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

In the spring of 1862, General George McClellan was defeated in his campaign to capture the Confederate Capital during what is called the Peninsula Campaign. The failure of the campaign seriously diminished the reputation of McClellan as the “Young Napoleon” and ended with Robert E. Lee firmly in command of the Army of Northern Virginia.

In The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation: African Americans and the Fight for Freedom Glenn David Brasher makes the argument that the campaign had a much larger impact on the American Civil War than what generals commanded what armies. Brasher effectively shows that the Peninsula Campaign laid the groundwork for Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, one of the most revolutionary acts of the Civil War.

According to Brasher it was during the campaign that the Union began to realize that the South’s slaves were a serious benefit to the Confederacy. The Confederate Army used local slaves to build the fortifications that would have to be overrun in order to capture Richmond.

Brasher also examines the very controversial issue of African Americans fighting for the Confederacy. Most historians shy away from the issue or outright dismiss it as a possibility under the mistaken argument that if African Americans took up arms for the Confederacy than the Civil War was not about slavery or that the slaves liked their position under the slave system. Slavery and war are two institutions as old as civilization itself. Slaves have fought in wars from the beginning. Sometimes slaves are forced to fight and sometime they fight willingly hoping that their loyalty will result in their ultimate reward, freedom. This had occurred in America’s earlier two wars in Virginia, it should not be so unbelievable that it happened in the third.

Brasher offers pretty solid evidence that there were African–American units in the Confederate army in Virginia during the first year of the war. How many were used is a nearly impossible question to answer, especially since northern abolitionists may have exaggerated these stories. Abolitionists saw the fact that slaves were serving, and serving in the Confederate army, as the strongest argument that emancipation was needed.

Brasher very successfully argues that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation did not happen in a vacuum. Abolitionists led a propaganda campaign arguing that ending slavery was a necessity for winning the war. Without this campaign, the Emancipation Proclamation would not been accepted as well as it was in the North. Soldiers had come to appreciate the desirability of having African–Americans working as freedmen for the Union army as opposed to working as slaves for the Confederate army.

The battle of Antietam has always been given credit as the battlefield victory that brought emancipation, but without the experience of the Peninsula Campaign it seems highly unlikely that Lincoln could have gained support for the emancipation.

Brasher’s book is extremely well researched and fills a void in Civil War literature. He traces the evolution of American thought on slavery and emancipation during the Civil War. Had the Peninsula Campaign ended differently the effects of the Civil War might have been very different. Whether he intended to or not, Brasher also shows the importance of battles, campaigns and leaders to the history of the period.