On YouTube, Andy of Atun-Shei Films responds to a social media post that presented Cleburne’s proposal without context, which appears to show Cleburne as an anti-slavery advocate:
Confederate army Major General Patrick Cleburne.
Painting by M.D. Guillaume (1816-1892) via Wikimedia Commons.
I recently came across a pro-Confederate Facebook post featuring this quote from Confederate major general Patrick Cleburne, written on January 2, 1864:
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.
Now, I’m not going to share the post itself, as that would inevitably lead to doxxing and bullying. However, this is a teachable moment, a classic example of the beloved Lost Causer past-time of divorcing quotes from their important contexts.
You need to keep a couple things in mind when considering a historical quote. Who is the speaker? Who are they talking to? Do they have an objective in mind? What events surrounding this person, if any, have inspired them to say this particular thing at this particular time?
Quotes by themselves are useless in historical education and can often be misleading. I see y’all making this mistake with the Cornerstone Speech [Wiki] all the time – it’s not the mic drop you think it is. You can’t just shove it in someone’s face and call it a day. If you really want to change minds, you need to present it in its proper context and alongside other evidence. Only then can you craft a complete and compelling argument.
Now as it happens, Alexander Stephens was totally sincere when he called late 18th century notions of racial equality “wrong,” and he spoke for the overwhelming majority of Confederate true believers in the Spring of 1861 when he said that “our new government is founded on exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the [black man] is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” But without context, how would I know that? When making an argument, the onus of proof is on you.
This particular pro-Confederate post presented the Cleburne quote by itself in meme format without any context whatsoever, so allow me to provide one. At first glance, it seems like Cleburne is espousing anti-authoritarian values. It seems like he is declaring, clearly and definitively, that the Southern states did not secede to preserve slavery, but rather to uphold their regional self-determination.
This quote is from a letter Cleburne wrote to Joseph E. Johnston, his commanding officer in the Army of Tennessee, proposing that the Confederate government emancipate and arm the South’s enslaved men to bolster the thinning ranks of the army. As you may remember from Checkmate Lincolnites, this proposal was met with shock and horror from the Confederate leadership, who quickly rejected it.
But Cleburne saw further than them. He believed – correctly – that unless something drastic was done, the Confederacy was doomed to destruction. As he writes in the proposal, “Instead of standing defiantly on the borders of our territory or harassing those of the enemy, we are hemmed in to-day into less than two-thirds of it, and still the enemy menacingly confronts us at every point with superior forces.”
“If this state continues much longer we must be subjugated,” he continues, arguing that achieving victory would require immense sacrifice, including “the loss of all we now hold most sacred — slaves and all other personal property, lands, homesteads, liberty, justice, safety, pride, manhood.”
