THE CIVIL WAR: THE TRUE STORY BOOK 1

Confederate Emancipation

Confederate Emancipation

By James Rutledge Roesch
Mar 15, 2016

The following is a transcription of a speech given at the inaugural Education Conference of the Alabama Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans:

'The best men of the South have long desired to do away with the institution and were quite willing to see it abolished.' – Robert E. Lee

'Most informed men realized that slavery was not an institution which would last forever; that soon it would have to be modified, and eventually, relinquished. They knew that the South could not maintain it very long after it ceased to serve a useful economic and social service, and that its utility was nearing an end. They wished, however, to choose the hour and method by which they should decree its gradual extinction. Knowing the complexity of the problem, they did not desire to be whirled into a catastrophic social revolution.' – Pulitzer-winning historian J. Allan Nevins

The story of Patrick R. Cleburne is well-known among Southerners, but Cleburne was not the first American – nor even the first Confederate – to propose arming and freeing slaves as a means of defense against foreign invasion. In fact, it was no less a figure than George Washington during the War of American Independence. As James Madison suggested, 'To liberate and make soldiers at once of the blacks' was 'more consonant to the principles of liberty which ought never to be lost sight of in a contest for liberty.' Likewise, during the War of Southern Independence, arming and freeing slaves was an idea broached from the very beginning. With the outbreak of war, slaveholders offered to organise their slaves into units while freedmen actually formed units of their own. When the slaves of James Chesnut, Jr., husband of the beloved diarist Mary Chesnut, asked to be armed so that they could fight for him, he devised a plan to reward any who enlisted with freedom and land. After winning the very first battle of the War at Manassas Junction, General Richard S. Ewell recommended such a policy to President Jefferson Davis. When President Davis claimed that Manassas was a sure sign of swift Southern victory, Ewell disagreed, replying that it was 'the beginning of a long, and, at best, doubtful struggle,' but that 'emancipating the slaves and arming them' would establish Southern independence. General Thomas C. Hindman, an old friend of Cleburne's, sent a letter to the Congress urging them to give the slaves 'the "chances of a white man" as against the Yankee – put him by the side of a white Southern soldier, allow him a little monthly pay, assure him of freedom for good conduct, his State consenting; let him feel that he defends his country as well as ours.' The idea grew in popularity in Gulf States such as Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, which had large slave populations and were occupied by the Federals early on in the War. After the fall of Vicksburg, for instance, the Jackson Mississippian enthusiastically endorsed the idea:

We sincerely trust that the Southern people will be found willing to make any and every sacrifice of which the establishment of our independence may require. Let it never be said that to preserve slavery we were willing to wear the chains of bondage ourselves – that the very avarice which prompted us to hold on to the negro for the sake of money invested in him, riveted upon us shackles more galling and bitter than a people ever yet endured. Let not slavery prove a barrier to our independence. If it is found in the way – if it proves an insurmountable obstacle to the achievement of our liberty and separate nationality, away with it! Let it perish! We must make up our minds to one solemn duty, the first duty of the patriot, and that is, to save ourselves from the rapacious North, WHATEVER THE COST.
A reader of the New Orleans Picayune under the pseudonym 'Corn Bread' denied that the War was about slavery and asserted that it was about independence. 'We are fighting for national independence, and not for slavery, and so, I think, believes Mr. Jefferson Davis,' declared Corn Bread. 'Let us never forget the great fact that we are fighting for independence, independence! And perish slavery if it stands in the way.' Corn Bread was confident that there was widespread but unspoken support for arming and freeing the slaves. 'Let every patriotic slaveholder canvass his slaves and find out who among them will volunteer for freedom and his home,' he urged. 'Let him prepare the negro's mind for the position he is about to assume, and excite in him that love of country and of home which I believe strongly exists in his breast.' John Forsyth, editor of the Mobile Register and Advertiser, claimed that the South was ultimately fighting for independence, not slavery. 'We protest against the theory that this is a war for the negroes; it is a war for constitutional liberty, and the rights of self-government,' proclaimed the Register. 'Our revolutionary sires never endured one-tenth degree of the provocation and injustice from the British government which the South had already endured at the hands of the Yankees.' Before General Cleburne's proposal, Forsyth was already in favor of arming and freeing the slaves. 'We hold that it is not only legitimate, but a safe and prudent policy to fight an enemy whose purpose is our ruin with every weapon which God and Nature has placed in our hand – with fire and water, with steel and powder and ball, and with our household servant and plantation hands, if they prove necessary to avert us from the supreme calamity of subjugation,' explained the Register. 'If then (and we would only employ them in case of clear necessity) negro soldiers are needed to beat the enemy and conquer independence and peace, there is no argument of doubtful expediency to counterbalance the superlative end.' President Abraham Lincoln, as many Southerners bitterly conceded, had certainly proven the value of slave soldiers. 'No human power can subdue this rebellion without using the emancipation lever as I have done,' boasted President Lincoln. 'Freedom has given us control of 200,000 able-bodied men, born and raised on Southern soil.' Lincoln challenged his 'enemies' in the North to 'prove by the history of this war, that we can restore the Union without it.'