The movie group met yesterday with Jane at the Digital Media Center and she was very helpful.  Her main point was that we should get all of our pictures, music, video, etc. together, and make a storyboard.  Along with that we should write a script and then combine the two with their help.  She said it takes a long time to edit and so we are doing our best to get ahead of the game.

We split up the work between the four of us and I will focus on Dick Dowling’s life and the Battle of Sabine Pass which should comprise a minute and a half of the video, roughly.  We want the main focus of our video to be on the memory of Dick Dowling, so a majority of our video will be dedicated to that.  We set a deadline to have our scripts done by April 8th, exchange them over the weekend for editing, and meet again on Monday to discuss and start working on the movie.  We are going to use the recorder that is available for checkout at the DMC for the music and voice over, Jane showed us how to use the recorder.

As for the immediate “next step” Kat decided that we set up a Dropbox account so we can share any research we find with our group. Drobox account done. My plan is to start researching Dowling and the Battle of Sabine Pass in the library and the resources we have already acquired from our class. Kat recommended that I use Edward Cotham’s book, “Sabine Pass: The Confederacy’s Thermopylae.  The clock is ticking!

All in all, we had a very productive meeting and we are all excited about the final product of our movie!

As Gabby wrote in her post, yesterday, we met with Jane at the Digital Media Center and she was incredibly helpful. She explained to us that the best way to tackle this project is to first gather all of the materials that we want to include in our movie (she described them as ingredients which was a good way to think of it). Once we have all of the materials we want to use–pictures, documents that our class has put online, music and video, we need to write a script and put together a basic storyboard. Then we can check out a recording device or use the recording studio at the DMC to record our script, then one of the women at the DMC will help us put all of this into movie form. She affirmed that no more than 5 minutes was a good length for our movie, and made sure that we understood how long it can take to edit a movie–this means that it is going to be really important for us to get moving on getting all of the “ingredients” for our movie.

With time being a big concern, we split up the work for the movie by themes. We decided this was an equitable way of dividing the work. We are going to focus more on the memory of Dick Dowling in Houston than on the battle of Sabien Pass and Dowling’s life, so Adam is the only member of our group who will be focusing on those topics. I am responsible for gathering all of the materials necessary for our discussion of the rededication of the statue in the 1990s. Fortunately, a lot of those materials are already online thanks to the library assignments, but I also will have to do more independent research, in particular, I am going to try to get in touch with the Dick Dowling Irish Heritage group in Houston. That being said, we all want our scripts drafted and materials gathered by April 8–we then are going to exchange drafts and edit each others’ drafts and meet on April 11 to get working on the movie.

Right now, the major thing that I have done to get moving on my project is to create a dropbox account and to make sure that the group has all of my contact information. This weekend my goal is to go through the Dowling archives that we have put online thanks to the Library Assignments and to go through the Dowling archives that the Houston Public Library has, so that I can get a good idea of what materials I already have access to and what materials I will need to find myself.

Overall, I think that our group is in a really good place, and I’m really excited to be getting to work on this project!

Today we met with one of the ladies at the Digital Media Center. She told us all the basic things we need to do before actually making the movie. She advised that we gather all of our media, the pictures, the video, the music, and write the script before going to the DMC again to put our movie together. She also gave us some websites we could use that would not violate copyright. She then told us that we should storyboard our ideas before constructing the movie. She also said that when we were ready, the DMC would be able to teach us how to put the movie together and how to edit it.

After that, we had a meeting to decide the next steps we will take on our project. We decided to all get a Dropbox so that we all have access to the same information. This will make the sharing of information easier within the group. We also decided that we would talk about the Dowling’s life and the Battle of Sabine Pass for about one minute to a minute and a half and use the rest of the five-minute film to talk about the statue and how he is remembered. We feel that focusing on his memory and will provide a different perspective from other sources out there. We also discussed the possibility of having talking heads in our movie. Some possible people for the talking heads are Edward Cotham, author of Sabine Pass: The Confederate Thermopylae, Dowling’s great-great niece or some member of the Dick Dowling Camp.

We split up the work according to themes, instead of tasks and each person is responsible for gathering the information, the visuals and writing a portion of the script related to their themes. Adam is going to be working on Dowling’s life and the Battle of Sabine Pass. Kat will work on the construction of the statue and what was happening around 1905. I will be researching the time in between including when the statue moved locations. Finally, Stephanie will work on the restoration and rededication in the late nineties.

