by Jill Lepore
The Civil War was a revolutionary war of emancipation. The exodus began even before the first shots were fired, but the closer the Union army drew, the more the people fled. The families who lived on Jefferson Davis’s thousand-acre cotton plantation, Brierfield, with its colonnaded mansion, in Mississippi, just south of Vicksburg, began leaving early in 1862. Another 137 people left Brierfield after the fall of Vicksburg and headed to Chickasaw Bayou, a Union camp. Confederate secretary of state Robert Toombs had boasted that the Confederacy would win the war and that he would one day call a roll of slaves at Bunker Hill. Wrote one newspaper reporter, after the arrival of Davis’s former slaves at Chickasaw Bayou, “The President of the Confederate States may call the roll of his slaves at Richmond, at Natchez, or at Niagara, but the answer will not come.”69
Lincoln announced on September 22, 1862, in a Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, that he would free nearly every slave held in every Confederate state in exactly one hundred days—on New Year’s Day 1863. He’d planned the announcement for a long time, wrestling with his conscience. “I said nothing to anyone,” he later told his cabinet, “but I made the promise to myself and to my maker.”70 Across the land, people fell to their knees. Frederick Douglass said that the war had at last been “invested with sanctity.” In New York, Horace Greeley declared that “in all ages there has been no act of one man and of one people so sublime as this emancipation.” The New York Times deemed the Proclamation as important as the Constitution. “Breath alone kills no rebels,” Lincoln cautioned. But a crowd of black men, women, and children nevertheless came to the White House and serenaded him, singing hosannas.71
The announcement set the South on fire. The Richmond Examiner called the promised Emancipation Proclamation the “most startling political crime, the most stupid political blunder, yet known in American history.” Fifteen thousand copies of the Proclamation having been printed, the news made its way within days to slaves, whispered through windows, shouted across fields. Isaac Lane swiped a newspaper from his master’s mail and read it aloud to every slave he could find. Not everyone was willing to wait as long as one hundred days. In October, men caught planning a rebellion in Culpeper, Virginia, were found to have in their possession newspapers in which the Proclamation had been printed; seventeen of those men were killed, their executions meant as a warning, the reign of a different hell.72
Frederick Douglass, who had led his people to the very gates of freedom, worried that Lincoln might abandon the pledge. “The first of January is to be the most memorable day in American Annals,” he wrote. “But will that deed be done? Oh! That is the question.” The promised emancipation turned the war into a crusade. But not all of Lincoln’s supporters were interested in fighting a crusade against slavery. As autumn faded to winter, pressure mounted on the president to retract the promise. He held fast.
On Emancipation Day, January 1, 1863, black men, women, and children celebrated outside Beaufort, South Carolina. “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history,” Lincoln told Congress in December. “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.” On Christmas Eve, day ninety-two, a worried Charles Sumner visited the White House. Would the president make good his pledge? Lincoln offered reassurance. On December 29, Lincoln read a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet. (It did not free slaves in states that had not seceded, nor those in territory in secessionist states held by the Union army.) Cabinet members suggested an amendment urging “those emancipated, to forbear from tumult.” This Lincoln refused to add. But Salmon Chase, secretary of the Treasury, suggested a new ending, which Lincoln did adopt: “I invoke the considerate judgment of all mankind and the gracious favor of almighty God.”73
On day ninety-six, Douglass declared, “The cause of human freedom and the cause of our common country are now one and inseparable.” Ninety-seven, ninety-eight. Ninety-nine: New Year’s Eve 1862, “watch night,” the eve of what would come to be called the “Day of Days.”
In the capital, crowds of African Americans filled the streets. In Norfolk, Virginia, four thousand slaves—who, living in a border state that was not part of the Confederacy, were not actually freed by the Emancipation Proclamation—paraded through the streets with fifes and drums, imitating the Sons of Liberty. In New York, Henry Highland Garnet, the black abolitionist, preached to an overflow crowd at the Shiloh Presbyterian Church. At exactly 11:55 p.m., the church fell silent. The parishioners sat in the cold, in the stillness, counting those final minutes, each tick of the clock. At midnight, the choir broke the silence: “Blow Ye Trumpets Blow, the Year of Jubilee has come.” On the streets of the city, the people sang another song:
Cry out and shout all ye children of sorrow,
The gloom of your midnight hath passed away.
One hundred. On January 1, 1863, sometime after two o’clock in the afternoon, Lincoln held the Emancipation Proclamation in his hand and picked up his pen. He said solemnly, “I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper.”74
In South Carolina, the Proclamation was read out to the First South Carolina Volunteer Infantry, a regiment of former slaves. At its final lines, the soldiers began to sing, quietly at first, and then louder:
My country, ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing!75
American slavery had lasted for centuries. It had stolen the lives of millions and crushed the souls of millions more. It had cut down children, stricken mothers, and broken men. It had poisoned a people and a nation. It had turned hearts to stone. It had made eyes blind. It had left gaping wounds and terrible scars. It was not over yet. But at last, at last, an end lay within sight.
