by James Oakes
Even more than secession, the Civil War opened the door to self-emancipation on a massive scale. Rather than escape all the way to the North, slaves could free themselves simply by running to the “free soil” within Union lines. Radicals like Senator James Lane of Kansas could scarcely contain their enthusiasm. What will happen, he asked, when “the armies of the Union march into the slave States, and the slaves themselves should get up an insurrection, as I believe will be the case, and flee to the armies of the Union, or march out by the roads that the Union armies march in?” Under such circumstances, he wondered, could any senator “expect the people of the North, or the armies of the North, to become the servants of the traitors, and return those slaves to their traitorous masters?”8 Not all of Lane’s fellow Republicans were so sanguine about the prospect of slave rebellion, but they all assumed that the First Confiscation Act cleared the path for self-emancipation. Under the terms of the statute, the president would order troops into areas in rebellion, slaves would escape into Union lines, and Union commanders would accept the fugitives—legally, because secession freed the North from any obligation to enforce the fugitive slave clause, and practically, because the northern people would not tolerate returning slaves to traitors.
As a policy, self-emancipation was formulated in Virginia, at Fortress Monroe, in the summer of 1861, but it was first applied on a large scale later that same year when the Union launched a successful invasion of coastal South Carolina.
THE SEA ISLANDS
Within days of the fall of Fort Sumter, Lincoln proclaimed an ambitious naval blockade of the entire South—from northern Virginia all the way down the Atlantic coast to Key West, back up the western edge of the Florida peninsula and around the wide arc of the Gulf Coast embracing Pensacola, Mobile, and New Orleans, until it finally reached the Mexican border at Brownsville, Texas. It soon became clear, however, that for the Union to make the blockade effective, it would have to establish naval bases as refueling stations along the southern Atlantic coast. By October, plans for a joint army-navy operation had been devised for the capture of Port Royal in the Sea Islands off South Carolina. Captain Samuel Francis Du Pont commanded the naval operation. The ground forces were placed under the command of General Thomas W. Sherman. The army and navy converged on Hampton Roads in late October and from there moved south for the attack on the Confederate fort on Hilton Head, the most formidable of the three forts guarding Port Royal Sound. A storm at sea scattered the fleet and nearly scuttled the operation. Sherman’s troops were in no condition to participate as planned. Instead, they watched from their transport on the morning of November 7, by which time the water was “as smooth as glass,” as Du Pont’s squadron delivered an intense pounding that reduced the fortress on Hilton Head and sent its defenders scurrying in retreat. Within hours Union troops were in control of Port Royal, scoring one of the first important northern victories of the war and giving the Union a crucial foothold on the southern Atlantic coast. It also brought thousands of slaves within Union lines.9
The Sea Islands south of Charleston were home to some of the wealthiest and most impressive plantations in the South. They produced an especially fine and valuable fiber from the long-staple cotton plants that could not be grown on the farms of the southern interior. The islands around Port Royal were also home to eleven thousand slaves—more than eight out of ten Sea Island inhabitants were black—who had developed over the centuries a subculture of their own, different not merely from the culture of their masters but from that of most southern slaves as well. Planter families and slave lives—largely untouched by the great inland cotton boom—were uncharacteristically stable on the Sea Islands. But on the morning of November 7, 1861, the sound of bursting shells and Union cannon fire turned that old way of life upside down in a matter of hours. Slaves dropped their hoes and ran from the fields as their owners scampered to gather their belongings and escape from the islands before the Yankee invaders arrived. When a young slave named Sam Mitchell heard the cannons roar, he thought it was thunder. “Son,” his mother explained, “dat ain’t no t’under, dat Yankee come to gib you Freedom.”10 And so the Yankees had.
