The Mysteries of History (March 13 Edition)
Confederacy Uses Slaves to Fight
“He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see.” — Alice O’Connor, 1961
1865 — Confederacy Begins Using Slaves to Fight the Union
public domain images from wikimedia commons (Robert E. Lee on the left, and a despondent-looking unidentified black Confederate soldier on the right)
The Confederacy desperately sought solutions in the final phases of the Civil War. Union General William Tecumseh Sherman had marched through Georgia and was making mincemeat of the rebels’ forces in the Carolinas. Grant and his swelling army were also stacking victories and besieging Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. Union forces outnumbered Confederate forces.
At this endgame of the conflict, Confederate leadership considered they had one of two choices: either Robert E. Lee take his forces away from Richmond, which Lee was defending against Ulysses S. Grant’s army, and team up with Joseph Johnston’s men in the Carolinas to first take on Sherman and then, if victorious, return together to engage Grant and his men, OR begin using slaves as soldiers to bolster their armies.
This latter would certainly be seen from within and without as an act of almost incomprehensible desperation. Robert E. Lee (who supported the idea) said, “We must decide whether slavery shall be extinguished by our enemies and the slaves be used against us, or use them ourselves.”
One Southern politician, on whom the illogic of using slaves to fight for the perpetuation of the institution of slavery was not lost, opined: “What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?” [they considered the slaves to be their personal property, which they would lose anyway if these fought for them — either through death on the battlefield or ultimately being emancipated as a recompense for fighting for them]. Another voice from the boiled peanut gallery commented, “If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”
And of course, their theory was wrong (intellectually, ethically, and morally). Ultimately, some slaves were used by the Confederate military, but they were given no promise of freedom for fighting. This last-ditch effort on the part of the Lost Causers was too little too late, as only a few thousand slaves joined the already outnumbered Confederate forces, whereas there were 200,000 highly motivated black men among the Union forces.
Questions: What might have happened if Lee had joined forces with Johnston and they had together battled Sherman’s forces? Would they have likely been victorious, and then taken on Grant and his army for “all the marbles”? How motivated do you think the slaves were in fighting for their “masters” and against the Union? How many of these fighting slaves abandoned their posts and joined the Union army, or simply escaped to the North?
