Themes of the American Civil War
Download 2.25 Mb. View original pdf
|
| condition.” 18 With matters in such a state, it was no wonder that in early November a lower South newspaper discovered a growing disposition within the Confederacy to make soldiers of the negroes.” 19 Governor William Smith of Virginia now endorsed the proposal, followed shortly afterward by Governor Henry W. Allen of Louisiana. 20 Jefferson Davis publicly embraced limited manumission as a war measure in a message to the Confederate Congress on November 7, 1864. He proposed that the government purchase outright 40,000 slaves and train them to serve as military laborers. Because performing such duties at the front would require not mere submission but positive motivation (loyalty and zeal”), Davis urged that such slave laborers be promised eventual freedom and the right to enjoy that freedom after the war within their home states. And while he expressed the cautious view that black troops were not yet needed, he did open the door to that eventuality, asserting that should the alternative ever be presented of subjugation or of the employment of the slave as a soldier, there seems no reason to doubt what should then be our decision Davis’s Secretary of State and closest cabinet advisor, Judah P. Benjamin, endorsed emancipation not only for such slaves but also for their families. 21 On February 10 Mississippi Congressman Ethelbert Barksdale introduced a measure in the Confederate House of Representatives calling for the arming of slaves. A legislative committee reviewed and reported favorably upon it within a matter of days. 22 Further support now came, on February 18, from Robert E. Lee, newly appointed Confederate general-in-chief. Ina letter to Barksdale intended for broader circulation, Lee endorsed the proposal to make slaves into soldiers. I think the measure not only expedient but necessary Lee wrote, urging in addition that those who are employed should be freed. It would be neither just nor wise, in my opinion, to require them to serve as slaves.” 23 Supporting letters and petitions came flooding in from Confederate officers and enlisted men alike. 24 On February 20, in secret session, the House passed Barksdale’s resolution in a close vote. 25 The Senate at first balked, but after the Davis administration successfully appealed to the Virginia legislature to instruct its senators to support the measure, the Confederate upper House reconsidered and passed the House Bill by another narrow majority on 13 March. The new law stipulated that nothing . . . shall be construed to authorize a change in the relation which the said slaves shall bear to their owners, except by consent of the owners and of the States in which they reside What Congress withheld Davis tried to reintroduce on his own initiative. Slaves enrolled in Confederate Emancipation • 231 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 before Appomattox. 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 Download 2.25 Mb. Share with your friends:
|