Confederate emancipation, as portrayed by Levine, was not at all the same notion as Union emancipation.The Confederate’s version of emancipation was not nearly as comprehensive or far-reaching as the Union’s notion of emancipation. Despite the differences in their concepts of emancipation, though, the Confederate and Union’s reasons for emancipation were surprisingly similar.
Most Confederates did not even entertain the idea of emancipation for quite some time during the Civil War, and, even the emancipation Levine describes is not exactly emancipation in the sense that it was used by the Union. When they began advocating emancipation, the Confederates essentially were considering allowing some slaves to earn their freedom by fighting on the battlefield in uniform. The idea was that slaves would be just as motivated to fight on the Confederate side as they were on the Union side because these slaves would know that a Confederate victory would assure them freedom.
This notion of emancipation was very different from that portrayed in the First and Second Confiscation Acts, where Lincoln was freeing slaves only if they were the property of southerners who were actively fighting against the Union. It was even more opposed to the Emancipation Proclamation, that freed any slaves in Confederate territories no loner occupied by the Union (at least that’s what it claimed to do on paper). Both of the Union notions of emancipation were at their core distinct from the Confederate’s because, the way the Union saw it, slaves would not have to do anything to earn their freedom. Furthermore, emancipation on Union terms was much more far-reaching. While the Confederates argued freeing just a few slaves–the bare minimum required to give them a military advantage on the front lines–the Emancipation Proclamation freed all of the slaves in any area under Union control, not just a select few. By those terms, if anything, the Confederate concept of emancipation was most similar to the First and Second Confiscation Acts, which did not emancipate all of the slaves in an area, but rather emancipated on an individual basis (the actions of the slaves’ owners). The Confederate and Union’s visions of a the future of an emancipated slave were also different. Confederates were still very concerned with preserving the social hierarchy associated with slavery, and so they sought to simply assure “a minimum amount of black liberty” (109). While the life of a free black in the Union was not nearly as democratic as it could be, there were many more opportunities in the Union for free blacks and former slaves to build communities, be employed and, in a few rare cases, even make a fair amount of money. Furthermore, documents such as the Emancipation Proclamation did not just free the slaves, it also allowed them to enlist in the military forces, which was putting blacks more on equal footing with whites. Lastly, the Confederates’ version of emancipation included compensation to slave-owners for the slaves they sent in to battle. While Lincoln did entertain the idea of compensating slave-owners for the slaves the Union emancipated, ultimately, neither the confiscation acts nor the Emancipation Proclamation contained such provisions.
However different the Confederate and Union concepts of emancipation were, though, the two sides did have somewhat similar reasons for entertaining the idea of emancipation: military strategy. Just as the Union realized how useful slaves were to the Southern war effort in terms of providing labor and other services to Confederates, the Confederates were realizing that they had this whole untapped resource of potential soldiers. As the war raged on, the number of Confederate troops dwindled while the number of Union forces swelled–partly because the Emancipation Proclamation allowed the enlistment of black soldiers–and, in order to preserve their chances of winning, some Confederates entertained the idea. Confederates also realized that slavery was a source of weakness to their army because slaves were running away and helping the Union effort by sharing Confederate military strategy. They hoped that emancipating slaves they enlisted would keep them loyal to the Confederate side (83).
I found it interesting that the first calls to use black troops came from within the cotton kingdom (58). At first glance, this seemed to me to be very strange: why would the areas that had the most slaves seek this version of Confederate emancipation? On another level, though, this makes sense. In areas where slavery was the most entrenched–the cotton kingdom of the South–there were so many slaves that if a few were allowed to fight on the Confederate side and then emancipated, they would still make up a very small portion of the total population of slaves. Slavery was so entrenched in these areas, that something like this would be much less likely to threaten it. In areas of the South where slavery was not quite as common, though, slave owners were already struggling to preserve the social hierarchy and hold on to their slaves. Allowing some slaves to fight in the war and then be emancipated could catastrophically upset the social hierarchy, which was, after all, the very thing that the war and the Confederate emancipation was trying to preserve.