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

With Practical Liberators, Kristopher A. Teters has provided a much-needed and bracing look at how Union officers approached emancipation in the West during the Civil War. Drawing on diaries, letters, and official documents, Teters charts how soldiers came to embrace emancipation. As the title of his work suggests, he finds that Union soldiers supported emancipation as a war measure and that their wartime experience rarely shifted their deeply held racist views of African American people.

Teters selects the area west of the Appalachians for his analysis because “the Lower South was the area where the Union army would free the most slaves and smash the heart of the South’s slave-based economy” (6). The broad geographic range and variations in economy meant that Union soldiers had a wider opportunity to encounter the institution and those held in bondage. The comparatively larger number of Union troops spread across the theater also allows Teters to survey a variety of soldiers.

For his study, Teters relies primarily on the testimony of 410 Union officers. He provides a thorough description of his data set and points out that “this study’s conclusions are thus drawn from a balanced and illustrative source base” (165). He supplements these personal accounts with official documents from the Official Records, finding a wealth of information on the implementation of policy during the war. Teters duly acknowledges the presence of abolitionists within the armies, but he also finds that they and their views represented only a narrow sliver of the western armies.

Teters finds that Union officers’ approach to emancipation mirrored legislation emanating from Washington, D.C. Officers began the war as conservatives, and as the conflict wore on they became more radical in their views about the end of slavery. As Congress clarified its policy toward the Confederacy with the First and Second Confiscation Acts, the army adjusted its behavior. In the first chapter of the book, Teters demonstrates how the loose stipulations of the First Confiscation Act—that soldiers could not return enslaved people to their masters—permitted local variations in enforcement. Union officers, confronted with escaping slaves, sought their own local and ad hoc expedients, leading to friction between the layers of the army hierarchy as conflicting policies in different locations led to inconsistencies. These inconsistencies in turn led to frustrations, particularly when dealing with local white civilians. In the absence of guidance from higher authorities, however, the army could not set its own effective policy.

In his second chapter, Teters shows how the strengthened Second Confiscation Act provided clearer guidance to the military, resulting in a consistent policy across the western theater. While officers could vary their own policies, the latitude for local innovation decreased. Soldiers paid attention to policy and sought to act within its boundaries. Moreover, with legal sanction they fully embraced emancipation as a way to weaken the Confederacy and punish secessionists. As Teters observes, the crucial shift with emancipation on the part of western armies occurred not with President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation but with congressional enactment of laws. Teters clearly and convincingly shows how officers translated policy made in Washington into action in the field.

The Confiscation Acts and emancipation enjoyed support from officers, because they saw that attacking slavery gave them a potent weapon to use against the Confederacy. Ulysses S. Grant, for instance, reflected in a letter to his sister that “I dont know what is to become of [slaves] in the end but it [is] weakning the enemy to take them from them” (46). Ample testimony from others echoes Grant’s sentiments; officers embraced emancipation as a pragmatic measure to hurt the Confederacy. Considerations as to what would happen to the enslaved people after the war, or even during it, often took a secondary place to the knowledge that hurting slavery would hurt the Confederacy.

Subsequent chapters examine...