We agreed to have our scripts finished by April 8, so that we would have a change to revise them before meeting. The group will meet April 11 to finalize the scripts and to determine how we will proceed with making the movie.

If I missed anything, I am sure the other members of my group will include it in their posts.

Richardson, Rupert Norval. Texas, the Lone Star State. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1943.

The first edition of Texas, the Lone Star State was written in 1943—during WWII—by an accomplished historian and veteran, Rupert Norval Richardson. In this book Richardson briefly summarizes the accomplishments of Dick Dowling and his men at Sabine Pass.  While the entry glosses briefly over the situation while making clear that the “Federals” were intending to invade Texas by first taking Sabine Pass, but Dowling heroically saved the day.  While the paragraph about Sabine Pass does mention fortifications, in this first edition it does not name a fort of any kind and makes it clear that the officials had only, “fortified it as well as their limited means would permit” (Richardson 1943, 252).  The piece on the battle was very brief, and not very specific at this stage because the author does not mention the number of gunboats or transports involved in the battle.  As we looked at some later editions already in class and only a paragraph existed on Sabine Pass, I chose to also look into the way in which the Civil War was presented by the author.  In the first edition, the Civil War segment starts with the description that ninety percent of all whites in Texas at the start of the war were migrants from other Southern states and uses this to explain that it was “natural for the state to join the proslavery movement” (Richardson 1943, 241).  While the author goes on to explain how secession was voted for and finally happened in Texas, leading with such a statement takes the blame from the state or even individuals as it was only “natural” to break from the Union.

Later editions confront this issue of the nature of Texas’ secession in different ways.  While the 3^rd edition stayed with the original argument that it was only natural for a state with 90% former Southern state residents to side with the proslavery arguments the 5^th and 6^th editions sum up this argument in one sentence, “Mostly immigrants from southern states who were sympathetic to slavery, Texans generally supported the southern position” (Richardson, Wallace, and Anderson 1970, 206).  This argument was tied into a larger paragraph that described the dividing nation listing state rights and distribution of land as causes, but interestingly specifically listing slavery as the main cause for division.  I was particularly surprised by this argument in all of the books as Richardson does not shy away from the fact slavery was a main cause for the Civil War, which I found shocking for a Texas historian. As each edition changed little changed about the overall entry about Dowling.  Like discussed in class, the exclamation point stayed the same and the only real difference between the earlier editions (1^st and 3^rd) and the later editions (5^th and 6^th) was the drop of a New York Herald claim stating that the battle and other morale downfalls of the North had caused the credit to rise. The numbers of transports and gunboats, however, present an interesting change.  The first edition completely neglected a number except for an outrageous claim of over 5,000 Federal soldiers on the ships invading Sabine Pass, the third edition listed only 1,500 troops but listed 4 gunboats and 17 transports, the 5^th listed 4 gunboats and 23 transports, and the 6^th edition stayed the same as the 5^th.  These changes in number are very interesting, as one cannot know if the rise in number can be attributed to better research or a kinder light on the memory of Dowling, either way an increase exists and only by seeing the earlier editions and later editions does it become clear that these numbers may not be fact.

However, given the background of Rupert Norval Richardson, they probably are fact or at least based in fact.  Richardson according to the Handbook of Texas was a well-known Texas historian and educator.  He wrote many publications on Texas history and was well known for his work with the Texas State Historical Survey Committee (now the Texas Historical Commission).  He was a well-qualified and respected individual in the field of Texas history and the President of Hardin-Simmons University in Texas for many years.  While he died in 1988, his book Texas, the Lone Star State lived on as it was a book with the distinct purpose of telling the story of Texas history. nEach of the four editions I had access to were written at very different times, but for mostly the same purpose.  The book, Texas, the Lone Star State was written to be a textbook for both high school and college students as well as an accessible book of Texas history for the greater populous.  As mentioned before, the 1^st edition was published in 1943, during the Second World War.  The 3^rd edition was a long time later, in 1970 when the country was going through massive changes in identity and just coming out of the Civil Rights Movement.  The 5^th edition was written in 1988, once again a time of change as the walls between the Soviet Union and the United States which had been up throughout the Cold War were starting to come down (the Berlin Wall was finally torn down in 1989), yet this sheds little light on why there was a change in the wording of why Texas entered the Civil War here as opposed to in 1970 when it would have maybe been more appropriate given the recent Civil Rights Movement.  Finally, the 6^th edition was written in 1993, but exhibited no considerable changes even given the fact that the authorship had changed as Richardson was deceased.

