CHAPTER FIFTEEN
And the Promise Being Made, Must Be Kept
THE STAMPEDE OF RUNAWAYS
BY ISSUING the Emancipation Proclamation, and particularly by recruiting black men into the Union army, Lincoln acquired a new duty, about which he would make his most rigorous presidential commitment to a particular group of human beings. No one was to be returned to slavery. If such treachery, such a cruel breach of faith, is to be done, get someone else, not me, to do it.
The response of the slave population to the war had been a giant engine of change. Four million human beings, spread from the Atlantic to Texas in a wide variety of settings, were not passive victims acted upon by others but were moral agents making decisions. If the slaves were not free legally, they were still free in the profounder sense that moral judgment implies: like prisoners and residents of tyrannies, within severe constraints and dangers, they still had choices.
Some slaves did work for the Confederate army, digging trenches, building breastworks, producing munitions at the Tredegar Iron Works, serving as body servants taking care of their masters in the army itself; a few were even allowed rifles and served as Confederate sharpshooters. A great many more did the work of keeping Confederate society going while the white men were off to war.
But the more significant choices made by slaves were the perilous decisions to defy the slave system and to attempt escape. American slaves, unlike those in Haiti who successfully revolted against their “masters,” did not have a numerical advantage; any attempt at the massive “servile insurrection” that loomed large in some fevered white fears would have been an enormous disaster and was not really possible under American conditions of the greater presence and larger numbers of whites and slave owners. (Jamaica had ten blacks for every one white; in the American South it was two whites to one black.) But once the war began, American slaves could and did engage in acts of noncooperation to such an extent that the great black scholar and writer W. E. B. DuBois could speak of a “general strike.”
There does not appear to have been anything as organized as that term implies, but there was malingering, shirking, and defiance, with the white males gone and the grapevine carrying the word about the war. Although much of the white North would hold, for the first year and a half, that the war was only about the Union, not about slavery, those who had the greatest existential stake in the matter—the slaveholders and the slaves—perceived otherwise.
South Carolina’s declaration of the causes for its secession, for example, with its many echoes of the Declaration of Independence, took for granted the defense of slavery as the war’s purpose and the election of Lincoln as a precipitating cause of the war:
A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to that high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that “Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,” and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.
Charles Dew, a historian of Southern origins, examined the letters and speeches of the “commissioners” sent by the Deep South states to other slave states in 1860–61 to try to persuade them to join. What were they saying to each other, in private as it were, about the definition of the Confederacy? The answer to the question is blatant: the cause of their secession was the maintenance of slavery based on racism.
The commissioners said, for example, that the North has “chosen their leader [Abraham Lincoln] upon the single idea that the African is equal to the Anglo-Saxon, and with the purpose of placing our slaves on [a position of ] equality with ourselves.”
The Confederacy’s rabid self-interpretation had the ironical result of persuading the slaves who overheard that this war was more exclusively and immediately about slavery, and that the newly elected Lincoln more immediately a liberator, than was in fact the case.
[M]ost slaves learned about the deepening sectional dispute from their owners’ denunciation of the North and of the Republican party and its champions, the most threatening of whom was Abraham Lincoln. Indeed, the slaveholders’ indiscriminate condemnations exaggerated the antislavery commitment of white Northerners, “Black Republicans,” and Lincoln himself. Masters with no doubts about the abolitionist intentions of the North inadvertently persuaded their slaves of the ascendancy and pervasiveness of antislavery sentiment in the free states. The general politicization of Southern society thus reached deep into the slave community, imparting momentous significance to Lincoln’s election.
The major action that slaves took was to run away and to present themselves to the Union army as it approached. W. E. B. DuBois, in 1933, correcting the then prevailing neglect of the role of the slaves, wrote:
The moment the Union army moved into slave territory, the Negro joined it…Every step the Northern armies took then meant fugitive slaves. They crossed the Potomac, and the slaves of northern Virginia began to pour into the army and into Washington. They captured Fortress Monroe, and slaves from Virginia and even North Carolina poured into the army. They captured Port Royal, and the masters ran away, leaving droves of black fugitives in the hands of the Northern army. They moved down the Mississippi Valley, and if the slaves did not rush to the army, the army marched to the slaves.
DuBois called this the “stampede of runaway slaves.” Lincoln in his argument for compensated emancipation in border states would point out that the war had already freed many slaves. He would say that “the institution in your states will be extinguished by mere friction and abrasion—by the mere incidents of war.” As the rebellion continued and more and more slaves fled, he would point out that “broken eggs cannot be mended.” The eggs were the pieces of the institution of slavery that the stampede of runaways had already broken.
FUGITIVE MASTERS
WHEN RUNAWAY SLAVES presented themselves to the Union army, seeking asylum, the commanders in the field had decisions to make, as runaways often provided intelligence. Union soldiers made decisions about the treatment of runaways also. Racism led to some horror stories, but some Union soldiers increasingly perceived the evil of slavery and appreciated the role the runaways could play.
