The Raliegh Daily Confederate "thousands of our citizens...selfish, narrow-minded, grasping"- had simply abandoned the Confederacy to its fate and were now content to pray that a triumphant Lincoln would "let us keep our property, keep our gold; keep our negroes."
The Lycnchburg Virginian "some prominent gentlemen from Virginia...whose more secret opinions have been made known to us confidentially...have opposed with the most vehemence and bitterness the conscription of slaves...[because]..."they want to fall back into the arms of Lincoln, hoping to save their property."
The Richmond Enquirer denounced the masters footdragging, to any black-soldier policy as "calculated, if not designed, to defeat its operation and render it fruitless...[they] may defeat temporarily the laws of their own government....[they could not prevent the enemy from placing such prospective Confederate soldiers in blue.]
Late February 1865, Richmond Whig,- Cleburne-Davis Bill vote in house and senate.- "it separates the trans-Alleghanian from the Atlantic States...A large majority of the Gulf State Senators voted for the bill. A large majority of the Atlantic State Senators voted against the bill."
From the beginning of the war, many calls for arming blacks and slaves came from a large collection of Southerners. The number of documented attempts to sway Richmond on this subject is extensive. Slave-owners dominated the government; although less than a third [this is not correct, its less than a fourth and closer to a fifth] of all Confederate families owned slaves, more than 90 percent of all Confederates congressmen did. The slave-owner domination of government explains why the War Department had spurned suggestions about arming them throughout the first three and half years of the conflict; why the Hindman-Cleburne proposal received such an icy reception in Davis' cabinet and why (as Hindman later recalled) it had found "not a friend in either House" of congress; why Lee and Davis began to advocate it only in the fall of 1864. Confederate Emancipation, Bruce Levine.
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David Upton