General Patrick R. Cleburne
1828 - 1864
Partick Ronayne
Cleburne (1828 - 1864) was a native of Cork County, Ireland. Known as the
"Stonewall of the West," he had imigrated to America after purchasing
his way out of the British 41st Regiment of Foot in which he had served for
several years. He worked first as a druggist and then as a property attorney. In
1861 he resided in Helena, Arkansas. Appointed Colonel in March 1862, he was
soon promoted to Brigadier and then Major General.
His command became
the most celebrated of those composing the Army of Tennessee. He participated in
the battles of Shiloh, Richmond (Kentucky), Perryville, Stones River,
Chickamauga, and those of the Atlanta campaign. At Missionary Ridge his Division
held its position against superior numbers and checked Union pursuit. In the
thickest of fighting, he could be found, saber in hand, leading his men.
At Franklin,
Tennessee he led his troops into the eye of the storm. A survivor said of the
brutal, hand-to-hand fighting his Division engaged in that "it was if all
the fires of earth and hell had been turned loose in one mighty effort to
destroy each other." The survivor of a severe wound to his face a year
earlier, Cleburne fell in a dramatic, but futile, frontal assault.
In a letter to his
family in 1861 he wrote that "I am with the South in death, in victory or
defeat. [Like most Southrons, he said] I never owned a Negro and care nothing
for them, but these people have been my friends and have stood up to me on all
occasions. In addition to this, I believe the North is about to wage a brutal
and unholy war on a people who have done them no wrong, in violation of the
constitution and the fundamental principles of the government. They no longer
acknowledge that all government derives its validity from the consent of the
governed."
In January 1864
Cleburne took the then radical step of advocating emancipating slaves who agreed
to fight for the Confederacy. In a letter first presented to his subordinates
that he sent to the general commanding the Army of Tennessee he wrote:
"Moved by the exigency in which
our country is now placed, we take the liberty of laying before you,
unofficially, our views on the present state of affairs....We have now been
fighting for nearly three years, have spilled much of our best blood, and lost,
consumed, or thrown to the flames an amount of property equal in value to the
specie currency of the world. Through some lack in our system the fruits of our
struggles and sacrifices have invariably slipped away from us and left us
nothing but long lists of dead and mangled. Instead of standing defiantly on the
borders of our territory or harassing those of the enemy, we are hemmed in today
into less than two-thirds of it, and still the enemy menacingly confronts us at
every point with superior forces. Our soldiers can see no end to this state of
affairs except in our own exhaustion; hence, instead of rising to the occasion,
they are sinking into a fatal apathy, growing weary of hardships and slaughters
which promise no results....
Every man should endeavor to
understand the meaning of subjugation before it is too late. We can give but a
faint idea when we say that it means the loss of all we not hold most sacred -
slaves and all other personal property, lands, homesteads, liberty, justice,
safety, priode, manhood. It means the history of this heroic struggle will be
written by the enemy; that our youth will be trained by Northern schoolteachers;
will learn from Northern school books their version of the war; will be
impressed by the influences of history and education to regard our gallant dead
as traitors, and our maimed veterans as fit objects for derision....
...The President of the United States
announces that 'he has already in training an army of 100,000 negroes as good as
any troops,' and every fresh raid he makes and new slice of territory he wrests
from us will add to this force. Every soldier in our army already knows and
feels our numerical inferiority to the enemy....Our single source of supply is
that portion of our white men fit for duty and not now in the ranks. The enemy
has three sources of supply: First, his own motley population; secondly, our
slaves; and thirdly, Europeans whose hearts are fired into a crusade against us
by fictitious pictures of the atrocities of slavery, and who meet no hinderance
from their Governments in such enterprise, because these Governments are equally
antagonistic to the institution. In touching the third cause, the fact that
slavery has become a military weakness, we may rouse prejudice and passion, but
the time has come when it would be madness not to look at our danger from every
point of view, and to probe it to the bottom. Apart from the assistance that
home and foreign prejudice against slavery has given the North, slavery is a
source of great strength to the enemy in a purely military point of view, by
supplying him with an army from our granaries; but it is our most vulnerable
point, a continued embarrassment, and in some respects an insidious
weakness....Like past years, 1864 will diminish our ranks by the casualties of
war, and what source of repair is there left us?....