Transcription From: Richardson, Rupert Norval. Texas, the Lone Star State. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1943.

Fighting took place about Sabine Pass, the outlet for both the Sabine and the Neches rivers.  In September 1862, a Federal blockade patrol forced the Confederates to abandon it.  Early in January following, the Confederates reoccupied the place and fortified it as well as their limited means would permit.  Admiral David G. Farragut and General N.P. Banks then made plans for a major campaign against Texas which would begin with the retaking of Sabine Pass.  Four gunboats and a large collection of transports bearing more than 5,000 troops attacked it on September 8, 1863.  To meet this formidable force Lieutenant Dick Dowling and two small gunboats and a garrison of forty-seven men!  Yet he disabled and captured two enemy craft, took about 350 prisoners and turned back the entire expedition.  His victory was a severe blow to the morale of the North and augmented doubts about the efficiency of the Federal Navy.  The New York Herald credited it, together with the Federal defeat at Chickamauga, with lowering the credit of the United Sates to the extent of raising the price of gold 5 per cent.

Transcription From: Richardson, Rupert Norval, Ernest Wallace, and Adrian N. Anderson. Texas, the Lone Star State. 3rd ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Prentice-Hall, 1970.

Fighting also took place about Sabine Pass, the outlet for both the Sabine and the Neches rivers.  In September 1863 a Federal blockade patrol forced the Confederates to abandon it.  After retaking Galveston, the Confederates on January 21 reoccupied the place and fortified it as well as their limited means would permit. Admiral David G. Farragut and General N.P. Banks then made plans for a major campaign against Texas that would begin with the retaking of Sabine Pass. Four gunboats and 17 transports bearing about 1,500 troops for the initial landing attacked it on September 8, 1863.  To meet this formidable force, Lieutenant Dick Dowling had two small gunboats and a garrison of 46 men! Yet he disabled and captured tow enemy craft, took about 350 prisoners, and turned back the entire expedition.  His victory was a severe blow to the morale of the North and augmented doubts about the efficiency of the Federal Navy.  The New York Herald credited it, together with the Federal defeat at Chickamauga, with lowering the credit of the United Sates to the extent of raising the price of gold 5 percent.

Transcription From: Richardson, Rupert Norval, Ernest Wallace, and Adrian N Anderson. Texas, the Lone Star State. 5th ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Prentice-Hall, 1988.

Fighting also took place around Sabine Pass, the outlet for both the Sabine and Neches rivers.  In September 1862 a Federal blockade patrol forced the Confederates to abandon it.  After retaking Galveston, the Confederates on January 21 reoccupied and fortified the post at Sabine Pass, Fort Griffin, as well as their limited means would permit.  However, Union leaders Admiral G. Farragut and General N.P. Banks planned for a major campaign against Texas that would begin with the retaking of Sabine Pass.  Four gunboats and 23 transports, bearing about 5,00 troops for the initial landing, attacked Fort Griffin on September 8, 1863.  To meet the formidable force, Lieutenant Dick Dowling had two small gunboats and a garrison of 46 men!  Yet he disabled and captured two enemy craft, took about 350 prisoners, and turned back the entire expedition.  His victor was a severe blow to the morale of the North and Augmented doubts about the efficiency of the Federal navy.

Transcription From: Richardson, Rupert Norval, Adrian N Anderson, and Ernest Wallace. Texas, the Lone Star State. 6th ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Prentice Hall, 1993.

