In Confederate Emancipation, Bruce Levine argues that the South’s last-minute push to enlist slaves as soldiers was not quite a move for emancipation in the Confederacy. He points out that Confederate leaders planned to use the South’s slave population to win independence from the North, then use their newfound control to oppress the African-Americans they had “freed” in new ways, ensuring that the old South’s social order would remain. Although this seems like common sense, Levine presents the argument in a most interesting way, by constantly providing information from primary sources of the time. Through the use of quotations from Confederate leaders, he reveals the political and social structures of the South during and immediately after the war, especially in relation to the period near the end of the war where the South considered freeing and arming its slaves. And even as the idea of Confederate emancipation seems to be legitimate, given what some Confederate leaders were saying at the time, Levine presents more than enough reasoning to explain how this “emancipation” was more of a way to ensure the return of the Southern hierarchy after the war than anything else.
Levine is certainly not afraid to bring up the argument for Confederate emancipation, as he features many quotes from Confederate leaders and citizens that suggest it was a possibility. In fact, the structure of Levine’s argument is based around countering each of these quotes, providing factual evidence to show what was really going on in the South and therefore proving that Confederate emancipation was not all it was cracked up to be. For example, Levine quotes Walter W. Fleming as claiming that slaves “were as devoted Confederates as the whites, all in all, perhaps more so,” as evidence of Southern historians’ tendency to favor the “Lost Cause” version of the Confederacy’s brief history. (p. 149) Levine later goes on to describe how slaves “ultimately became indispensable instruments of [the Confederacy’s] destruction,” pointing out that “nearly 200,000 were already wearing Union blue” by the time some slaves began fighting for the South in 1865. (p. 151) It is through these comparisons that Levine reveals the propaganda that Confederates and some historians based the idea of Confederate emancipation on; by portraying the slaves as loyal to their masters and the South, Confederate emancipation becomes much more reasonable.
Perhaps Levine’s strongest argument for why Confederate emancipation was even considered is that, given the true nature of this “emancipation”, Southern slaves would never be made truly free at all. Of course, Levine’s first argument is that the Confederacy’s need for soldiers prompted the consideration of Confederate emancipation, citing Confederate leaders like General Patrick R. Cleburne at the beginning of the book. But these leaders knew full well that the South needed to win the war in order to “preserve as much of the Old South as they could,” in Levine’s words, and they knew that “slavery was swiftly becoming a dead letter” (p. 153). Without independent control of the South, Confederate leaders could not hope to maintain the same social hierarchy they had had before the war, so they had to do the unthinkable and offer freedom to slaves in order to gain a boost in their war effort. But Confederates who proposed emancipation never intended to give slaves true freedom in the first place; rather, “the freedom they expected actually to grant would be severely circumscribed” (p. 154), preventing freed slaves from owning land so that they would have to look to their old masters for work and giving Confederate states the power to enact labor regulations to further impede their freedom. Thus, Levine argues that Confederate leaders only began to consider emancipation when it became evident that it was the only way they could maintain a society anywhere near that of the South before the war, and so it was a concept that was much easier for Confederates to swallow.
I found Levine’s explanation to be persuasive enough. His evidence is sound and from varied sources, from primary documents to the arguments of historians long after the war. He certainly does not avoid considering the opposing argument, and frequently brings it up only to expose its flaws, a basic strategy we have had to employ in our own causal arguments. Levine approaches his argument from multiple angles, first suggesting the South’s military needs as a primary reason for considering the enlistment of slaves as soldiers, but later pointing out that Southern leaders never intended to provide slaves with true freedom in the first place. In the end, Levine provides us with a better idea of what was going on in the South at the time of “Confederate emancipation”, by showing the true political and social motives behind the idea and how, by giving the South a chance to win the war, the enlistment of slaves was actually providing Confederates with an opportunity to maintain their way of life beyond the abolishment of slavery.