The experiment didn’t work, at least not on the terms of northern plantation lessees. They signed contracts to pay workers by the month, only to find that at the end of 1862, half of the cotton was rotting in the fields—cotton that could have been picked only at whip-driven speed. Unwilling to admit that wage labor might not be as efficient in all cases as slave, some experimented with paying pickers by the pound, withholding monthly wages until the end of the harvest, or haranguing the workers—telling them that if they failed to work well, “I shall report them to Massa Lincoln as too lazy to be free.” Yet neither Sea Island experiments nor distant continents came close to spinning Lancashire’s mills back up to speed. Cotton remained scarce on the world market, and cotton prices sky-high.4
Across this particular continent, the Union and the Confederacy fought bigger and bloodier battles with almost every passing month. By late 1862, the two warring republics, one slave and the other still part-slave, had between them almost a million men under arms. The Union barely blunted a southern invasion in a battle when 3,600 soldiers died and 17,000 were wounded on a single September day at Antietam Creek in western Maryland.
Most of the press focused on the eastern theater of war. Much of the nation’s historical memory continues to focus on the drama and the generals of that front of battle. Yet the war was also decided on the cotton frontier of the Mississippi Valley, the theater where many of the fundamental dramas of American economic development had been played out. And the key event here occurred at the end of April 1862, when a Union fleet—succeeding where the British had failed—broke through the Mississippi River’s collar of forts and reached New Orleans. Confederate officials fled the South’s biggest city, and Union troops disembarked on the same levee where Rachel and so many others had landed.
Soon after the Union captured New Orleans, “contrabands” began to leave nearby slave labor camps and stream into the army’s Camp Parapet just west of the city. Parapet’s Union commandant resisted enslavers’ entreaties for him to sort out the bondpeople of “loyal” masters and send them back. So many thousands of runaways thronged the facility that the army soon built a second camp in St. Charles Parish at Bonnet Carré, not far from the 1811 slave revolt’s epicenter.
Since the beginning of the war, Lincoln had been working to convince politicians in the loyal border states to agree to gradual or compensated emancipation plans. His efforts already represented a more active support for freedom than those of all previous presidents combined. In April 1862, Congress passed a law freeing—in return for payments to enslavers totaling $1 million—all 3,000 people enslaved in the District of Columbia. Maryland, Delaware, and Kentucky politicians refused to bend, holding out for permanent slavery. Yet after the Union won its narrow victory at Antietam, Lincoln felt that he could act more decisively against slavery. He released a document he’d written months before.5
The Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation would prove to be the most important executive order ever issued by an American president. It announced that as of January 1, 1863, any slaves in rebel-held areas would be free. The Proclamation wasn’t complete. It excluded the enslaved in Union-held territory, which meant not only the border states, but also the western Virginia counties that were forming themselves into a separate pro-Union state. Also exempted was southern Louisiana, where Union leaders were trying to create a “reconstructed” state government and didn’t want to antagonize local whites.
Yet the Emancipation Proclamation offered the possibility of freedom to enslaved people held in the giant prison that was the Confederacy. So its tide ran ahead of the blue-coated army. Liza’s Iberville Parish enslaver tried to move Liza farther from the flood, to Texas. African Americans called this maneuver “refugeeing.” At any moment after early 1862, thousands of people were being refugeed all over the South to make it more difficult for them to trek to Union lines. But as the column of slaves was passing through Opelousas, Union raiders swooped down, scattering the Confederate guards. Marching the newly liberated people back to the river, the soldiers put Liza and hundreds of liberated African Americans onto boats bound for New Orleans.
Because Liza had been in the Confederate zone, the Proclamation officially freed her. But after being disembarked on the New Orleans levee, she and the others were herded into the city’s cotton warehouses. “From there,” Liza remembered, decades later, “we were all scattered about” to different Union-controlled plantations to do forced labor: “I went on the McCall place near Donaldsonville.” There she met a man named Thomas Faro. They started a relationship. They went out into the field every day, demonstrating to Union officials “a disposition to work” that entitled them to receive government rations. Others resisted, and went hungry. This was not quite freedom. Still, enslaved people had been knocking on the portal of freedom for decades, in any way possible. Now, in a single moment, the Emancipation Proclamation had unbarred the door. Next, African Americans would force it all the way open.
