Patrick Cleburne

>>1895686

The idea that slaves would actually fight for the confederacy seems hopelessly delusional.

>>1895708
They were fighting on one side for their freedom, why not the other?

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>>1895735

>Option 1: I can wait until the Union army gets to the planation and then they'll free me.

>Option 2: If I don't want to wait that long, I can try to run away now, knowing that the Union won't ever try to send me back.

>Option 3: Or I could join the Confederate Army, which is already badly losing the war, and thus get killed before achieving freedom while fighting for people who were enslaving me to begin with and fighting against people who were trying to free me.

>>1895772
Cleburne presented his proposal in early 1864. While the war definitely was in the Union's favour at that point, it was could have still gone either way.The South had the ability to emancipate both the man and his family for his service whereas the North couldn't.

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>>1895708

>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 Saint Domingo, fighting for freedom, defeated their white masters and the French troops sent against them. The negro slaves of Jamaica revolted, and under the name of Maroons held the mountains against their masters for 150 years; 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.

>>1895943

There is also the simple fact that the confederacy wouldn't have been willing to free large numbers of negro slaves because that would have undermined the entire purpose of the confederacy in the first place.

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>>1895974

The overreach of the federal government w/r/t policy on slavery was the primary cause of the war.

For many it wasn't that they supported slavery so much, rather they thought the federal government was overreaching.

That's why there were those, like General Cleburne, who were willing to free slaves if it meant driving the federal army out of the South.

>>1896027

>For many it wasn't that they supported slavery so much, rather they thought the federal government was overreaching.

And for many others, it WAS specifically about slavery and keeping their slaves was their entire motivation for supporting succession from the union. This is something that can't be glossed over if we are honest about the nature of the confederacy. They even put images of slaves picking cotton on their currency.

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>>1896100

I said it was the primary cause of the war. I'll never gloss over slavery. You can accept that federal government's attitude toward slavery was the main reason southern states seceded and still think the South was justified.

There were also men like Cleburne and Lee who fought for other reasons.

>>1896146
>Cleburne and Lee
I honestly think those two would have really hit it off. Could you imagine if Cleburne was a part of Jackson's Corps?

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>>1895686

Well Lee ultimately vouched for his plan after his death (albeit it was already too late) so probably.

The main problem was with the Confederate civilian leadership, most of whom were from the Planter class (the kind of people who the most likely to find such a proposal threatening). The fact Cleburne was of foreign birth was also major problem, as many would've simply dismissed it outright as him "not understanding" the Southern way of life.

If Cleburne had managed to talk a Southern-born officer such as Lee or Longstreet into making such a proposal on his behalf, it might've made somewhat more headway.

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>>1895708

After the Emancipation Proclaimation, more or less. Before the Emancipation Proclaimation, not so much. If Cleburne had put forth the proposal in 1862 and it was somehow enacted before the Battle of Antietam, before Lincoln made every slave in the country have a direct stake in the war's outcome, it could've cut the Union's moral high ground from right out under them.

Tom Berenger in the movie Gettysburg put the South's conundrum best, "We should have freed the slaves, then fired on Fort Sumter".

>>1896521
I thought that line was from Gods and Generals when Jackson is talking to the slave who's his chef?

>>1896594

It was from Gettysburg.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbhEPtUseeM

>>1896699

Gettysburgh was a good movie for its time. i remember watching it in high school and playing the PC game.

>>1896699
My bad, thank you General Forrest.

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>>1896100

>>1896521
The problem is, that the Confederacy would never have thought to do it as anything other than a last resort. While many of them may have had other motivations for fighting, desperation was the real reason Cleburne and later Lee endorsed the proposal and like so many things that could have turned the tide in favour of the South, it was paradoxically contingent on the tides already being in favour of the South.

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>>1898867