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

by James Oakes

  Proslavery senators and representatives were a surprisingly vocal and persistent minority in Congress. Four slave states had remained in the Union, and several members representing loyal elements from other slave states—including Virginia and Tennessee—had also been seated. Southern representatives, in alliance with most northern Democrats, took a leading role in opposing every Republican effort to emancipate slaves. If conservatives could not muster the votes, they could certainly take the floor, argue their case, and repeatedly introduce resolutions and amendments condemning all Republican moves to link the struggle for the Union with the struggle against slavery. Despite their minority standing, conservatives tried desperately to thwart the Republicans’ antislavery agenda and, by their mere presence, provoked a sustained debate over emancipation.

  The strategy backfired. By their aggressive defense of slavery and their belligerent attacks on Lincoln and the Republicans, conservatives—in a repeat performance of the 1850s—forced moderates to acknowledge the crucial antislavery premises they shared with their more radical colleagues. Radicals, for example, openly embraced the prospect of an assault on slavery, but they insisted that the destruction of slavery was the effect rather than the goal of the war. Nevertheless, radicals warned, the longer the South persisted in making war on the Union, the more thorough emancipation would be. They predicted that slavery would collapse of its own accord because wherever the Union army went, slaves would run to their freedom. And once that began to happen, the northern people would scarcely tolerate turning their soldiers into slave-catchers for the traitors who made war on the Constitution. If emancipation was not the purpose of the war, radicals explained, it would surely to be the consequence.

  It did not take much pressure to get moderate Republicans to say the same things. Their chief difference with the radicals lay in the tenor of their remarks rather than the substance of their positions. When pressed by conservatives, Republican moderates refused to repudiate emancipation as a likely consequence of a protracted war. Forced to choose between the destruction of the Union and the destruction of slavery, moderates argued, they would opt without question for slavery’s destruction. Where radicals embraced the prospect of emancipation with enthusiasm, moderates were fully prepared to accept it—and even those who accepted it with reluctance often declared that emancipation was nonetheless a good thing. All Republicans, radical and moderate alike, argued that the official “purpose” of the war was the restoration of the Union, but all agreed that slavery had caused the war and all were prepared to free slaves as a means of ending it.

  In several congressional votes on slavery taken during the summer of 1861, moderates and radicals voted the same way. Moderates were concerned about maintaining constitutional principles but were nevertheless prepared to accept emancipation as necessary to suppress the Confederacy. And yet it was the radicals who offered some of the most powerful arguments for the constitutional legitimacy of emancipation. As a result, Republicans voted almost unanimously in favor of the first federal law in American history designed to emancipate slaves in states where slavery was legal. By contrast, Democrats and Border State congressmen argued that federal emancipation in any form was illegal. They always voted against it.

  NOT THE DUTY OF THE ARMY

  As soon as the war began, Lincoln called the Thirty-Seventh Congress into special session, five months ahead of schedule, to convene on July 4, 1861. Only war measures were to be considered; all other business would be taken up in the normal session that would meet later, from December through July of 1862. One crucial consequence of Congress’s decision to restrict the special session exclusively to war matters was that “military emancipation” was initiated in the summer of 1861, whereas the peacetime policy of gradual state abolition through containment was implemented later in the regular session of Congress. The most important business at hand in July of 1861 was the retrospective sanctioning of the president’s unilateral decision, in the wake of the attack on Fort Sumter, to raise an army to suppress the southern rebellion. There was no doubt that Congress would authorize the expenditures and the military buildup necessary to sustain the war. Yet throughout the special session the fate of slavery also commanded the sustained attention of Congress, an indication that from the very beginning Republicans saw slavery as inseparable from the war.

  The first issue to come up, only a few days after Congress convened, revealed a sharp Republican reaction against military commanders who were turning fugitive slaves away from Union lines. In the two months since Butler’s fugitive slave policy had been approved, the Union army revealed deep internal divisions about how to handle slaves who ran to Union lines. Some soldiers refused to turn slaves away or send them back; others insisted on doing so. The outbreak of war had led to a reversal of the policy at Fort Pickens, where escaping slaves had been returned to their owners during the secession crisis. After the war began, however, Colonel Harvey Brown bluntly informed his superiors in Washington that he would “not send the negroes back as I shall never be voluntarily instrumental in returning a poor wretch to slavery.” Rank-and-file soldiers sometimes evaded higher-ups who ordered the return of runaway slaves. A number of Ohio troops stationed at Camp Upton, Virginia, were accused of “practicing a little of the abolition system in protecting the runaway” whose owner came looking for him. Superiors ordered the commanding officer to return runaways to their rightful owners, but, strangely, nobody could find fugitives anywhere in the camp. Colonel Thomas Davies, in Alexandria, was sharply rebuked when he decided not to send slaves back to their owners. Davies “has been instructed,” Colonel D. S. Miles explained, “to respect private property and to send back to the farm the negroes his troops brought away.” If emancipation was to proceed along the lines Republicans had assumed, such internecine squabbles within the Union army would have to be resolved in favor of the soldiers who refused to return runaway slaves to their owners.4

