Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865

by James Oakes

  If my emphasis on the Republican Party can readily accommodate the role slaves played in slavery’s downfall, so too does it fully acknowledge Abraham Lincoln’s importance as president. I began this book as an admirer of Lincoln and I finish it with my admiration undiminished. But there’s too much hyperbole in the way we talk about Lincoln. He was neither the Great Emancipator who bestrode his times and brought his people out of the darkness, nor was he in any way a reluctant emancipator held back by some visceral commitment to white supremacy. In the evolution of wartime antislavery policy, Lincoln was neither quicker nor slower than Republican legislators. Instead they seemed to move in tandem. Lincoln’s swift endorsement of the “contraband” policy, his administration’s aggressive implementation of the First Confiscation Act, and his Emancipation Proclamation all pushed Union antislavery policy beyond where Congress had left it. On the other hand, with the Confiscation Acts of 1861 and 1862, as with the abolition amendment in 1864, Congress moved a step beyond Lincoln’s own policies up to that point. Neither was ever in the lead for long, and they were never very far apart.

  More than ever I view Lincoln in much the same way that Frederick Douglass did in 1876. “Abraham Lincoln was at the head of a great movement,” Douglass explained, “and was in living and earnest sympathy with that movement, which, in the nature of things, must go on until slavery should be utterly and forever abolished in the United States.11 Freedom National can be read as a history of that “great movement”—of the antislavery activists who struggled for decades to formulate the policies and build a political coalition that might one day be able to destroy slavery; of the fugitive slaves who became agents of slavery’s destruction by escaping from their farms and plantations to the camps and fortresses of the Union army; and of those northern soldiers who moved into the slave states where they colluded with runaway slaves to undermine the slave system wherever they went. Radicals and runaways, Union soldiers black and white alike, have long since become familiar figures in the history of the “great movement” that destroyed slavery in the United States, and justifiably so.

  But when Frederick Douglass spoke of the movement Lincoln led, he was also thinking of the Republican Party, and he would have been perplexed by the relatively inconspicuous place the party currently occupies in the stories we tell of slavery’s destruction. “Men are important,” he explained in 1880, “but parties are incomparably more important.” By then Douglass was unapologetic about his own political allegiance. “I am a Republican,” he declared before an enthusiastic audience of African Americans at Cooper Union, “a black Republican [applause,] dyed in the wool [Applause.] Of the Republican Party it may be said that it has been connected for the last 20 years with every reform. It came into existence to prevent the extension of slavery. [Applause.] It has done that. And it came into existence to save the country from slavery. It roused the spirit of the old master class in the South, and they rebelled. It met that rebellion and put it down, [applause,] beyond the possibility of resurrection. And it put down the cause of the rebellion and abolished forever the greatest reproach this Republic has ever known.”12

  Lincoln said in 1852 that under ordinary circumstances men “naturally divide into parties.” The man “who is of neither party,” he added, “cannot be of any consequence.”13 In the months after his election to the presidency, when supporters and opponents alike demanded a public statement that might defuse the secession crisis, Lincoln responded by declaring that he would never abandon the basic principles of the Republican Party. Asked to clarify his position on slavery, Lincoln said in late 1860 that “he was with his own party; that he had been elected by that party and intended to sustain his party in good faith.”14 There’s nothing new in this: anyone who has spent some time studying Lincoln understands that he was, at bottom, a politician. But the party he headed in 1860 was an antislavery party. That’s why most abolitionists were either Republicans or supporters of the Republican Party. That’s why slaves across the South put so much hope in Lincoln’s election. That’s why the South seceded. Because when Lincoln took his oath of office in March of 1861, he and his party were committed to an array of policies aimed at the “ultimate extinction” of slavery.

  This is not to say that there were no significant differences among Republicans. But most of those differences had to do with matters unrelated to slavery. The party was bitterly divided over the revenue bill to finance the war; it split over the Land-Grant College Act, the Pacific railroad bill, and homestead legislation. There were particularly sharp divisions over the government’s power to confiscate real estate, and potentially disruptive tensions between Congress and the president over the reach of each other’s war powers, nowhere more so than on the question of who was responsible for reconstruction policy. On bills and resolutions related to slavery, emancipation, and ­abolition, however, Republicans went out of their way to bury their differences and produced a remarkable string of unanimous or near-unanimous votes—all of them designed to undermine slavery, beginning in July of 1861 and lasting into 1865. Noah Brooks, the perceptive Washington reporter, noticed the pattern halfway through the war. President Lincoln “does not have the cordial and uniform support of his political friends,” he observed. Among Republicans there was “an undercurrent of dissatisfaction” along with a “spirit of captious criticism” of their own party leader. It was nevertheless “true,” Brooks added, “that upon all great questions, such as emancipation, confiscation, suspension of the writ of habeas corpus act, and other kindred measures, the administration party, per se, is a solid column.”15

  Party moderates and radicals worked hard to maintain their consensus against slavery throughout the Civil War. Though he never claimed to be an abolitionist, Lincoln viewed antislavery radicals as the indispensable base of the party, and most of them returned the favor by supporting him in 1860. Abolitionist criticism sometimes annoyed Lincoln, but more often when he spoke of the radicals he emphasized how close he was to them. He once said that the difference between himself and Charles Sumner was six weeks. During his presidency Lincoln met with leading abolitionists—Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and several others—and in those conversations he generally stressed their shared hatred of slavery and their joint commitment to its destruction. No doubt there were differences between antislavery radicals and moderates, but they were differences of style more than substance, of strategy more than goals, differences within the “great movement” against slavery.

