Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

the proposal to arm the slaves and offer them the carrot of emancipation to guarantee good service had not originated with Davis. Richard Ewell, the scapegoat of Gettysburg, had suggested this to Jefferson Davis after First Bull Run in 1861, even volunteering to “command a brigade of Negroes,” and Davis continued to get advice from desperate citizens to dismiss “all squeameshness about employing negroes in civilized warfare.” The idea was formally introduced on January 24, 1864, by Patrick Cleburne, the Army of Tennessee’s Irish-born corps commander. Significantly, Cleburne was not a slave owner himself and had little interest in slavery. His principal rationale was the preservation of Confederate independence: “As between the loss of independence and the loss of slavery, we assume that every patriot will freely give up the latter—give up the negro slave rather than be a slave himself.”100

This was asking much more of Southerners, in the name of the Confederacy, than Cleburne realized; he was, in fact, asking them to surrender the cornerstone of white racism in order to preserve their nation, and that was more than Davis felt he could safely ask. All copies of Cleburne’s written proposal were destroyed, by Davis’s order. But ten months later Davis felt he no longer had room for choice, and so in November 1864 Davis introduced his proposal for arming the slaves to the Confederate Congress. This time, even Davis’s closest political allies stopped short. Howell Cobb, who thought he was fighting the war to preserve slavery and not some elusive Confederate nationalism, warned Davis, “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.” North Carolina newspapers bitterly attacked the proposal as “farcical”—“all this was done for the preservation and perpetuation of slavery,” and if “sober men… are ready to enquire if the South is willing to abolish slavery as a condition of carrying on the war, why may it not be done, as a condition of ending the war?” North Carolina’s soldiers were even more terse in their dismissal of the plan. “I did not volunteer to fight for a free negroes country,” J. F. Maides wrote home. “I do not think I love my country well enough to fight with black soldiers.” Without slavery, Virginia governor William Smith exclaimed, the South “would no longer have a motive to continue the struggle.”101

The continuing collapse of the Confederate field armies eventually frightened even the most diehard slaveholders in Congress, and when General Lee added his endorsement to a bill introduced into the Confederate Congress by Mississippian Ethelbert Barksdale in February 1865, the opposition crumbled. On March 8, with a margin of only one vote in the Senate, the Congress voted to authorize the recruitment of black soldiers. Seventeen days later, the first black Confederate companies began drilling in Richmond.102

Would African Americans have fought to save the Confederate nation? They just might have, since southern blacks demonstrated repeatedly throughout the war a healthy skepticism of all white intentions and promises, in blue or in gray, and were prepared to grasp for liberty without regard to who offered it. A skeptical Georgia slave told Union major George Ward Nichols that it was all well and good that the Union armies had come to bring him freedom, “but, massa, you’se’ll go way tomorrow, and anudder white man’ll come.” Nichols could only nod in agreement: “He had never known any thing but persecutions and injury from the white man” and saw no reason to put more trust in one class of white people than another. “Freedom and liberty is the word with the Collered people,” wrote a free black Louisianan; if fighting for the Confederacy “makes us free we are happy to hear it.”103 In the event, it was really too late for anyone to find out. Less than a month after the Confederate Congress authorized black enlistment, the war was over and the prospect of black Confederates was left to drift off into the realm of might-have-been.

Yet this is not to say that the idea of creating a Confederate nation was a foreordained failure. Southerners may have lost faith in the Confederate government’s success in waging war but not in the fundamental notions of Confederate nationalism, and especially not white racial supremacy. The move to recruit black soldiers may have rocked some Southerners, but not all of them, and belated as its appearance was, it testified to the degree to which Davis and like-minded Southerners had managed to move the Confederacy toward thinking of itself as a nation whose collective survival was more important than the preservation of its individual parts. Southerners assured themselves to the very end that God was with the Confederacy, and labored to incorporate Confederate nationalism into novels, plays, music, and even spelling books. And whatever disenchantment Southerners experienced with the Davis administration, they converted Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia into near deities in whom they never lost confidence. What the Confederacy demonstrated was this truth, that it was easier to create a nation than it was to create a nation-state.

The Confederate nation-state did not survive the Civil War, but the Southerners who died in its battles, and the four years of fire that it sustained in the teeth of the North’s industrial and military might, are a warning not to underestimate how close they came to succeeding. The Confederacy’s internal fractures were not more serious than the ones other governments have lived with, nor was a nation that glamorized a Romantic aristocracy an impossibility; what made it ultimately unsustainable was the constant military pounding to which it was subjected. The Confederacy might have survived its fractures; culturally speaking, it actually did, as postwar Southerners went about converting the basic elements of Confederate nationalism—race, class, and sectional politics—into the badges of a peculiar people. What the Confederate government could not survive was the defeat of its armies in battle.104

What Jefferson Davis needed was time—time