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

Kristopher Teters’s Practical Liberators: Union Officers in the Western Theater during the Civil War sets out to examine how western theater commanders in the Federal armies “carried out emancipation in the field” through focusing on “the general patterns and characteristics of this policy” (2). Teters’s decision to center his analysis on the western theater and the Lower South states it encompassed is a sensible one; as he points out, the majority of slaves lived in those states, and the Union army interaction with the institution unfolded across a variety of armies with high stakes and significant consequences.

Teters repeatedly emphasizes the practicality and pragmatism of his subjects’ emancipation policy. The morality of slavery took a backseat to the tangible military effect of emancipation, and winning the war was always more important to these officers than undoing the moral damage of slavery. The picture that emerges is one of an officer corps largely uninterested in, even hostile to, the idea of abolition, and the racial views of the Union’s western armies reflect the prevailing positions of nineteenth-century American society as a whole. Teters’s narrative also correctly charts the haphazard and occasionally incoherent policy of the US government toward slaves and contraband through 1862, noting that any true guidance from the War Department and from Congress did not actually come until the Second Confiscation Act. Before then, officers improvised their approach to slaves and slavery, with erratic results.

Teters’s examination of the interactions between white officers and black servants is enlightening. He finds that while employment of black servants, mostly former slaves, by Union officers was a common practice, overall it did not seem to change the officers’ prejudicial racial attitudes. The war “represented no moment of enlightenment or transformative experience. On the whole, officers continued to view black people as inferior, incapable, and even subhuman” (104). Teters may overstate the significance of this finding, however, in claiming that “this persistent racial prejudice of Union officers helps explain why the North eventually retreated from Reconstruction and acquiesced in segregation and disfranchisement” (105). Nevertheless, the image of the Union officer corps as leaders of a reluctant army of liberation, far more interested in the downfall of the Confederate government than the overthrow of slavery, is inescapable and persuasive.

Perhaps the most valuable contribution of Practical Liberators is Teters’s compelling case for the central importance of the Union army in the process of emancipation. As he succinctly puts it, “the army became the key instrument for bringing freedom to Southern slaves” (154). Emancipation, born of practical concerns about depriving the Confederacy of a critical resource, became a critical tool for the Union army. In turn, the Union army served as emancipation’s primary agent. “Most slaves did not have to be told and understood very well that the arrival of the Union army meant freedom” (122). It is difficult to imagine emancipation unfolding in a similar way, if at all, without the Union army to execute it. Well-argued and succinct, Teters’s study is a useful contribution to our understanding of Union officers and the evolution of emancipation policy and ought to inspire future examinations of military emancipation and army racial attitudes in the East, in the Trans-Mississippi, during Reconstruction, and beyond.