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After the bombardment of Fort Sumter, free blacks in several towns organized themselves into military companies and offered their services to their respective states. The most notable example proved to be the free colored community of New Orleans, with its strong Creole element and the tradition of having fought under Andrew Jackson in 1815. After announcing early in the war their determination to “take arms at a moment’s notice and fight shoulder to shoulder with other citizens” in defense of the city, two regiments of free colored men, known as the Native Guards, were soon parading the streets with white soldiers. Although formally incorporated into the Louisiana militia, the Native Guards were never called upon for combat duty. The same disinclination to employ black troops appeared elsewhere in the Confederacy. When sixty Richmond free blacks, bearing a Confederate flag, proffered their services as soldiers, the local authorities praised their loyalty and sent them home.92

Whether such volunteers were motivated by opportunism, a genuine patriotism, community coercion, or the prospect of better treatment is difficult to determine. By serving the Confederates, a New Orleans black leader later explained, they had hoped to improve their legal and social position; at the same time, almost in self-defense, they had felt the need to prove their fighting abilities and to learn the use of firearms, thereby raising their esteem among both the whites and their own people. “No matter where I fight,” a New Orleans black later told the Yankees, “I only wish to spend what I have, and fight as long as I can, if only my boy may stand in the street equal to a white boy when the war is over.” This may help to explain the ease with which the Native Guards quickly switched their loyalties after the fall of New Orleans; the colored troops—“the darkest of whom,” said one Union general, “will be about the complexion of the late Mr. [Daniel] Webster”—were subsequently mustered into Federal service and sent into battle against the Confederates at Port Hudson, Louisiana.93

When Colonel James Chesnut’s slaves volunteered in March 1862 “to fight for him if he would arm them,” he professed to believe them. But one person could not make that decision, he told them. “The whole country must agree to it.” Although there had been some proposals early in the war to enlist slaves, usually in the form of appeals from planters in threatened areas for permission to arm their slaves, the wisdom of such a drastic move was never seriously debated by the Confederacy until late in 1063. With the steady deterioration of the military effort, the question suddenly took on a new importance. In the ensuing and often far-reaching debate, the reasons advanced for slave enlistments ranged from the improved moral position of the South in the world community to how it might demoralize the black Yankees. But the most compelling argument, as it had been in the North, was that of military necessity. For some whites, at least, the urgent need to preserve the independence of the South took precedence over the institution upon which it was based, and the system they had initially viewed as the economic strength of the South now loomed as a critical source of military manpower as well. “The element which has been the foundation of wealth should now be made the instrument of our salvation,” a Mississippi slaveholder told his fellow planters. “Arm our slaves.” If the Confederacy failed to utilize this manpower, he warned, “the Yankees will, and the terminal scenes of this struggle … will be the subjugation of the Southern gentleman by his own slaves.” It behooved every patriotic slaveholder, then, to “prepare the negro’s mind for the position he is about to assume, and excite in him that love of country and of home which, I believe, exists strongly in the negro’s breast.” Having reprinted this slaveholder’s appeal, the New Orleans Tribune, a black newspaper established in 1864, could not help but comment on its tragic irony: “The chivalrous Southerners, after bragging so long