The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation
Page 42
By early September 1862, Confederate victories not only seemed to fulfill Palmerston’s criteria for recognizing Southern nationhood, but convinced the French foreign secretary that “not a reasonable statesman in Europe” believed the North could win the war. As Palmerston anticipated news of “a great battle” north of Washington (Antietam), he proposed having a cabinet meeting, where he would present a mediation plan that he would offer to both North and South. If the North accepted, and Palmerston stressed that a “thorough” defeat would “bring them to a more reasonable state of mind,” Britain would recommend an armistice, an end to blockades, and a negotiated separation. If only the South accepted, Palmerston concluded, “we should then, I conceive, acknowledge the independence of the South.”10
Lord John Russell and William E. Gladstone, chancellor of the exchequer and son of a West India merchant and slaveholder, were far more enthusiastic about intervening to end the war and the terrible bloodshed. The battle at Antietam (25,000 casualties in a single day) convinced Gladstone that only Britain had the power “to stop the humanitarian crisis unfolding in America.” Even after the news of what he termed “Lincoln’s lawless proclamation,” Gladstone urged forming an alliance with France and Russia to force the Union and Confederacy to agree to an armistice. And Russell not only urged the cabinet to intervene and settle the war, but made a somewhat successful overture to Napoleon III via the British ambassador in Paris.11
But Palmerston was shaken by the wholly unexpected news of Lee’s rout and retreat at Antietam, which raised new questions about the weakness of his army and the outcome of the war. He also feared that any involvement might lead Britain into the war (given Seward’s warnings), and felt a strong need to wait before making any decision. Though Russell and Gladstone continued to press for intervention, on November 11 the cabinet endorsed Palmerston’s argument against moving beyond the position of neutrality.
In addition, despite initial negative press reaction, by early 1863, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation aroused growing public support for the North. An outflowing of pamphlets and books coincided with widespread “Emancipation Meetings” celebrating the antislavery goals of the Union. The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society abandoned its pacifist stance and endorsed the Union’s emancipationist cause, which, given the bleak views of British West Indian emancipation in the 1850s, put British historical leadership in an entirely new perspective. This point was powerfully confirmed by the Thirteenth Amendment, which permanently freed all American slaves and evoked enthusiastic British support.12
Although British responses to the war continued to fluctuate, given the complexities of the transatlantic relationship, liberal leaders became increasingly aware that a Union defeat would shatter prospects for electoral reform in Britain. As the war progressed, an increasing number of intellectuals, evangelicals, and labor reformers agreed with Goldwin Smith “that the union cause was not that of the negro alone, but of civilization, Christian morality, the rights of labour, and the rights of man.”13
2
The changing British responses to the American Civil War underscore two broad points. First, the extreme fortuity and contingency of the final stage of the Age of Emancipation. Second (as we will see in part 3), the fact that America’s Emancipation Proclamation and especially the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments represent the climax and turning point of the Age of Emancipation, with the sudden liberation of some 4 million slaves—far more than had ever been amassed in one part of the New World—followed by their award of citizenship and the right to vote.
Turning first to the issue of contingency, it is now clear that New World bondage was not a retrograde or economically backward institution that, without war or abolition movements, was headed for natural extinction. In Cuba and Brazil as well as the American South, slave labor was not only profitable and productive but was deeply intertwined with transatlantic industrial capitalism and had become compatible with the latest technology, from steamboat transportation to sugar mills. New World slavery actually anticipated the efficiency and productivity of factory assembly lines, and in the American South exhibited enough flexibility to put slaves to work in mines, building canals and railroads, and even manufacturing textiles and other industrial products. By 1860, two-thirds of the wealthiest Americans lived in the South, where the value of slaves continued to soar along with a major export economy. Many slaveholders dreamed of annexing an expanding tropical empire ranging from Cuba to Central America, and it is conceivable that an independent Confederacy might have moved in that direction.