  From the Republicans’ perspective the most disturbing news was the proclamation issued by General George McClellan, on May 26, “To the Union Men of Western Virginia.” “Your homes, your families, & your property are safe under our protection,” McClellan declared. He urged Virginians to disregard the warning of secessionist traitors that the Union army intended to interfere with “your slaves.” The Union will do no such thing. “[N]ot only will we abstain from all such interference,” McClellan wrote, “but we will on the contrary with an iron hand, crush any attempt at insurrection on their part.”5 Only a few days before McClellan issued his proclamation, Virginia’s voters ratified the decision to leave the Union. To Republicans this meant that Virginia had forfeited any right to claim protection for slavery under the Constitution. But McClellan was a Democrat, and he would never reconcile himself to the Republican view that a war to restore the Union was inescapably a war over slavery’s fate as well.

  On July 8, a few days after Congress opened its special session, Lincoln told Illinois Senator Orville Browning that “the government neither should, nor would send back to bondage such as came to our armies.” The very next day Illinois Congressman Owen Lovejoy introduced a resolution declaring that “it is no part of the duty of the soldiers of the United States to capture and return fugitive slaves.” Lovejoy wanted to put Congress on record in opposition to the orders and proclamations of men like McClellan. He offered a resolution because a statute seemed unnecessary; in his mind, the U.S. military had no legal authority to capture and return slaves. Lovejoy’s resolution thereby raised, at the very outset of the war, the explosive question of who was responsible for enforcing the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution. Most Republicans believed that states alone should be responsible. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which nearly all Republicans hated, created a special cadre of U.S. commissioners to enforce the clause. As the Lovejoy resolution affirmed, however, there was nothing in either the Constitution or the 1850 statute authorizing American soldiers to capture or return fugitive slaves. Border State congressmen scramb
led to table the resolution, but after a brief flurry of parliamentary maneuvering, Lovejoy’s wording was endorsed by a lopsided vote of 93 to 55. Though the resolution never came up in the Senate, the overwhelming vote in the House suggests that the outcome would have been the same. Nearly all the Republicans supported it, while just about every Democrat and Border State congressman voted against it.6

  THE OBJECT OF THE WAR

  Two days after the House endorsed the Lovejoy resolution, Clement Vallandingham, the antiwar Democrat from Ohio, made the first of many attempts to stop the emancipation juggernaut just as it was getting started. Mimicking Lovejoy’s language, Vallandingham proposed an amendment to a military appropriations bill declaring that U.S. military forces had no business “abolishing or interfering with African slavery in any of the States.” A week later, Senator Lazarus W. Powell of Kentucky introduced a similar resolution, likewise declaring that “no part of the Army or Navy of the United States shall be employed . . . in abolishing or interfering with slavery in any of the states.”7 Powell and Vallandingham were responding to widespread talk among Republican members of Congress suggesting that emancipation would be one of the inescapable consequences of a prolonged war. In offering their amendments, conservatives provoked an extensive congressional debate over emancipation weeks before any emancipation bill came up for discussion. At issue in the debate was nothing less than the purpose of the war.

  The debate over the war’s “object” or “purpose” had been simmering in the northern press for some months before Congress convened in July. Within weeks of the firing on Fort Sumter, editorials questioning “The Object of the War” began appearing in Democratic newspapers across the North. They were already protesting against Republican efforts to bind the “object” of the war—the restoration of the Union—to the destruction of slavery. On May 7, for example, Lincoln told his private secretary that “the central idea” of the war was “whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up that government whenever they choose.” Nevertheless, Lincoln added, there was “one consideration” that may be used “in stay of such final judgment,” and that consideration was slavery, the “vast and far reaching disturbing element” that had caused the war to begin with.8

  By July, when the debate reached the floor of Congress, the administration’s endorsement of Butler’s contraband policy had been widely publicized. Democrats declared that Lincoln was behaving like a tyrant, that Republicans were prosecuting the war by unconstitutional means, and that the clearest indication of this was their willingness to let the army and navy “interfere” with slavery in the seceded states. In the House, for example, Democratic Representative Henry Burnett of Kentucky denounced Lincoln as “a despot” and asked his fellow congressman the question of the hour: “What are the objects of the war? Are they to maintain the Constitution and the Union? No, sir; that Constitution has already been discarded, set aside, suspended in its operation, trodden under foot” by the Republican president. Representative William Holman, an Indiana Democrat, quickly took up Burnett’s question. “What is the object of the war?” Certainly not the abolition of slavery. He would fight to the death to restore the Union, but he would never countenance federal interference in southern slavery. “I am for prosecuting this war for the purpose of vindicating the Federal authority and putting down rebellion,” Representative John McClernand, an Illinois Democrat, insisted, “and not for the purpose of subjugating the seceding States and holding them as conquered provinces; nor for the purpose of abolishing slavery.” The Vallandingham-Powell resolutions expressed the views of Democrats and Border State congressmen who wanted to prevent the Union army from “interfering” with slavery.9