Just before Sherman embarked on the expedition in early November, the assistant secretary of war instructed the general that his treatment of slavery should be governed “by the principles of the letters addressed by [the secretary of war] to Major-General Butler on the 30th of May and 8th of August, copies of which are herewith furnished to you.” As was true for Butler, Sherman was not to entice slaves from plantations that were functioning peaceably; however, slaves who voluntarily came under Union army control were to be treated as free. Sherman was instructed to avail himself of the services of any person, “whether fugitives from labor or not, who may offer them to the National Government.” Once again, labor in service of the Union secured emancipation. In keeping with these instructions, on November 8, Sherman issued a proclamation promising Sea Island planters that the army’s policy was not to “interfere with any of your lawful rights or your social and local institutions” beyond what the circumstances of war and rebellion make “unavoidable.” But the owners were in no position to take comfort from Sherman’s promises—by the time he arrived, they were gone.11
“The effect of the victory is startling,” Sherman reported to his superiors on November 11. “Every white inhabitant has left the island.” The “beautiful estates of the planters” had been abandoned in panic and “left to the pillage of hordes of apparently disaffected blacks.” The panic was general. Hilton Head, St. Helena, Lady’s, and Port Royal Islands—every one had been abandoned by the white inhabitants. Retreating Confederates passing through the town of Beaufort found it “deserted by the white population.” Shortly after the fort on Hilton Head surrendered, U.S. reconnaissance troops scouted the island “without encountering any of the enemy or any white person whatever.” Not only had the whites fled, but also they had tried, and largely failed, to force their slaves to flee with them. Young black men, the most valuable and productive workers, were the ones most likely to be taken. On island after island, however, there were reports of slaves who hid in the fields and swamps to avoid being carried off to the mainland. By refusing to leave with their masters, by welcoming the invading Yankees, the slaves of Port Royal had effectively “volunteered” to come into Union lines, even though they never left their plantations. If the War Department instructions prevailed, the Sea Island contrabands would be treated as free.12
But it was not up to the War Department. Shortly after the Union victory, the administration of the Sea Islands was transferred to the Treasury Department. The Sea Island plantations had been abandoned, and it was the Treasury that disposed of abandoned property. Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase was reputed to be the member of Lincoln’s cabinet most congenial to emancipation. By late 1861, the more radical Republicans in Congress regularly consulted with Chase, either at his office or at his home, where they frequently dined together. Yet Chase’s views on slavery and emancipation did not differ significantly from the other members of Lincoln’s cabinet, or from those of most Republicans. Here again it was hard to discern a distinctively “radical” position on slavery and abolition. As of September in 1861, for example, Chase continued to insist that neither he nor any member of the administration “has any desire to convert this War for the Union . . . into a War upon any State Institution whatever, whether that institution be slavery or another.” For Chase this meant that the federal government had no constitutional authority to prosecute the war for any purpose other than the restoration of the Union. Like all Republicans, however, Chase understood that the war had been caused by slavery and that slavery would be a casualty of the war. “We all see,” he wrote, “that the madness of disunion” was endangering “the system of slavery.” It was “impossible” for civil war to go on “without harm to slavery,” and should the war be prolonged, “a fatal result to Slavery will be well nigh inevitable.” Frémont’s order emancipating the slaves of M
issouri rebels was essentially meaningless, Chase explained, because the civil authorities of the state were still functioning and the federal government had no constitutional power to overrule them. But in seceded states, like South Carolina, “the State organization was forfeited and it lapsed into the condition of a Territory with which we could do what we pleased.” In territories the Constitution was sovereign, and under the Constitution the slaves “are not recognized as the property of rebels.” By Chase’s reasoning, when the slaves on the Sea Islands came within Union lines, they came under the protection of a Constitution that did not recognize slavery within its sovereign jurisdiction. The Sea Island slaves were therefore free.13
Administration officials used a distinctive linguistic construction to indicate that slaves were already being emancipated. They declared that it was “impossible” or “inconceivable” that slaves, having been freed, could ever be returned to bondage. As early as July of 1861, Lincoln had told his friend Orville Browning that the federal government “neither should, nor would send back to bondage such as came to our armies.” A year later he was more emphatic: slaves whose labor had been “forfeited” by their owners and who were subsequently emancipated by the government could never be re-enslaved. “I do not believe it would be physically possible, for the General government, to return persons so circumstanced, to actual slavery,” Lincoln explained. “I believe there would be physical resistance to it, which could neither be turned aside by argument, nor driven away by force.” Labor in service to the Union remained a crucial guarantor of emancipation. Chase would “never consent,” he declared, “to the involuntary reduction to Slavery of one of the negroes who had been in the service of the Government.”14
In December of 1861, Lincoln himself affirmed emancipation in a statement that almost certainly referred to the slaves on the Sea Islands that had been occupied by the federal forces a few weeks earlier. In his first annual message to Congress, Lincoln noted that numerous contrabands had recently come into Union lines and, under the terms of the First Confiscation Act, were “thus liberated.”15 Chase followed the same policy from the moment the Treasury assumed authority over the Sea Islands. Indeed, everyone in a position of authority at Port Royal, beginning with those in charge of the cotton, agreed that the slaves had been freed.