In a very important recent work, historian Walter Johnson points out that our standard accounts of the coming of the Civil War focus on the territorial spaces that resulted from the war and overlook the plans for territorial expansion before the war. Such accounts not only minimize the growing significance of the Mississippi River’s great “Cotton Kingdom,” but ignore the fact that slaveholders in that region had a vision of a proslavery empire in which Cuba, Nicaragua, and the reopening of the African slave trade were far more crucial than congressional debates over slavery in Kansas. Many of these concerns were shared in other parts of the Deep South and should be kept in mind when considering the contingencies of a Confederate victory or of continued peace.14
Johnson shows that the Mississippi Valley, centered on New Orleans and containing more millionaires per capita than any other part of the nation, was a highly distinctive part of the South. Since steamboats could sail up as well as down the Mississippi (by 1860, more than 3,500 arrived at the levee in New Orleans), since the hundreds of millions of acres of upriver land were especially fertile, and since New Orleans long exported most of the cotton used in the British textile industry and brought in much of the financial credit that America absorbed from Europe, it’s not surprising that the region took in most of the million slaves transported from the Upper South (especially Virginia and Maryland) to the Deep South from 1820 to 1861.15
Slaveholders in the Mississippi Valley were especially alert to the Northern antislavery strategy of building a wall or “cordon” of freedom around all slaveholding territory—a vision eloquently expressed, as we have seen, in Frederick Douglass’s lectures in Britain. This strategy to contain and demoralize slaveholding would also become central for Lincoln’s Republican administration from 1860 well into the Civil War. It is therefore highly significant that in an 1857 article in DeBow’s Review, William Walker defended his war in Nicaragua as a struggle for “whiteness” that involved “the question whether you will permit yourselves to be hemmed in on the South as you already are on the North and West—whether you will remain quiet and idle while impassible barriers are being built [especially by the British] on the only side left open for your superabundant energy and enterprise.”16
Walker’s focus on Nicaragua was preceded by a number of filibustering efforts to overthrow the Spanish regime in Cuba, which even John Quincy Adams and other national leaders viewed as a “natural” and inevitable part of the United States, given Cuba’s location and the long decline of the Spanish New World empire. But whereas the American government relied on diplomacy with Spain, and outlawed military expeditions against countries at peace with the United States, Southern expansionists were deeply concerned with the need to revitalize an economy overinvested in land, slaves, and steamboats. They were also alarmed by Britain’s anti-slave-trade interventions in slaveholding Cuba, following the emancipation of British colonial slaves.17 Cuba was said to be “the Sentinel of the Mississippi” and “the Mistress of the Gulf of Mexico”—the stepping-stone from New Orleans to the Atlantic and the Pacific. But since Central America provided the only short, noncontinental access to the Pacific, a matter of even greater importance before the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869, Nicaragua offered an added attraction in terms of trade. Moreover, if Walker had succeeded in permanently restoring both slavery and the slave trade, control of Nicaragua would destroy any cordon of freedom
.18
William Walker graduated summa cum laude at age fourteen from the University of Nashville; he spent two years in Europe and obtained both law and medical degrees.19 He became a popular figure throughout the South and drew financial and military support from Mississippi Valley slaveholders. In 1856 he became “a more or less self-appointed president” of Nicaragua after intervening in a civil war with a group of mercenaries and briefly establishing a filibuster government that evoked for the South the vision of a proslavery Latin American empire. Walker’s government restored Nicaraguan slavery and also reopened the African slave trade at a time when states in the Deep South were calling for such a measure to meet the growing demand for slave labor and, in view of the rising price of slaves, to enable the growing and mistrusted population of nonslaveholding whites (some 40 percent of the white population) to become part of the slaveholding elite. Walker also addressed this concern by arguing that nonslaveholding whites would be able to migrate to places like Nicaragua, where they could become members of the ruling white master class.20
While Upper South leaders in states like Virginia and Maryland naturally opposed any reopening of the African trade, which would undercut their own internal slave trade with the Deep South, Mississippi Valley and South Carolina planters expressed growing fears that the internal trade was “draining” the Upper South of slaves and thus threatening the solidarity of the South as a whole. Walker’s forces were defeated in 1857 by a coalition of Central American armies, and he was then executed in 1860 after another filibustering expedition. Yet he had continuing influence on Confederate scenarios of securing a southern frontier against abolitionist encirclement.21
Among countless contingencies, if we keep in mind America’s conquest of Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Spanish American War of 1898, as well as the hypothetical removal of the crucial impact of America’s Civil War on Cuban and Brazilian emancipation in the 1880s, it seems quite possible that, despite British opposition, a victorious Confederacy might have acquired Cuba and Puerto Rico and created at least a minor slaveholding empire. This effort to present a wholly “modernized” version of racial slavery would have been reinforced by the shocking rise and spread of “scientific racism.” The article on “Negro” in the renowned 1911 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica underscored the semiofficial consensus that “mentally the negro is inferior to the white.”22 It is certainly clear that without a Civil War, American slavery would probably have persisted well into the twentieth century, significantly setting back “the century of New World emancipation.” As for any argument that slavery is wholly incompatible with “modernized” nations, in the 1940s the productive Nazi and Soviet economies became dependent on more enslaved people than ever existed at one time in the New World.23
3
The second broad point I mentioned, that America’s Emancipation Proclamation and especially the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments represent the climax and turning point of the Age of Emancipation, is illuminated by James Oakes’s recent revisionist book on the destruction of slavery in the American Civil War.24
Oakes shows, contrary to many standard accounts, that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation did not appear as a sudden, radical action, totally out of the blue. For more than a year, Lincoln’s Republican administration did remain committed to a supposed constitutional ban on interference with slavery in the existing slaveholding states. But they were determined from the first to move toward the ultimate extinction of slavery, first by establishing an antislavery “cordon of freedom” around the South that would contain and undermine the institution; and second, by using the doctrine of “military necessity” to free tens of thousands of slaves—so-called contrabands—who fled behind Union lines. Republican leaders drew upon the antislavery arguments of John Quincy Adams as well as leading abolitionists and were convinced that since chattel bondage violated natural and international law and was unrecognized by the Constitution, which defined slaves as “persons held in service,” not property, it was restricted within the boundaries of specific Southern states. In 1862 they thus banned slavery on the high seas and in all territories “where the national government has exclusive jurisdiction.” And in early 1862, while applying pressure on the four slaveholding Border States that remained within the Union, they required a new state, West Virginia, to abolish slavery as a condition for admission to the Union.
