A new American revolution began with the secession of the southern states in 1861; however, it was a much different revolution than southerners had originally expected.  This revolution began with the intent of one political entity separating from another, like the American Revolution of the late 1770s, but a revolution for the freedom of an oppressed social group resulted.  The failure of the revolution against northern aggression led to a revolution to dismantle the institution of slavery, an unintended consequence of four long years of civil war.  The emancipation of over four million enslaved African Americans is the crucial revolutionary outcome of the Civil War and the process of emancipation changed the future of the southern states as well as the nation as a whole through a complete destruction and reconstruction of government and society.

As Union war policy shifted in late 1862 from a war against secession to a war for emancipation, the realities of the civil war as well as the key political and military decisions of both sides caused the decline of slavery in the South.  As Union armies infiltrated the South, the number of runaway slaves increased along with the number of slaves who followed these armies who, in many cases, used army protection to flee north or to become servants to the soldiers and officers.[1]  Furthermore, Union generals used these “contrabands” to the advantage of withdrawing “as much productive labor as possible” from the Confederacy.[2]  With many white men away from home fighting the war combined with the problem of slaves outnumbering whites who remained behind, life in the rural South changed primarily for women and children left to attend to the household duties normally shared by both men and women.  As one Georgia resident wrote in a letter to the Confederate Secretary of War in 1861, “some of our people are fearful that when a large portion of our fighting men are taken from the country, that large numbers of negroes aided by emissaries will ransack portions of the country, kill numbers of our inhabitants, and make their way to the black republicans.”[3]  This fear, combined with the very real problem of how to continue agricultural production with a large proportion of white males away at war, posed a unique challenge to southerners and their revolution for independence.  Furthermore, this situation undermined the integrity of the slave institution that the South wished to protect.[4]

The actual emancipation process in the lands occupied by Union armies forced a dramatic social change in the South, especially with the effect of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.  An example of the military contribution to this process is General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Special Field Order 15 which allocated large tracts of land from Charleston, South Carolina south to Jacksonville, Florida for ex-slaves to occupy and farm property that was evacuated by white plantation owners.[5]  The significance of this act, along with many similar grants of lands or privileges to African Americans, is that it caused an immediate social problem for white southerners and increased racial tension.  Though the intent was to cause “Rebels to lay down their arms,” Sherman’s orders became a problem for all whites in the South.[6] As gradual emancipation and the shift to free labor took place during the Civil War, southern civilians and the leadership of the occupying Union military sought to resolve the dilemma of integrating blacks with whites into a free society as well as resolving the problem of how to create an economically productive society.  According to Berlin’s Free at Last, “former slaves and slaveholders struggled to shape the emerging order as best they could” and blacks gradually gained rights and liberties in areas of the South where they had not experienced this freedom before.[7]  Furthermore, many slaves who fled the South returned after the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation in order to attempt the re-acquisition of lands where they had previously lived.[8]

The influence of Union troops occupying the southern states along with the gradual destruction of the South’s socio-economic system allowed emancipation and the downfall of the slavery institution to take place.  However, it is historically significant that not only did the uncertainty of the slave situation cause fear among whites at home but also some southerners believed that the Confederate government should grant the emancipation of slaves in order to utilize them as soldiers for the war effort and to prevent them from fleeing to the North.[9]  For example, in a letter to the military leadership of the Confederate Army of Tennessee, Major General P.R. Cleburne recommended this idea in order to save the Confederacy and its war for independence.[10]  The irony of this letter as well as other southern sentiments to settle for emancipation illustrates the declining morale of southerners as the war progressed, even though Cleburne believed his proposition to be patriotic to the Confederate cause.  Furthermore, in occupied areas, former slaveholders and ex-slaves made labor agreements based on employment rights and wage negotiations.[11]  However, as the documentary evidence suggests, these agreements “were inherently unstable.”[12]  This sudden change in the social status quo uprooted the entire elite social structure of the South in only a few years.  Confederate war losses, southern economic devastation, the increase of slave runaways, and emancipation all combined to cause the loss of morale in the southern states as well as the destruction of the South’s traditional social order.  One Confederate soldier writing home complained how exhausted southern soldiers were of the war and how tired they were “of asking for and hearing the news.”[13]

By the end of the war, the emancipation of millions of slaves was legal throughout the United States.  Even though some areas of the South were not required to emancipate slaves under the 1863 proclamation, emancipation gradually took place throughout the South as the Confederate government lost control of its territory and white southerners lost control of African Americans.[14]  The gradual diminishing of slavery and the experience of free African Americans in some regions of the South became an immediate social reality for the states and a revolutionary change in the nation.  The dilemma for the South and the nation at the end of the war was how to integrate these ex-slaves into society.  This problem was not resolved until the end of Reconstruction, or later, as some historians would argue.

The Civil War in the South began as a revolution to protect southern states independence from a northern government imposing on their revered way of life.  Slavery and the slave labor institution was the cornerstone of this way of life and became the crux of the secession movement.  Though southerners had hoped for a revolution of states rights and protection of their social mores, they in fact received an opposite result, one that they fought to prevent.  However, the Civil War was a revolutionary event for both whites and blacks in the South.  Four million African Americans were abruptly integrated into free society, and in some cases this worked well even though the process of change was not fully complete at the end of the war.  The important revolutionary social change, however, was the complete destruction of the elite social order of the South and the forced transition from an economic system based on slave labor to a new industrial-agricultural system based on free labor.  As historian James McPherson explained, this change sparked “a new birth of freedom” where a new order could replace the dying social order of the old United States, for North and South.[15]  Though the South and the nation as a whole faced a long struggle of economic recovery and race relations for years to come, a new South was born during the Civil War.