Some of the best work on the history of emancipation in the Civil War is by the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland, College Park.[1] This editing project scoured the National Archives in Washington, D.C. for documents dealing with the coming of freedom for the slaves. They have published the best documents in their many publications, the best of the best being found in Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War (The New Press, 1992).
In Free at Last (p. 5) the following document is found, a letter dated May 4, 1861, from a Georgia man, John J. Cheatham, to the Confederate Secretary of War, Leroy Pope Walker. It is not only an eloquent example of the insurrection fear that existed among white Southerners throughout the South in Spring 1861, but also made a highly unconventional proposal for how to deal it–enlist slaves for armed service in the Confederate army where they could be closely watched and used to fight federal forces.
***
***
Of course, Cheatham’s proposal went nowhere except to the files and eventually to the federal archives where it was found by the University of Maryland researchers over a century later. In earnestly proposing his solution to the insurrection scare, John J. Cheatham overlooked the fact that black military service was a highly subversive threat to the racial ideology at the heart of the Confederacy. As Howell Cobb, a founding father of the Confederacy, candidly wrote late in the war when the South really was in extremis and actually seriously considering enlisting black soldiers: “You cannot make soldiers of slaves, or slaves of soldiers. . . . The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of the Revolution. And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.“
Using slaves as military laborers, of course, did not violate the Confederacy’s racial ideology. And by May 1861, secessionist forces were using African Americans as workers by the thousands. But employing slaves for this purpose increasingly brought them in proximity to federal troops, tempting many to take their chances at escape in the hope they would find sanctuary in Union lines. Such had already been the case at Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens in March, just after Lincoln’s inauguration. Federal soldiers had turned those slaves away. However, two months later, with hostilities commenced, the atmosphere and attitude toward the Confederates was quite different in the North, and so would be the reception given their escaped slaves.
[1] Personal Note: I received my Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park and Ira Berlin, who headed up the Freedmen and Southern Society Project for many years, was my dissertation advisor. I never worked for the FSSP, but I know many people associated with this now legendary documentary editing project, including Leslie Rowland, its current director.
Civil War Emancipation 
What’s interesting about the Howell Cobb quote — and you really have to read the whole passage to get a sense of Cobb’s revulsion at the idea of African American soldiers — is that he figures prominently in the Steiner account of the Confederate occupation of Frederick, Maryland in 1862, a dubious account that is widely quoted as “evidence” of large numbers of black Confederate soldiers. The advocates of BCS routinely omit Steiner’s vivid description of Cobb, presumably because the idea of him leading thousands of victorious African American soldiers in butternut uniforms is utterly incompatible with his position on arming slaves just two years later, when the Confederacy itself is in extremis. It’s all smoke and mirrors.