That opportunity was even more tangible because, as Lincoln made emancipation the policy for a long-term war that could only end with the fall of slavery’s empire, another policy shifted, too. Since the beginning of the war, free northern blacks had been pushing for enlistment. The federal government, afraid of the reaction of the border states, resisted. Policymakers knew that as much as many northern whites hated the idea of disunion, many feared even more that Frederick Douglass had been right when he’d insisted that “let the black man get upon his person the brass letters US . . . a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.”6
Image A.1. Interior of former slave trader’s pen in Alexandria, Virginia, partially dismantled. This was probably the same structure used by John Armfield in the 1830s, though other traders had used it in the ensuing years before Union soldiers captured the city in 1861. Today the structure is the site of the Freedom House Museum, operated by the Northern Virginia Urban League. Photo c. 1861–1865. Library of Congress.
On January 1, 1863, Lincoln reaffirmed the Emancipation Proclamation. He also confirmed that the executive branch would fulfill Congress’s summer 1862 mandate, allowing the Union Army to enlist African Americans. Many had already been drilling under individual states’ authority—such as the soldiers of the famous 52nd Massachusetts Regiment. The new U.S.C.T. (United States Colored Troops) also included numerous new enlistees from places such as Fortress Monroe and Camp Parapet. Soon some enslaved men, drawn by word of mouth passed from one side of the battle lines to the other, were leaving slavery and enlisting immediately in the Union Army. One night in 1863, for instance, Cade McCallum and his friend James Douglass crept out of Madame Palang’s slave quarters and set off east through the deep woods. To the north, the Union was trying to encircle Vicksburg. They reached the Mississippi and found a tiny skiff lodged against the west side.
Douglass, who couldn’t swim, climbed into the skiff. McCallum, in the water, held the boat’s edge as he kicked it out into the stream. They drifted downriver. In the morning light, someone from the Confederate-controlled west bank took a shot. Douglass lay in the bottom of the skiff. McCallum ducked like a turtle. A couple of other bullets whistled past. Then the shooting stopped.
Around a bend loomed a Union gunboat. Seeing the Stars and Stripes, Douglass and McCallum hailed the crew, and kicked and paddled that way. The sailors hauled the two men up the sloping iron-plated side of the Essex and told the river-soaked runaways they had a choice. They could go to Bonnet Carré and do plantation labor. Or they could serve in the US Army. Douglass and McCallum immediately enlisted in the 80th Regiment of the U.S.C.T.
Over the next two years, almost 200,000 other African-American soldiers—many of them former slaves—did mighty things that defined the rest of their lives. McCallum and Douglass’s 80th Regiment took part in the siege of Port Hudson, one of the first Civil War battles in which black tro
ops played a major role. Union victory there helped ensure the fall of Vicksburg in July 1863, which cut the Confederacy in half along the Mississippi. At the same time, at Gettysburg, the Union defeated the South’s second invasion of the North.
Now slavery began to crumble more quickly. Blue-coated troops ranged ever more widely through the cotton belt. A column raided through the bayous of central Louisiana, where they rounded up Eliza and Andre Dupree, Felo Battee, and hundreds of other African Americans from the parishes where Solomon Northup had toiled after he had been kidnapped from freedom. The soldiers “drove us like cattle,” Battee later remembered. He and the liberated men were herded onto the tops of the boxcars, while the women were crowded inside them. The train unloaded Eliza Dupree and the other women onto steamers bound to leased-out “Government farms,” while the soldiers marched Andre Dupree, Battee, and the remaining men overland to the Mississippi, offering them the same choice that had been presented to James Douglass and Cade McCallum.