Fighting also took place around Sabine Pass, the outlet for both the Sabine and the Neches rivers.  In September 1862, a federal blockade patrol forced the Confederates to abandon it.  After retaking Galveston, the Confederates on January 21 reoccupied and fortified the post at Sabine Pass, Fort Griffin, as well as their limited means would permit.  However, Union leaders Admiral David G. Farragut and General N.P. Banks planned for a major campaign against Texas that would begin with the retaking of Sabine Pass.  Four gunboats and 23 transports, bearing about 5,000 troops for the initial landing, attacked Fort Griffin on September 8, 1963.  To meet the formidable force, Lieutenant Dick Dowling had two small gunboats and a garrison of 48 men!  Yet when he disabled and captured two enemy craft, took about 350 Union prisoners, and turned back the entire expedition.  His victory was a severe blow to the morale of the North and augmented doubts about the efficiency of the Union navy.

Hello Movie Group! We’ve reached that part of the course where it’s time to start working on your small group projects for the Dick Dowling archive. In this post I’m going to talk a little bit about the project you’ve been assigned–making a brief movie related to Dowling’s statue and memory. Please take time to read this post carefully so that you can begin to talk amongst yourselves about what you plan to do.

In the course of this semester, you’ve learned a lot about Dowling and the Battle of Sabine Pass that you probably didn’t know when we first tramped out to the statue during the first week of classes. Even if you had gone out to the statue yourself, you could have learned something about it from the historical marker. But as we’ve seen, even the marker and the rededication ceremony that accompanied it has a particular history that might not be apparent to a viewer of the marker, and there are things about the battle that the marker emphasizes while leaving other things out altogether.

In this project, your challenge will be to communicate some of what you’ve learned to a wider audience and interpret it by producing a movie about Dowling and his memory, suitable for upload to the Internet either on our Dowling archive site or a video service like YouTube.

Conceivably, your movie could be of any length and talk about anything related to the Dowling statue. But in deciding what to put in your movie, think about the specific virtues of the medium you’re working with. One advantage of a movie is the diversity of content it can contain–sound, text, images, and moving images. We’ve seen some movies in class this semester, like Henry Louis Gates’s documentary on Looking for Lincoln, which give some sense of the kind of material a documentary film (even a brief one) might contain. Consider the kinds of things even these brief eight- to ten-minute films manage to convey about Lincoln and his contested memory. Or consider these even briefer student-designed videos as possible models for what you might be able to do.

As you watch such videos, it should quickly become clear that your primary chore will be making tough decisions about how to fill the silence and make a video that will appeal to and inform general viewers while simultaneously helping them interpret what they are seeing. Those are decisions that involve both technical and interpretive dimensions.

The Technical Dimension

To complete this project, you’ll need to learn about how to use video recording equipment, and how to edit video files. Fortunately, the Digital Media Center includes the equipment you need to do these things. And the staff in the Media Center, including director Lisa Spiro, are available to help you. One of the first things you should so is meet as a group with Lisa (she knows you’re coming) to figure out the kinds of things that are technically possible when making a movie, and the kinds of things that aren’t. You can also ask about renting equipment to make your movie.

As you work on your movie, you may discover other technical tasks that you’ll need to figure out, like how to record or sample music (if you choose to include it), or how to strip video off of other sources (like, to give an example, this video of the recent Dick Dowling Days at Sabine Pass).

To determine what technical skills you’ll need to be make your movie, you’ll first need to decide what kind of video you want to make. Will it be modeled on a news report, with the standard correspondent-with-microphone format? Will it be more like a documentary with narration in the background? Will it only include images available for primary source documents? Or do you want to record actual video of sites in the city like the statue in Hermann Park or Dowling’s gravesite in St. Vincent’s Cemetery? Whatever you decide, it will be crucial for you to make early contact with the technical experts in the Digital Media Center so you’ll know the technical parameters you have to work in.

The Interpretive Dimension

Just as with the podcast group, the primary challenge for you will be to determine what to include in your movie. Before you ever record or edit a scene, that means you’ll need to script out what will be in the video and how long you want the movie to be.

As you script your podcast, the biggest question will be about what you want the movie to be about and what point you want it to make. To answer that question, you’ll need to think first about audience. Imagine your audience as someone who, like you on the first day of class, doesn’t know about Dowling and the statue. What should that viewer learn, in your view?

And more than information, what interpretation do you want the listener to take away from your movie? Virtually any attempt to talk about Dowling carries with it an interpretation. When Jefferson Davis gave his speech about the battle of Sabine Pass (DD0001), which might have been videotaped if the technology had existed, he had a clear message he wanted to get across. And later writers about Dowling have, at various moments in time, presented him in particular ways as a “hero” or otherwise. How will you present him to your audience?

