October 17, 1864---“We must save ourselves from the rapacious North --- WHATEVER THE COST.”

OCTOBER 17, 1864:                   

The Governors of the Confederate States of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi meet in Augusta, Georgia. “The Augusta Conference” discusses increasing the level of Poor Relief, the raising of additional brigades of State Militia, the possibility of State-by-State-supported blockade running, the growing problem of military desertions in the C.S.A. army, and, by far most revolutionary, the emancipation of slaves to aid in the war effort. 

The idea of Confederate emancipation is gaining currency. Quietly discussed in correspondence and in diaries since the early days of the war --- “Free our negroes and put them in the army,” wrote Mary Chesnut in December 1861 --- most Southerners nonetheless remain aghast at the idea. 

Still, Confederate emancipation was bruited about frequently enough in the early days of the war to concern Ralph Waldo Emerson, who feared in 1862 that the South would emancipate its slaves, seize the moral high ground in the conflict, and win the war with European support. 

Like much else, the idea of Confederate emancipation ebbed and flowed alongside Confederate military fortunes. Contemplated in 1861, the idea became moribund in 1862 as Robert E. Lee began a string of brilliant field victories. After Gettysburg, the idea of freeing the slaves began to spread again, aided in part by the religious revivalism that was sweeping the Confederate ranks.   

In January of 1864, the iconoclastic General Patrick Cleburne C.S.A. had openly called for Confederate emancipation: “Satisfy the negro that if he faithfully adheres to our standard during the war he shall receive his freedom and that of his race . . .  and we change the race from a dreaded weakness to a position of strength.”

Cleburne’s comments, endorsed by some, rejected by many, created a firestorm in the Confederate Officer Corps so severe that Jefferson Davis had to issue an Order that the subject was off limits. But the evaporation of the Confederacy’s fighting forces --- through battle deaths, disease, defeats, and desertions --- had created a desperate need for a new reserve of troops. 

That reserve, logically, was the slave population. Numbering four million in total in 1860, the Confederacy had the option to call upon hundreds of thousands --- possibly as many as one million --- fit and healthy black men in that population to take up arms in the Southern cause. Not long after the Augusta Conference, Jefferson Davis discussed the proposal with Robert E. Lee, who enthusiastically gave it his support.

Confederate emancipation, as Lee and Davis divined it, was not intended to grant equal rights to the former slaves, but rather to place them into a condition of “peonage” in which the white population could choose (or not) to bestow limited property rights and domestic relations rights upon the newly-freed blacks. This was seen as a far better alternative than allowing the victorious Yankees to dictate racial policy after the South’s defeat in the war.  

“The time has come,” the Governor of Louisiana announced, “for us to put into the army every able-bodied negro man as a soldier.” 

The editor of the Jackson Mississippian summed up the South’s Hobson’s Choice perfectly, opining that “We must save ourselves from the rapacious North --- WHATEVER THE COST.” 

But will blacks fight for the South? By mid-October 1864, it is clear to most slaves that the North will win. The story is told of a Southern slaveowner who explained to a field hand, “If you fight for us you will be free,” to which the slave replied, “That’s as may be, Massa. But if I don’t fight for you, we’re all going to be free!”

 

 

Despite Lee’s very public support for the Confederate emancipation plan, there are Southerners who stringently believe that the “peculiar institution” is the raison d’etre of the Confederacy, and still others who consider the idea of arming slaves “monstrous,” and “revolting to Southern sentiment, Southern pride, and Southern honor.” Such men continue to insist, even in mid-October 1864, that “We are not whipped and can never be whipped.”