by James Oakes
The attack on Fort Sumter had a more discernible effect. On April 12, 1861, heavily fortified Confederate batteries surrounding Charleston Harbor opened fire on the U.S. military installation at Fort Sumter, which was in the middle of the bay. There was no way the Union troops inside the fort could withstand the assault. With their inevitable surrender to the South, the war that everyone expected finally began. Lincoln immediately called up seventy-five thousand volunteers to suppress the rebellion. His action provoked four more slave states—Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas—to join the Confederacy, and with that the antislavery mood among northerners grew more defiant than ever. For the first time, a small but vocal minority of northern Democrats joined the Republican chorus in declaring that slavery was doomed. For many northerners the secession of the Upper South, especially Virginia, was the final act of treachery, prompting more threats of slave rebellion and renewed demands for emancipation. Many of these demands were now aimed at the new Republican president.
Lincoln could hardly have missed all the prophesying about slavery’s doom among his fellow Republicans. His own cabinet members were predicting that secession would lead to slave rebellion and emancipation. And Lincoln’s mailbox was rapidly filling up with letters from politicians and pundits across the Republican spectrum, all of them telling the new president the same thing. In late April the radical William Channing wrote to Lincoln “advising [the] abolition of Slavery by martial law as the surest way to conquer rebellious States & preserve the border ones.” Similar letters to Lincoln arrived from other states, and not only from radicals. “Had I the power,” George Field wrote from Brooklyn in early May, “I would march an army forthwith to Richmond proclaiming every where immunity & protection to all of any color who would desert the Rebel standard.” “The war must be carried into Africa,” a Republican politician from New York wrote in May of 1861. “Take the occasion by the hand,” one Pennsylvanian wrote, “and make The bound of freedom wider yet.” Lincoln’s mercurial Illinois friend Orville H. Browning predicted that the time would come when the president would have to push the war “to the uttermost extremity,” when “it will be necessary for you to march an army into the South, and proclaim freedom to the slaves.” Browning’s letters expressed the views of many northerners at the time. Slavery had caused the rebellion; suppressing the rebellion would therefore require the destruction of slavery.42
The “contest sounds the death-knell of slavery,” an Indiana journal explained a few days after Fort Sumter was captured. And who “will mourn its loss?” Slavery has divided the country and hindered its progress for so long that “it would be truly a God’s blessing to be rid of it. So every patriot feels in his heart of hearts.” An independent newspaper in Paris, Maine, echoed the thought. We are in the midst of a revolution caused by the institution of slavery, the Oxford Democrat explained. Whatever happens, “the final abolition of slavery will be hastened by the movement.” Slave insurrections will erupt across the South, “touched off by any John Brown or Nat Turner that has the courage to apply the fuse.” The federal government has long been “the great protection of slavery in this country,” but with the slave states gone from the Union that same government “will be the greatest agency that can be brought into existence to extinguish slavery in the United States.” Southerners must understand, another paper in Roxbury, Massachusetts, explained, that “[t]he rule of the Slave power in America is at length ended.” Slavery’s “besotted arrogance has proved its ruin.” It was May of 1861, the war had just begun, and already there was nothing remarkable about Republican declarations that the conflict could result only in the complete destruction of slavery.43
More surprising was the support for emancipation expressed by a small but growing number of northern Democrats, opening a rift within the party that would persist through the war. Before the firing on Fort Sumter, virtually all Democrats in the North blamed the crisis on the Republicans’ relentless attacks on slavery, and most Democrats continued to make that claim. They often resorted to racist demagoguery, hoping to redefine the struggle over slavery as a struggle over racial equality. But most northern Democrats were also unionists, and with the attack on Fort Sumter some of them turned against the South and with it slavery. “With the first gun from the rebels in arms perished every sympathy at the North with slavery,” a Democratic editor in Wisconsin explained. “The war cannot now end but with the total extinction of slavery, which was the cause of the war.” Democrats in Columbus, Ohio, who had supported the pro-southern candidate John C. Breckinridge in the recent presidential election suddenly sounded like radical Republicans. “The South is doomed, and with it slavery,” they declared. If poor whites join with slaves to overthrow the rule of the southern aristocracy, slavery may end quickly in a servile insurrection. “In your rebellious zeal you have sown the wind that you may reap the tornado, whose tracks will be blood, blood, blood.”44
But if secession divided northern Democrats over slavery, it solidified the Republican commitment to slavery’s destruction. Over the next several years Republicans would disagree among themselves about many things—the confiscation of rebel property, the power of the president versus Congress, and above all Reconstruction policy—but they did not disagree about slavery and abolition. Even before the war started, William Howard Russell, the perceptive reporter for the London Times, could not find any Republicans in Washington who doubted that the war would end in the complete destruction of slavery. The reporter showed up at a state dinner held at the White House on March 28—halfway between inauguration day and the day of the attack on Fort Sumter. The affair was hosted by the president and the First Lady; Lincoln’s cabinet members and leading Republican politicians were in attendance. As Russell worked the room, chatting with them and listening in on their conversations, he noticed a “uniform tendency” in the way they spoke. “They seemed to think,” Russell reported, “that England was bound by her anti-slavery antecedents to discourage to the utmost any attempt of the South to establish its independence on a basis of slavery, and to assume that they were the representatives of an active war of emancipation.”45
Russell viewed such talk among Republicans as arrogant bluster, and no doubt much of it was. The war had not yet begun. Until then all the Republicans could do was make predictions, issue warnings, and hurl threats. It was easy enough for Republicans to wrap themselves in the mantle of emancipation, threaten the South with slave rebellion, and predict the downfall of slavery. But scenarios were not the same as policies. It remained to be seen whether Republicans were prepared to act on their promises. Yet surely it matters that Republicans were contemplating slavery’s destruction from the beginning. If it is too much to say that they went to war with clearly formulated plans about how to go about abolishing slavery, it is a more serious mistake to claim that Republicans were not talking openly about the destruction of slavery.
