Practical Liberators: Union Officers in the Western Theater during the Civil War by Kristopher A. Teters (review)

In Practical Liberators, Kristopher Teters contends that the Union officer corps in the American Civil War’s western theater supported emancipation primarily for military considerations rather than moral objections to slavery. He further argues that this pragmatic approach guided how these officers implemented emancipation in the field, clarifies why their racial prejudices changed little during the war, and explains part of why northerners lost the will to persist in Reconstruction: they cared about emancipation only insofar as it helped them crush the rebellion, not because of any commitment to the well-being of black people. This study presents a broad spectrum of views on slavery and emancipation, with company and regimental officers tending to be more avidly emancipationist than their generals. Teters’s thesis rests on a sample of 410 Union officers from across the western theater. Teters himself notes that generals are over-represented in his sources, a reality apparent in his study’s content, but he still provides strong representation for the perspectives of more junior officers.

Union officers fought to save the Union, and their embrace of emancipation hinged on becoming convinced it was a military necessity. The Second Confiscation Act (which stated the Union Army could take property from persons in rebellion against the United States), the Emancipation Proclamation, and firsthand experience did much to solidify the western officer corps’ support for freeing slaves. Western officers prioritized the liberation of able-bodied men who could perform useful labor for the army and showed little interest in women, children, and the aged. The book’s final chapter presents William T. Sherman as an exemplar of Teters’s previous claims about western officers, a man who began the war unopposed to slavery, held racist views throughout the conflict, opposed the use of black soldiers, and yet became a powerful force for liberation simply because the war rendered it logical.

Teters’s work fits into several ongoing historiographical conversations. In the scholarly debate over Union soldiers’ concern with emancipation, Teters aligns himself with the utilitarian perspective toward emancipation shown in Gary Gallagher’s The Union War (Harvard University Press, 2011) and diverges from the more idealistic view of studies such as Chandra Manning’s What This Cruel War Was Over (Knopf, 2007). Teters rightly emphasizes that, however much modern readers might find fault with officers’ intentions, the Union’s western armies nonetheless brought liberty to countless slaves and effectively destroyed slavery as an institution throughout most of the Confederacy. Practical Liberators also pushes back against texts that so heavily emphasize slaves’ agency in liberating themselves that they seriously understate how indispensable the Union armies were to the process of emancipation. Finally, this study is a welcome addition to the paucity of scholarly work on the Civil War officer corps.

Teters effectively highlights the common thread of military necessity that ran through western officers’ comments regarding slavery, emancipation, race, and black soldiers, while also acknowledging the range of views found among Union officers. Indeed, the number of dissenting examples he supplies may leave one wondering if he downplays too much the place of moral factors in officers’ support for antislavery measures. Teters’s articulate and clean writing should be accessible to scholarly and non-scholarly readers alike who are interested in the attitudes of Union soldiers toward slavery and race, in Civil War officers collectively, or in the practical mechanics of emancipation.