Commanders in the Union army held a spectrum of political opinions and racial attitudes. West Point conservatism and Lincoln’s need to include prominent Democrats probably meant that the commanders were tilted against emancipation. McClellan, Burnside, Buell, and Halleck all returned fugitive slaves to “masters.” It is reported that throughout McClellan’s command of the Army of the Potomac the regimental bands were forbidden to play “John Brown’s Body.”
In the first months of the war General Ben Butler (in prior life a Tammany Democratic politician) managed to illustrate all by himself two contradictory military responses. When he first came into Maryland with the Third Brigade of the Massachusetts Voluntary Militia, in the exciting days of late April 1861, he reassured Governor Thomas Hicks not only that these Massachusetts troops would be “passing quickly through the state,” “respecting private property,” and “outraging the rights of none,” but also that they would be available to put down any “negro” insurrection.
But almost exactly a month later, on May 23, when Butler was commanding at the little pocket of Union control in Virginia, Fort Monroe, and three runaway slaves presented themselves saying they would rather build fortifications for the Union than for the Confederacy, Butler had the inspired idea to claim them as “contraband of war.” That concept spread. (There was, however, this little whiff of the old order: Butler gave the “masters” who claimed these fugitives a receipt.)
The West would provide similar contradictory responses by commanders. As we have seen, Frémont in Missouri in September 1861 tried to go all the way to military emancipation but was countermanded by Lincoln. But then on November 20 his suc
cessor Henry Halleck issued an oppressive order, Order No. 3, barring all fugitives from the Union lines and sending away those who had already made it.
To read Halleck’s order is to sense the gulf of attitude in the North: “It has been represented that important information respecting the numbers and condition of our forces is conveyed to the enemy by means of fugitive slaves who are admitted within our lines. In order to remedy this evil it is directed that no such person be hereafter permitted to enter the lines…and that any now within such lines be immediately excluded therefrom.” Others in the Union army, looking at the fugitives with different eyes, saw the matter more accurately: most fugitives were a source of intelligence not to the Confederate but to the Union forces.
A Vermont abolitionist named General John Phelps, commanding a camp north of New Orleans in May 1862, confronted swarms of black fugitives and organized them into companies. When he asked his commander in New Orleans for arms for them, that commander—the ubiquitous Benjamin Butler—told him he could not have guns but could put them to work with shovels and axes. Phelps refused, saying he was a general, not a slave driver. He tendered his resignation and spent the rest of the war in Vermont.
Union generals Phelps and David Hunter, who first recruited black troops, were declared outlaws, to be shot, by the Confederate government.
Lincoln revoked military emancipations issued not only by Frémont out in Missouri and then by Hunter on the Southern coast but also by his secretary of war, Simon Cameron. In his report of December 1861 Cameron recommended that slaves should be emancipated and armed as part of the war effort, and he sent a copy of the report to newspapers without informing Lincoln. The president promptly ordered the report recalled and the passage about freeing slaves expunged. Cameron’s appointment had smacked of political necessity in the first place, and his conduct of the War Department did nothing to improve his already malodorous reputation.*53 Cameron was surely aware of the president’s disapproval; his emancipation proposal in the report presumably was an attempt to engender some support for himself, like that which had burst forth from the antislavery world in response to Frémont’s edict in Missouri. But Lincoln held that it would equally have brought forth a revolt on the border, and in places in the North, that the Union effort could not withstand.
David Hunter, a thoroughgoing abolitionist by personal conviction, came fresh from the Kansas border war to take command in March 1862 of the Department of the South, which nominally consisted of the entire states of Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina but practically consisted only of the coastal areas that the Union had recovered the previous November. Hunter was the friend whom Lincoln had enjoined to act well his part, and he apparently was determined to do so now in this arena by declaring martial law, freeing slaves, recruiting black soldiers, and ending the war at a stroke. On April 25, 1862, he issued a declaration of martial law for his department, and then on May 9 he declared that slavery and martial law were incompatible, and that “the persons…hitherto held as slaves” were now free.
Hunter’s action resembled that of Frémont and Cameron at least in this regard: he did not tell Lincoln beforehand. Salmon Chase urged Lincoln to approve Hunter’s action. Lincoln’s response made one essential point: “No commanding general shall do such a thing, on my responsibility, without consulting me.” Lincoln countermanded Hunter’s order.
But there was more. Hunter had found that the whites on the cotton plantations had fled en masse, leaving behind the huge population of slaves, which had outnumbered the whites five to one. There were able-bodied men among these suddenly masterless sometime slaves, and short of soldiers as he was, he recruited a regiment from the now free population, using methods that bordered on coercion. He dragooned five hundred of them, organized them into squads, and issued them weapons.
