Confederates Debate Emancipation (1863-1864)

After the critical Confederate defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in 1863, with emanci-
pation now Union policy and African Americans flocking to Union colors, some Confed-
erates began to think the previously unthinkable: that in order to attain independence, the
Confederacy might have to enlist blacks in its own army. The ensuing debate got louder as
the Confederate position deteriorated, and especially after President Jefferson Davis in
November 1864 suggested the possibility of emancipation as a reward for service. In March
1865, after intervention by General Robert E. Lee, the Confederate Congress finally passed
legislation permitting the enlistment of slaves, but without changing their status. Although
the army recognized the impossibility of arming slaves, the most it could do was require that
masters grant freedom to any slaves they sent into service. Few were recruited in the scant
month remaining before Appomattox. Thus the debate was fatally inconclusive for the
Confederacy; but it laid bare some of the basic contradictions underlying the Confederate
cause.

Source: Robert F. Durden, The Gray and the Black: The Confederate Debate on Emancipation (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), 30-32,97-99,124-125,141-142. Used by permission of
the publisher.
(a) Excerpts from the Jackson Mississippian, Reprinted in Montgomery (AL) Weekly Mail,
September^ 1863
EMPLOYMENT OF NEGROES IN THE ARMY.
... We must either employ the negroes ourselves, or the enemy will employ them against us. While the enemy retains so much of
our territory, they are, in their present avocation and status, a dangerous element, a source of weakness. They are no longer
negative characters, but subjects of volition as other people. They must be taught to know that this is peculiarly the country of
the black man—that in no other is the climate and soil so well adapted to his nature and capacity. He must further be taught that
it is his duty, as well as the white man's, to defend his home with arms, if need be.
We are aware that there are persons who shudder at the idea of placing arms in the hands of negroes, and who are not
willing to trust them under any circumstances. The negro, however, is proverbial for his faithfulness under kind treatment. He is
an affectionate, grateful being, and we are persuaded that the fears of such persons are groundless.
There are in the slaveholding States four millions of negroes, and out of this number at least six hundred thousand able-
bodied men capable of bearing arms can be found. Lincoln proposes to free and arm them against us. There are already fifty
thousand of them in the Federal ranks. Lincoln's scheme has worked well so far, and if no[t] checkmated, will most assuredly be
carried out. The Confederate Government must adopt a counter policy. It must thwart the enemy in this gigantic scheme, at all
hazards, and if nothing else will do it—if the negroes cannot be made effective and trustworthy to the Southern cause in no other
way, we solemnly believe it is the duty of this Government to forestall Lincoln and proceed at once to take steps for the
emancipation or liberation of the negroes itself. Let them be declared free, placed in the ranks, and told to fight for their homes
and country.

We are fully sensible of the grave importance of the not willing to jeopardize the precious liberty of the country
question, but the inexorable logic of events has forced it by his eagerness to hold on to his slaves, but that he was
upon us. We must deal with it, then, not with fear and ready to give them up and sacrifice his interest in them
trembling—not as timid, time-serving men—but with a whenever the cause demanded it. It would lend a new
boldness, a promptness and a determination which the ex- impetus, a new enthusiasm, a new and powerful strength to
igency requires, and which should ever characterize the the cause, and place our success beyond a peradventure. It
action of a people resolved to sacrifice everything for lib- would at once remove all the odium which attached to us on
erty. It is true, that such a step would revolutionize our account of slavery, and bring us speedy recognition, and, if
whole industrial system—that it would, to a great extent, necessary, intervention.
impoverish the country and be a dire calamity to both the We sincerely trust that the Southern people will be
negro and the white race of this and the Old World; but found willing to make any and every sacrifice which the es-
better this than the loss of the negroes, the country and tablishment of our independence may require. Let it never
liberty. be said that to preserve slavery we were willing to wear the
If Lincoln succeeds in arming our slaves against us, he chains of bondage ourselves—that the very avarice which
will succeed in making them our masters. He will reverse the prompted us to hold on to the negro for the sake of the
social order of things at the South. Whereas, if he is check- money invested in him, riveted upon us shackles more
mated in time, our liberties will remain intact; the land will galling and bitter than ever a people yet endured. Let not
be ours, and the industrial system of the country still con- slavery prove a barrier to our independence. If it is found in
trolled by Southern men.
