Reddit mentions of Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War

Napolitano really sneaks in the "Lincoln tried to arm the slaves" line in the interview without much context. I was hoping to tackle this, but I'm not sure where he is coming from.

Can we speak to what position he might be making this claim from?

Lincoln dispels any notion of support for John Brown in his famous Cooper Union Speech on Feb. 27, 1860. There were some prominent Northern supporters and funders of Brown's (a few of whom fled to Canada after the raid on Harper's Ferry), but attempting to tie their ambitions of an armed slave uprising to Lincoln would be tenuous at best.

My reading and research into Brown hasn't shown any other connection there aside from the strange linkage of Lincoln's love of "Battle Hymn of the Republic," which was written to the tune of "John Brown's Body," which was written by Julia Ward Howe after visiting Lincoln in Washington. Howe was wife of Samuel Gridley Howe, who himself was one of the "Secret Six" funders of Brown's raid. This New York Times post recognizes this connection as fairly ironic given Lincoln's previous attempts to distance himself from Brown and concedes that Lincoln appears ignorant to the tune's origin. It's more of an interesting factoid than anything else.

More information of the Howes and Brown's supporters:
> Nora Titone, My Thoughts Be Bloody: The Bitter Rivalry That Led to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Free Press, 2011).

As an aside, there does appear to be well-researched documentation for the Confederacy's attempts to arm slaves. Near the end of the war as the military situation worsened for the South, there was support for allowing slaves to earn their freedom by fighting for the Confederacy. The first all-black company was formed in Richmond in late-March of 1865, then the capital city fell to the Union a week later.

Bruce Levine has written about this in "Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War." A quick journal review of his work is here for those interested.

This is the subject of a very interesting book by Bruce Levine, called Confederate Emancipation.

The skinny of it is that both the idea of emancipating the slaves as a war necessity (whether to help encourage European recognition or else to try and endear the slaves into joining the southern cause en masse) and of training slaves to fight for the Confederate Army, whether or not freedom was part of that enlistment, was talked about almost from day one of the war. However, it was only ever seriously supported by a fairly small minority among Confederates and in all cases encountered very, very strong opposition from most confederates. As things turned badly for the Confederacy during the war, Jefferson Davis began trying very hard to enlist black troops for the south and was heavily resisted. Ultimately a very small number of black troops were trained at the very end of the war, but they never saw actual combat. Predictably, black volunteers, even with the incentive of freedom, always came up short, and the number who actually got into uniforms is too small to be significant in any way. IIRC barely a company of black confederate troops was formed, but I can't confirm that at the moment.

That being said, black slaves were used by the army for support roles from day one as well. They tended soldiers in the camps, built defenses, and fulfilled many other roles, except fighting and soldiering. This led to the whole incident at Fort Monroe and the Confiscation Acts, which are quite worth researching.

Two really good books on the topic are, The Gray and the Black and Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0807125571/ref=rdr_ext_tmb

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0195315863/ref=rdr_ext_tmb

No, slavery was the over-riding issue, and States Rights was a justification. How could you expect anything else when an entire economic structure is challenged? Ideas like States Rights come from the material world, not the other way around. To start a discussion with an idea, and proceed to its affects is to turn the entire dialectical exchange on its head.

Regarding the "many" blacks who served in the Confederate Army: Where are the enlistment records for black confederates? Where are the muster rolls? Where are the reliable eyewitness accounts? Why did the Confederate Congress debate recruiting blacks and authorized that recruitment, in the closing days of the war, if there were already black regiments?

Here's a book and a comic.