By the time Lincoln was inaugurated, Republicans had inherited from the antislavery movement two broad scenarios for a federal attack on slavery—a peacetime policy that would cordon off the slave states and gradually force them to abolish slavery on their own, and a wartime policy of immediate emancipation as a military necessity—both of which they repeatedly affirmed during the secession winter of 1860–61. Precisely how the two scenarios would be implemented nobody could really know, but that one or both would bring about the destruction of slavery the Republicans seemed certain. They blustered. They were arrogant—though scarcely more so than the secessionists, the northern Democrats, and not a few abolitionists. More important Republicans were naive about how easy it would be to destroy slavery. Yet they were anything but reluctant emancipators.
3 “FULFILLMENT OF THE PROPHECIES”
NESTLED WITHIN THE LARGER SECESSION debate over the fate of slavery was a smaller but equally fascinating dispute over what the slaves would do. On January 12, 1861, the same day that William Seward was warning his southern colleagues in the Senate that the slaves mi
ght take advantage of a civil war by rising in rebellion, a Democratic newspaper in Cleveland dismissed the forecast of slave insurrection as a “popular error” among Republicans. If there is a war, the editors predicted, “no class of beings will be less troublesome than these blacks. Docility is the leading feature of the race.” The slaves “are more happy and contented than any other race of people on the earth.” Left alone, the editor explained, a “pure blooded African . . . has no aspirations for liberty as we understand it.”1 Republicans started from a very different premise. They generally assumed that African Americans harbored the same instinctive desire for freedom that all human beings shared. “Whenever our armies march into the Southern states,” Orville Browning wrote, “the negroes will, of course, flock to our standards—They will rise in rebellion, and strike a blow for emancipation from servitude, and to avenge the wrongs of ages. This,” he declared, “is inevitable.”2
What would the slaves do? The question was everywhere when the war began. Would they take advantage of the Union invasion by acting on their natural human desire for freedom, as Republicans predicted? Or were slaves so comfortably situated, were blacks so innately subservient, that they would, as northern and southern Democrats alike insisted, remain loyal to their masters?
OUTRAGED BY REPUBLICAN PREDICTIONS of servile insurrection, many slaveholders ostentatiously avowed their faith if not in the loyalty at least in the docility of their slaves. Traveling through the slave states in May of 1861, William Howard Russell found that “[n]one of the Southern gentlemen have the smallest apprehension of a servile insurrection. They use the universal formula ‘Our Negroes are the happiest, most contented, and most comfortable people on the face of the earth.’ ”3 On a plantation in South Carolina, Russell noticed that the “fidelity” of the slaves was “undoubted.” The house, he observed, “breathes an air of security.” The doors and windows were unlocked. There was a single gun on the premises. Here, as elsewhere, the planter had no “dread” of any of his slaves. Near Fort Pickens in Florida, Russell struck up a conversation with a slaveholder who had joined the Confederate army, leaving his wife and children “to the care of the niggers.” Aren’t you “afraid of the slaves rising?” Russell asked. “They’re ignorant poor creatures, to be sure,” the master answered, “but as yet they’re faithful.”4 Russell heard the same thing in Alabama. “Not the smallest fear is entertained of the swarming black population.”5 Similar reports came in from farms and plantations across much of the South.6
But Russell was skeptical of all the talk of loyal slaves. He knew that insurrection panics had erupted across the South during the election campaign and the secession crisis, and he had read recent accounts of slaves murdering their masters—accounts that at the very least suggested more anxiety than the slaveholders were letting on.7 “There is something suspicious in the constant never ending statement that ‘we are not afraid of our slaves,’ ” Russell observed. He concluded that the slaveholders were relatively unconcerned because southern slave society had made itself into something close to an armed camp. “The curfew and the night patrol in the streets, the prisons and watch-houses, and the police regulations prove that strict supervision, at all events, is needed and necessary.”8 As long as the South was able to maintain this police system, Russell believed, it was not surprising that white southerners would feel secure in their own homes.
