By January 1864, Confederate Major General Patrick Cleburne had few illusions. With its armies depleted, the Confederacy’s hopes of victory were fading. However, with one reform, he believed, the cause could be revived. It was, though, to be a reform of the cause itself. Before an assembly of the officers of the Army of Tennessee, he proposed an emancipation of all slaves “who will remain true to the Confederacy in this war,” from which would be drawn regiments of free black soldiers.

As radical as this appeal seemed in the American South of 1864, it was based upon commonplace experience. From the perspective of world history, it wasn’t radical at all. For thousands of years, masters had often freed their slaves to gain their service as soldiers in wartime. The Confederacy’s Union foes had been recruiting southern slaves with the promise of emancipation for a year. For Cleburne, the utility of his solution was self-evident.

He did, though, understand that the forfeiture of slave property in the South would be a great economic loss. But looming defeat threatened far more, he said, “the loss of all we hold most sacred — personal property, lands, homesteads, liberty, justice, safety, pride, manhood.” He challenged the South to stand on principle — “It is said that slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all…. [But] we assume that every patriot will freely give up the negro slave rather than be a slave [to Yankees] himself.”

“We” assumed far too much.

Though there was some support, the proposal was principally met with outrage, or stony silence. President Jefferson Davis had “Cleburne’s Memorial” actively suppressed. It was patently clear that the vast majority of Confederate leaders emphatically did believe that “if we give up [slavery] we give up all.” It must be remembered that slaveholders were a minority in the Confederacy, but a large majority within its political and military leadership circles, with large slaveholders being particularly prominent. Cleburne was asking this wealthy minority within a minority to sacrifice financially to ease the bodily sacrifices of the men in their beleaguered armies — manned primarily by the non-slaveholding majority. This the “slavocrats” refused to do. As a result, reinforcements did not come.

Over the next year, Atlanta and Mobile fell. Sherman and Sheridan respectively gutted Georgia and the Shenandoah. The resolutely anti-secession Lincoln was reelected. By January 1865, the Confederacy’s doom was sealed. At which point – and not a moment sooner — ever-astute Confederate leaders began to reconsider Cleburne’s year-old proposal. But some insisted that slave armies could be mustered without troublesome emancipation. Across the South, it was commonly asserted that slaves actually preferred bondage to liberty. Therefore, it was alleged, an offer of freedom would be a punishment rather than a reward. Slaves, then, would willingly fight for the Confederacy solely out of loyalty to their beloved masters. This, the Confederate Congress could accept. On 13 March 1865, it authorized masters to send their slaves, as slaves, to the front to fight. To fight for their own enslavement, and against their own emancipation, already being offered by the Union.

Which was lunacy. A week later, Davis did order emancipation for the enlistees, but the entire debate had been nothing more than a deathbed farce. The war was over. Lee surrendered on April 9th.

Fate had confronted the Confederacy with an unambiguous choice, “your slavery or your life?” It had selected death. Uniquely in world history, it opted for obliteration with slavery intact rather than life without it. Few things define its essence more precisely. The Confederacy had rebel-yelled its sacred “Cause” from the gallows.

This is the real story of “Black Confederates.” It doesn’t concern the insignificant few who were. It is the tale of the hundreds of thousands who might have been, but never were.
Jim Wiggins is a retired Copiah-Lincoln Community College history instructor.