  Republicans, however, believed that U.S. soldiers were perfectly within their rights to “interfere” with slavery in the seceded states. It was true that the Constitution did not allow the federal government to prosecute the war for the explicit purpose of destroying slavery in those states, but to Republicans that did not mean the federal government could not attack slavery as a means of suppressing the rebellion. On the contrary, they uniformly declared that although the abolition of slavery was not the purpose of the war, they would readily destroy slavery to save the Union because slavery was the cause of the war. If, “in the course of events, it shall appear that either slavery or the Government must perish,” Senator James Dixon of Connecticut declared, “then the voice of a united people will declare, let slavery perish and let the Government live forever.” This was not the overheated rhetoric of fire-breathing radicals, Dixon added. Rather, it was “the stern determination to which thousands have come, who have been considered heretofore men of moderate views”—men like Dixon himself. He spoke in neutral terms of the destruction of slavery, expressing neither disdain nor enthusiasm for it. Instead, he simply claimed that emancipation was something that was bound to happen as an inescapable consequence of the war. “Let me not be misunderstood,” Dixon insisted. “The object of the struggle we are engaged in, on the part of the loyal States, is not the abolition of slavery; but if it shall prove a long continued contest, that may be its inevitable consequence.”10

  Mindful of the fact that the Constitution protected slavery in the states where it existed, Republicans were always careful to separate the “object” or “purpose” of the war—which was the suppression of the rebellion and the restoration of the Union—from the effect of the war—which was likely to be the destruction of slavery. “[A]lthough the abolition of slavery is not an object of the war,” the pugnacious antislavery Senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire declared, the rebels “may, in their madness and folly and treason, make the abolition of slavery one of the results of the war. This is what I understand to be precisely the position of the Administration upon the subject of this war.” James K. Lane, the Republican senator from Kansas, agreed. Despite having survived the attempt by the “slave oligarchy” to force slavery on his Kansas constituents, he and they had been willing to abide by all the constitutional guarantees of slavery wherever it existed. But in their boundless arrogance slaveholders had provoked all-out war whose “logical conclusion” was emancipation. Lane predicted “that the institution of slavery will not survive, in any State of this Union, the march of the Union armies.” Slavery had been “the curse of the country” for as long as he could remember. “There is no crime that the devotees of slavery will not commit in maintaining or extending it.” If the war destroys slavery, “I thank god that [it] is so.”11

  Republicans insisted not only that the rebellion had been caused by slavery but that war was forcing loyal northerners to choose between the survival of slavery and the survival of the Union. The loyal citizens of the North are prepared to sacrifice millions of dollars and thousands of lives to uphold the Union, radical Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy argued. If slavery is abolished as one of “the incidental results of this war . . . , I can only say that it is a year of sacrifices to us all.” If the rebel states “are called upon to sacrifice that species of property,” Pomeroy concluded, “it is only in harmony with the sacrifices that the loyal States of the Union are called upon to make.” Senator Browning, one of the most conservative Republicans, was even more blunt. “[I]f our brethren of the South force upon us the distinct issue . . . , whether the Government shall go down to maintain the institutions of slavery, or whether slavery shall be obliterated to sustain the Constitution and the Government . . . then I am for the Government and against slavery.” As another Republican had put it, “[I]f we force the country to the issue of choosing between the continuance of slavery and the perpetuation of the Government, then slavery must fall.”12

  What distinguished the moderate from the radical Republicans on slavery’s fate—if there was any distinction at all—was the tendency among moderates to shed crocodile tears over the fact that they were being “forced” to confront the issue. For a radical like Lane, if “the institution of slavery perish, we will thank God.” Moderates were more fatalistic. Dixon b
elieved he was speaking for northerners who had long tolerated and “even guaranteed” the rights of slaveholders. But the northern people do not “love slavery as they love the Union,” Dixon warned. “If either must be sacrificed,” Dixon concluded, “they will have no question as to which it shall be.” Here again was a difference of tone rather than substance. Moderates often declared that although they regretted the “necessity” of emancipation, they nevertheless welcomed it. Browning, for example, spoke warmly of “sweeping the last vestige of barbarism from the face of the continent.” He viewed himself and his fellow unionists as “the conservators of the eternal principles of justice and freedom for the whole human family. . . . We do not desire this issue; we do not want this necessity; but we have no power to prevent it.”13 As far as Republicans were concerned, the rebellion was making slavery’s destruction inevitable.

  It was a measure of how widespread talk of slavery’s demise was that this intense debate took place before any confiscation bill had been reported out of the Senate or House Judiciary Committees. By the time the bill was finally introduced, many of the terms of the debate had already been established. Opponents of emancipation claimed that because slave property could not be legally or constitutionally distinguished from any other form of property, slaves could be “confiscated” only from those who were duly convicted of treason. By that reasoning, the federal government would never be able to emancipate slaves. In contrast, supporters of emancipation defined slaves as “persons” rather than “property” and therefore not subject to the same constitutional restrictions on permanent confiscation. Moreover, they rested their case on the ground of “military necessity,” and under the laws of war emancipation was constitutionally legitimate.