When the war began, the slaveholders’ first instinct was not to lock down their plantations but to beef up the local militias, redouble the slave patrols, organize “home guards,” and enforce the curfews. These were the official and semi-official institutions that maintained order within the plantation by sustaining the master’s authority without. Sheriffs, justices of the peace, and local police were only one part of a much larger network of accomplices who upheld the security of southern slavery. It worked well enough. Slaves resisted in various ways but rarely rose in outright rebellion. They ran away all the time in the Old South, but only a tiny fraction of fugitives succeeded in escaping from slavery. It is not surprising that when the war began, so many slaveholders expressed confidence in the security of their system.9
And yet there were indications that the slaveholders were more anxious than they let on, at least to English reporters. They nervously read reports of disturbances among slaves, especially those nearby. Daniel Cobb, a slaveholder in southeastern Virginia, reported no disruption among his own slaves, but he peppered his diary with rumors of insurrectionary plots and tales of slaves who murdered their masters. He paid close attention to the stories about other peoples’ slaves escaping to Union lines. In January of 1861, Cobb heard that a “Bachelor was taken by his servants from his bead at Midnight. Carried out of the house and beat to death with an ax.” Outsiders may have been impressed by open windows and unlocked doors, but Cobb was upset by the news that on the farm where the ax murder took place, “the door was left unfastened by the house Boy.” In March, Cobb reported that “People has several Negrows Runaway &c.” In April he “hurd of several fires round that Could not be accounted for.” By June, as Union forces had begun to establish bases in northern and eastern Virginia, Cobb heard reports of slaves in groups of ten or twenty who “has made there escape.” Daniel Cobb was fifty—too old, he thought, to join the Confederate army. But he made his own contribution to the southern cause by helping to organize a local “Home Guard” to monitor “all misconduct of negrows and low life white people of the County and to keep the state of affair right.” Yet despite all of this concern with security—or perhaps because of it—there was no disruption among Cobb’s slaves through the first year, except in November when the Confederate government began impressing some of his slaves to work on local embankments.10
The slaveholders’ anxiety revealed itself most clearly in their concerns about the ability of government to maintain order. They wrote pleading letters to state and local officials, and even to the new Confederate president. Less than two weeks after the capture of Fort Sumter, Charles Mitchell wrote to Jefferson Davis from Louisiana about the “great fear” of a northern invasion down the Mississippi River and the “sense of insecurity” that was already widespread. There was “a deep seated anxiety in regard to negroes,” a widespread fear that a Yankee invasion would likely provoke a “panic” that could only “be ruinous to our cause.”11 A week later William H. Lee, of Bell’s Landing, Alabama, wrote to Davis suggesting that the best way to thwart slave insurrection (and alleviate white fears) was for the Confederate government to order all black men “in the army and make them fite.”12 Barely a month after the war began, George Gayle of Dallas County, Alabama, was already worried that so many of the locals had joined the Confederate army that if any more enlisted, there would not be enough men left “to save ourselves from the horrors of insurrection.”13 The slaveholders knew that the security of slavery depended on the viability of their government.
This is what made an invading Union army so worrisome—not merely its capacity for physical destruction, or even its attractiveness to runaway slaves, but its profound threat to the civil authority in the South. Runaway slaves and insurrection panics were nothing new to southern slave society. This was different, however, because at stake was the South’s ability to police the slave system in the face of an invading army. Union authorities claimed that northern invasion of the Confederacy was necessary to restore “civil authority” to those parts of the South where it had ceased to function properly—that is, loyally. Hence, the U.S. Army had to be sent in to fill the presumed void. This meant that whatever else the Union army was, it was not an extension of the slaveholders’ authority. If the sectional conflict proved anything, it was that the slaveholders’ power was ultimately political power.
The slaves could hardly remain unaware of this, if only because their masters were so often indiscreet. During the 1860 election campaign, observers noticed that the “colored population” of Georgia was “manifesting an unusual interest in politics, and the result of the Pre
sidential election.” In Macon “every political speech” attracted “a number of negroes” who “managed to linger around and hear what the orators say.”14 Thomas Johnson, a Virginia slave, recalled that in 1860 “there was great excitement in Richmond over the election of Mr. Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States. The slaves prayed to God for his success, and they prayed very especially the night before the election. We knew he was in sympathy with the abolition of Slavery. The election was the signal for a great conflict for which the Southern States were ready.”15 Further South, George Womble in Talbot County, Georgia, overheard his owner declare that “he was going to join the army and bring Abe Lincoln’s head back for a soap dish. He also said that he would wade in blood up to his neck to keep the slaves from being freed.”16 In Montgomery, Alabama, the governor gave an impromptu speech “in which he dwelt on Southern Rights, Sumter, victory, and abolitiondom,” while nearby “[t]here were a number of blacks listening.”17 The slaves have “been talking a great deal about Lincoln freeing the servants,” a Mississippi mistress worried in her diary in May of 1861.18 The slaveholders made no attempt to disguise the fact that they had seceded because Abraham Lincoln had been elected president. When he was a young slave in Georgia, Levi Branham recalled, one of his “young masters” told him about the 1860 election and said “that if Mr. Abe Lincoln was elected the negroes would be free. Then he asked me if I wanted to be free and I told him ‘yes.’ ”19 How could the slaves not know what was going on?