Themes of the American Civil War

CHAPTER
“What did we go to war for?”
Confederate Emancipation and its Meaning
BRUCE LEVINE
During the first month of the Civil War, Jefferson Davis presented to the
Confederate Congress a straightforward justification for secession and a now classic explanation for the war’s origins. Over the decades, Davis explained,
the South’s slave labor force had converted hundreds of thousands of square miles of wilderness into cultivated lands covered with a prosperous people while the productions in the South of cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco . . . had swollen to an amount which formed nearly three-quarters of the exports of the whole United States and had become absolutely necessary to the wants of civilized man For the full development and continuance of such achievements, Davis stressed, the labor of African slaves was and is indispensable Naturally, then, with interests of such overwhelming magnitude imperiled secession was necessary.
1
After decades of scholarly struggle, the prevailing interpretation today of the war’s causes follows Davis’s speech in placing slavery at center stage.
And yet, just four years later, Confederate President Jefferson Davis was advocating the large-scale emancipation of the most able-bodied male slaves of the South in exchange for their taking up arms and fighting on behalf of the Confederacy against Union forces. To every slave ready to accept such an offer, Davis’s government proposed to say, Go and fight you are free.”
2
That policy has attracted a considerable amount of attention over the years.
3
Much of it has tended to place a question mark over the centrality of slavery to the Confederate cause. Did these events not demonstrate, after all, that other values—cultural, political, philosophical—proved more important (or,
at least, more enduring) than attachment to a plantation system based on
11

unfree labor A hundred years ago the public obtained its first look at many of the documents produced in the course of the Confederacy’s debate about arming and freeing its slaves. A quarter of a century ago a documentary collection focused entirely on that subject appeared.
4
The intervening years have not dispelled the cloud of confusion that hangs over the meaning of this story.
5
These anniversaries provide a convenient occasion for reconsidering the matter.
Once it became clear that the war would be no glorious and swiftly consummated adventure, the Union’s overwhelming numerical superiority in adult white males led individual Confederate loyalists to look for other sources of military manpower.
6
But an important turning point came during the second half of 1863, when the Confederacy suffered devastating blows in the war’s western theatre. The fall of Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Port
Hudson, Louisiana, in July of 1863 completed the Union’s conquest of the
Mississippi River, the South’s chief inland water route, thereby physically splitting the Confederacy and opening the way for the penetration of
Union forces deep into the heartland of the cotton kingdom. Lee’s stunning and immensely costly defeat at Gettysburg that same month deepened a sense of foreboding among highly placed Confederate leaders.
7
These reversals posed much more urgently than before the question of manpower and possible sources thereof. In the fall of 1863 the Alabama legislature endorsed the enlistment of slaves as soldiers.
8
The first fully argued Confederate proposal for arming and freeing slaves came in December, 1863, from the pen of Major General Patrick
Cleburne, an energetic, courageous, and highly regarded division commander in the Confederate Army of Tennessee, a man known for the clinical detachment of his judgment. Cleburne’s beleaguered army, its ranks already plagued by low morale and its officer corps riven with dissension, had in
November come face to face with the enemy’s numerical superiority. Union reinforcements that month breached the siege of Chattanooga, after which the augmented force simply burst out of that city’s confines, hurling
Braxton Bragg’s troops from its seemingly impregnable position on nearby
Missionary Ridge.
9
Afterwards, as the Army of Tennessee licked its wounds in winter quarters in northwest Georgia, Patrick Cleburne considered the hard lessons to be learned and the grim choices to be faced.
10
In a careful and lengthy memorandum Cleburne pointed to the lopsided relationship of forces between
Confederate and Union armies, as a result of which our soldiers can see no end . . . except in our own exhaustion hence, instead of rising to the occasion, they are sinking into a fatal apathy, growing weary of hardships and slaughter which promise no results.”
Cleburne therefore proposed that we immediately commence training a large reserve of the most courageous of our slaves, and further that we
Confederate Emancipation
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guarantee freedom within a reasonable time to every slave in the South who shall remain true to the Confederacy in this war This alone would supply the Confederacy with the combat forces so sorely required. Nor did Cleburne shrink from the further implications of this proposal. If we arm and train him and make him fight for the country in her hour of dire distress, every consideration of principle and policy demand that we should set him and his whole race who side with us free.”
11
This was a remarkable recommendation, to say the least. More remarkable still was the aftermath. When Cleburne circulated his memo among the officers in his command, four brigade commanders, ten regimental commanders and one cavalry division commander added their signatures to his.
Encouraged by this support, Cleburne then invited all general officers,
including the newly appointed commander, Joseph E. Johnston, to meet with him the evening of January 2 at the headquarters of General William
Hardee. There Cleburne read the memo aloud, to a mixed reception.
Informed of these events, Secretary of War James Seddon ordered Johnston to suppress not only the memorial itself, but likewise all discussion and controversy respecting or growing out of it Johnston quickly complied,
as did Cleburne.
12
But though discussion of Cleburne’s proposal was suppressed, and
Cleburne himself died in battle before the year was out, the further deterioration of the Confederacy’s situation kept alive the idea that Cleburne had raised.
13
The fall of Atlanta in September, 1864, had not only great military significance, demonstrating that the balance of forces in the field had irrevocably tilted in favor of the North. It also ensured the reelection of
Lincoln and a landslide congressional victory in the North fora Republican
Party determined to employ that military superiority to prosecute the war down to the unconditional surrender of the South. Sherman’s occupation of Savannah in December sharpened the Confederate sense of desperation.
“Demoralization is rife in our armies came a report from southwestern
Georgia in early 1865, and among the people at home the sign of succumbing maybe seen. . . . treason is stalking the land.”
14
From that point onward, the Confederate government received a steady stream of reports testifying to the collapse of morale both in army and on the home front. Stationed near Petersburg, Sergeant Alexander W. Cooper felt compelled by inexorable duty to inform Jefferson Davis that the elements from which you have heretofore drawn your armies is exhausted,”
leaving the ranks filled with the mere dreggs [sic] of the noble armies that have so far sustained the Confederacy.”
15
A report from Sherman’s path affirmed that we must be overrun if an adequate force is not thrown into the field to check the Yankees.”
16
Assessing the relationship of forces in the field in November, 1864, Robert E. Lee summarized, simply, The inequality is too great.”
17
From Greenville, Meriwether Country, in western Georgia,
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Bruce Levine

came this alarming assessment of popular morale If the question were put to the people of this state, whether to continue the war or return to the union,
a large majority would vote fora return Indeed, this writer added, he
“almost inclined to believe that they would do it if emancipation was the

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