Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (166 page)

41
. Marion Brunson Lucas,
Sherman and the Burning of Columbia
(College Station, Tex., 1976). This fine study reduces the estimated extent of the damage to about one-third of the buildings in Columbia, including most of the business district but relatively few homes in residential districts. Lucas also deflates the number of drunken Union soldiers and the amount of plundering from the wholesale orgy of rapine into which it had ballooned in southern mythology.

Sherman kept the enemy guessing about his ultimate objective until mid-March, when it became clear that he was headed for Goldsboro and a junction with 30,000 additional bluecoats moving in from the coast. In the forlorn-hope style that had become southern strategy, Johnston planned to attack one wing of Sherman's army and try to cripple it before the remainder could come up in support. On March 16 two of Johnston's divisions fought a delaying action against four of Sherman's at Averasborough, thirty-odd miles south of Raleigh. From this affair the rebels learned that the two wings of Sherman's army were separated by a dozen or more miles. Johnston concentrated his infantry (17,000 men) to ambush about the same number of Federals strung out on the road in the advance of the left wing near Bentonville on March 19. The attackers achieved some initial success, but the Yankees dug in and repulsed several assaults during the afternoon. That night and next day the rest of Sherman's army was hard on the march to reinforce the left wing. On March 21 a Union division drove in the Confederate left, but Sherman called off the attack and let Johnston slip away during the night.

What prompted this reluctance to finish off an opponent he outnumbered by three to one? Sherman wanted to get his road-weary troops to Goldsboro to replenish equipment and supplies after seven weeks of the most strenuous campaigning of the war. Beyond that, despite his ferocious reputation Sherman was careful with the lives of his soldiers. "I don't want to lose men in a direct attack when it can be avoided," he said.
⁴²
He would rather win by strategy and maneuver than by battle. He was confident that the war was nearly over and that his destruction of enemy resources had done much to win it. Johnston's small and demoralized force, in Sherman's view, hardly mattered any more. The important thing was to rest and refit his army for the move up to Virginia to help Grant "wipe out Lee."

42
.
O.R
., Ser. I, Vol. 47, pt. 2, p. 910.

28
We Are All Americans

I

The Confederacy had one last string to its bow—a black string. Early in the war a few voices had urged the arming of slaves to fight for their masters. But to most southerners such a proposal seemed at best ludicrous and at worst treasonable. With a president who denounced the North's emancipation and recruitment of slaves as "the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man," it required rash courage to suggest that the Confederacy itself put arms in the hands of slaves.
¹

After the fall of Vicksburg and the defeat at Gettysburg, however, the voices suggesting such a thing had become less lonely. Several newspaper editors in Mississippi and Alabama began speaking out in extraordinary fashion. "We are forced by the necessity of our condition," they declared, "to take a step which is revolting to every sentiment of pride, and to every principle that governed our institutions before the war." The enemy was "stealing our slaves and converting them into soldiers. . . . It is better for us to use the negroes for our defense than that the Yankees should use them against us." Indeed, "we can make them fight better than the Yankees are able to do. Masters and overseers can marshal them for battle by the same authority and habit of obedience with which they are marshalled to labor." It was true, admitted the
Jackson

1
. Davis quoted in Robert F. Durden, ed.,
The Gray and the Black: The Confederate Debate on Emancipation
(Baton Rouge, 1972), 24.

Mississippian
, that "such a step would revolutionize our whole industrial system" and perhaps lead to universal emancipation, "a dire calamity to both the negro and the white race." But if we lose the war we lose slavery anyway, for "Yankee success is death to the institution . . . so that it is a question of necessity—a question of a choice of evils. . . . We must . . . save ourselves from the rapacious North,
WHATEVER THE COST
."
²

General Patrick Cleburne had been thinking along similar lines. He wrote down his ideas and presented them to division and corps commanders in the Army of Tennessee in January 1864. The South was losing the war, said Cleburne, because it lacked the North's manpower and because "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." The Emancipation Proclamation had given the enemy a moral cause to justify his drive for conquest, Cleburne continued, had made the slaves his allies, undermined the South's domestic security, and turned European nations against the Confederacy. Hence we are threatened with "the loss of all we now hold most sacred—slaves and all other personal property, lands, homesteads, liberty, justice, safety, pride, manhood." To save the rest of these cherished possessions we must sacrifice the first. Let us recruit an army of slaves, concluded Cleburne, and "guarantee freedom within a reasonable time to every slave in the South who shall remain true to the Confederacy."
³

Twelve brigade and regimental commanders in Cleburne's division endorsed his proposal. This was a potentially explosive matter, for these were not just editors expressing an opinion, but fighting men on whom the hopes for Confederate survival rested. Cleburne's arguments cut to the heart of a fundamental ambiguity in the Confederacy's
raison d'être
. Had secession been a means to the end of preserving slavery? Or was slavery one of the means for preserving the Confederacy, to be sacrificed if it no longer served that purpose? Few southerners in 1861 would have recognized any dilemma: slavery and independence were each a means as well as an end in symbiotic relationship with the other, each essential

2
. These quotations are from editorials in the
Jackson Mississippian
reprinted in
Montgomery Mail
, Sept. 9, 1863;
Montgomery Weekly Mail
, Sept.
2
, 1863; and
Mobile Register
, Nov. 26, 1863, all reprinted in Durden,
The Gray and the Black
, 30–35, 42–44.