The American Odyssey had barely begun. From cabins and fields they left. Freed men and women didn’t always head north. They often went south or west, traveling hundreds of miles by foot, on horseback, by stage, and by train, searching. They were husbands in search of wives, wives in search of husbands, mothers and fathers looking for their children, children for their parents, chasing word and rumors about where their loved ones had been sold, sale after sale, across the country. Some of their wanderings lasted for years. They sought their own union, a union of their beloved.
“MEN OF COLOR, TO ARMS!” Frederick Douglass cried on March 2, 1863, calling on black men to join the Union army: “I urge you to fly to arms, and smite with death the power that would bury the Government and your liberty in the same hopeless grave.” Congress had lifted a ban on blacks in the military in 1862, but with emancipation, Douglass began traveling through the North as a recruiting agent for the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry, a newly formed all-black regiment. “The iron gate of our prison stands half open,” Douglass wrote. “The chance is now given you to end in a day the bondage of centuries.”76
The Confederacy, meanwhile, had called its own men to arms, instituting the first draft in American history. The Union had soon followed, instituting a draft of its own. In July 1863, white New Yorkers, furious at being called to fight what was plainly a war of emancipation, protested the draft during five days of violent riots that mainly involved attacking the city’s blacks. Eleven men were lynched, and the more than two hundred children at the Colored Orphan Asylum only barely escaped when the building was set on fire.
The Confederate draft called on as many as 85 percent of white men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, a much broader swath of the population than served in the Union army. Seventy percent of Union soldiers were unmarried; the Confederate draft drew on married men, leaving their families at risk of destitution and starvation. “I have no head to my family,” one Confederate woman wrote in 1863, the year the Confederate government also passed a “one-tenth tax,” requiring citizens to give 10 percent of everything grown or raised on farms to the state.77 Near the end of the war, the Confederate government, its army desperately short of both men and supplies, decided to do what had been for so long unthinkabl
e: it began enlisting slaves as soldiers, to the great dismay of many Confederate soldiers, who’d been urged to fight to protect their rights as whites. One private from North Carolina wrote home to his mother, “I did not volunteer my services to fight for A free Negroes free country, but to fight for A free white mans free country.”78
The Civil War expanded the powers of the federal government by precedents set in both the North and the South that included not only conscription but also a federal currency, income taxes, and welfare programs. The Union, faced with paying for the war against the Confederacy, borrowed from banks and, when money ran short, recklessly printed it, producing federal legal tender, the greenback. The House Ways and Means Committee considered levying a tax on land, willing to take the risk that such a measure would be eventually struck down as unconstitutional, because a land tax is a direct tax. But Schuyler Colfax, a Republican from Indiana, objected: “I cannot go home and tell my constituents that I voted for a bill that would allow a man, a millionaire, who has put his entire property into stock, to be exempt from taxation, while a farmer who lives by his side must pay a tax.” A tax on income seemed a reasonable, and less regressive, alternative. A number of states—Pennsylvania, Virginia, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, and Florida—already taxed income. And Britain had partly funded the Crimean War by doing the same. Unlike a tax on real estate, an income tax was not, or at least not obviously, a direct tax, prohibited by the Constitution. Income also included earnings from stocks and so didn’t exempt fat cats. In 1862, Lincoln signed a law establishing an Internal Revenue Bureau charged with administering an income tax, later turned into a graduated tax, taxing incomes over $600 at 3 percent and incomes more than $10,000 at 5 percent. The Confederacy, reluctant to levy taxes, was never able to raise enough money to pay for the war, which is one reason the rebellion failed.79
Yet ironically the Confederacy, a government opposed to federal power, exercised it to a far greater degree than the Union. The rhetoric of war had it that Southerners were fighting to protect their homes and especially their wives. But Confederate conscription led white women in the South to protest politically. They entered the political arena with much the same fervor that Northern women had for decades demonstrated in the fight for abolition. By 1862, large numbers of soldiers’ wives had begun petitioning the government, seeking relief. Mary Jones, a soldier’s widow from the river town of Natchez, Mississippi, wrote to her governor: “Every Body say I must be taken care of by the Confederate States they did not tell my Deare Husband that I should Beg from Door to Door when he went to fight for his country.” These disenfranchised women employed the rhetoric of wartime sacrifice as a claim to citizenship: “We have given our men.” They also began organizing collectively by staging food riots. In November 1862, two petitioning women warned that “the women talk of Making up Companys going to try to make peace for it is more than human hearts can bear.” Another woman warned the governor of North Carolina, “The time has come that we the common people has to hav bread or blood and we are bound boath men and women to hav it or die in the attempt.” The following spring, female mobs numbering in the hundreds, and often armed with knives and guns, were involved in at least twelve violent protests. “Bread or blood,” rioting women shouted, in Atlanta, in Richmond, in Mobile. In Salisbury, North Carolina, Mary Moore had a message for her governor: “Our Husbands and Sons are now separated from us by the cruel war not only to defend their humbly homes but the homes and property of the rich man.”80
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, a Northern paper, in 1863 ran this before-and-after illustration of Southern women first urging their men to rebellion and later staging bread riots. In the end, the petitions written and protests staged by white Confederate women contributed to the creation of a new system of public welfare, relief for soldiers’ wives, a state welfare system bigger than any anywhere in the Union. The rise of the modern welfare system is often traced to the pension system instituted for Union veterans in the 1870s, but it was the Confederacy—and Southern white women—that laid its foundation.81
The war was not yet won and emancipation not yet achieved. As late as the summer of 1862, in the last weeks before the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln had insisted that the purpose of the war was to save the Union. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it,” he wrote Horace Greeley, “and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”82 But by 1864, he had wholly changed his mind. Victory without abolition would be no victory at all.