  The determination among Republicans to maintain an antislavery consensus enabled the party to forge a unified opposition to any compromise with the opponents of emancipation. Republicans stood firm during the secession crisis, refusing to support any measures that represented a retreat from their fundamental antislavery policies. Through four years of war Republicans repeatedly swept aside every effort by northern Democrats to keep slavery out of the conflict. Border State leaders watched with increasing dismay as Republicans took advantage of what Lincoln called the “friction and abrasion” of war to undermine slavery even in the loyal slave states. The antislavery consensus began to crack in late 1863 and early 1864, as Republicans embarked on a frantic search for ways to ensure that when the war ended, slavery would be ended as well. But once the party settled on the Thirteenth Amendment, Republicans once again closed ranks against its opponents. Not until December in 1864 did the supermajority requirements of the amendment process force Republicans to trawl for votes among their congressional opponents, working to peel a handful of Democrats away from their party to support the amendment. But that was jawboning, not compromising.

  Republicans never forgot that the fundamental conflict of mid-nineteenth-century America was not the squabbling between moderates and radicals within the antislavery movement, but the life and death struggle between those who hated slavery and were prepared to risk war rather than extend its life, and those who defended slavery and were willing to go to war to preserve it. As Lincoln
himself explained in 1865, everyone knew that slavery was “somehow, the cause of the war.” Where secessionists would “rend the Union, even by war,” to “strengthen, perpetuate, and extend” the slave “interest,” the Republicans would refuse to compromise on slavery and in so doing “would accept war” rather than let the Union perish.16

  FREEDOM NATIONAL TRACES THE development of antislavery policy from its prewar origins to the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. It builds on the work of countless scholars who have charted the history of the antislavery movement, slave resistance, Lincoln’s presidency, and emancipation. Yet what is new in this book stems less from any specific disagreements I might have with the work of others than from the implications of resuscitating the antislavery origins of the Civil War. Two of those implications seem worth highlighting.

  A long and distinguished tradition of scholarship evaluates emancipation chiefly in terms of its consequences—the critical struggles over land and labor, the reconstruction of black family life, civil rights, political mobilization, issues that go to the very meaning of freedom in the United States after the Civil War. This book focuses instead on the development of antislavery policy, on the origins and implementation of abolition rather than the aftermath of slavery. It ends where many studies of emancipation begin.

  Another tradition, equally distinguished, reconstructs the ideological origins of the antislavery movement—with its many roots in enlightenment philosophy, Christian evangelicalism, natural law, and the political cultures of the Whig and Democratic Parties. There’s a lot of that sort of history in this book, especially in my reconstruction of the universe of constitutional assumptions within which the opponents of slavery operated as they formulated their policies. But my concern with antislavery constitutionalism is frankly utilitarian: I need to explain the ideas in order to explain the policies. You have to pay careful attention to what Republicans were saying about slavery to fully understand what they were doing, even to recognize that they were doing anything at all. You need to grasp what “freedom national” meant to appreciate what Republican policy was.

  Reconstructing the history of antislavery policy has also compelled me to reconsider a popular assumption about the broader trajectory of the Civil War itself. Like most historians I always believed that the purpose of the war shifted “from Union to emancipation,” but over the course of my research that familiar transition vanished like dust in the wind, and I have been unable to recover it. Republicans did not believe that the Constitution allowed them to wage a war for any “purpose” other than the restoration of the Union, but from the very beginning they insisted that slavery was the cause of the rebellion and emancipation an appropriate and ultimately indispensible means of suppressing it. It was the Democrats, not the Republicans, who insisted on keeping slavery out of the war, who hoped to restore the Union “as it was,” who vehemently denied that the restoration of the Union required the destruction of slavery, and who tried to shift the discussion from slavery to race by demanding an answer to the question What is to be done with the Negro?17 The real question, Republicans believed, was What is to be done with slavery? They never had to move from Union to emancipation because the two issues—liberty and union—were never separate for them. If there was a shift over the course of the war, it was the realization by Republicans that destroying slavery would be much harder than they had originally expected. Not until January 31, 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment finally squeezed through the House of Representatives­—with but a few votes to spare, and against overwhelming Democratic opposition—could Republicans be reasonably certain that slavery would be fully abolished.

