From: morphy@cco.caltech.edu (Jones Maxime Murphy)
Subject: Did Lincoln free the slaves for military purposes?
Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
Date: Sun, 23 Aug 1992 06:03:18 GMT

whale@leland.Stanford.EDU (Stephen Schmidt) writes:

>In article <1992Aug23.035253.22360@cco.caltech.edu> morphy@cco.caltech.edu (Jones Maxime Murphy) writes:

>>This is very true. The slaves were freed as much as a military maneuver as for
>>any other reason.

>Not true. That was his rationalization for it, because he could only issue
>edicts for military reasons. In fact, however, it was done for purely
>political reasons stemming from the conflicts between Lincoln and the
>Senate, but going deeper than that.
>Rather than try to sum up an entire literature, I'll refer you to Catton's
>Terrible Swift Sword which discusses it in some detail.

I'll look it up, but it is anti-intuitive and flies in the face of the facts.
Legal recognition of their freedom was a major psychological boost for the
black allies of the Union. How could that not be a military advantage? Blacks
served as spies and soldiers for the Union after emancipation, with their
intimate knowledge of the land they were brutally compelled to work.

>>It created havoc at the very core of the South, and brought
>>it to state of crisis.

>Not true. It had essentially no effect on the South whatever except to
>confirm the impression that they already had, that the Republican party
>wanted to take their slaves away. Since they already thought that, what
>impact could it have had?

You are talking about *whites* as if they're the South. Stop it.

>>By the end of the war, well over 10% of the Union army
>>was ex-slaves. Freeing the slaves brought fresh, highly motivated manpower into
>>a beleaguered Union camp.

>True but unrelated to the Emancipation Proclamation. That proclamation says
>nothing about arming slaves. The decision to recruit colored troops into
>the Federal army was made in late 1863, and no such troops saw action until
>1864. (Some state-recruited colored troops, notably 54th Massachussetts, saw
>action in 1863.)

"Arming slaves"? I'm not surprised the proclamation didn't refer to them,
since they were not slaves any more, except perhaps in your mind and the mind
of the whites in the South at the time.

How on earth can you separate the influx of "colored"(as opposed to colorless,
no doubt) troops from their legal release from the chains of institutionalized
slavery? Up until the Emancipation proclamation, Federal officers were 
technically bound to return blacks to their masters! And in fact, many often
did until July 1862, when they were forbidden to do so. That was also when
Congress authorized Lincoln to enlist "persons of African descent" for "any
war service". Sounds an awful lot like arming the "slaves" to me. In fact,
blacks had been fighting in the Union army long before that, and not just in
state-recruited units.

>Try not to be any more revisionist than your distorted positions force you
>to be.

And what exactly are my "distorted" positions, pray tell?
Jones
-- 
Jones M Murphy Jr                                        (212) 602-4375
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