its outcome, and its meaning.¹

The issue shook the Confederate nation to its core because black enlistment was linked, both in Cleburne's proposal and Davis's, with black emancipation in some form. As nearly all professional historians of the Civil War today affirm—including Levine himself—the Confederacy's founders created their nation primarily to preserve and protect slavery. Thus, talk of emancipation challenged the very heart and soul of the Rebel cause.

Spurring the proposal was the Confederacy's desperate military plight. In 1864 the Rebel armies were reeling from a series of battlefield disasters and withering away due to casualties and desertion. They were by now heavily outnumbered and becoming more so with each passing day. Conscription had gathered up all available white manpower. It was obvious to Davis and many others that unless the Confederate government could significantly reinforce its armies, and do so soon, defeat was inevitable. The only solution, as they saw it, was to draw on the vast reserves of black manpower, the hundreds of thousands of able-bodied slave men whose muscle and sweat the Confederacy already relied on to produce much of its food and cotton. But to simply order the slaves to take up arms in defense of the nation that enslaved them would accomplish nothing and could actually be counterproductive, as Davis recognized. Conscripted slaves would be, at best, unwilling and unmotivated soldiers. They might well desert to the enemy at the first opportunity or even turn their guns on white Rebel troops. No, Davis reasoned, the only way to get slaves to fight effectively in the Confederacy's ranks—with "loyalty and zeal," as he put it—was to offer them something to make it worth their while (p. 33). Black men must be enticed to volunteer by a grant of freedom. This meant freedom for themselves at the very least, whether upon enlistment or as a reward for faithful military service, and perhaps for their families, too; even, perhaps, for the black race as a whole.

The slaves themselves had helped push the Confederacy to this point, as Levine emphasizes. By running off to the Union invaders in huge numbers, as they had been doing since the war began, and by actually fighting in the ranks of the Union army, as they...