The potential subjects you could cover are conceivably very numerous: (a) the differences between the facts of the battle and the way it has been represented; (b) the changes in the attention given to Dowling over time in Houston’s history, as signified by the placement of stories about him in past newspapers or the fact that a man once feted by governors and mayors and city councilmen later depended on small groups of descendants to promote his memory; (c) the contexts in which Dowling’s memory should be placed and the subjects (slavery? Irish immigration? etc.) that should be included to make sense of the battle or the man, and so on. The choice is ultimately yours to decide what would best make a coherent brief film that takes advantage of the medium and speaks to a wider audience. Given all that you could say about Dowling on the basis of what we’ve learned, the hardest task will probably be deciding what to say and what to leave unsaid, a decision that should be guided partially by your other decisions about how long a video your audience can stand and the purpose of your movie.

What Next?

It could be that not everything you would like to do with your movie will be feasible within the time frame you have to work on this project. That introduces another level of choices you will have to make about what to prioritize, what your main objectives are, and how you will pool your collective skills and divide the labor among you. For now, think broadly about what–in an ideal world–your movie would be able to include. Begin to talk with each other and make an appointment to meet with Lisa Spiro in the Digital Media Center.

By the time that Blog Post #9 is due next Thursday, you should have done at least enough groundwork and discussion on this project to be able to give a progress report and share ideas you have for the movie. The following week, you will meet with me to draft a contract for your project. That meeting won’t be useful to you, however, if you’ve done no thinking or learning about the project before then.

So you should think of these as your next two steps and strive to complete them sometime in the next two weeks: (a) meet with the Digital Media Center staff to get a quick feel for the technology you’ll need to record and edit your movie; (b) talk with each other about the project, paying special attention to sharing information about particular skills and interests you have; (c) begin to discuss with each other what the objective and format of your movie will be, since so many of your decisions will hinge on that.

And as always, if you have questions, let me know!

Bruce Levine’s book, Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War might more aptly have been titled “Confederate Desperation: Southern Plans to Grant Incredibly Limited Freedoms to a few Slaves who would join the South’s rapidly Failing Military Efforts in the Civil War.” Levine chronicles the efforts of Southern political and military leaders to boost the South’s declining numbers of soldiers, and although he uses the words “emancipation” and “free” in his title, his central thesis is not that Confederate leaders ever intended to truly free the slaves. Instead, Levine notes that the Confederacy considered arming the slaves and granting freedom to those who fought for the Confederacy only as a desperate war effort, and Confederates believed that “If we triumph in the end…The institution itself will be preserved,” (Kindle Edition, Location 1454). “Emancipation” and “freedom” to the Confederacy meant nothing more than granting some limited rights to African-American slaves in order to preserve white supremacy and Confederate independence.
Emancipation for the Confederacy then, meant something very different than it meant to the Union, but this was not the case throughout the entire war. Indeed, the first Confiscation Act defined freedom in a way very similar to the way that the Confederacy defined Emancipation. The first Confiscation Act sought to deal with the fact that slaves were running away to Union soldiers, and many Union troops felt that sending slaves back to their owners, where they would surely be forced to aid the Confederate war effort, was absurd. The First Confiscation Act thus freed slaves who had been used to help aid the Confederate rebellion, and it allowed Union troops to employ these slaves to help the Union cause. Importantly, this did not free slaves’ families. Similarly, the Confederacy wanted to free a select group of slaves who could help them in their war effort. There was no mention of freeing loyal slaves family members. But the spirit of the laws was similar as well. Levine notes, “In 1861 it [the Union] was still flatly refusing to champion emancipation of southern slaves, still insisting that it fought exclusively to restore the Union,” (Location 1982). Ultimately, this meant that even if a slave gained their freedom by running away to Union lines and stating that their masters had been using them to aid the Confederate war effort, this slave would be aiding a Union that was not committed to ending slavery in the South—they could have received their freedom and helped the Union to preserve the status quo, that is, to keep slavery in the South. Similarly, one slave said of the Confederate option for emancipation, “they said I should fight for my freedom…[but] to gain my freedom…I must fight to keep my wife and children slaves,” (Location 2193). Thus the Confederate definition of “emancipation” and the First Confiscation Act’s definition of “emancipation” were very similar to one another, and did not offer true emancipation.
Ultimately, however, the Union’s definition of emancipation did change. Although the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863 did end slavery largely because of Lincoln’s war aims, it freed all slaves and their families, allowed black soldiers to enlist in the Union Army and was the first step in the Union towards granting African-Americans a number of basic human rights. In contrast, the Confederacy never thought that allowing slaves to fight in the Confederate Army or giving them some basic freedoms would lead to any sort of complete emancipation or political and social rights for African-Americans. Levine notes, “Ultimately, the key difference between Union and Confederate emancipation would be found in the nature of the legal status that would replace slavery” and the Confederacy planned to give limited freedom and then “make statues for the regulation of labor,” prevent emancipated slaves from owning property, and keep them politically disenfranchised (Location 1487-1498).
The Confederacy never sought to offer slaves freedom, it sought to do the bare minimum necessary to win the war. Once they had won the war, the Confederacy would work to maintain the status quo, and to keep slaves oppressed and dependent on working on white plantations. This was not freedom; it was a paltry attempt to give slaves in the Confederacy minimal rights to get the maximum reward of Confederate victory.

