Emancipation Proclamation  "The Southern Reaction"

In the Union, President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation evoked a wide range of positive and negative reactions. In the Confederacy, the Proclamation was universally condemned. The idea of blacks resisting the authority of whites had been a nightmare of Southerners for more than 200 years. Lincoln's proclamation endorsed the concept of arming and training slaves stolen from Southern farms and sending them into the Confederacy to wage war against their masters.

The Southern reaction was not only vehement, but ferocious. Confederate President Jefferson Davis had warned the South that the Union intended "to incite servile insurrection and light the fires of incendiarism." The North, said Davis, would "debauch the inferior race by promising indulgence of the vilest passions," and he hinted at "atrocities from which death itself is a welcome escape."

Eleven days after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Davis told the Southern Congress that the document was "the most execrable measure in the history of guilty man." He said Union officers captured at the head of black troops would be turned over to state governments to be punished as "criminals engaged in inciting servile insurrection"; the penalty for this crime would, of course, be execution. Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard recommended the summary execution of Union officers of black units, and "let the execution be with the garrote."

Though the South never officially carried out its policy of punishment for officers of black troops, there is considerable evidence that captured black troops and their officers were sometimes "dealt with red-handed on the field or immediately thereafter." In a letter to his mother, a North Carolina soldier reported skirmishing with a black unit and that "several [were] taken prisoner & afterwards either bayoneted or burnt. The men were perfectly exasperated at the idea of negroes opposed to them & rushed at them like so many devils."

Fascinating Fact:  Confederate Gen. Howell Cobb, the owner of a large Georgia plantation, said poignantly, "If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong."


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