This paragraph was the legislative bottom line.
"But not everyone could be made to accept the proposal. On March 4 and 6, the Virginia legislature agreed that slaves and free blacks could fight in the Confederate army, but their military service would NOT result in emancipation. '
But in implimentingthe practice of the law, General Lee, head of the army, chose to ignore the legislature's decision, and wrote his general order number 14 in a maner diiferent from the bill that was passed.
"The Confederate Army and Davis managed to overcome the opposition by the Virginia legislature and the Confederate Congress to emancipation by ADDING to army regulations that slaves could fight if they so desired and if their masters submitted a written approbation that the slave could be freed after the war. "
Lee "overcame" the legislative opposition in Virgian and in the CSA Congress not by successfully persuading the politicians to change the bill to his liking (he failed to be able to do that), but by simply ignoring them and writing his orders to be enforced his way. The politicians had failed Lee, refused to provide for the emancipation Lee had asked for, so he went around them and put what he chose into his general orders.
In practice, Lee required that any officer receiving donated slaves that the bill permitted to be given to the army by their masters , would have to be guaranteed emancipation by their masters before they would be accepted by the army, something the bill did not itself contain.
As for "here and there" that only refelects the true fact that using slaves, or even free men of color as armed warriors was not official across the board accepted CSA policy, but that it may have occured in local levels as long as the bureaucricy was more or less fooled. Thus, free men of color who enlisted and who were used as soldiers, did so frequently by having their paperwork changed from "private" to "cook" etc. Then if any embarrassing questions were asked, the local officer could say, something like "well yes, my colored cook here, is armed but only to protect the provisons", or some such excuse, while in reality he was indeed serving as a black soldier.
Whatever, this is immaterial, because it it was being done on a widespread basis, in the numbers then CSA required, Ewell's, Cleburne's, Hindman's, Oates' and others', warning and pleas would have been completely unnecesary. That fact that Lee himself even as late as 1865 had to beg the congress, and be personally insulted by their refusal to heed his advice, proves that Le himself saw that what was being done locally in this place or that, in this uniot otnthat, was NOT ENOUGH to change anything. Therefore Lee acted on what he himself realized urgently needed to be done, and went to Congress.
When they dithered around and did not yield legislation in the manner he wanted, Lee unilaterally, with Davis' promise to back him if it made political trouble, acted on his own. But George, Lee's general order requiring donated slaves to be emancipated by their master before the army would take them did not raise anywhere near the large numbers of blacks Lee wanted and was too little too late.
In the Petersburg trenches, Lee asked for 5,000 slaves to help build-up the breastworks. He got a tenth that amount, the others were held up by lawsuits the local slaveholders filed in Richmond courts to prevent their slaves being requisitioned.
I certainly find that compelling evidence of someone's "priorities", unless you believe Lee was requesting these slaves illegally, or unreasonably, without sufficient need.