Andre Dupree and Felo Battee joined the 81st U.S.C.T. regiment. Meanwhile, Eliza Dupree appreciated the plentiful rations available on the “Old Hickory” labor camp—food was getting scarce in the Confederate-held areas—but she had little interest in toiling under armed supervision any longer. She slipped away, walked fifty miles to Baton Rouge, and got a job in an army hospital. A few months later, as she stirred a giant iron pot of boiling laundry outside the tents, Andre walked up to her through the billowing steam. His regiment was at Camp Parapet, completing its training. Someone had told him where she was, and he came to find her on a one-day pass.7
By 1864, the crippled Confederate Army was too weak to launch major offensives. But it could still make the Union spend oceans of blood for every advance in Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia. The pro-war resolve of the white northern press began to sag. Volunteering declined. Resistance to the draft increased. The weaker-willed began to talk of a negotiated peace, which was exactly what Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy were now playing for. Instead, Andre Dupree, James Douglass, Cade McCallum, and 200,000 other African-American men kept the faith, becoming the increment that helped the war-weary Union to persist in its effort through 1864 and 1865. They paid a high collective price: 40,000 black soldiers died, and a similar number of African Americans may have died in the camps and in the chaos of the war-devastated South. One day, Andre’s brother-in-arms Sylvester Caffery came to Eliza and told her that Andre had died of cholera.
Yet there was birth as well as death in the refugee and army camps. Here the once-enslaved found each other for the first time, or again. Here they laid the groundwork for African Americans’ claim to civic and political identity in a postslavery society. For instance, take Lucinda Howard, who had been shipped from Virginia to New Orleans for sale right before the war—along with her sisters Emily and Margaret. An agent bought all three for a Mrs. Welham, who owned the “Oneida” labor camp in St. James Parish. Lucinda was only fifteen when the Yankees came in 1862. She ran first. When her sisters and other girls whom they knew followed her, they found Lucinda at the Bonnet Carré camp, doing the heavy labor of levee repair and making a wage. They also met her man, a black soldier named Abram Blue. And they stood with her as the provost marshal, the military commandant who governed civilians living in the camp, married Lucinda to Abram “under the flag,” as the saying went.
The certificate that the commandant gave them proved that Abram and Lucinda had been married in a legal ceremony, one sanctioned by the national state itself. Unlike prewar marriages, which enslavers erased at whim, these weddings had the force of law. They established the claim of a man and a woman to choose to stay together, to not be separated by the desires of a white person, to make decisions for their own lives and their own blood. Abram and Lucinda brought the certificate with them when they joined a new church in Mississippi after the war. It showed that they were serious—not merely cohabiting. It made Abram the legitimate father of the fifteen children Lucinda bore. And it gave Lucinda recognition as someone who had already earned citizenship by supporting Abram, a soldier-citizen. That would entitle her to a claim to his pension, for she, too, had put her shoulder to the wheel of the nation.8
Image A.2. An enslaved man’s journey to escape, freedom, and death as a Union soldier martyred for the twin causes of the United States and freedom. Depicted by artist James Queen, who may have made the panel for Harper’s Weekly. Library of Congress.
By 1864, once-enslaved people were marching through almost every southern state, not in tatters and chains, but bearing arms and wearing blue uniforms with the confidence of people who believed that the federal government would back their claims to rights. Their presence encouraged still-enslaved people to refuse to work for their owners, or to run to the woods. The growing number of U.S.C.T. enlistees also provided a crucial increment for a North that was running out of soldiers. Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment in March 1865, just before Lincoln’s second inauguration. The amendment ended slavery throughout the United States forever, freeing people even in areas not covered by the Emancipation Proclamation, such as the 425,000 African Americans who had still been enslaved in the border states. Soon afterward, Richmond fell, and Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia surrendered at Appomattox in Southside Virginia on April 9, 1865. Confederate President Jefferson Davis had already fled Danville. Like the sold and stolen whom Lorenzo Ivy had seen flow by, and of whom he had spoken in his interview with Works Progress Administration worker Claude Anderson, Davis now carried his all in a little bag.
