Robert E. Lee on Black Troops and the Confederacy In the waning days of the Civil War, Gen. Robert E. Lee disclosed his thoughts on the subject of Negroes as soldiers for the Confederacy.
In the waning days of the Civil War, when desperation drove the Confederacy to enlist Negroes in her army, General Robert E. Lee disclosed his thoughts on the subject of Negroes as soldiers in two remarkable letters to Lieutenant General Richard S. Ewell. The letters were written by Charles Marshall, Lee's assistant adjutant general, but the thoughts expressed are clearly Lee's. In addition, these letters provide rare insights into the unexpected difficulties encountered by the Confederacy in wresting slaves from their owners to preserve a last, slim hope of a Southern Confederacy.
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The original letters are located in the Richards S. Ewell Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
Hd Qs CS Armies
27th March 1865
Lt Gen RS Ewell
Commdg General,
General Lee directs me to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 25th inst: and to say that he much regrets the unwillingness of owners to permit their slaves to enter the service. If the state authorities can do nothing to get those negroes who are willing to join the army, but whose masters refuse their consent, there is no authority to do it at all. What benefit they expect their negroes to be to them, if the enemy occupies the country, it is impossible to say. He hopes you will endeavor to get the assistance of citizens who favor the measure, and bring every influence you can to bear. When a negro is willing, and his master objects, there would be less objection to compulsion, if the state has the authority. It is however of primary importance that the negroes should know that the service is voluntary on their part. As to the name of the troops, the general thinks you cannot do better than consult the men themselves. His only objection to calling them colored troops was that the enemy had selected that designation for theirs. But this has no weight against the choice of the troops and he recommends that they be called colored or if they prefer, they can be called simply Confederate troops or volunteers. Everything should be done to impress them with the responsibility and character of their position, and while of course due respect and subordination should be exacted, they should be so treated as to feel that their obligations are those of any other soldier and their rights and privileges dependent in law & order as obligations upon others as upon theirselves. Harshness and contemptuous or offensive language or conduct to them must be forbidden and they should be made to forget as soon as possible that they were regarded as menials. You will readily understand however how to conciliate their good will & elevate the tone and character of the men….
Very respy.
Your obt. servt.
Chaarles Marshall
Lt. Col & AAG
Hd. Qts. CS Armies
30th March 1865
Lt Gen RS Ewell
Commdg General,
General Lee directs me to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 29th inst: and to say that he regrets very much to learn that owners refuse to allow their slaves to enlist. He deems it of great moment that some of this force should be put in the field as soon as possible, believing that they will remove all doubts as to the expediency of the measure. He regrets it the more in the case of the owners about Richmond, inasmuch as the example would be extremely valuable, and the present posture of military affairs renders it almost certain that if we do not get these men, they will soon be in arms against us, and perhaps relieving white Federal soldiers from guard duty in Richmond. He desires you to press this view upon the owners.
He says that he regards it as very important that immediate steps be taken to put the recruiting in operation, and has so advised the department. He desires to have you placed in general charge of it, if agreeable to you, as he thinks nothing can be accomplished without energetic and intelligent effort by someone who fully appreciates the vital importance of the duty….
Very respy
Your obt servt
Charles Marshall
Lt col & AAG
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[...] freedom for themselves and their families. His thoughts on black troops are set forth in these letters. I have little doubt that if it had been in his power Lee would have used black troops from the [...]
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This reinforces the idea that whites in the south knew that blacks were not savages and had intelligence, but thier greed compromised thier moral conscience.
It was not "…whites in the south…" but the U.S. Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 that legally defined Blacks as property and that they could never become citizens of the United States because they were of an "inferior race." Slavery was, therefore, not considered to be a matter of morality but of legality. Looking at our modern agenda I think it may honestly be said that we have not learned the lessons of history.
If a slave gains respectability as a soldier, granting him land and freedom will make him a threat to the owners as both a loss of labor and a competed economic threshold for pricing on crops. King Cotton as a commodity system functioned only at fixed subsidy thresholds (what one might consider mercantile socialism) for everything, it was very vulnerable to sudden shifts in any of a number of necessary enablers.
OTOH, if a slave fights for the Confederacy and the Confederacy loses, any recompense which is given by the Union must still come through the system of private ownership of the land and commercial privilege which was perceived to be a white dominated arena.
Slave owners refused to allow valuable slaves to fight in a white cause under the mistaken belief that by denying legal precedent for service in a failing national entity and appeasing the enemy by engineering of Union victory, they would be protected as economically necessary members of the national economy.
Instead, Reconstructionism ruined them enmasse and what the North didn't take through illegal acts of Congress, the British did: chockablock replacing U.S. cotton with Egyptian equivalents as the dominant force in the cotton industry for the next 70+ years.
Still gathered by what amounts to slaves too.
The Civil War was a tragedy because the rise of mechanization and the depletion of Southern Soil would have made the end of the independent Cotton Barons lifestyle a given anyway. Whether slaves were repatriated home or became the founding members of a new form of indentured servitude in the Northern Industrial Revolution wouldn't matter as much as the lasting harm to our social cohesion caused by the various civil rights rent seeking abuses of the last half century.