Contrary to many conventional accounts, the Republicans’ First and Second Confiscation Acts freed enormous numbers of slaves and led directly to Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862. While the First Confiscation Act was originally intended to apply only to those fugitives “employed in hostility to the United States,” under the War Department’s instructions of August 8, 1861, “military necessity” meant the freeing of all slaves who voluntarily entered Union lines from any Confederate state. Despite some debate over “loyal” and “disloyal” masters, no freed people were to be reenslaved. While Union generals acted in different ways, they were influenced by the fact that runaway slaves often provided Northern troops with important military intelligence regarding the location of rebel forces. Within a year of passage, the law had liberated tens of thousands of slaves, and it is difficult to imagine how emancipation could have begun any sooner.
The Second Confiscation Act, or “The Emancipation Bill” as it was frequently called, was debated for seven months and aimed at completely destroying slavery in the seceded states. Signed by Lincoln on July 17, 1862, it immediately freed thousands of slaves in parts of Louisiana and the lower Mississippi Valley occupied by Union troops. Most surprising, a “prospective” clause called upon Lincoln to issue a proclamation freeing all rebel-owned slaves in areas not yet occupied by Union forces. Lincoln acknowledged this by quoting verbatim Section 9 of the Act in his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which he finally felt free to release following the Union victory at Antietam on September 17, and which promised to call for slave emancipation on January 1, 1863, if the South continued to rebel. One should note that Democratic and Border State congressmen were outraged by the success of the Second Confiscation Act, and declared that Republican fanatics had destroyed all prospects of restoring the Union.
Unfortunately, Oakes’s emphasis on the antislavery unity of the Republican Party obscures the crucial importance of Abraham Lincoln as a leader of the Union. Everything would have been different if Lincoln had not possessed the extraordinary “capacity for growth” documented in Eric Foner’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. Though Lincoln hated slavery from his earliest reflections and stressed in 1858 that the natural rights of the Declaration of Independence applied to blacks and that Democrats were attempting to “dehumanize the negro,” he had no adequate reply to Steven Douglas’s persistent repetition of Jefferson’s famous question, “what shall be done with the free negro?”25 Indeed, despite his impressive growth on other fronts, such as treating Frederick Douglass as a genuine equal, Lincoln advocated colonization and helped plan for voluntary black removal even after his Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. Yet Lincoln also played a central role in helping to shape public opinion toward the radical goal of emancipation and in helping to pass the Thirteenth Amendment.
Oakes refutes the myth that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation did not free a single slave as well as the myth that it shifted the purpose of the war from the restoration of the Union to the abolition of slavery—the war to restore the Union had always been a conflict over slavery. He also highlights other aspects of the Proclamation, such as the importance of recruiting 180,000 black troops to join the Union army, which became indispensable for a Union victory. The Proclamation not only converted the Union army into a true army of liberation but helped lift the ban on the “enticement” of slaves, so that countless Union soldiers now coaxed slaves to leave, spread word of the Proclamation, or even delivered talks on plantations, reducing fears of flight and adding to the hu
ge number of blacks who followed invading Union forces. Above all, the Proclamation gradually helped convince a large number of voters that total slave emancipation was a necessary condition for the restoration of the Union, a prerequisite for passage and ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.
Yet military emancipation could never free most of the slaves in the South, and the Union army could hardly deal with the hundreds of thousands who flocked behind their lines. Of the nearly 4 million slaves in the South in 1860, no more than 14 percent of those in the eleven Confederate states had been freed by war’s end (approximately 474,000 in the Confederate states and another 50,000 in the Border States). Lincoln and the Republican leaders long expressed faith in both military emancipation and the effects of a “cordon of freedom,” especially for Border States, but the major military victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in 1863 showed that the war might end without any assurance that even the emancipated blacks would not be reenslaved. How could Lincoln guarantee his proclamation that freed slaves would be “forever free” when Confederate leaders promised they would be reenslaved after the war? In early 1864 Republicans arrived at a consensus that the full and permanent destruction of slavery would require a Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.