  What-if history is always a tricky business, but in this case Lincoln and the Republicans laid out the alternative scenario for us. They believed that if George B. McClellan, the Democratic candidate, were elected president in 1864, the Confederacy would still be defeated but slavery would survive the war. The mass emancipations of 1865 would not have happened. A President McClellan would not have required the defeated Confederate states to abolish slavery as a condition for readmission to the Union. There would have been no Thirteenth Amendment, and without it control over slavery would have reverted to the states where the slaveholders made it clear that even in defeat they would hold on to slavery forever if they could. If that happened there’s no telling when, if ever, slavery would have ended in the United States. Who knows what would have happened to slavery in Cuba and Brazil? If the Republicans had not succeeded in making freedom national, we might not even be talking about an Age of Emancipation.

  MAPS

  1 “ULTIMATE EXTINCTION”

  A FEW WEEKS BEFORE ABRAHAM LINCOLN was inaugurated on March 4, 1861, the House of Representatives unanimously approved a resolution declaring that the federal government had no power to abolish slavery in any state. Lincoln had said the same thing many times before, and he reiterated the point in his inaugural address: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” Lincoln went on to indicate that he would have “no objection” to a constitutional amendment that reaffirmed the existing ban on federal abolition of slavery in any state where it was already legal.1 What clearer indication could there be that Lincoln and the Republicans were initially unwilling to make the Civil War into a struggle over slavery? But disavowals of the kind that Lincoln made had a long history within the antislavery movement. Abolitionists had been struggling for decades to develop an antislavery politics that could overcome one inescapable fact—that the U.S. Constitution recognized and protected slavery in the states where it already existed. Block out that history, and it is impossible to understand what the Republicans expected to do about slavery once Abraham Lincoln became president.

  THE FEDERAL CONSENSUS

  In 1787 the delegates at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia made a series of compromises that obliged the new national government to leave slavery untouched within the states. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, one of a handful of slavery’s forceful defenders in Philadelphia, had threatened to vote against the proposed Constitution if it “should fail to insert some security to the Southern states against an emancipation of the slaves.” The specific passages in the Constitution dealing with slavery are well known. The federal government was prohibited from regulating the Atlantic slave trade for twenty-one years; the three-fifths clause counted 60 percent of the slave population for purposes of direct taxation and representation in Congress; and the fugitive slave clause gave masters a claim on runaways who escaped across state lines. In as many as a dozen other places the Constitution recognized slavery indirectly.2

  Almost immediately Americans began to dispute the meaning of these various clauses, but there was general agreement that the Constitution gave Pinckney and the southern slaveholders what they most wanted: assurance that the federal government had no power to interfere with slavery in the states where it already existed. As one delegate explained to the Massachusetts ratifying convention, “[I]t is not in our power to do anything for or against those who are in slavery in the southern States.” Elbridge Gerry, also of Massachusetts, “thought we had nothing to do with the conduct of the States as to Slavery.” Connecticut’s Oliver Ellsworth agreed that under the new Constitution slavery was strictly a state institution. “The morality or wisdom of Slavery,” he said, “are considerations belonging to the States themselves.” This was as axiomatic in the South as it was in the North. During the Virginia ratification debates James Madison was “[s]truck with surprise” by anti-federalist claims that the proposed Constitution would empower the national government to abolish slavery in the states. “[T]here is not power to warrant it” in the Constitution, Madison insisted. “If there be, I know it not.” Thomas Jefferson read the Constitution the same way. Shortly before the election in 1800 he allowed a spokesman in South Carolina to release a
statement in his name affirming that “the Constitution has not empowered the federal legislature to touch in the remotest degree the question of the condition of property of slaves in any of the States, and that any attempt of that sort would be unconstitutional and a usurpation of rights Congress does not possess.”3

  For seventy-five years hardly anybody—North or South, proslavery or antislavery—doubted that the Constitution put slavery in the states beyond the reach of federal power. This was the federal consensus. No specific clause in the Constitution actually stated that slavery was strictly a state institution, beyond the ability of the federal government to interfere. And yet no other constitutional precept so profoundly shaped the contours of antislavery politics in the years between the founding of the nation and the Civil War.4

  Even abolitionists agreed that the power to abolish slavery in any state resided solely within that state. Article II of the 1833 “Declaration of Sentiments” announcing the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society stated unequivocally that “each State, in which Slavery exists, has, by the Constitution of the United States, the exclusive right to legislate in regard to its abolition in said State.” William Lloyd Garrison wrote that, and he was not alone. In the blistering antislavery speech that Senator Thomas Morris of Ohio delivered in February of 1839—the speech that got him expelled from the Democratic Party—he acknowledged that “the Constitution left the subject of slavery entirely to the States.” Joshua Giddings, who was nearly expelled from the Whig Party for his radical opposition to slavery, took a similar “state rights” position. With the adoption of the Constitution, Giddings argued, “slavery was made strictly a State institution.” Slavery was a “strictly local” institution, the Liberty Party platform of 1844 announced, “its existence and continuance rest on no other support than State legislation.” Four years later the Free Soil Party platform made the same declaration: slavery “depends on State laws alone, which cannot be repealed or modified by the Federal Government.” The Free Soil platform would “therefore propose no interference by Congress with Slavery within the limits of any State.” Because it was accepted even by abolitionists, the slaveholders clung to the federal consensus as the essential constitutional protection for slavery against a potentially powerful central government.5