When the whites fled the islands, most of that year’s cotton had been harvested but had yet to be ginned and sold. General Sherman appointed a number of cotton agents to supervise the collection and sale of the cotton, but the army wanted to hand the business off to the Treasury. In early December, acting on the advice of Rhode Island Governor William Sprague, Chase appointed William Reynolds as the Treasury agent to oversee the disposition of the cotton under a system of free labor. That the freedom of the slaves was already presupposed by New England cotton interests was clear from the title of a pamphlet they published in mid-December: Proposition to Employ Liberated Negroes. Before the month was out, Reynolds was reporting back to Chase on how the new wage labor system was designed to get the “liberated Negroes” back to work. Because he found it “impossible to hire the Negroes by the day,” Reynolds explained, he had authorized his clerks to “allow them a dollar for every four hundred pounds of stone cotton which they deliver at the steamboat landing, paying them partly in money & the balance in clothing and Provisions.” That would dispose of the current year’s crop. But for the longer term, Reynolds suggested leasing the abandoned plantations to “loyal citizens,” with “the Negroes to be paid a fair compensation for their services.” This was an opportune moment, he added, “to try the experiment of producing cotton in one of the oldest slaveholding states with paid labor.”16 However, Reynolds and his Treasury agents soon found themselves in competition with an influential group of northern philanthropists, who likewise assumed that the Sea Island slaves had been “liberated.”
On December 21, Chase telegraphed Edward L. Pierce, the Massachusetts abolitionist who had served as Chase’s secretary some years back and had recently worked for General Butler supervising the contrabands at Fortress Monroe. “If you incline to visit Beaufort in connection with the contraband and cotton,” Chase wrote his protégé, “come to Washington at once.”17 The Treasury secretary offered Pierce an appointment as a special Treasury agent in charge of supervising the transition to freedom among the Sea Island blacks. Pierce quickly accepted the assignment and, after stopping in Washington to meet with Chase, arrived at Port Royal on January 13, 1862. Before the month was out, he had produced his first report, titled The Negroes of Port Royal, written for Chase but quickly published, first in the Boston Transcript and a week or so later in the New York Tribune. Pierce estimated that as of late January there were between ten and twelve thousands blacks within Union lines on the islands, although the number was “rapidly increasing” as more and more slaves escaped from the mainland.
