The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation: African Americans and the Fight for Freedom by Glenn David Brasher (review)

Glenn David Brasher begins The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation by recounting a tour he gave as a National Park Service ranger of the site of one of the Peninsula campaign’s key battles. Conducted after Congress had required Civil War battlefield sites to educate visitors about slavery’s role in the conflict and its impact on individual battles, Brasher for the first time added slavery to the standard military history tale of battles and leaders of the Peninsula campaign. After explaining different northern attitudes toward slavery in the spring of 1862, Brasher argued that General George McClellan’s failure to capture Richmond during the campaign exasperated northerners and prolonged the war, both of which led President Abraham Lincoln to issue the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation later that year. Brasher was not satisfied, however, having brought slavery but not the slaves themselves into the discussion. Over a decade later, the result is this insightful study that brings together military, social, and political history to analyze the agency of Virginia blacks in the Peninsula campaign and emancipation.

Brasher’s extensive research in a wide variety of primary sources allows him to make two major and interrelated arguments. First, African Americans influenced the strategy and outcome of Union and Confederate army actions during the campaign. Brasher deftly shows the myriad choices Virginia blacks faced early in the war and demonstrates that they were important actors in the campaign, building fortifications, serving as laborers, running away to Union lines, and providing military intelligence. African American participation in the campaign—in particular the Confederate army’s use of their labor—helped northerners accept emancipation as a military necessity. Union soldiers complained that Confederate soldiers benefited from having African Americans perform much of the fatigue duty in the Confederate army, such as digging fortifications. More explosively, Republican and abolitionist newspapers reported the existence of black Confederate regiments, and such assertions became “a mainstay in speeches by congressmen who favored the confiscation and liberation of southern slaves” (154). Brasher nicely demonstrates how some northerners used accounts of black Confederate soldiers as propaganda to argue for the Union to enlist black soldiers.

Brasher briefly discusses the “black confederate legend” (5) and how neo-Confederates now use it to insist that slavery had nothing to do with the war. He “emphatically rejects claims of widespread slave support for the Confederacy” (6) and quickly dismisses every one of the numerous accounts of black Confederate regiments. For instance, he writes that “a Hoosier soldier made the outrageous claim that the New Yorkers came upon ‘a body of 700 negro infantry’” (77) and asserts that a Pennsylvania soldier who wrote about fighting against two black Confederate regiments “obviously greatly embellished the number of blacks he may have observed” (132). Brasher also warns that Civil War–era newspapers “frequently provided inaccurate information about events” (5). He argues that blacks serving as body servants to Confederate soldiers or the fog of war may have confused witnesses, and that these accounts were then circulated for propaganda. This analysis makes sense and fits with Bruce Levine’s findings in Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War (2006).

Unfortunately, Brasher’s examination of smaller numbers of blacks fighting for the Confederate army is a significant weakness in this otherwise fine volume. He thinks “many professional historians have too quickly dismissed any claims that blacks fought with the Confederates,” insisting that “when contemporaries maintained that Southerners were using blacks in combat roles, they were not manufacturing it out of the whole cloth” (5–6). Brasher repeatedly states as fact that African Americans served as snipers with the Confederate army and regularly argues that the evidence suggests that African Americans served as combatants for the Confederacy. The evidence Brasher uses, however, is the same he labels unreliable about the existence of...