the newly created units would become freemen not after completing their service but as soon as they enlisted—with their masters consent.
26
In military terms the measure was fruitless. The Confederate War Office issued the necessary orders only on March 23, 1865,
just two weeks beforeAppomattox. But such orders, however belated, have understandably attracted the attention of generations of historians anxious to determine what this extraordinary chapter in Southern history signified about the nature of the Confederacy and its evolution.
Most commentators have treated the proposal to emancipate slaves in return for military service as prima facie evidence of a weak (or, at least, a weakened) commitment to the economic interests and institutions—
plantation agriculture based on unfree black labor—of the Southern elite.
Some have argued that a firm commitment
to those interests had, in fact,
never been central to the Confederate cause. Others contended that it had but that the socioeconomic stakes had declined in importance during the war years, to be replaced by a nationalistic commitment to Southern independence for its own sake. Still others, declining to characterize the
Confederate leadership
as a whole in such terms, have nonetheless presented the proposal’s chief architects in this light.
This general understanding of the proposal’s significance originated in the Confederacy’s wartime debate itself. Planter resistance to the Confederate government’s interference with their slave property, especially through impressment, was notorious. They give up their sons,
husbands, brothers and friends caustically observed one Confederate Congressman,“and often without murmuring but let one of their negroes betaken, and what a houl
[
sic] you will hear.”
27
The response to the Cleburne–Davis policy was naturally even shriller. Planter critics saw it as an abandonment—indeed,
a betrayal—of their core interests.
The Charleston Mercury responded to Jefferson Davis’s November, 1864, Message to Congress by recalling that
“the mere agitation in the Northern States to effect the emancipation of our slaves largely contributed to our separation from them And now, the
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