Confederate Emancipation

In early 1864, as the Confederate Army of Tennessee licked its wounds after being routed at the Battle of Chattanooga, Major-General Patrick Cleburne (the 'Stonewall of the West') proposed that 'the most courageous of our slaves' be trained as soldiers and that 'every slave in the South who shall remain true to the Confederacy in this war' be freed. In Confederate Emancipation, Bruce Levine looks closely at such Confederate plans to arm and free slaves. He offers an engaging and illuminating account of a fascinating and politically charged idea, setting it firmly and vividly in the context of the Civil War and the part played in it by the issue of slavery and the actions of the slaves themselves.

Bruce Levine is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of Civil War and The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of Civil War, and is co-author of Who Built America? Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society.