Bruce Levine’s Confederate Emancipation sheds light on the difficulties the Confederacy had of drafting a plan to arm the soldiers and emancipate them. The title, “Confederate Emancipation” is far from the actual truth because slaves were never truly emancipated under the Confederacy. However, Levine does a good job of narrating the situation of the Confederacy throughout the war and paints a good picture of why it was so difficult for the Confederacy to agree on any form of Emancipation. The idea of emancipating the slaves to add to their numbers quantitatively claimed to have been mentioned at the beginning of the war by few, but it was an idea that received much more attention as the South began to struggle. The Confederates began to embrace the idea of Confederate Emancipation seriously towards the end of the war through meager legislation because it was essentially a last ditch effort.

On November 7, 1864, Jefferson Davis finally decided to embrace the idea of “manumission as a war measure.”(32) Levine writes that the Davis acknowledged the overall manpower problem and he conceded it was quite serious. To address that problem successfully, Davis asserted, would require “a radical modification in the theory of the law.”(32) The idea of using the slaves for the war effort had been kicked around by many of the great Confederate minds, but this was the first time it was admitted publicly by their President. This address to Congress did not yet ask for the power to arm the slaves, rather use them as laborers. Yet, as Levine writes, “He did open the door to employing black troops in the future, should the need arise.”(33) Patrick Cleburne was the first to officially bring this idea up to any form of Confederate officials. In early 1864, he read his memo to the generals assembled in Dalton, Georgia, and he could not receive any support. However, a year later, the situation would be different.

The main reason for the manumission of soldiers was to gain soldiers for the war effort, but there were hopes that such efforts would appeal to British and French forces. Both countries were anti-slavery and some Confederate officials hoped that this extreme effort would gain foreign sympathy and assistance. Patrick Cleburne had promised his fellow officers that such a measure “will at one blow strip the enemy of foreign sympathy and assistance, and transfer them to the South.”(37) By this time in the war, many Confederates were desperate for any form of help. The ploy for foreign sympathy and assistance never proved to be anything more than a dream.

The Confederacy was forced by a worsening war situation to rethink their tactics. Looking across enemy lines after the Confiscation Acts and the Emancipation Proclamation, they saw the enemy using their “property” against them. Confederates were seeing their way of life and the very institution of slavery crumble right in front of their eyes. The manumission of slaves was merely a last ditch effort to win the war and save whatever was left of slavery. Levine writes, “By freeing and arming slaves, Cleburne, Lee, Davis, and Benjamin sought simultaneously to win the war and to salvage as much as they could of the Old South, including the plantation system and the white-supremacist social order more generally.”(110) Some Confederates saw the emancipation of the slaves by the Union as inevitable, so they might as well do it themselves and use them against the Union. This form of emancipation caused an incredible amount of dissent among the Confederate ranks and was merely a last ditch effort to win the war.