3
.
O.R.
, Ser. I, Vol, 52, pt. 2, pp. 586–92.

for the survival of both. By 1864, however, southerners in growing numbers were beginning to wonder if they might have to make a choice between them. "Let not slavery prove a barrier to our independence," intoned the
Jackson Mississippian
. "Although slavery is one of the principles that we started to fight for . . . if it proves an insurmountable obstacle to the achievement of our liberty and separate nationality, away with it!"
⁴

At the time of Cleburne's proposal, however, such opinions still seemed dangerous. Most generals in the Army of Tennessee disapproved of Cleburne's action, some of them vehemently. This "monstrous proposition," wrote a division commander, was "revolting to Southern sentiment, Southern pride, and Southern honor." A corps commander abhorred it as "at war with my social, moral, and political principles." A shocked and angry brigadier insisted that "we are not whipped, & cannot be whipped. Our situation requires resort to no such remedy. . . . Its propositions contravene the principles upon which we fight."
⁵

Convinced that the "promulgation of such opinions" would cause "discouragements, distraction, and dissension" in the army, Jefferson Davis ordered the generals to stop discussing the matter.
⁶
So complete was their compliance that the affair remained unknown outside this small circle of southern officers until the U. S. government published the war's
Official Records
a generation later. The only consequence of Cleburne's action seemed to be denial of promotion to this ablest of the army's division commanders, who was killed ten months later at the battle of Franklin.

By then the South's dire prospects had revived the notion of arming blacks. In September 1864 the governor of Louisiana declared that "the time has come for us to put into the army every able-bodied negro man as a soldier." A month later the governors of six more states, meeting in conference, enigmatically urged the impressment of slaves for "the public service as may be required." When challenged, all but two of the governors (those of Virginia and Louisiana) hastened to deny that they meant the
arming
of slaves. On November 7, Jefferson Davis urged

4
. As reprinted in
Montgomery Weekly Mail
, Sept. 9, 1863, in Durden,
The Gray andthe Black
, 31–32.

5
. Patton Anderson in
O.R
., Ser. I, Vol. 52, pt. 2, pp. 598–99; Alexander P. Stewart to William H. T. Walker, Jan. 9, 1864, William B. Bate to Walker, Jan. 9, 1864, Civil War Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library.

6
.
O.R
., Ser. I, Vol. 52, pt. 2, p. 608.

Congress to purchase 40,000 slaves for work as teamsters, pioneers, and laborers with the promise of freedom after "service faithfully rendered." But this cautious proposal proved much too radical for most of the press and Congress. It would crack the door of Abolition, declared the
Richmond Whig
. The idea of freeing slaves who performed faithfully was based on the false assumption "that the condition of freedom is so much better for the slave than servitude, that it may be bestowed upon him as a reward." This was "a repudiation of the opinion held by the whole South . . . that servitude is a divinely appointed condition for the highest good of the slave."
⁷

Congress did not act on the president's request. But the issue would not go away. Although Davis in his November 7 message had opposed the notion of arming blacks
at that time
, he added ominously: "Should the alternative ever be presented of subjugation or the employment of the slave as a soldier, there seems no reason to doubt what should then be our decision." Within three months the alternative stared the South starkly in the face. The president and his cabinet made their choice. "We are reduced," said Davis in February 1865, "to choosing whether the negroes shall fight for or against us."
⁸
And if they fought for us, echoed some newspapers, this would not necessarily produce wholesale abolition. Perhaps those who fought must be offered freedom, but that would only "affect units of the race and not the whole institution." By enabling the South to whip the Yankees, it was the only way to
save
slavery. "If the emancipation of a part is the means of saving the rest, then this partial emancipation is eminently a pro-slavery measure." Some advocates went even further and said that discipline rather than the motive of freedom was sufficient to make slaves fight. "It is not true," declared General Francis Shoup, "that to make good soldiers of these people, we must either give or promise them freedom. . . . As well might one promise to free one's cook . . . with the expectation of thereby securing good dinners."
⁹

Such talk prompted one exasperated editor to comment that "our Southern people have not gotten over the vicious habit of not believing

7
.
O.R.
, Ser. I, Vol. 41, pt. 3, p. 774; Rowland,
Davis
, VI, 394–97;
Richmond Whig
, Nov. 9, 1864, in Durden,
The Gray and the Black
, 110.

8
. Rowland, Davis, VI, 396;
O.R
., Ser. IV, Vol. 3, p. 1110.

9
.
Lynchburg Virginian
, Nov. 3, 1864;
Richmond Sentinel
, Nov. 24, 1864; article by Shoup in
Richmond Whig
, Feb. 20, 1865, all in Durden,
The Gray and the Black
, 79, 121, 214.

what they don't wish to believe."
¹⁰
Most participants in this debate recognized that if slaves became soldiers, they and probably their families must be promised freedom or they might desert to the enemy at first opportunity. If one or two hundred thousand slaves were armed (the figures most often mentioned), this would free at least half a million. Added to the million or so already liberated by the Yankees, how could the institution survive? asked opponents of the proposal.