Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  What prompted this reluctance to finish off an opponent he outnumbered by three to one? Sherman wanted to get his road-weary troops to Goldsboro to replenish equipment and supplies after seven weeks of the most strenuous campaigning of the war. Beyond that, despite his ferocious reputation Sherman was careful with the lives of his soldiers. "I don't want to lose men in a direct attack when it can be avoided," he said.42 He would rather win by strategy and maneuver than by battle. He was confident that the war was nearly over and that his destruction of enemy resources had done much to win it. Johnston's small and demoralized force, in Sherman's view, hardly mattered any more. The important thing was to rest and refit his army for the move up to Virginia to help Grant "wipe out Lee."

  42. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 47, pt. 2, p. 910.

  28

  We Are All Americans

  I

  The Confederacy had one last string to its bow—a black string. Early in the war a few voices had urged the arming of slaves to fight for their masters. But to most southerners such a proposal seemed at best ludicrous and at worst treasonable. With a president who denounced the North's emancipation and recruitment of slaves as "the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man," it required rash courage to suggest that the Confederacy itself put arms in the hands of slaves.1

  After the fall of Vicksburg and the defeat at Gettysburg, however, the voices suggesting such a thing had become less lonely. Several newspaper editors in Mississippi and Alabama began speaking out in extraordinary fashion. "We are forced by the necessity of our condition," they declared, "to take a step which is revolting to every sentiment of pride, and to every principle that governed our institutions before the war." The enemy was "stealing our slaves and converting them into soldiers. . . . It is better for us to use the negroes for our defense than that the Yankees should use them against us." Indeed, "we can make them fight better than the Yankees are able to do. Masters and overseers can marshal them for battle by the same authority and habit of obedience with which they are marshalled to labor." It was true, admitted the Jackson

  1. Davis quoted in Robert F. Durden, ed., The Gray and the Black: The Confederate Debate on Emancipation (Baton Rouge, 1972), 24.

  Mississippian, that "such a step would revolutionize our whole industrial system" and perhaps lead to universal emancipation, "a dire calamity to both the negro and the white race." But if we lose the war we lose slavery anyway, for "Yankee success is death to the institution . . . so that it is a question of necessity—a question of a choice of evils. . . . We must . . . save ourselves from the rapacious North, WHATEVER THE COST."2

  General Patrick Cleburne had been thinking along similar lines. He wrote down his ideas and presented them to division and corps commanders in the Army of Tennessee in January 1864. The South was losing the war, said Cleburne, because it lacked the North's manpower and because "slavery, from being one of our chief sources of strength at the commencement of the war, has now become, in a military point of view, one of our chief sources of weakness." The Emancipation Proclamation had given the enemy a moral cause to justify his drive for conquest, Cleburne continued, had made the slaves his allies, undermined the South's domestic security, and turned European nations against the Confederacy. Hence we are threatened with "the loss of all we now hold most sacred—slaves and all other personal property, lands, homesteads, liberty, justice, safety, pride, manhood." To save the rest of these cherished possessions we must sacrifice the first. Let us recruit an army of slaves, concluded Cleburne, and "guarantee freedom within a reasonable time to every slave in the South who shall remain true to the Confederacy."3

  Twelve brigade and regimental commanders in Cleburne's division endorsed his proposal. This was a potentially explosive matter, for these were not just editors expressing an opinion, but fighting men on whom the hopes for Confederate survival rested. Cleburne's arguments cut to the heart of a fundamental ambiguity in the Confederacy's raison d'être. Had secession been a means to the end of preserving slavery? Or was slavery one of the means for preserving the Confederacy, to be sacrificed if it no longer served that purpose? Few southerners in 1861 would have recognized any dilemma: slavery and independence were each a means as well as an end in symbiotic relationship with the other, each essential

  2. These quotations are from editorials in the Jackson Mississippian reprinted in Montgomery Mail, Sept. 9, 1863; Montgomery Weekly Mail, Sept. 2, 1863; and Mobile Register, Nov. 26, 1863, all reprinted in Durden, The Gray and the Black, 30–35, 42–44.

