Couldn't Jeff Davis fire anyone?

[has.been]

Yet at the (almost) end they employed black infantry.

[vtsaogames]

Yet at the (almost) end they employed black infantry.

Yeah, in small numbers, over a year after Cleburne suggested doing it en masse. Davis and crew were shocked, said he was an abolitionist. Cleburne never got his deserved shot at corps command. He was certainly the best division CO in the western army by far.

I suspect Cleburne's version of abolition did not include the vote. It would have been emancipation on Confederate terms in return for combat.

[has.been]

Mmmm?  Slaves fighting for the state.
Where did they get the idea from, Sparta perhaps?

[Baron von Wreckedoften]

He actually mentions the Helots of Sparta in his letter proposing the mass freeing of slaves.

[has.been]

He actually mentions the Helots of Sparta in his letter proposing the mass freeing of slaves.

There really is nothing new under the sun.

[Baron von Wreckedoften]

It's all Greek to me.....

[Macunaima]

Mmmm?  Slaves fighting for the state.
Where did they get the idea from, Sparta perhaps?

Brazil has a long tradition of organizing slave armies. In the War of the Triple Alliance, which began in 1865, thousands of slaves were sent to fight Paraguay after the free whites got sick of dying en masse.

[carlos marighela]

In a way it's a pity it didn't come to pass at an earlier junction . I doubt the irony of fighting for a regime that wanted to keep them enslaved against one seeking to free them would have bypassed many prospective slave draftees in the Confederate army. Mass desertion at the earliest opportunity seems likely and armed slave rebellions were hardly unknown in the US.

It would have been a security and logistical nightmare anyway. In Brazil during the Guerra do Paraguai, with perhaps one or two notable exceptions, slaves were integrated into existing units made up of the rainbow of ethnicities that constitute Brazil. Even where there was a heavily dependence on Afro-Brazilian draftees, the units weren't technically segregated. You can't imagine that happening in the old CSA. I mean the US Army wasn't desegregated until 1948 for fucks sake.

So would the CSA have had to form special units to ensure that the slave regiments didn't do a bunk en masse or start shooting their masters? Sounds a bit tricky to me.

Of course the various medieval Arab, Egyptian and Ottoman Armies managed to make it work for centuries so perhaps old Jeff Davis was looking to the east for inspiration.

[shandy]

I remember reading a statement by a slave who, after the war, said something like "The day they would have given us weapons would have been the last day of the war". I can't find the citation at the moment, but I'll look...

But the Confederate resistance to arming slaves shows very well that they themselves did not believe their propaganda about happy and loyal slaves...

[Old Contemptable]

Please forgive posting to an old thread. The only General that Davis removed from command was Joe Johnston. He commanded the Army of Tennessee. He was reassigned in July of 1864.  He was removed for lack of aggression.
 
“If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone: ‘Died of a Theory.'”

Jefferson Davis                     

[joroas]

https://www.clevelandcivilwarroundtable.com/too-small-for-a-republic-too-large-for-a-lunatic-asylum/

[joroas]

I doubt that the Confederacy raised any black regiments, I suggest that it is one of those stories that has grown in the telling!

[Inkpaduta]

It has. Historians have shown that the whole black CSA soldiers is a myth.

[Old Contemptable]

It was approved by the CS Congress on March 13, 1865. It was an act of desperation. There may have been one small group that marched down main street in Richmond, very late in the war. It amounted to nothing.

“We must decide whether slavery shall be extinguished by our enemies and the slaves be used against us, or use them ourselves.” - R.E. Lee

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/confederacy-approves-black-soldiers

 “If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”  -  Thomas Howell Cobb: Letter to Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon

https://magthehistorian.com/2016/02/07/298/

“What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?”  - Confederate Congressmen

[vtsaogames]

That small group was maybe a company or two, certainly not a regiment. They marched but I'm not aware of them actually fighting. It was a few days before Richmond fell.

There are stories of 5,000 to 7,000 slaves fighting as individuals for the Confederacy. Contrast this with the 180,000 Blacks who fought for the Union, in many cases after first escaping from the Confederacy.

The ones who fought for the slave power might be explained by Stockholm syndrome.