Such action on the part of our Government would place
our people in a purer and better light before the world. It
would disabuse the European mind of a grave error in regard
to the cause of our separation. It would prove to them that
there were higher and holier motives which actuated our
people than the mere love of property. It would show that,
although slavery is one of the principles that we started to
fight for, yet it falls far short of being the chief one; that, for
the sake of our liberty, we are capable of any personal
sacrifice; that we regard the emancipation of slaves, and the
consequent loss of property as an evil infinitely less than the
subjugation and enslavement of ourselves; that it is not a war
exclusively for the privilege of holding negroes in bondage.
It would prove to our soldiers, three-fourths of whom never
owned a negro, that it is not "the rich man's war and the poor
man's fight," but a war for the most sacred of all principles,
for the dearest of all rights—the right to govern ourselves. It
would show them that the rich man who owned slaves was
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....
(b) Charleston Mercury* November 3,1864
Usurpation is ever prolific. When the Confederacy, by the
Confederate Congress, claimed omnipotence over the States
and its citizens, including the officers of the States in its mil-
itary resources, by the Conscription Law, any one conversant
with human nature must have known that this might not be
the end of its usurpations. A Constitution is like a dyke keep-
ing out the sea. Cut it and the influx of waters must be end-
less. This usurpation was soon followed by the Direct Tax
Act, by which the Confederate Government claimed to be
omnipotent and consolidated, in its taxing, as it was, by the
Conscription Law, in its military powers. We are now at a
third stage of its usurpations, soon to [be] accomplished, if
not promptly met by the States—the power to emancipate
our slaves.
... Now, if there was any single proposition that we thought
was unquestionable in the Confederacy it was this—that the
States, and the States alone, have the exclusive jurisdiction
and mastery over their slaves. To suppose that any
slaveholding country [i.e., state] would voluntarily leave it to
any other power than its own, to emancipate its slaves, is such
an absurdity, that we did not believe a single intelligent man
in the Confederacy could entertain it. Still less could we
believe that after what had taken place under the United
States, with respect to slavery in the Southern States, it was
possible that any pretension to emancipate slaves could be
set up for the Confederate States. It was because the exclu-
sion of slaves from our Territories by the Government of the
United States, looked to their emancipation, that we resisted
it. The power to exercise it was never claimed by that Gov-
ernment. The mere agitation in the Northern States to effect
the emancipation of our slaves largely contributed to our
separation from them. And now, before a Confederacy
which we established to put at rest forever all such agitation
is four years old, we find the proposition gravely submitted
that the Confederate Government should emancipate slaves
in the States. South Caroline, acting upon the principle that
she and she alone had the power to emancipate her slaves,
has passed laws prohibiting their emancipation by any of her
citizens, unless they are sent out of the State; and no free per-
son of color already free, who leaves the State, shall ever af-
terwards enter it. She has laws now in force, prohibiting free
negroes, belonging either to the Northern States, or to Euro-
pean powers, from entering the State, and by the most rigid
provisions, they are seized and put into prison should they
enter it. These were her rights, under the Union of the
United States, recognized and protected by the Government
of the United States, and acquiesced in by all foreign nations.
And, now, here, it is proposed that the Government of the
Confederate States, not only has the right to seize our slaves
and to make them soldiers, but to emancipate them in South
Carolina, and compel us to give them a home amongst us.
We confess, that our indignation at such pretensions is so
great, that we are at a loss to know how to treat them. To ar-
gue against them, is self-stultification. They are as mon-
strous as they are insulting.