  3. O.R., Ser. I, Vol, 52, pt. 2, pp. 586–92.

  for the survival of both. By 1864, however, southerners in growing numbers were beginning to wonder if they might have to make a choice between them. "Let not slavery prove a barrier to our independence," intoned the Jackson Mississippian. "Although slavery is one of the principles that we started to fight for . . . if it proves an insurmountable obstacle to the achievement of our liberty and separate nationality, away with it!"4

  At the time of Cleburne's proposal, however, such opinions still seemed dangerous. Most generals in the Army of Tennessee disapproved of Cleburne's action, some of them vehemently. This "monstrous proposition," wrote a division commander, was "revolting to Southern sentiment, Southern pride, and Southern honor." A corps commander abhorred it as "at war with my social, moral, and political principles." A shocked and angry brigadier insisted that "we are not whipped, & cannot be whipped. Our situation requires resort to no such remedy. . . . Its propositions contravene the principles upon which we fight."5

  Convinced that the "promulgation of such opinions" would cause "discouragements, distraction, and dissension" in the army, Jefferson Davis ordered the generals to stop discussing the matter.6 So complete was their compliance that the affair remained unknown outside this small circle of southern officers until the U. S. government published the war's Official Records a generation later. The only consequence of Cleburne's action seemed to be denial of promotion to this ablest of the army's division commanders, who was killed ten months later at the battle of Franklin.

  By then the South's dire prospects had revived the notion of arming blacks. In September 1864 the governor of Louisiana declared that "the time has come for us to put into the army every able-bodied negro man as a soldier." A month later the governors of six more states, meeting in conference, enigmatically urged the impressment of slaves for "the public service as may be required." When challenged, all but two of the governors (those of Virginia and Louisiana) hastened to deny that they meant the arming of slaves. On November 7, Jefferson Davis urged

  4. As reprinted in Montgomery Weekly Mail, Sept. 9, 1863, in Durden, The Gray andthe Black, 31–32.

  5. Patton Anderson in O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 52, pt. 2, pp. 598–99; Alexander P. Stewart to William H. T. Walker, Jan. 9, 1864, William B. Bate to Walker, Jan. 9, 1864, Civil War Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library.

  6. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 52, pt. 2, p. 608.

  Congress to purchase 40,000 slaves for work as teamsters, pioneers, and laborers with the promise of freedom after "service faithfully rendered." But this cautious proposal proved much too radical for most of the press and Congress. It would crack the door of Abolition, declared the Richmond Whig. The idea of freeing slaves who performed faithfully was based on the false assumption "that the condition of freedom is so much better for the slave than servitude, that it may be bestowed upon him as a reward." This was "a repudiation of the opinion held by the whole South . . . that servitude is a divinely appointed condition for the highest good of the slave."7

  Congress did not act on the president's request. But the issue would not go away. Although Davis in his November 7 message had opposed the notion of arming blacks at that time, he added ominously: "Should the alternative ever be presented of subjugation or the employment of the slave as a soldier, there seems no reason to doubt what should then be our decision." Within three months the alternative stared the South starkly in the face. The president and his cabine
t made their choice. "We are reduced," said Davis in February 1865, "to choosing whether the negroes shall fight for or against us."8 And if they fought for us, echoed some newspapers, this would not necessarily produce wholesale abolition. Perhaps those who fought must be offered freedom, but that would only "affect units of the race and not the whole institution." By enabling the South to whip the Yankees, it was the only way to save slavery. "If the emancipation of a part is the means of saving the rest, then this partial emancipation is eminently a pro-slavery measure." Some advocates went even further and said that discipline rather than the motive of freedom was sufficient to make slaves fight. "It is not true," declared General Francis Shoup, "that to make good soldiers of these people, we must either give or promise them freedom. . . . As well might one promise to free one's cook . . . with the expectation of thereby securing good dinners."9

  Such talk prompted one exasperated editor to comment that "our Southern people have not gotten over the vicious habit of not believing

  7. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 41, pt. 3, p. 774; Rowland, Davis, VI, 394–97; Richmond Whig, Nov. 9, 1864, in Durden, The Gray and the Black, 110.

