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Emancipation and the Army of the Cumberland
Issues: Saving the Union
1) The
vast majority of Union soldiers enlisted to fight
secession, not free the slaves. Certainly, there were
those for whom slavery was the one and only issue, and
abolishing it the one and only cause. And we
include one such memoir for you to read. Yet, more
interesting is how the rest were slowly--or not so
slowly--persuaded to shift their point of view.
There were some, mostly former activists in the
Republican party, who saw the slave system as the cause
of the war and secession, but who did not join the war
to make it an abolition crusade. Like Abraham
Lincoln himself, they wanted slavery ended, but by a
process more rational and constitutional than
war-making. However, they found it impossible in
their own minds to separate the war against secession
from the issue of the slave system, and very quickly
adjusted to the shift in policy.
2) For
many other Union soldiers, invasion changed their minds.
At least in the records, these men had no defined
feelings about slavery one way or the other. But
then refugee slaves showed up at camps offering labor to
soldier boys who couldn't cook or do laundry. The
need for camp labor made many soldiers admit slave
refugees. Then, soldiers found that in the enemy's
country where every white hand was either against them
or couldn't be trusted, it was the slaves who brought
reliable information and assistance. Slaves
pointed out where the local roads led or where the
guerilla hide outs were. As the soldiers often
said, blacks were "our one true friend."
Finally, it occurred to these men that every slave left
in bondage worked a cotton field for an owner whose son
was a Confederate soldier, or ended up being conscripted
by Confederate officers to build fortifications to kill
Union soldiers.
3) Even
at this, fighting an emancipation war went down hard for
many soldiers. There were those who never
reconciled themselves to the change. While we have
yet to run across a memoir that takes this point of view
expressly, many of the sources record incidents and
outbursts during the war, including, for example, the
case of a Kentucky officer who cheered Abraham Lincoln's
assassination in 1865.
4)
Midwestern disloyalty complicated the matter.
Active opposition to the war began as soon as the
fighting started. More became disgruntled as
casualties mounted and as the Union effort shifted from
saving the Union to ending slavery. Many
midwestern residents hated secession and happily aided
the Union army, but refused to support an abolition
crusade. However, it was impossible for soldiers
at the front to distinguish between secessionist
sympathizers opposed to the war in any sense--the
so-called Copperheads--from those opposed only to
abolition, particularly since both groups vied for
control of the Democratic party. The soldiers
believed that any expression of dissent amounted to
disloyalty. Because of this, the emancipation
cause gained support in the army simply because opposing
freedom became linked to opposing the war itself.
5) For
those soldiers with doubts, silence became the best
solution. Despite all the changes brought by the
war, many soldiers wanted nothing to do with abolition.
There are many memoirs/regimentals that say absolutely
nothing about the issue of emancipation during the war.
Many do not even discuss the existence of blacks
anywhere around the army. Of course, one cannot
possibly know the motive behind such a silence.
One can only note that this exists--and we have included
an example of such a memoir for you--and observe that it
was quite possible for veterans in the 1890s to write
about the Union war effort and never mention that
slavery was actively ended by the army during the war.
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