By 1864 the Northern example had convinced some Confederate leaders of the value of Negro soldiers. A few Southerners began to wonder out loud why the Confederacy did not take steps to utilize this powerful human resource. On January 2, 1864, a group of rebel officers in the Army of Tennessee, headed by General Patrick R. Cleburne, submitted the following report to their commanding general:
We have now been fighting for nearly three years, have spilled much of our best blood, and lost, consumed, or thrown to the flames an amount of property equal in value to the specie currency of the world. Through some lack in our system the fruits of our struggles and sacrifices have invariably slipped away from us and left us nothing but long lists of dead and mangled…. We can see three great causes operating to destroy us: First, the inferiority of our armies to those of the enemy in point of numbers; second, the poverty of our single source of supply in comparison with his several sources; third, the fact that slavery, from being one of our chief sources of strength at the commencement of the war, has now become, in a military point of view, one of our chief sources of weakness….
Apart from the assistance that home and foreign prejudice against slavery has given to the North, slavery is a source of great strength to the enemy in a purely military point of view, by supplying him with an army from our granaries; but it is our most vulnerable point, a continued embarrassment, and in some respects an insidious weakness…. All along the lines slavery is comparatively valueless to us for labor, but of great and increasing worth to the enemy for information. It is an omnipresent spy system, pointing out our valuable men to the enemy, revealing our positions, purposes, and resources….
Adequately to meet the causes which are now threatening ruin to our country, we propose … that we immediately commence training a large reserve of the most courageous of our slaves, and further that we guarantee freedom within a reasonable time to every slave in the South who shall remain true to the Confederacy in this war. As between the loss of independence and the loss of slavery, we assume that every patriot will freely give up the latter….
The measure will at one blow strip the enemy of foreign sympathy and assistance, and transfer them to the South; it will dry up two of his three sources of recruiting; it will take from his negro army the only motive it could have to fight against the South, and will probably cause much of it to desert over to us…. The immediate effect of the emancipation and enrollment of negroes on the military strength of the South would be: To enable us to have armies numerically superior to those of the North, and a reserve of any size we might think necessary; to enable us to take the offensive, move forward, and forage on the enemy. … It would instantly remove all the vulnerability, embarrassment, and inherent weakness which result from slavery. The approach of the enemy would no longer find every household surrounded by spies…. There would be no recruits awaiting the enemy with open arms, no complete history of every neighborhood with ready guides, no fear of insurrection in the rear…. Apart from all other aspects of the question, the necessity for more fighting men is upon us. We can only get a sufficiency by making the negro share the danger and hardships of the war….
Will the slaves fight? The helots of Sparta stood their masters good stead in battle. In the great sea fight of Lepanto where the Christians checked forever the spread of Mohammedanism over Europe, the galley slaves of portions of the fleet were promised freedom, and called on to fight at a critical moment of the battle. They fought well, and civilization owes much to those brave galley slaves. The negro slaves of Santo Domingo, fighting for freedom, defeated their white masters and the French troops sent against them, … and the experience of this war has been so far that half-trained negroes have fought as bravely as many other half-trained Yankees. If, contrary to the training of a lifetime, they can be made to face and fight bravely against their former masters, how much more probable is it that with the allurement of a higher reward, and led by those masters, they would submit to discipline and face dangers?1
Jefferson Davis refused even to consider Cleburne's proposal, and issued instructions forbidding further discussion of the matter in the Confederate Army. But the subject would not die down. In the fall of 1864 the South suffered serious reverses in Georgia, Alabama, Virginia, and other areas; her resources were depleted, and she seemed on the verge of collapse. More and more men in the Confederacy were coming to the conclusion that defeat could only be averted by freeing and arming the slaves. Judah P. Benjamin, the Confederate Secretary of War, wrote to Fred A. Porcher of Charleston on December 21, 1864:
For a year past I have seen that the period was fast approaching when we should be compelled to use every resource at our command for the defense of our liberties…. The negroes will certainly be made to fight against us if not armed for our defense. The drain of that source of our strength is steadily fatal, and irreversible by any other expedient than that of arming the slaves as an auxiliary force.
I further agree with you that if they are to fight for our freedom they are entitled to their own. Public opinion is fast ripening on the subject, and ere the close of the winter the conviction on this point will become so widespread that the Government will have no difficulty in inaugurating the policy [of recruiting Negro soldiers].
… It is well known that General Lee, who commands so largely the confidence of the people, is strongly in favor of our using the negroes for defense, and emancipating them, if necessary, for that purpose. Can you not yourself write a series of articles in your papers, always urging this point as the true issue, viz, is it better for the negro to fight for us or against us?2
But even as late as January 1865, there was still considerable opposition in the South to the idea of arming the slaves. After all, the Confederacy had gone to war to defend a social and political system based on slavery, and to accept Benjamin's proposal would be to subvert the very cause for which the South was fighting. General Howell Cobb wrote on January 8 that the proposition to make soldiers of our slaves is the most pernicious idea that has been suggested since the war began. … My first hour of despondency will be the one in which that policy shall be adopted. You cannot make soldiers of slaves, nor slaves of soldiers…. The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.3
But in a letter of January 11 to a Confederate senator, General Robert E. Lee sanctioned the policy of arming slaves:
If it ends in subverting slavery, it will be accomplished by ourselves, and we can devise the means of alleviating the evil consequences to both races. I think, therefore, we must decide whether slavery shall be extinguished by our enemies and the slave be used against us, or use them ourselves at the risk of the effects which may be produced upon our social institutions. … We should employ them without delay.4
Lee's advice was decisive. On March 13 President Davis signed a “Negro Soldier Law” which authorized the enlistment of slaves as soldiers. Such slave soldiers could not be emancipated “except by consent of the owners and of the States in which they may reside.” The “Negro Soldier Law” was the dying gesture of a crumbling nation. A few companies of black soldiers were enrolled in Richmond and elsewhere, but before any regiments could be organized Richmond had fallen and the war was over. 5