  8. Rowland, Davis, VI, 396; O.R., Ser. IV, Vol. 3, p. 1110.

  9. Lynchburg Virginian, Nov. 3, 1864; Richmond Sentinel, Nov. 24, 1864; article by Shoup in Richmond Whig, Feb. 20, 1865, all in Durden, The Gray and the Black, 79, 121, 214.

  what they don't wish to believe."10 Most participants in this debate recognized that if slaves became soldiers, they and probably their families must be promised freedom or they might desert to the enemy at first opportunity. If one or two hundred thousand slaves were armed (the figures most often mentioned), this would free at least half a million. Added to the million or so already liberated by the Yankees, how could the institution survive? asked opponents of the proposal.

  These opponents remained in the majority until February 1865. Yet with the Yankees thundering at the gates, their arguments took flight into an aura of unreality. We can win without black help, they said, if only the absentees and stragglers return to the ranks and the whole people rededicate themselves to the Cause. "The freemen of the Confederate States must work out their own redemption, or they must be the slaves of their own slaves," proclaimed the Charleston Mercury edited by those original secessionists the Robert Barnwell Rhetts, father and son. "The day that the army of Virginia allows a negro regiment to enter their lines as soldiers they will be degraded, ruined, and disgraced," roared Robert Toombs. His fellow Georgian Howell Cobb agreed that "the moment you resort to negro soldiers your white soldiers will be lost to you. . . . The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong."11

  And was not that the theory the South fought for? "It would be the most extraordinary instance of self-stultification the world ever saw" to arm and emancipate slaves, declared the Rhetts. "It is abolition doctrine . . . the very doctrine which the war was commenced to put down," maintained a North Carolina newspaper. It would "surrender the essential and distinctive principle of Southern civilization," agreed the Richmond Examiner.12 Many southerners apparently preferred to lose the war than to win it with the help of black men. "Victory itself would be robbed of its glory if shared with slaves," said a Mississippi congressman.

  10. Charlottesville Chronicle, reprinted in Richmond Sentinel, Dec. 21, 1864, in Durden, The Gray and the Black, 147.

  11. Charleston Mercury, Nov. 3, 1864, in Durden, The Gray and the Black, 99; Toombs quoted in Foote, Civil War, III, 860; Cobb in O.R., Ser. IV, Vol. 3, pp. 1009–10.

  12. Charleston Mercury, Nov. 3, 19, 1864, North Carolina Standard, Jan. 17, 1865, in Durden, The Gray and the Black, 99, 114, 177; Richmond Examiner, Jan. 14, 1865, quoted in Paul D. Escott, After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure ofConfederate Nationalism (Baton Rouge, 1978), 154.

  It would mean "the poor man . . . reduced to the level of a nigger," insisted the Charleston Mercury. "His wife and daughter are to be hustled on the street by black wenches, their equals. Swaggering buck niggers are to ogle them and elbow them." Senator Louis Wigfall of Texas "wanted to live in no country in which the man who blacked his boots and curried his horse was his equal." "If such a terrible calamity is to befall us," declared the Lynchburg Republican, "we infinitely prefer that Lincoln shall be the instrument of our disaster and degradation, than that we ourselves should strike the cowardly and suicidal blow."13

  But the shock effect of Lincoln's insistence at Hampton Roads on unconditional surrender helped the Davis administration make headway against these arguments. During February many petitions and letters from soldiers in the Petersburg trenches poured into Richmond to challenge the belief that white soldiers would refuse to fight alongside blacks. While "slavery is the normal condition of the negro . . . as indispensable to [his] prosperity and happiness . . . as is liberty to the whites," declared the 56th Virginia, nevertheless "if the public exigencies require that any number of our male slaves be enlisted in the military service in order to [maintain] our Government, we are willing to make concessions to their false and unenlightened notions of the blessings of liberty."14

