Analysis: General Lee on Black Confederate Soldiers

Date: January 11, 1865; February 18, 1865

Authors: Lee, Robert E.

Genre: letters

Summary Overview

From the first year of the war, with General Robert E. Lee serving as Jefferson Davis’ military aid, until the last year, with Lee as General-in-Chief of Confederate armies, President Davis had always turned to the general as a confidant and as a source for sound and competent advice. By 1865, Lee served as more than the president’s closest advisor; he stood as the most widely trusted and admired man in the Confederacy. No other general or politician held the confidence of such a wide part of the population. Where Davis faced opposition and had to fight for every political gain, Lee’s gravitas could sway public opinion and official policy with a stroke of his pen.

Davis, in his November 7, 1864 address to the Second Confederate Congress had cautiously proposed an expanded role for enslaved blacks in the Confederate military. While he spoke only of employing blacks in more dangerous positions with pioneer and engineer troops, the power to do so that he requested implied blacks’ future right to consideration as regular soldiers in the service. While the Confederate’s prospects for victory in the war appeared increasingly distant and more people began to favor Davis’s position, the proposal still faced significant opposition in Congress and in the public mind. Therefore, when Davis and ever more strident proponents of arming slaves, like Secretary of State Judah B. Benjamin, found the proposal at a public impasse, they turned to Lee.

Document Analysis

Lee offered his position in two letters. The second letter, to influential Mississippi Congressman Ethelbert Barksdale, is considered here first, because it was released to the public, reprinted in newspapers across the South, and had the greatest public influence. Barksdale, after early opposition, had reconsidered his position on the slave-soldier plan and by 1865 he stood as one of the plan’s proponents in Congress. Prompted by a query from Barksdale, Lee wrote intending his letter to be quickly and widely published.

Lee’s letter to Barksdale is short and succinctly declares his support for the plan to emancipate and arm slaves. He declared up front, “I think the measure not only expedient but necessary.” He offered three points to back up his assertion. First, he noted that the Union army recruited black soldiers from the South, and the more territory they captured, the more recruits they could access. Lee admitted that while the existing population of white Southern men might be enough to repel the enemy in a single battle or campaign, he insisted that the present reserve of men could not sustain the South in any protracted contest. To enlist black soldiers would both withhold those recruits from Federal service and support the service of white men in Southern armies. Second, Lee contended that blacks would make fine soldiers, owing to what he considered their “habits of obedience.” This endorsement from the Confederacy’s premier military commander likely alleviated the fears of many Southerners who did not think a former slave had the moral capacity to make a good soldier. Finally, Lee offered his opinion on the process of recruitment. He insisted that for a black soldier to be effective, he must demonstrate his devotion to the cause of freedom by volunteering for service. A man coerced into service by his master, Lee thought, would not fight as hard.

In Lee’s letter to Barksdale the general crafted a forceful but palatable political message for public consumption. The issue of freeing slaves to fight for the South, however, touched upon greater and more fundamental concerns—those of the future of slavery in the white republic. Lee deliberately sidestepped this issue in his public letter. That he had considered the larger ramifications of black soldiers is clear from an earlier missive to Virginia state senator Andrew Hunter.

To Hunter, Lee had been candid. He explained his expectation for an ideal form of slavery. He valued slavery “controlled by humane laws and influenced by Christianity and an enlightened public sentiment.” That vision is one that he and his family had attempted to implement at Arlington. That was the form of slavery he desired, and “I would deprecate any sudden disturbance of that relation.” All things considered, then, Lee would have preferred to leave slavery as it was, or at least as he had imagined that he had practiced it. But he, as clearly as any other man in the Confederacy, knew that the war had irrevocably changed slavery. Two choices faced the Confederacy and its chief institution: to lose the war and have universal emancipation forced upon the South by a vindictive conqueror, or to get ahead of the changing institution and take a direct hand in how it changed. Thus, when Lee said that he would prefer to see slavery confirmed as it was “unless it be necessary to avert a greater calamity,” he meant that the South should take charge to ensure that slavery changed on Southern white people’s terms, and not those of Southern blacks or Northern whites. “If it [the proposal] end in subverting slavery it will be accomplished by ourselves, and we can devise the means of alleviating the evil consequences to both races.”

Lee’s Virginia paternalism still expressed itself with his insistence that the best method of survival for blacks was in inferior positions to Southern whites. Offering limited emancipation to worthy blacks in the South was his solution. Only white Southerners could compose a “well-digested plan of gradual and general emancipation.” Even Lee’s paternalism could not shield him from the realization that tampering with the fundamental aspects of slavery would lead irresistibly to “general emancipation.”

Lee rehearsed the points he would unveil in his letter to Barksdale. The Union army threatened to recruit even more black Southerners. We should act to prevent that by bringing blacks into our own army. They will be good soldiers. And he insisted that if such a plan were to be considered and passed by Congress, it must be done immediately.

Bibliography

Gallagher, Gary. The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism, and Military Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999. Print.

Levine, Bruce. Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. Print.

Pryor, Elizabeth Brown. Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters. New York: Penguin, 2007. Print.

Further Reading

Clampitt, Bradley R. The Confederate Heartland: Military and Civilian Morale in the Western Confederacy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2011. Print

Escott, Paul D. Military Necessity: Civil-Military Relations in the Confederacy. Westport: Praeger, 2006. Print

Glatthaar, Joseph T. General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse. New York: Free Press, 2008. Print.