Using the halting efforts of the Confederate government to organized black military units at the stroke of midnight as a prism, Levine considers what this whole episode says about the weakness of Southern society in terms of achieving cohesive social action and how the willingness of the enslaved population to vote with their feet undermined Richmond's war effort. Essentially, Levine finds an effort to stage a revolution from above as was done in Prussia, Russia, and Japan to grant limited emancipation while maintaining the preponderant rights of the political classes; a grasping at straws that in the Confederacy's case was undermined by the overweening sense of denial displayed by a planter class only concerned with their local affairs. Regardless of your opinions regarding American social and political relations, the unwillingness of the planters to collectively do the hard thing in the face of imminent disaster should give you pause for thought.

I mark this book down slightly for two points. One, Levine could have dwelt a little more on how even if large numbers of Afro-Confederate soldiers could have been raised, the logistical wherewithal to do so really wasn't there in 1865. Two, while we hear from the non-slaveholders of the Confederacy, and their concerns about maintaining racial separation, we hear rather less from the planter substrate on whose behalf so much useless sacrifice was made. This is as opposed to their self-appointed spokesmen in the Confederate press. ( )

Detailed and well documented discussion on the plans the Confederacy made to free slaves during the Civil War including an interesting discussion on why it failed.A good well argued viewpoint although it's somewhat one sided in that it ignores details that go against the authors basic ideas. ( )