  Robert E. Lee's opinion would have a decisive influence. For months rumors had circulated that he favored arming the slaves. Lee had indeed expressed his private opinion that "we should employ them without delay [even] at the risk which may be produced upon our social institutions." On February 18 he broke his public silence with a letter to the congressional sponsor of a Negro soldier bill. This measure was "not only expedient but necessary," wrote Lee. "The negroes, under proper circumstances, will make efficient soldiers. I think we could at least do as well with them as the enemy. . . . Those who are employed should be freed. It would be neither just nor wise . . . to require them to serve as slaves."15

  13. Mississippi congressman quoted in Durden, The Gray and the Black, 140; Charleston Mercury, Jan. 26, 1865, quoted in Bell Irvin Wiley, Southern Negroes 1861–1865 (New Haven, 1938), 156–57; Louis Wigfall quoted in E. Merton Coulter, The Confederate States of America 1861–1865 (Baton Rouge, 1950), 268; Lynchburg Republican, Nov. 2, 1864, in Durden, The Gray and the Black, 94.

  14. Published in Richmond Whig, Feb. 23, 1865, reprinted in Durden, The Gray andthe Black, 222–23.

  15. Lee to Andrew Hunter, Jan. 11, 1865, in O.R., Ser. IV, Vol. 3, pp. 1012–13; Lee to Ethelbert Barksdale, Feb. 18, 1865, in Durden, The Gray and the Black, 206.

  Lee's great prestige carried the day—but just barely. Although the powerful Richmond Examiner dared to express a doubt whether Lee was "a 'good Southerner'; that is, whether he is thoroughly satisfied of the justice and beneficence of negro slavery," even this anti-administration newspaper recognized that "the country will not venture to deny to General Lee . . . anything he may ask for."16 By a vote of 40 to 37 the House passed a bill authorizing the president to requisition a quota of black soldiers from each state. In deference to state's rights, the bill did not mandate freedom for slave soldiers. The Senate nevertheless defeated the measure by a single vote, with both senators from Lee's own state voting No. The Virginia legislature meanwhile enacted its own law for the enlistment of black soldiers—without, however, requiring the emancipation of those who were slaves—and instructed its senators to vote for the congressional bill. They did so, enabling it to pass by 9 to 8 (with several abstentions) and become law on March 13. In the few weeks of life left to the Confederacy no other state followed Virginia's lead. The two companies of black soldiers hastily organized in Richmond never saw action. Nor did most of these men obtain freedom until the Yankees—headed by a black cavalry regiment—marched into the Confederate capital on April 3.17

  A last-minute diplomatic initiative to secure British and French recognition in return for emancipation also proved barren of results. The impetus for this effort came from Duncan F. Kenner of Louisiana, a prominent member of the Confederate Congress and one of the South's largest slaveholders. Convinced since 1862
that slavery was a foreign-policy millstone around the Confederacy's neck, Kenner had long urged an emancipationist diplomacy. His proposals got nowhere until December 1864, when Jefferson Davis called Kenner in and conceded that the time had come to play this last card. Kenner traveled to Paris and London

  16. Richmond Examiner, Feb. 16, 25, in Durden, The Gray and the Black, 199, 226.

  17. War Department regulations governing the recruitment of slave soldiers bootlegged a quasi-freedom into the process by stipulating that a slave could be enlisted only with his own consent and that of his master, who was required to grant the slave in writing, "as far as he may, the rights of a freedman." Whether this ambiguous language actually conferred freedom, as several historians maintain, must remain forever moot. See Durden, The Gray and the Black, 268–70; Escort, After Secession, 252; and Emory Thomas, The Confederate Nation 1861–1865 (New York, 1979). 296–97.

  as a special envoy to offer abolition for recognition. Davis of course could not commit his Congress on this matter, and these lawmakers could not in turn commit the states, which had constitutional authority over the institution. But perhaps European governments would overlook these complications.