After four years, the war was over. Although 700,000 Americans had died, mixed with the sorrow was joy. As Union troops spread throughout the remaining areas of the slave states in May and June of 1865, they found properties where people were still being held in slavery. Again and again, the scene of celebration was repeated, on days still remembered in African-American communities across the country as the holiday “Juneteenth,” for June 19. People broke into spontaneous song and dance. Some told enslavers what they really thought. Some set off on the road with everything they had, looking for lost ones, heading back to Tennessee or Virginia, or simply looking to get away. Some literally picked up their cabins and moved them out of sight of the big house. When landowners could get the attention of those whom they had once ruled, they sometimes offered to share the proceeds of the crop fifty-fifty. And more than one former enslaver, their world turned upside down, committed suicide on the day of jubilee.
There was one final casualty, of course. In the surviving photo from March 4, 1865, the triumphant and solemn day of Lincoln’s second inauguration, you can see among the massive crowd of people covering the Capitol portico a mustached figure leaning against a pillar. For John Wilkes Booth was present for Lincoln’s astonishing second inaugural address. This was, perhaps, the greatest speech ever given in the English language. It was itself a history of the half untold. It named slavery and the incessant pressure for its expansion as the reason why oceans of blood had drowned the battlefields of the Civil War. When he turned over the last page of his so-brief text, Lincoln had only forty days to live.
After Richmond fell, the president went to visit. He walked through Shockoe Bottom in wonder, among throngs of people celebrating freedom on the very docks from which thousands of their kin had been shipped to the cotton country. Four million African Americans—most of whom had been enslaved when the first cannonballs plunged into Fort Sumter—had raised over four years of war a claim to freedom, to citizenship, and to relationships no one could sell. When he returned to Washington, Lincoln gave another speech, in which he acknowledged this indisputable claim. Then the president announced his support for extending the vote to African-American men. Their service in battle had saved the nation. Booth was in the crowd at that speech, too. He turned to a friend. Lincoln’s announcement, Booth snarled, “means nigger citizenship. Now, by God, I’ll put him through.” And on Good Friday 1865, April 14, he murdered the president.
ABRAHAM L
INCOLN WAS EITHER the last casualty of the Civil War or one of the first of a long civil rights movement that is not yet over. He was succeeded by his vice president, Andrew Johnson, who was unfortunately an alcoholic racist bent on undermining emancipation. Johnson spent the summer signaling to southern whites that they could build a new white supremacy that looked much like the one African Americans had fought to end. In the fall of 1865, southern white voters made it clear that they did not plan to come to terms with freedom. In elections intended to reseat southern states in Congress, they sent a host of sullen Confederates back to Washington. At the same time, whites in southern legislatures were trying to keep the status of African Americans as close to slavery as possible, passing vagrancy laws to limit mobility, proposing apprenticeship laws binding black youths as unfree laborers in white families, and making troubling threats about bringing back the whip as cotton-picking rates declined.
Angered by southern whites’ unwillingness to admit that they had lost the verdict of war, northern Republicans in Congress, led by a faction called the “Radicals,” took control of Reconstruction. Overriding Johnson’s objections, they refused to seat the newly elected southern representatives and senators. They passed a series of bills that took the vote away from most ex-Confederate officers, and they extended the power of the army and the “Freedman’s Bureau” to impose new labor systems on the cotton South. The Freedman’s Bureau sent agents into southern counties to mediate between land-owning, cash-poor planters and the formerly enslaved. African Americans wanted, above all, to avoid anything like the pushing-system or the whipping-machine: no more driver’s lash, no weighing-up and recording, nothing that resembled that. They wanted mothers to have a chance to care for their babies and tend their gardens. They wanted men to be able to plow without other men riding behind them with guns on their hips. They wanted children to go to school instead of doing field work all year. And African Americans throughout the South usually wanted their own land, on which they could grow subsistence crops and live as what, in another country, we would call independent peasant farmers.
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