Gaining support for emancipation of slaves was next to impossible, but the Confederacy was able to gain a little ground. On February 10, 1865, Jefferson Davis’ old friend Ethelbert Barksdale introduced a bill into the House of Representatives that would become the administration proposal.(117) The bill would allow for Jefferson Davis “to ask for and accept from the owners of slaves, the services of such number of able-bodied negro men as hey may deem expedient.”(117) The House amended that bill because they didn’t think the call for voluntary slaves assistance would result in any numbers. Levine posits, “It added language that would allow Richmond in such a case to call upon each state government to raise it won share of a total of 300,000 black troops.”(118) The bill went through the House and the Senate with a little difficulty and was signed by Davis on March 13. The new Confederate law did not free any slave, and it did not attempt to do so.

Ultimately, the undivided front of the Confederacy hindered its successes both diplomatically and militarily. The debate over how to arm the slaves and/or emancipate them resulted in a Confederate law that hardly did anything-let alone free any slave. I do find Levine’s explanation persuasive because he did a good job of showing the whole picture. I do not think he was trying to make an argument that the South took major attempts to emancipate the slaves. He acknowledges the difference between the Union’s emancipation and the Confederate’s attempts.  Rather, I think he was telling the story as the way it was. The attempt at Confederate Emancipation was at the very end of the war and it was a last ditch effort to win the war and preserve the South’s way of life. Simply put, it was too little too late.

The “Confederate Emancipation” was a sham.   While Bruce Levine does well to address this long confused and misinterpreted movement to free slaves to serve in the Confederate army in his book Confederate Emancipation, the fact of the matter is that Confederate emancipation never freed a slave.  As Levine states, “the newly enacted Confederate law did not free a single slave, nor did it attempt to do so,” (Levine, 118).  Even at its most liberal inception, the Confederate emancipation might have freed slaves on two basic conditions: 1) they serve in the Confederate army, where they would never be considered equal to whites and most likely would have lost their lives from being placed in the most precarious of situations; and 2) should these slaves survive the war to their own freedom they would have been granted no property, little to start with and would have been bound by necessity to return to their positions on plantations where they would work for low wages in the same or worse conditions they might have had as slaves.

In this context,  “Confederate emancipation” is not the proper word for this envisioned slave enlistment; instead this movement can be considered more of a draft or forced conscription. This draft of the slaves guaranteed them no improvement in condition, it allowed them little opportunity for advancement, and would simply place black able-bodied men on the line instead of the dwindling white forces.  According to Levine this decrease in Confederate troops had only escalated as,  “the battlefield reverses and erosion of popular morale of mid-1863 aggravated the Confederacy’s manpower problem,” (Levine, 24).   So, by 1864 the Confederacy was not so interested in the “loyalty” of these slave and their love of the confederacy as it was with the real number of bodies it might add to their quickly diminishing ranks.

While it is true that federal policies like the Confiscation Acts proposed the drafting of contraband to contribute their labor to the Union army, this labor was not to be in arms, but instead in the building of fortifications and other manual labor tasks that would not require risk of life or limb.  When the Emancipation Proclamation changed these policies to allow for the enlistment of blacks in the federal army, it did so on an entirely voluntary basis from free men.

While the Confederate emancipation had required such voluntary measures, it was not from free men acting upon their own interests but instead from the joint volunteering of their masters and the slaves themselves.  This voluntary action was done with the understanding at the time that as no emancipation policy was in practice, the slave would be returned to his master following the war.  These slaves would experience no elevation for their service nor experience any major improvement in their lifestyle.  Under these conditions, the slave would not be volunteering for a “cause” per se but instead trading one master for another.

Also, even when the possibility of emancipation was introduced into the Confederate enlistment Levine says, “Cleburne, Benjamin, Lee, and Davis hoped to have their cake and eat it, too.  They hoped to win black cooperation with an offer of freedom.  But the freedom they expected to grant would severely circumscribed,” (Levine, 154).  Under this proposed freedom blacks would be expected to serve, but when they returned they would receive no land, and be forced by law and necessity to return to their former masters to serve as “freed” laborers. While they might have the ability to rise above this position, the continued domination of white over black and rigid maintenance of the economic system would have prevented easy change in quality of life for these former slaves.  As Patrick Cleburne, a proponent of emancipation proclaimed, “writing a man ‘free’ does not make him so, as the history of the Irish laborer shows, ” (Levine, 103).  So, even when freedom was “offered” true emancipation was never on the table in the Confederacy, as Confederate leaders and the public were not quite ready for equality.  Instead, through careful structuring Confederates attempted to gain the arming of slaves without the moral and societal changes it would require, a factor that would contribute to the failure of black Confederate enlistment.