The Emancipation Proclamation had freed all slaves within the Confederate states, but it had not freed slaves in the border states, and it had not made slavery itself impossible: that would require a constitutional amendment. While soldiers fought and fell on distant battlefields, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony knocked on doors and gathered four hundred thousand signatures demanding passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, prohibiting slavery in the United States.83 The measure was approved by the Senate, 33–6, on April 8, 1864. All Senate Republicans, three Northern Democrats, and five senators from border states voted in favor. But in the House, voting weeks before the Republican National Convention was scheduled to meet in Baltimore, the amendment fell thirteen votes short of the needed two-thirds majority.
A war-weary Abraham Lincoln had decided to run for reelection, even though no American president had served a second term since Andrew Jackson. His supporters handed out campaign buttons, tintype photographs of Lincoln, cased in metal. His face is sunken and craggy, as chiseled as a sea-swept rock. He lifts his chin and looks off into the distance as if offering a promise.84 In the election, he confronted a meager opponent, George McClellan, an inept general whom Lincoln had relieved of his command. McClellan’s support within the party was thin. At the Democratic Convention in August, a display outside the hall—coiled gas pipe with jets that were meant to ignite and spell out the words “McClellan, Our Only Hope”—failed and only sputtered, as helplessly as the candidate.85 Three months later, Lincoln won 55 percent of the popular vote, the greatest margin since Jackson’s reelection in 1828. His most sweeping victory came from the Union army: 70 percent of soldiers voted for him. Instead of voting for their former commander, McClellan, they cast their votes for Lincoln—and for emancipation.86
After the election, Lincoln pressed the House for passage of the Thirteenth Amendment by lobbying senators from border states. “We can never have an entire peace in this country so long as the institution of slavery remains,” said James S. Rollins of Missouri, a former slave owner. When the amendment finally passed by the required two-thirds majority, on January 31, 1865, 119 to 56, the hall for a moment fell silent. And then members of Congress sank to their seats and “wept like children.” Outside, a hundred-gun salute announced the result. From the battlefield, one black Union soldier wrote: “America has washed her hands at the clear spring of freedom.”87 Only time would tell whether the water from that spring could ever clean the stain of slavery.
Rain fell in Washington for weeks that winter as winds lashed the city, uprooting trees, as if the very weather were bringing the cruelty of war to the capital. On the morning of Lincoln’s inauguration, March 4, the crowds came armed with umbrellas, bayoneted against the sky. They huddled in a swamp of puddles and mud. A fog fell over the city. But just as Lincoln rose to speak, the skies cleared and the sun broke through the clouds. With the heavy steps of his lumbering gait, Lincoln ascended the platform on the east front of the Capitol. Alexander Gardner captured him in a photograph of magnificent acuity. Lincoln wears no hat. He holds a sheaf of papers in his hand and looks down. He spoke but briefly. Slavery had been “the cause of the war,” and yet “fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away”: a prayer for the living and for the dead. And then he closed, with words that have since been etched into his memorial:
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With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
John Wilkes Booth, twenty-six, watched from the balcony. “What an excellent chance I had to kill the President, if I had wished, on Inauguration Day!” he’d later say.88
On April 9, in the parlor of a farmhouse in Appomattox, Virginia, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his command to Union General Ulysses Grant. Two days later, Booth, a well-known Shakespearean actor, stood uneasily in a crowd, watching Lincoln deliver a speech in which the president explained the terms of the victory. “That means nigger citizenship,” Booth muttered. Four days and some hours after that, at about 10:15 p.m. on April 14, Good Friday, Booth shot Lincoln with a derringer in Ford’s Theatre, a playhouse six blocks from the White House.
Lincoln slumped in a chair, a walnut rocker, unconscious. An army surgeon leapt into the president’s box, laid Lincoln out on the carpeted floor, removed his shirt, and looked for the wound. He and two other doctors then carried the president down a staircase, out of the playhouse, and into a first-floor room in a boardinghouse on Tenth Street. The president, fifty-six, was not expected to survive. Hoping he might speak before dying, more than a dozen people remained at his side through the night. They waited in vain. He never woke. He died in the morning, the first president of the United States to be killed while in office. Word of his death, spread by telegraph, was reported in newspapers on Saturday and mourned in churches on Sunday. “May we not have needed this loss,” declared one minister, “in which we gain a national martyr.”89 It was Easter.