Jefferson Davis's Final Campaign: Confederate Nationalism and the Fight to Arm Slaves by Philip D. Dillard (review)

With thorough but targeted research, Philip D. Dillard has brought greater depth and more extensive information to our knowledge of the Confederacy's last-minute discussion about arming and freeing its slaves. His study advances our understanding of efforts by the Jefferson Davis administration and especially the reactions among some white southerners.

Dillard raises meaningful questions, such as the following: "had a real transformation in [white] people's views of slavery taken place?" (p. 261); "Did the common people … [decide] to abandon slavery and place black troops in the field?" (p. 262); "Had it all been merely a theoretical discussion?" (p. 262). Historical circumstances make definitive answers to these questions impossible, since there is little or no data about Union-occupied areas of the Confederacy, the views of those southerners who by 1865 had mentally abandoned the war effort, and the states Dillard did not study. We know that the Confederate Congress was slow to act and rejected emancipation for slave soldiers, and of course there was no national referendum on the question. Still, Dillard has enlarged our understanding through his research methods and the energy that he has brought to his work.

Dillard focuses on three states—Virginia, Georgia, and Texas—by combing every newspaper that he could find and by examining some personal correspondence. This method has given him a fairly diverse field to study. Virginians had suffered extensively throughout the war; Georgians painfully felt the war come home to areas of their state in 1864; and Texans were not facing any dangerous Union offensives and were profiting from wartime trade through Mexico. The twenty-eight newspapers Dillard studies represent different areas of these three states that were affected differently by the war. He scrutinizes the attitudes expressed during three periods in the Confederacy's final days: from October 1864 to William Tecumseh Sherman's capture of Savannah, Georgia; from the fall of Savannah to the Hampton Roads conference; and from the Hampton Roads conference to Appomattox. Over these three periods, as the Confederacy's situation became more desperate, public discussions of Davis's plan to arm and free the slaves intensified in each of the three states. Dillard finds that the Confederacy had an "open, thorough debate," complete with a variety of ideas on the status of slave soldiers (p. 261). He also finds that there was a "rising tide" of support for using black troops, despite the destructive impact that the measure would have had on the institution of slavery (p. 229). However, the debate came later to areas that were less threatened, and the pattern of rising support was far stronger in Virginia and Georgia than in Texas, where comparatively favorable conditions allowed an unrealistic attitude of "collective denial" that lasted until May 1865 (p. 272).

The Confederacy did not consider using slaves or free black men as soldiers until defeat was near, and in every state some voices adamantly opposed Davis's proposal and never stopped insisting on the rightness of slavery. Still, Dillard concludes from the data he has found that "military necessity led the overwhelming majority of the people in Virginia and Georgia to support the concept of black troops by early March" (p. 273). They "readily accepted black troops even if they continued to differ on the black veteran's status in a post-war Confederacy" (p. 273). Dillard argues that although white racism remained strong, "a significant transformation had occurred in the mind of many Confederates" very late in the war (p. 273).