In his report Pierce took care to demonstrate that the contrabands met the criteria for self-emancipation. Their “former masters” were almost uniformly rebels who had “offered their slaves to the Governor of South Carolina, to aid in building earth works, and calling on him for guns to mount upon them.” This would suggest that the blacks at Port Royal were not unlike those at Fortress Monroe—with whom Pierce was quite familiar—who had escaped to Union lines rather than face the prospect of being forced to support the Confederate war effort. In both cases the owners had thereby “forfeited” the labor of their slaves, and the slaves themselves were “discharged” from service. Moreover, Pierce insisted that the Union army had done nothing to interfere with the ordinary workings of slavery on the Sea Islands, nor had the soldiers enticed slaves to leave their plantations. The “negroes within our lines,” Pierce reported, “are there by the invitation of no one; but they were on our soil when our army began its occupation and could not have been excluded except by violent transportation.” In short, the slaves had chosen to stay within Union lines, thereby satisfying the standard of the War Department’s instructions of May 30 and August 8, 1861: the army could not entice slaves off working plantations but all slaves coming voluntarily were emancipated.18
Still other blacks on the Sea Islands were fugitives from the mainland who had risked the wrath of Confederate pickets to reach the Union camps at Port Royal. “In March,” a local planter reported in his diary, “15 of my negroes including 3 women and 1 child left the plantation and went over to the enemy on the Islands.” Forty-eight slaves had recently escaped from a single plantation under rebel control near Grahamville. “[L]ed by the driver,” Pierce reported, “and after four days of trial and peril, hidden by day and threading the waters with their boats by night, evading the enemy’s pickets,” they “joy fully entered our camp at Hilton Head.” Pierce wanted to leave no room for doubt in his readers’ minds that the “contrabands” had emancipated themselves by voluntarily embracing the Union army occupying the Sea Islands.19
Pierce told the contrabands that if they remained on their plantations, worked hard, and behaved themselves, they would be paid wages, their families would be secure, and their children would be educated. But he disagreed with Reynolds’s plan to lease the plantations to private investors. Instead, Pierce proposed that the government hire “superintendents” at salaries high enough to attract the most qualified men to take charge of the plantations and oversee the transition from slavery to freedom. The superintendents would put the former slaves back to work as free laborers raising cotton, but they would do so with the specific needs of the freed people in mind. There was to be no more whipping, for example. “The lash, let us give thanks, is banished at last.” The freed people would have to work, but they would be “assured at the outset that parental and conjugal relations among them are to be protected and enforced; that children, and all others desiring, are to be taught; that they will receive wages.” Pierce imagined his system of superintendents as temporary, a stepping stone designed to “fit” the freed people “for all the privileges of citizenship.” Once “fitted,
” they should be “dismissed from the system” and allowed to take any jobs they pleased, save their earnings, and buy land of their own. The laborers were “no longer slaves of their former masters, or of the Government,” Pierce explained, but having been acculturated to the vices of slavery, they needed the “paternal” guidance of employers whose “interests” did not conflict with the dictates of “humanity.” Pierce thus raised the question that would continually arise in the immediate aftermath of emancipation: If blacks were no longer slaves, what were the boundaries of their freedom? Yet notwithstanding the need for some form of guidance, Pierce insisted, the blacks on the Sea Islands were “entitled to be recognized as freemen.”20
Pierce’s alternative to Reynolds’s leasing system would require a cadre of teachers, ministers, and superintendents, none of whom could be paid for by the U.S. government. Instead, Pierce negotiated what today would be called a “public/private partnership” in which volunteers recruited by Pierce would be paid for their services by northern philanthropists but would be provided with transportation, living accommodations, and supplies by the government. The abolitionist communities of the North, particularly in Boston and New York, responded to Pierce’s call for volunteers for the great “social experiment” at Port Royal. Like Pierce himself, the volunteers assumed that they would be working with people who had been emancipated, an assumption emblazoned in the names of the organizations that sponsored the effort: the “Educational Commission for Freedmen” out of Boston, the “National Freedmen’s Aid Society” out of New York. Edward Philbrick—who arrived with the first boatload of volunteers in early March of 1862—made it clear that he and his fellow volunteers would not leave for South Carolina until they had assurances from Washington that blacks on the Sea Islands were in fact free. Those assurances were forthcoming, Philbrick wrote on February 19, two weeks before his departure. Treasury and War Department officials “ridicule the idea that these blacks can ever be claimed by their runaway masters.” To Philbrick this was “satisfactory foundation for our exertions in overseeing their labor and general deportment.”21