Our country has already some friends
in England and France, and there are strong motives to induce these nations to
recognize and assist us, but they cannot assist us without helping slavery, and
to do this would be in conflict with their policy for the last quarter of a
century, England has paid hundreds of millions to emancipate her West India
slaves and break up the slave-trade. Could she now consistently spend her
treasure to reinstate slavery in this country? But this barrier once removed,
the sympathy and the interests of these and other nations will accord with our
own, and we may expect from them both moral support and mateiral aid....This
measure will deprive the North of the moral and material aid which it now
derives from the bitter prejudices with which foreigners view the institution,
and its war, if continued, will henceforth be so despicable in their eyes that
the sources of recruiting will be dried up. It will leave the enemy's negro army
no motive to fight for, and will exhaust the source from which it has been
recruited. The idea that it is their special mission to war against slavery has
held growing sway over the Northern people for many years, and has at length
ripened into an armed and bloody crusade against it....Knock this away and what
is left" A bloody ambition for more territory, a pretended veneration for
the Union, which one of their own most distinguished orators (Doctor Beecher in
his Liverpool speech) openly avowed was only used as a stimulus to stir up the
anti-slavery crusade, and lastly the poisonous and selfish interests which are
the fungus growth of the war itself. Mankind may fancy it a great duty to
destroy slavery, but what interest can mankind have in upholding this remainder
of the Northern war platform?
The Constitution of the Southern
States has reserved to their respective governments the power to free slaves for
meritorious services to the State. It is politic besides. For many years, ever
since the agitation of the subject of slavery commenced, the negro has been
dreaming of freedom, and his vivid imagination has surrounded that condition
with so many gratifications that it has become the paradise of his hopes. To
attain it he will tempt dangers and difficulties not exceeded by the bravest
soldier in the field....The slaves are dangerous now, but armed, trained, and
collected in an army they would be a thousand fold more dangerous; therefore
when we make soldiers of them we must make free men of them beyond all question,
and thus enlist their sympathies also....
It is said that Republicanism cannot
exist without the institution. Even were this true, we prefer any form of
government of which the Southern people may have the molding, to one forced upon
us by a conqueror....It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we
give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not
all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish
sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive
us of our rights and liberties."
The idea of the Confederacy
considering enlisting blacks isn't quite so far fetched as it seems today. Early
in the War, for example, it was reported in the Southern press that some mixed
race, free men had offered to organize regiments composed of their peers.
Uniformed, black musicians served from the start of the War. In addition, there
have recently appeared in various publications reports of various individual
slaves serving as personal servants, laborers, or cooks who picked up guns and
fought and black or mixed-race individuals who enlisted in the Confederate army.
Ultimately, a
number of Confederate soldiers, including General Robert E. Lee, advocate the
enlistment of blacks. On 15 March, 1864, for example, several commissioned
offcers in Thomas' Brigade (14th Georgia) asked General Thomas to forward a
request that almost all the enlisted men had agreed to which proposed
"...that negroes in the counties of Georgia which our companies hail from
be conscribed [sic] in such numbers and under such regulations as the War
Department may deem proper....
...When in former
years," they explained, "for pecuniary purposes, we did not consider
it disgraceful to labor with negroes in the field or at the same work bench, we
certainly will not look upon it in any other light at this time, when an end so
glorious as our independence is to be achieved. We sincerely believe that the
adoption throughout our army of the course indicated in the above plan, or
something similar to it, will insure a speedy availability of the negro element
in our midst for military purposes and crate, or rather cement, a reciprocal
attachment between the men now in service and the negroes highly beneficial to
the service..." On 18 March, 1865, General Thomas approved and forwarded
this proposal.
According to Ervin
L. Jordan, Jr. in his book, Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War
Virginia, after the Confederate Congress approved of the enlistment of
blacks--something General Robert E. Lee had been advocating for a good while--a
few black units participated in minor engagements.
A complete copy of
General Cleburne's proposal to enlist blacks can be found in The Gray and the
Black, The Confederate Debate on Emancipation by Robert F. Durden.
"If this cause that is so dear to my heart is doomed to fail, then I pray heaven may let me fall with it, while my face is turned toward the enemy and my right arm battling for that which I know to be right." -- Patrick R. Cleburne in a address to his troops on 2 October, 1864.