A conservative Kentucky congressman demanded an explanation from Cameron’s successor Edwin Stanton, and Stanton sent the congressman’s questions on to Hunter. Hunter, who seems to have had glimmers of a writerly ambition, seized on the opportunity, one might infer, with glee, and himself composed a response to the congressman’s questions. When Secretary Stanton received and read Hunter’s letter, he hurried it down to the House (according to Hunter’s later account), where its reading by the clerk brought the gentle rain of laughter in the desert of congressional debate.
I reply that no regiment of “fugitive slaves” has been…organized in this department. There is, however, a fine regiment of persons whose late masters are “fugitive rebels”—men who everywhere fly before the appearance of the national flag…
It is the masters who have, in every instance, been the “fugitives,”…whom we have only partially been able to see…dodging behind trees in the extreme distance. In the absence of any “fugitive master law,” the deserted slaves would be wholly without remedy had not the crime of treason given them the right to pursue, capture, and bring back those persons of whose protection they have been thus suddenly bereft.
Hunter, pleased with himself, later said, “[T]he effect was magical. The Clerk could scarcely read it with decorum; nor could half his words be heard amidst the universal laughter.”
To be sure, the laughter was not quite universal. A Kentucky colleague of the congressman who asked the original questions said: “The scene was one of which I think this House should forever be ashamed…It was a scene…disgraceful to the American Congress.” Hunter certainly did not think it was a disgrace, however, and in Hunter’s opinion, neither would Lincoln.
And although the president declared Hunter’s emancipation edict “altogether void,” he accompanied his declaration with his first statement that the president might under the war power do what Hunter had tried to do, which we quoted in Chapter 13. And Lincoln did not order Hunter to disband his nonfugitive nonslave regiment. Moreover, Lincoln sent no order directly to Hunter censuring him. As Hunter’s edict had appeared in the “public prints,” so did Lincoln’s revocation. Hunter would say: “Lincoln repudiated in the newspapers my orders freeing slaves.” Hunter believed Lincoln privately “rejoiced in my action.”
Whether or not he rejoiced in Hunter’s action, Lincoln did use it for polemical purposes, the way presidents do—see how I am pressed by this other side. In his presentation to border state representatives on July 12, he made reference to Hunter as an example of the pressures he was under from abolitionists.*54
A MEETING AT THE WHITE HOUSE
THE PRESIDENT, who had to cope with this extremely volatile situation, would suffer in after years from an acute version of the Mount Rushmore effect—or rather, in his case, the Lincoln Memorial effect. Simplified and exaggerated celebration would lead, on further knowledge, to simplified and exaggerated disillusionment. Lincoln would turn out to be not the brooding perfection of the memorial but an actual human being living in a particular time and place. His role in the world was not to be an unsullied moral hero but to be a shrewd, worthy, prudent politician.
Although Lincoln had strong and consistent convictions against slavery and a dedication to an inclusive but abstract principle of human equality, he had not in fact in his shaping years had many dealings with actual black persons. He had been born a poor white in a slave state; he spent his formative years, from age eight to age twenty-one, in the all-white world of the southern Indiana woods, and his first days as an independent adult in the all-white village of New Salem. His life had been spent in a heavily prejudiced atmosphere; Indiana and Illinois were probably the most “racist” of free states. When Frederick Douglass praised Lincoln’s freedom from prejudice, he would make a point of this geography—that Lincoln came from a state with severely restrictive racial laws.
Lincoln had had a few encounters with slavery—on a raft trip to New Orleans and a visit to the Kentucky home of his friend Joshua Speed—which would be much examined and sometimes made into myths in later years, and he had one encounter with a wandering black barber, a Haitian, whom he helped and befriended. In his growing law
practice he defended slaves, in one case not only obtaining the freedom of a young slave woman named Nance but also providing “a mass of data supporting the principle of freedom,” and in another case raising the money to purchase “freedom” for a young black man snared by New Orleans curfew laws. But in another case, embarrassing to his admirers in later years, he was associated in the attempt to recover a slave for an owner named Matson.
Shortly after he was elected, to the world’s astonishment, as president of the United States he was asked by the editor of the New York Times whether he had been the speaker at a meeting held by Negroes to give an award to the great “attorney for the runaways” who had become the governor of Ohio, Salmon Chase. Lincoln sent the deflating answer: “I never was in a meeting of negroes in my life.”
The great evil of Lincoln’s lifetime was slavery. When in the next century, after the Second World War, the great evil would become racism, the Great Emancipator would be perceived to have warts. Taking a verbal beating from Senator Douglas in front of prejudiced white male Illinois voters in their 1858 debates because of his strong endorsement of equality, Lincoln in the southern Illinois town of Charleston explicitly disavowed social equality in words that a hundred years later would be repeatedly quoted against him. It would turn out that he had used the terms “Sambo” and “Cuffee” that he had called Sojourner Truth “Aunty” that he had attended minstrel shows; that he had probably told and laughed at some jokes that would not meet the standards of a later time.
President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman Page 37