While the Confederacy, with some adjustment, might have made such a policy work and change the tides of war, by 1865, such hopes were simply too late—especially considering how difficult it would be to secure the “volunteer” slaves for the army.  These volunteers would not be experiencing difference in life, but instead a new more violent master and little chance for survival—explaining the lack of actual volunteers actually enlisted at the end of the war.

The “confederate emancipation” movement was no emancipator action, but instead the conscription of slaves to fight for a “cause” they had no interest in with absolutely no reward for their service, making the “emancipation” aspect of such a movement a complete sham.

The book Confederate Emancipation by Bruce Levine explores the South’s thoughts and proposals for the inclusion of black troops into the army.  While the confederacy did use black labor to help them with the war effort, they were extremely hesitant to arm the slaves. The generals and the government acknowledged that forcing the blacks to fight, still as slaves, was a bad idea because they were essentially arming a population that did not hold the planters in the highest of esteems (86). However, the South did not want to provide emancipation for their slaves because they were essential to the plantation system and the form of life they were fighting for. This dilemma left the Confederacy is a problem that was not addressed promptly. While the north passed the first and second Confiscation Acts, freeing those slaves held captive under rebel plantation owners, and allowing them to integrate themselves into Union lines, the confederacy had a difficult time formulating legislation that would allow for the integration of black troops into the army.  Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation also freed the slaves that were still under Confederate control and furthermore allowed these slaves to join the Union Army and actually take part in the fighting.

The notion of emancipation expressed in the book is not ever defined because of the fear that the Southerners felt in regard to the liberation of their slave population. The planters were not willing to lose all of their slaves when in part they were fighting to keep slavery as part of the Confederacy. If they liberated all the slaves, they were essentially throwing away all they had fought for up to that point (56). The Southerners proposed for plantation owners to volunteer their slaves for the cause (124). This did not guarantee freedom and it was up to the owner how he would compensate his slave for the service provided.  The possible framers of the legislation were clear on the fact that in order for the emancipation of the slaves to work in their favor they had to be the ones providing liberty. However, these thoughts came a little too late into their minds. Since the Confederacy was doing well in the battles against the Union despite having less of a pool from where to draw soldiers, the utilization of slaves did not cross their mind. However, when morale declined due to loses on the battlefield, this idea became more attractive (21). When it dawned upon the Confederacy that there was a possibility of defeat, the Union had already taken steps to win over the enslaved population.

Since the plan in the Confederacy was to liberate the man who had fought for the Southern cause, it only allowed for men to receive this treatment. On the other hand, the Emancipation Proclamation and the second Confiscation Act declared all people under Confederate rule free.  These pronouncements meant that whole families could leave a plantation and seek a profitable life elsewhere. Under the
Confederacy, the man would go off to war and gain his freedom. According to Levine, there were slaves who claimed they would not participate in this system because they were not willing to leave their wives and children behind (145). Furthermore, it seems highly unlikely to me that the slaves would be willing to fight for the Confederacy even if they offered freedom to their whole family. Since the Union offered the same thing, and the Union was not fighting to keep them enslaved it is more feasible that more blacks would be willing to cross into Union lines. Why would they fight for the Confederacy when they could be free under the Union without conditions?

Ultimately, I do not think that even if the Confederacy had passed any legislation to arm black men they would have emancipated all the slaves in their holding. Consequently, I do not see their idea of emancipation the same as the one expressed in the Emancipation Proclamation and the Confiscation Acts. Their goal was not to free a population but to find more fighters to continue their way of life, one that included slavery.  Although the Union was not completely altruistic, their plan of action did specify freedom for all slaves (under the Confederacy).They even acknowledge that it would be better for them to liberate their slaves so that later they could mold the relationships between whites and blacks (103). They still sought to be in control and were not willing to allow freedom to their slaves. Although some slaves would have been freed under “Confederate Emancipation”, this phrase does not have the same meaning as what most of the population considers emancipation now.