Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [35]
The gravity of the military situation notwithstanding, any proposal to enlist slaves as soldiers was bound to provoke strong opposition. When confronted with the prospect of armed slaves, in fact, many whites all too easily belied their previously expressed confidence in black loyalty and fidelity. “Would they not, with arms in their hands, either desert to the enemy or turn their weapons against us?” a prominent North Carolinian asked. By undertaking this experiment, opponents warned, the South will only have succeeded in introducing into the towns and countryside a veritable Trojan horse. “Are we prepared for this?” a Virginian asked. “To win their freedom with our own independence, to establish in our midst a half or quarter of a million of black freemen, familiar with the arts and discipline of war, and with large military experience!” At best, critics charged, black recruitment would exchange “a profitable laborer for a very unprofitable soldier,” and, at worst, it leveled all distinctions and elevated blacks to equality with whites. If the Confederacy had to resort to such measures, thereby violating all previous practices and teachings, some whites thought it unworthy of survival. “The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution,” General Howell Cobb warned. “If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”95
After the military reverses of late 1864, the Confederacy edged still closer to raising a black army. If nothing else, the heavy casualties they were sustaining impressed whites with the need to draw upon their immense reservoir of black manpower. Why condemn to destruction “the flower of our population, the hope of the country,” a Virginia newspaper asked, “rather than mould to our use and make subsidiary to the great ends of independence, the inferior race that has so long acknowledged our guidance and control! Surely, they are good enough for Yankee bullets.” What little was left of slavery, Mary F. Akin wrote her husband in the Confederate Congress, “should be rendered as serviceable as possible and for that reason the negro men ought to be put to fighting and where some of them will be killed. [I]f it is not done there will soon be more negroes than whites in the country and they will be the free race. I want to see them got rid of soon.” Walter Clark, a young Confederate officer, had initially opposed the enlistment of blacks but he now thought the policy deserved full support. “Let Negro fight negro,” he advised. “This is an age of progressive ideas and mighty changes.”96
The arguments grew increasingly bitter and vindictive as the war reached a desperate point. On March 13, 1865, the Confederate Congress, with the strong backing of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, finally authorized the enlistment of 300,000 additional troops “irrespective of color.” To allay the fears of many whites, the act stipulated that no state was to enlist more than 25 percent of her able-bodied slave population between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. Within a few days, advertisements appeared in newspapers to urge the recruitment of blacks. In Richmond, a company of blacks in Confederate uniforms paraded in the streets to attract additional volunteers. Among those witnessing the spectacle was John S. Wise, a Confederate officer and the son of a former governor of Virginia. “Ah!” he thought, as he watched the “Confederate darkeys” drill in Capitol Square, “this is but the beginning of the end.”97
Although the law authorizing black recruits avoided the question of emancipation, leaving that decision to the slave owners and the states, the clear implication was that slaves who served in the Confederate Army would be freed at the end of the war. But the promise of freedom as a reward for