JANUARY 2, 1864:
The
Irish-born and openly gay Major
General Patrick Cleburne C.S.A. dares convention once again and broaches a
subject that no Southerner has dared voice to date, that being the arming of
slaves to fill out badly-thinned Confederate ranks. His letter to his superior,
General Joseph E. Johnston, reads in part:
Dear General,
Moved by the exigency
in which our country is now placed we take the liberty of laying before you,
unofficially, our views on the present state of affairs. The subject is so grave, and our views so
new, we feel it a duty both to you and the cause that before going further we
should submit them for your judgment and receive your suggestions in regard to
them . . .
We have now been fighting for nearly three years, have spilled much
of our best blood, and lost, consumed, or thrown to the flames an amount of property
equal in value to the specie currency of the world. Through some lack in our system the fruits of
our struggles and sacrifices have invariably slipped away from us and left us
nothing but long lists of dead and mangled.
Instead of standing defiantly on the borders of our territory or
harassing those of the enemy, we are hemmed in to-day into less than two-thirds
of it, and still the enemy menacingly confronts us at every point with superior
forces. Our soldiers can see no end to
this state of affairs except in our own exhaustion; hence, instead of rising to
the occasion, they are sinking into a fatal apathy, growing weary of hardships
and slaughters which promise no results. In this state of things it is easy to
understand why there is a growing belief that some black catastrophe is not far
ahead of us, and that unless some extraordinary change is soon made in our
condition we must overtake it . . . If this state continues much longer we must
be subjugated . . .
We can see three great causes operating to destroy us: First, the inferiority of our armies to those
of the enemy in point of numbers; second, the poverty of our single source of
supply in comparison with his several sources; third, the fact that 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 . . .
[T]he President of the United States announces that "he has
already in training an army of 100,000 negroes as good as any troops," and
every fresh raid he makes and new slice of territory he wrests from us will add
to this force . . .
Our single source of supply is that portion of our white
men fit for duty and not now in the ranks.
The enemy has three sources of supply:
First, his own motley population; secondly, our slaves; and thirdly,
Europeans whose hearts are fired into a crusade against us by fictitious pictures
of the atrocities of slavery . . .
In touching the third cause, the fact that
slavery has become a military weakness . . . [a]part from the assistance that
home and foreign prejudice against slavery has given to the North, slavery is a
source of great strength to the enemy in a purely military point of view, by
supplying him with an army from our granaries; but it is our most vulnerable
point, a continued embarrassment, and in some respects an insidious weakness .
. . [W]hites can no longer with safety
to their property openly sympathize with our cause. The fear of their slaves is continually
haunting them . . .
[S]lavery is
comparatively valueless to us for labor, but of great and increasing worth to
the enemy for information. It is an omnipresent spy system . . . Even in
the heart of our country, where our hold upon this secret espionage is firmest,
it waits but the opening fire of the enemy's battle line to wake it, like a
torpid serpent, into venomous activity . . . In view of the state of affairs
what does our country propose to do? In
the words of President Davis "no effort must be spared to add largely to
our effective force as promptly as possible.
The sources of supply are to be found in restoring to the army all who
are improperly absent, putting an end to substitution, modifying the exemption
law, restricting details, and placing in the ranks such of the able-bodied men
now employed as wagoners, nurses, cooks, and other employe[e]s, as are doing
service for which the negroes may be found competent." Most of the men improperly absent, together
with many of the exempts and men having substitutes, are now without the
Confederate lines and cannot be calculated on.
If all the exempts capable of bearing arms were enrolled, it will give
us the boys below eighteen, the men above forty-five, and those persons who are
left at home to meet the wants of the country and the army, but this
modification of the exemption law will remove from the fields and manufactories
most of the skill that directed agricultural and mechanical labor, and, as
stated by the President, "details will have to be made to meet the wants of
the country," thus sending many of the men to be derived from this source
back to their homes again . . .
The supply from all these sources, together
with what we now have in the field, will exhaust the white race, and . . .
still we have no reserve . . . [a]dequate[ ] to meet the causes which are now threatening
ruin to our country . . .
[W]e propose, in addition to a modification of the
President's plans, that we retain in service for the war all troops now in
service, and that we immediately commence training a large reserve of the most
courageous of our slaves, and further that we guarantee freedom within a
reasonable time to every slave in the South who shall remain true to the
Confederacy in this war. 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. If we are correct in this
assumption it only remains to show how this great national sacrifice is, in all
human probabilities, to change the current of success and sweep the invader
from our country . . .
Will the slaves fight?
The helots of Sparta stood their masters good stead in battle. In the great sea fight of Lepanto where the
Christians checked forever the spread of Mohammedanism over Europe, the galley
slaves of portions of the fleet were promised freedom, and called on to fight
at a critical moment of the battle. They
fought well, and civilization owes much to those brave galley slaves. The negro slaves of Saint Domingo, fighting
for freedom, defeated their white masters and the French troops sent against
them. The negro slaves of Jamaica
revolted, and under the name of Maroons held the mountains against their
masters for 150 years; and the experience of this war has been so far that
half-trained negroes have fought as bravely as many other half-trained Yankees. If, contrary to the training of a lifetime,
they can be made to face and fight bravely against their former masters, how
much more probable is it that with the allurement of a higher reward, and led
by those masters, they would submit to discipline and face dangers . . .
Negroes
will require much training; training will require much time, and there is
danger that this concession to common sense may come too late.
P. R. Cleburne,
major-general, commanding division
