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Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves During the Civil War. By Bruce Levine. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. pp. 252. Cloth, $80.00. Paper, $19.99.)

At the heart of this great little book is an investigation of who would get to control the narrative of why the South embarked upon the Civil War, and if it was possible to change that narrative given changing circumstances. This book details a narrative not so much between North and South as it does about contentions over the narrative within the South itself. Arming slaves in exchange for their freedom struck at the very core of how the Confederacy conceptualized itself, its status in the war, and its motivations for going to war and continuing to fight it, even when it was becoming clear that the only realistic prospect was loss.

Faced with a Northern army with access to a myriad of available recruits in comparison to the South’s dwindling forces, Southern officers began calling for the arming of slaves as early as 1863. But these suggestions slammed into a controversy over the meaning of the South’s core principles and motivations for going to war that would not subside and indeed, continued on after the Civil War as the South (successfully) tried to create a victory out of the inarguable military defeat.

As Levine writes it (correctly so), the South went to war to maintain the Southern plantation system and the institution of slavery. They saw slavery as too integral a part of their economy and culture to ever surrender it willingly. This belief in the sanctity of slavery and its ability to elevate the class of all whites in the South is laid bare by Levine in a argument reminiscent of Edmund Morgan’s American Paradox*”:

Nor, critics continued, was slavery’s demise a problem for slaveowners alone. Defenders of the peculiar institution had long represented it as the only way to enforce the prized privileges and dominant position of the white race as a whole. Slavery’s breakdown therefore threatened the vast numbers of whites who never owned a slave (53).

Whites of all classes embraced slavery, even if they were not slave owners, because a permanent, legal black underclass meant that no white person could sit at the bottom of the ladder. This pillar meant that all whites invested themselves in slavery because it protected their own class status. Also, in principle, all whites had the possibility of owning slaves, which would elevate their status as well. Thus, it was necessary to maintain slavery not just to protect the current planter class, but to keep a path of upward mobility available to those who didn’t own slaves (yet) who might otherwise chafe under planter rule.

As Levine writes it, slaveowners found the possibility of arming slaves to be so distasteful, disturbing, and destabilizing not just because once armed, slaves might turn on their former masters, but because it undermined everything they had built the Confederacy upon. Southerners had gone to war to protect their right to own slaves in existing slave states and to expand slavery into the territories to avoid political imbalance that they felt might spell abolition in the United States. To arm slaves and promise them emancipation for their participation on the side of the Confederacy flew in the face of everything they had believed about the war effort. Though they hid behind a smokescreen of paternalism to consistently assert their slaves’ happiness and loyalty, they knew that arming and emancipating slaves would cause as great a blow to the Confederacy as did the Emancipation Proclamation. Even when they did finally pass a law to arm and emancipate slaves in 1965, as the situation weighed heavily in the North’s favor, slaveowners by and large refused to participate in the muster.

Slaves also saw through the eventual Confederate attempts to arm and free them. They accurately pointed out that even though they as soldiers might be freed, their families would not be. Without allotments of land, they would have no way to support themselves and would end up working for their old owners, free only in name. Even as slaveowners resisted mustering slaves so as not to sacrifice their property, slaves saw the writing on the wall and refused to be lured by limited promises of freedom.

Ultimately the North won and the South lost, and arming Southern slaves did not make a difference in the military outcome. But yearslong debates over arming black slaves played a large role in how the Civil War would be remembered in the North and the South. The particulars of the campaign to arm slaves may be mostly forgotten, but visions for a postwar future in the South hinged on attempting to find ways to keep freedman in bondage as laborers in the South, even in freedom. Levine writes, “Inseparable from the this conflict over the future status of black Americans was the struggle over how to remember the South’s (and the nation’s) past.” (164) As my dad likes to point out, the North won the war but lost the peace. The South wrested the history of the Civil War from the North, and in the name of reconciliation, the North went along with it.

I knew nothing about this topic when I picked up this book. Levine is a good writer. He uses a lot of direct quotations, which can be a problem, but in this case Levine wove the quotes seamlessly into the text. He allowed his historical actors to damn themselves. I think this would be a great book to read in a graduate class on the Civil War or military history. It is also very valuable for the insights it offers beyond the military debate. This is not a battlefield history. It is about a proposed military tactic and the political, cultural, and social debates it inspired. It is about a historical battle over narrative.

The only thing I would have liked to see more of were sources from the enslaved or Union blacks about how they felt about arming Confederate slaves. Black voices do appear in the book, but they come toward the end, filtered through whites. I understand this drawback might be related to a limitation of sources. It might also have been interesting to hear more about what Northern reactions were to the proposed arming of Confederate slaves. Did they know about it at all? If they did, what did they think about this tactic? Silencing Northern voices in a way tips the balance, perhaps unintentionally, toward the Southern point of view. Slaveowners and Southern actors are the only ones who get a say.

In all a great, thought-provoking book.

*Morgan, Edmund S. “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox.” The Journal of American History 59, no. 1 (1972): 5–29. https://doi.org/10.2307/1888384.