Confederate Reckoning

McCurry compares the history of the Confederacy to the rebellion that turned the island of Saint-Domingue, a colony of France, to the Republic of Haiti. Conflict on the island led to enslaved people becoming armed and forming their own armies. At first, they negotiated for their freedom in exchange for a fixed term of military service. By June of 1793, however, a commissioner named Léger Félicité Sonthonax, facing an attempt to overturn his authority, offered emancipation to all enslaved people who fought on his and the First Republic of France’s behalf. Later, he extended the offer to all the wives of the men who were married in a way legally recognized by the First Republic. By 1794, the First Republic enacted the first universal abolition of enslavement in history. Still, Black Haitians had to defend themselves against efforts to re-enslave them. The Confederates were well aware of the parallels between Haiti’s history and their own.

The Confederacy was faced with two challenges involving its Black male population. The first was that the North drastically outnumbered their armed forces. The second was the Emancipation Proclamation, which gave the Confederacy’s large population of Black men a reason to side with the Union. About 180,000 African American men fought for the Union during the Civil War with 98,500 of them formerly enslaved people from the Confederacy (318-19). It became Union policy to actively recruit formerly enslaved people and to extend refuge to women only if they could be considered wives.

After the CSA’s catastrophic defeat at Gettysburg, President Davis’s administration called for stricter impressment laws. Facing near total conquest, a representative from Alabama proposed abolishing enslavement to make it easier to achieve diplomatic recognition by foreign governments. Another representative argued for the enlistment of Black men in the Confederate army. By August 1863, a legislative committee in Alabama passed a resolution calling for the enlistment of Black men in exchange for their emancipation. However, “no one discussed…whether slave men would be willing to serve the C.S.A.” (324). An officer in Tennessee, Patrick Cleburne, wrote a memorandum calling for enlistment across the Confederacy. He noted the logistical difficulties faced by a warring state that practiced enslavement: Southern states lacked manpower since nearly half their male population was ineligible for service, enslaved people would readily defect to and spy for the enemy, and slaveholders were often more interested in preserving their property than serving the needs of the state. To address these problems, Cleburne proposed emancipating all of the Confederacy’s enslaved people. Cleburne’s memorandum was “immediately suppressed” (329).

Nonetheless, by 1864 the Confederacy was in such dire straits that the debate over enlisting enslaved people spread across the South. That October, the debate reached President Davis’s administration. Even then, many Confederates, unlike Cleburne, believed that enslavement could be maintained with emancipation only given to those who provided military service “and perhaps their families” (332). Others, like Virginia senator Allen T. Caperton, believed that enslaved men could be forced to fight without offering them emancipation. In November, President Davis made a speech to Congress. He proposed recognizing enslaved people as people, not property, and offering emancipation to enslaved people in exchange for state service. However, he would not propose enlisting enslaved people as soldiers since that would be likely “to overthrow the very republic the South had seceded to perfect” (337). Even Davis’s compromise position faced bitter opposition and further spurred on a debate in the press about allowing enslaved people to be soldiers.

As the Confederacy’s survival was further threatened, Davis and his secretary of state, Judah P. Benjamin, became more open to the idea of enslaved soldiers. Davis needed the endorsement of General Robert E. Lee to win support for his own proposals. In fact, Lee endorsed emancipation for enslaved people who enlisted in the army along with gradual emancipation of all enslaved people and their families, predicting that enslavement “was done for, one way or another” (341). Any talk of enslaved soldiers sparked fierce opposition from congressmen who “made the argument that military service was the obligation of the free citizen and slaves who provided it could not be denied the rights that went with it” (347). Eventually, such proposals were watered down into a bill in the Confederate Congress that would enable President Davis’s administration to enlist enslaved people in the military with their enslavers’ permission, leaving emancipation up to the enslavers and the state governments. This bill was titled “A Bill to Increase the Military Force of the Confederate States.” However, Davis followed this up with General Order No. 14, which stated that military enlistment would come with freedom, though enslaved people could still only enlist in the first place with the consent of their enslavers.

In the last months of the Confederacy, impressment continued, and enslaved people were prosecuted for treason. Two enlisted Black soldiers in Richmond were detained as runaways. Lee asked the governor of Virginia to draft all enslaved people. Two army majors, J.W. Pegram and Thomas P. Turner, asked for planters to raise regiments of black soldiers, leaving it ambiguous whether their service would be voluntary. Only two companies of Black soldiers were formed under the Confederacy, fighting in Petersburg toward the end of the war. It is unclear if they fought under coercion or because they were promised or given freedom.