Analysis: General Patrick Cleburne Proposes Black Soldiers for the Confederacy

Date: January 2, 1864

Author: Cleburne, Patrick R.

Genre: petition

Summary Overview

As the Army of Tennessee shivered in its winter quarters around Dalton, Georgia, in December 1863, one of its most popular division commanders formulated a startling proposal. Major General Patrick R. Cleburne, like many others, had taken stock of the Confederacy’s gradually diminishing chances for military success. He could see defeat in drawn faces of the soldiers in his own army. Cleburne discussed his proposal with anyone who would listen—including his close friend and fellow general, Thomas Hindman—and composed a “memorial” detailing the plan’s reasoning and advantages. Before taking the plan to the army’s leadership, Cleburne enlisted the support of the generals and colonels in his division, who quickly added their names to the document.

On January 2, 1864, Cleburne and his supporters presented the memorandum to the Army of Tennessee’s other general officers, including its commander, General Joseph E. Johnston, with the hope of gaining their endorsement before sending it to the Confederate government in Richmond. While a few officers expressed support for Cleburne’s proposal, many others violently rejected the idea. A “monstrous proposition,” one called it; “treasonous,” said another. The opposition to the proposal meant that it would get no further up the chain of command, but a copy was leaked to Richmond anyhow. Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, and his cabinet considered the plan so inflammatory that they forbade Cleburne and his associates from discussing it further. The resistance to Cleburne’s proposal is not surprising, for he had suggested nothing more than a complete reversal of the very cause the Confederacy fought for: he had proposed that the South free slaves and allow them to serve as soldiers in the struggling nation’s army.

Document Analysis

Patrick Cleburne’s memorial laid out his proposal for the arming of slaves with the rhetorical skills of an attorney. He presented the problem, offered a solution, countered potential critics, and finished with an appeal for action. In addition to the straightforward suggestion about arming slaves, Cleburne slyly and skillfully advocated a wholesale reconsideration of the Confederate cause—a reversal which advocates and opponents alike could not help but notice.

Cleburne began with a stark vision of the present and the probable future. He noted that the Confederacy has spent blood and treasure on the war effort but instead of standing victorious, its armies are “hemmed in.” The chief cause of this calamity was the overwhelming numbers the Union army was able to command, and this fact was apparent to every Southern soldier. Confederates were “sinking into a fatal apathy,” Cleburne noted. He then painted a vivid picture of the “black catastrophe” that awaited a defeated South. Our dead will be dishonored and our living will be despised. Our teachers will be vindictive Yankees, bent on imposing a hostile racial order. Our conquerors will turn our loyal slaves against us and engender a mood among them of animosity and suspicion. Cleburne reeled off a remarkably succinct list of “all we now hold most sacred” that would be sacrificed in defeat: “slaves and all other personal property, lands, homesteads, liberty, justice, safety, pride, [and] manhood.”

He reiterated the potential cause of defeat—the numerical inferiority of Confederate armies and the inability to replenish its ranks with new recruits. Then Cleburne introduced a set of facts that did not accord with Southern rhetoric about the value of slavery and therefore had not been widely considered. The time had come, he insisted, to face the fact that slavery was not a strength but, in fact, a weakness. How so? First, the enemy has successfully turned our slaves against us by recruiting them into their armies and utilizing their skills as guides and spies in Confederate territory. Further, in occupied areas, loyal slave owners eagerly cooperate with Union forces because to do otherwise would ensure the destruction of their property and the escape of their slaves. Finally, slaves had shown a shocking willingness to throw off their shackles and flee to the Yankees whenever armies were near. Thus, Confederate military strategy had been hampered by a need to not just protect militarily important junctions or strike at Federal armies, but to guard all our “vulnerable points,” which “are found where there is a slave to set free.”

Cleburne considered the administration’s plan to modify the exemption laws to squeeze a few more men into the army unworkable and merely “a temporary expedient.” He then stated his audacious idea, “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.” The plan to arm and train blacks for Confederate service was one thing, but Cleburne directly embraced the wider implication of his plan: universal emancipation. An honest state, after all, had to honor dangerous service with the benefits of freedom (if not complete political equality.) Thus, by abandoning claims to slavery itself, Cleburne found benefits far beyond hundreds of thousands of potential Confederate soldiers. By toppling slavery from its position as chief reason for secession, the Confederacy could execute a brilliant rhetorical move that would completely undermine its enemies and earn it new friends.

Removing slavery as the Confederate casus belli would reveal what many Southerners considered the venal and greedy intent that lay behind the North’s moral posturing, and thus clear-eyed people in America and Europe would immediately drop their support for the Union war effort. England and France would be relieved of their moral qualms and come to the South’s rescue. Most importantly, Cleburne contended, the move would give Southern slaves a reason to fight for the Confederacy if they believed that doing so would ensure their freedom. After all, Cleburne reasoned, if a black man had to be free, would not he much rather fight with his family and home at stake than on behalf of insidious Northerners who did not truly know or care for him?

Cleburne understood that a cause predicated on wealthy men keeping other men in bondage could be interpreted as a fundamentally “selfish” idealism. He reasoned that slavery had been the issue that obscured potentially higher-minded and more widely acceptable reasons for Southern independence. Therefore, dropping the pretense of slavery meant that the South could then “place independence above every question of property.”

The general pithily dismissed potential objections to his plan. To those who claimed that republicanism could not survive without slavery, he pointedly noted that a compromised republicanism was preferable to complete subjugation. To those who insisted that white men could not labor in the way black slaves did in hot Southern fields, Cleburne raised the example of Confederate soldiers digging trenches and marching along dusty roads in the summer heat. White men could indeed endure it. Would not the idea of arming slaves cause too much “excitement” in the Confederacy? Cleburne claimed that excitement would be better than the present apathy. Finally, if an opponent insisted that “slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all,” then he replied that the war had revealed that the North fought for “sectional superiority…a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberty.” Was not opposing them a higher principle?

Cleburne’s memorial received a cool reception at the Army of Tennessee headquarters. Other generals and staff officers condemned it outright. General William Bate declared it “hideous and objectionable…the serpent of Abolitionism.” Cleburne clearly understood the rhetorical and practical intricacies of slavery, but had misjudged the attachment of Southerners to slavery as the preferred method of racial control. Upon observing the virulent opposition to Cleburne’s plan, Johnston decided that it should go no further, and ordered Cleburne to cease promoting it. Cleburne did not send it along to Richmond, but opponents, alarmed by the apparent treachery in the officer corps, sent it to the Confederate capital to raise an alarm.

Bibliography

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

Symonds, Craig L. Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 1997. Print.