GDG- Fwd: H-CivWar review, Monroe on Levine, _Confederate Emancipation_

[Dennis Lawrence]

>H-NET BOOK REVIEW
>Published by H-CivWar at h-net.msu.edu (July 2008)
>
>
>Bruce Levine. _Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and 
>Arm Slaves during the Civil War_. New York: Oxford University Press, 
>2006. vii + 252 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $17.95 (paper), ISBN 
>0195315863.
>
>
>
>Reviewed for H-CivWar by Dan Monroe, Department of History, Millikin 
>University
>
>
>Confederate Emancipation: An Oxymoron?
>
>
>With Union armies marching to victory throughout the South and with 
>the Confederate capital at Richmond besieged at the end of 1864, the 
>slave republic belatedly considered enlisting slaves in the armed 
>forces.  Bruce Levine, the James G. Randall Professor of History at 
>the University of Illinois, examines the internal debate that 
>preceded the eventual decision to employ black Confederate troops, a 
>decision that came too late to rescue the Confederacy from 
>destruction.  Levine found that the debate revealed a great deal 
>concerning the true motives behind secession, and he also punctures 
>a number of Lost Cause myths along the way.
>
>Patrick Cleburne, a fiercely effective general in the Army of 
>Tennessee, had broached the idea of arming slaves in exchange for 
>emancipation in a memo that he read to an officers' caucus in early 
>January 1864.  Cleburne's suggestion received no support from 
>Jefferson Davis's administration; indeed, Cleburne was ordered to 
>drop the matter.  Yet by the fall of 1864, the Confederate 
>government reconsidered the proposal in the face of battlefield 
>setbacks, particularly William Tecumseh Sherman's devastating march 
>through Georgia and subsequent conquering of South Carolina, Abraham 
>Lincoln's reelection, and growing desertion from even Robert E. 
>Lee's army and consequent manpower shortages.  The ensuing debate 
>over emancipating and arming slaves took place in letters, newspaper 
>editorials, and speeches from Confederate luminaries, such as Judah 
>P. Benjamin, and Levine artfully mines these sources.
>
>The proposal to enlist black slaves in the army excited considerable 
>criticism, and that criticism, Levine points out, illustrated the 
>contradictions inherent in the entire enterprise of the slave 
>republic.  Critics charged that in enlisting slaves the central 
>purpose for which the Confederacy had been created--to preserve a 
>slave-based society--would be abandoned.  Further, for decades, 
>Southern quack intellectuals had argued that black slaves were 
>docile and content with bondage, even loyal and devoted to 
>masters.  The plan to arm slaves directly contradicted the myth of 
>docility, while the necessity to offer freedom as an incentive to 
>fight vitiated the myth of contentment.
>
>Levine correctly notes the slaves' own agency in their eventual 
>freedom from bondage, for the debate within the Confederacy on 
>arming the slaves was strongly influenced by wartime acts of slaves 
>themselves.  To those who argued that slaves would not fight, 
>advocates pointed to the thousands of escaped slaves who had 
>enlisted in the Union army and fought with valor and 
>distinction.  Further, Levine argues that growing black resistance 
>on Southern plantations and farms prompted some to insist that home 
>front safety demanded clapping slaves into the army.  Just as the 
>reality of thousands of escaped slaves crossing into the lines of 
>the Union army forced the Lincoln administration and Congress to 
>act, so, too, did the subsequent distinguished service of black 
>Union troops force reconsideration of old assumptions regarding 
>slave behavior in the South.
>
>Perhaps most important, Levine dismisses a number of the arguments 
>of Lost Cause adherents.  After the war's conclusion, Confederate 
>devotees suggested that the willingness to abandon slavery proved 
>that a desire for liberty from Northern tyranny and oppression 
>motivated the formation of the Confederate government, not a desire 
>to preserve slavery.  Further, so the argument went, Cleburne, Lee, 
>and Davis had all endorsed black Confederate troops and emancipation 
>because slavery had never been central to their struggle.  Yet 
>Levine convincingly argues that only the exigencies of a failing war 
>effort compelled the Confederate government and its principal 
>officials to embrace emancipation as a tool to entice slaves into 
>the army.  Men like Lee and Davis continued to maintain that slavery 
>worked for blacks and whites, and indeed intended to create a social 
>and labor system as close to de facto slavery as possible in the 
>post-emancipation South.  Although J. D. B. De Bow and others 
>initiated and perpetuated the "loyal slave" myth, Levine notes that 
>the slaves' evident thirst for freedom forced the Southern 
>government to reluctantly offer emancipation as incentive to 
>military service.  Even then, few slaves took up arms for the 
>Confederacy at the end of the war.
>
>Levine's study of the Confederate struggle with emancipation is an 
>outstanding treatment that deserves a wide audience.  He has 
>provided a window into a hitherto largely unknown debate in which 
>the participants unwittingly revealed the animating principles of 
>the Confederacy.
>
>
>
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