“Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves During the Civil War.” To judge a book by its cover, Bruce Levine’s work may seem to offer a vision of the South that Lost Cause supporters, and proponents of the Black Confederates thesis we discussed early in this course, have constructed and tried to keep alive: a South where a close bond existed between master and slave, such as the two would actually fight side-by-side. That the South would craft plans involving “emancipation” at all seems to suggest that they were quite more progressive than we are typically led to believe today. However, reading the book reveals quite the opposite situation. Bruce Levine uses his evidence to tear down rose-tinted Lost Cause idealizations and show that the Confederacy considered turning slaves into freedmen soldiers only as a last-ditch effort to retain power for the planter class; even if slavery had to be sacrificed in part or whole, the government hoped to salvage as much of the South’s social order – that is, the inequality between blacks and whites – as possible.
As Levine notes, many contemporary commentators throughout both the North and South dismissed the idea that the Confederacy might free and arm slaves as madness. After all, was it worth winning the war if it meant giving up the very reason they had gone to war in the first place? Indeed, such a policy makes little sense unless, as Levine argues, it had become a practical necessity. How could policy-makers in the highest echelons of government – including the president and the secretary of state – support a plan that seemed to go against all of their efforts so far? Levine argues that it was not madness which led the government to such radical ideas, but rather, a frank and realistic look at circumstances. Arming slaves, and holding up freedom as an incentive, was the most sensible and far-sighted method they could enact to try and preserve as much of the status quo as could realistically be maintained. “The plan’s architects were inspired not by doubts concerning the merits or justice of slavery and white supremacy, nor by a late-in-the-day decision to prize southern independence more highly than the social and economic foundations of southern life,” argues Levine. “Political and military leaders came to champion the use of black troops not despite their antebellum values but because of them. In pushing to enact this measure, they were trying to preserve as much of the Old South as they could” (153). With Union invasions and slaves fleeing in great numbers or committing various forms of domestic disobedience, realistic Confederates had come to see slavery as doomed, at least in certain areas. Only by winning the war could white Confederates at least retain political and social supremacy, and if blacks became nominally free, they would certainly not be equal. Levine shows that “Both Patrick Cleburne and Jefferson Davis had looked to a salvaged Confederacy to enforce strict limits on prospective postwar black freedom” (158). But the war could not be won without more manpower, for which the Confederate States were desperate. Thus the idea to draw upon slaves as soldiers was born.
Levine uses examples of similar situations in roughly the same time period to show that the situation of Confederate masters, while certainly unique, was not unparalleled in the history of the world. Like the ruling classes in Prussia and Russia, the Confederate government attempted to realistically face social change while still retaining as much of their own power as possible. They did this by trying to adapt the social change to their own needs and define it on their own terms. That is, rather than letting the Union conquer their territory and define freedom for their former slaves, they hoped to win the war, retain their independence, and let the planter-controlled Southern government define such freedom. Such “freedom” as they hoped to eventually enact could hardly be called freedom at all, and therefore such “emancipation” as they promised was hardly a gift. While freedmen would attain rights to receive an education, to organize their own churches, and would never again have to worry about spouses or children being sold away, they would still be subject to crushing inequality and limitations in their economic outlook. Bruce Levine believes that what Confederate states tried to enact as “black codes” shortly after the war provide a glimpse at the kind of “freedom” they would have offered blacks if the Confederacy had won its independence. For instance, this law from Lousiana, which came into being shortly after the war:
A newly enacted state law required Louisiana blacks to obtain “a comfortable home and a visible means of support within twenty days after the passage of this act.” Those who failed to meet that deadline would “be immediately arrested…and hired out” to “the highest bidder, for the remainder of the year in which hired.” Should said freedman leave his employer’s service before the year’s end, he would be apprehended and made “to labor on some public work without compensation until his employer reclaimed him.” Louisiana lawmakers also provided that a freedman’s children be assigned to the same employer and that if a freedman died during his term of employment, his children would remain in the employer’s “service until they are twenty-one years of age, under the same conditions as the father” (160-161).
Fortunately, this law (and many others like it) was blocked and repealed by the Republican government during Reconstruction – just as Southern politicians had feared. The harsh labor statutes of this and similar laws provided for a system that was little more than slavery.
Examining such labor laws is one way to show that Confederate “emancipation” would have been very limited indeed. But the most crucial point is that the Southern government would not have allowed blacks to vote. Therefore, not only were former slaves trapped under such laws; they were powerless to change them. Levine offers a quote which sums up “confederate emancipation” quite nicely: “When we ‘have a white man’s civil government again,’ South Carolina planter William Heyward expected, the landowners will once more impose their will on black laborers, and the latter ‘will be more slaves than they ever were'” (162).
But how does the Confederate emancipation proposal compare with the Union’s efforts to free and arm slaves? Levine notes that the Confederate plan’s crucial weakness was its lack of spine, its tiptoeing efforts not to upset masters: it stipulated that the slaveholders must agree to give up their slaves to the Confederate cause. However, the government and army soon found masters less than willing; this tight-fistedness prompted outrage throughout the South, but did not change the fact that slaveholders simply were not about to give up their property. The Union’s conscription acts and emancipation proclamation, however, made no scruples to pander to slaveowners. These documents declared property in slaves to be simply lost, without compensation, and needed no permission on behalf of the masters. This enabled these acts to be highly efficient, in contrast to the Confederate counterpart, which never took off, and did not seem like it was about to unless altered, no matter how much time it was given to act.