The pretext for this policy is, that we want soldiers in
our armies. This pretext is set up by the Enquirer in the face
of the fact disclosed by the President of the Confederate
States, that two-thirds of our soldiers, now in the army, are
absentees from its ranks. The Enquirer is a devout upholder
of President Davis and the Administration. It does not
arraign the Government for such a state of things. It passes
over the gross mismanagement which has produced them;
and cries out, that negroes are wanted to fill the ranks of our
armies.... It is vain to attempt to blink the truth. The freemen
of the Confederate States must work out their own
redemption, or they must be the slaves of their own slaves.
The statesmanship, which looks to any other source for
success, is contemptible charlatanry. It is worse—it is
treachery to our cause itself, Assert the right in the
Confederate Government to emancipate slaves, and it is
stone dead.
(c) "Sydney" (a nonslaveholder), in the Macon
Telegraph and Confederate, November 19,1864
... Now there is [sic] in the Confederacy one or two hundred
thousand able bodied negroes not engaged in agriculture.
Many of them [are] refugees from the country overrun, and
they consume just as much as if they were in the army and
can be very well spared. While thousands of poor white men
that have nothing but their country to defend, have bled and
died, their families are left to the cold charities of the world.
The rich planters can stay at home undisturbed, and if it is
hinted [that] cuffey [the Negro] is wanted to help defend his
country and property we see a great howl set up about it, and
more fuss made than if 1000 white men were sacrificed. Try
to hide it as much as we may, yet the question of negro slav-
ery was the great leading cause of this war, and but for it we
would have been recognized long ago by foreign powers, but
in that particular the world is against us, and so we will re-
main until this war shall have placed it upon a basis too firm
to be questioned.
Then why may not the negro help to establish the only
government that looks to the Christianizing of the African
and placing him in a condition far above his fellow country-
men in any part of the world, if the exigency demands men
to the extent above referred to, in God's name, do not sacri-
fice every white man in the Confederacy in preference to tak-
ing a few negroes from their fondling masters.
(d) Rep. Henry C. Chambers (MS) in
Confederate House of Representatives,
November 10,1864
... Sir, on what motive is he to fight our battles? He is after
all a human being, and acts upon motives. Will you offer
him his freedom? The enemy will offer him his freedom, and
also as a deserter, immunity from military service. Will you
offer him the privilege of return home to his family, a
freeman, after the war? That you dare not do, remembering
it was the free negroes of St. Domingo, who had been
trained to arms, that excited the insurrection of the slaves.
And the enemy would meet even that offer with the promise
of a return free to his Southern home and the right of
property in it. The amount of it all is, that in despair of
achieving our independence with our own right arms, we
turn for succor to the slave and implore him to establish our
freedom and fix slavery upon himself, or at least upon his
family and his race, forever. He, at least, after the expiration
of his term of service, is to be banished to Liberia or other
inhospitable shore, for the States could never permit an army
of negroes to be returned home, either free or slave.. . .
... Sir, this scheme, if attempted, will end in rapid
emancipation and colonization—colonization in the North
by bringing up the slaves by regiments and brigades to the
opportunity of escape to the enemy; emancipation and
colonization abroad to those who render service to us for a
specified period. I argue on the presumption that nothing of
the kind will be attempted without the consent of the States,
whether as to employing them on the promise of freedom, or
as to returning them free and disciplined to their old homes.
By means of the power of impressment or purchase, this
Government could not safely be permitted, without the
consent of the States, to inaugurate a system of emancipation
that might end in the abolition of the institution, nor do I
suppose that the President designed the contrary. In
suggesting freedom as the motive to be offered to the slave,
he performed a simple official duty, leaving to Congress if it
adopted the suggestion, to provide by law all the conditions
it might be proper to impose.
In any aspect of the case, this is a proposition to subvert
the labour system, the social system and the political system
of our country. Better, far, to employ mercenaries from
abroad, if dangerous and impracticable expedients are to be
attempted, and preserve that institution which is not only the
foundation of our wealth but the palladium of our liberties.
Make the experiment, of course, with negro troops as the last
means to prevent subjugation; but when we shall be reduced
to the extremity of exclaiming to the slave, "help us, or we
sink," it will already have become quite immaterial what
course we pursue!