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

by James Oakes

  As Republicans were coming to see emancipation as a punishment of rebellious masters, another novel element entered into their discussions of emancipation. Republican congressmen, editors, government officials, and private citizens—all noticed that whenever Union soldiers or sailors arrived in the South, the slaves made their allegiance to the United States clear. Everywhere along the Atlantic coast, rebellious masters fled from advancing Union forces, but their slaves stayed behind. On the streets of New Orleans, sullen whites, men and women alike, averted their eyes, spat in contempt, and stood on their balconies emptying chamber pots onto Union soldiers below. In contrast, the slaves in the South welcomed U.S. troops, risked their lives to make their way to Union camps, and provided crucial intelligence on the size and location of nearby Confederate forces. Impressed by the allegiance of the slaves, Republicans began to argue that the United States was obliged not only to suppress the rebels but also to protect the four million loyal blacks in the southern states. Emancipation was not merely a punishment for treason; it was also a just reward for the loyalty of the slaves. That the slaves hated slavery, that they would take advantage of the war by claiming their freedom—these had always been the premises of Republican emancipation policy. By 1862, however, countless Union soldiers and officers had sent word back home, and to Washington, that the slaves were the only people they could trust when they got to the South. This was a new theme in the wartime debate over slavery and emancipation.

  There is no such thing as a disloyal slave, Frederick Douglass declared in what became a standard feature of Republican rhetoric. Salmon Chase called for “liberation of the loyal population of the South from slavery to the rebels.” One version of the confiscation act would have authorized Union commanders in the South “to invite all loyal persons to come within his lines and be enrolled in the service of the United States.” Slaves themselves raised the issue when they came to Union lines claiming their masters were “rank secessionists.” This made the slaves’ loyalty to the Union all the more compelling. “The slave of a rebel is placed in a somewhat peculiar position,” one Republican congressman explained. The master demands the slave’s allegiance, but so does the government. “In my opinion the Government’s claim to allegiance is paramount to all others, and in order to prevent the slave being forced to aid in rebellion, it has the unquestionable right to break the bonds by which the master holds him.”31

  Another line was being crossed. If the Constitution prevented the federal government from interfering with slavery in the states, it just as surely required the federal government to protect those who resisted the claims of their disloyal masters and instead kept faith with their government. The implications of the new policy were felt most clearly, and immediately, in Louisiana.

  LOUISIANA EMANCIPATED

  Sometime in the spring of 1862 a number of Babbillard Lablanche’s slaves walked off his plantation and made their way to the Union army at Camp Parapet, with their clothes and furniture in tow. The Lablanche place was located twelve miles above New Orleans, and he himself was one of the most prominent planters in the area. As General John Phelps, the commander at Camp Parapet, told the story, Lablanche threw the slaves off his plantation, telling them that “Yankees are king here now, and that they must go to their king for food and shelter.” Lablanche told a somewhat different story. He claimed to have been loyal to the Union and “to have taken no part in the war,” though his son was off fighting for the Confederacy. When the Union occupied the area the previous month, Lablanche told his slaves “that they were free” if they left and went to nearby Camp Parapet, where Phelps was welcoming runaways as emancipated. Led by “Jack,” a number of Lablanche’s slaves decided to leave, whereupon their owner provided them with a boat that would take them safely across the river to the Union camp. As of June 16, the slaves were living outside of Camp Parapet, excluded from entering by the orders of General Benjamin Butler. Butler was unsure what the actual policy regarding such slaves was. Phelps wanted to admit the slaves and to have them—along with all the slaves in the seceded states—declared free by the commander in chief as an act of military necessity. He was using the Lablanche slaves to force the issue. Phelps “intends making this a test case for the policy of the Government,” Butler explained to the secretary of war on June 18. “I wish it might be so.”32

  As the Second Confiscation Act was making its way through Congress, the status of slaves in Union-occupied areas of the Mississippi Valley remained unclear. Unlike Fortress Monroe and the Sea Islands, Butler noted, many of the sugar planters of southern Louisiana had been reluctant secessionists, and many stayed on the plantations when the Union occupied the area in early 1862. Should Louisiana be treated like the loyal Border States, or should it be treated like the abandoned plantations along the southern Atlantic coast, where all the slaves were emancipated and put to work as free laborers? As he struggled to formulate a policy in May of 1862, Butler issued carefully worded instructions that combined elements of the two policies. He never referred to slaves, and he did not so much as hint at the status of those employed or excluded. Instead, Butler wrote his instructions as if the people arriving at the Union camps were vagrants. Those who could be usefully employed, black or white, were welcome to stay. Those who could not work, black or white, were to be excluded.33

  This was a holding pattern, a temporary solution that Butler devised while he awaited policy instructions from his superiors in Washington. It could not last for long. As the weeks passed and the number of escaping slaves increased, even Phelps realized that he could not provide for all the runaways with the resources at his disposal. “In spite of indirect discouragements,” Captain John W. DeForest wrote, the slaves “are continually quitting the plantations and swarming to us for protection and support.” When DeForest asked Phelps what to do with the most recent arrivals, the exasperated general replied, “ ‘I don’t know,’ as much bothered by the ‘inevitable nigger’ as if he were not an abolitionist.” It was in the hopes of some resolution that Phelps had insisted that the exchange of letters between himself and Butler be forwarded to Washington, so that administration officials could determine what to do. Nobody wanted clarification more than Butler, and he happily complied with Phelps’s request by forwarding the exchanges to the War Department along with a characteristically astute letter explaining the situation. But Secretary of War Edwin Stanton kept Butler waiting. “It has not yet been deemed necessary or wise to fetter your judgment by any specific instructions,” Stanton told Butler on June 29.34

  By then it was clear that the Republican policymakers in Washington were about to revise emancipation policy. Treasury Secretary Chase explained this in a letter to Butler in late June. Before the war began, Chase wrote, he had hoped that the rebellion would be quickly suppressed and the abolition of slavery “would be gradually effected” by the slave states themselves, “without shock or disturbance or injury, but peacefully & beneficially.” But as the war persisted, Chase concluded that “the restoration of the old Union, with slavery untouched except by the mere weakening effects of the war, was impossible.” Like “the great majority of the people of the United States,” Chase concluded that to suppress the rebellion and restore the Union, “slavery must go.” He had never doubted that “the war power” could be used to “destroy slavery,” but he initially “doubted the expediency of its exercise.” As the months passed, however, Chase’s doubts dissipated until he realized that it was foolish “to abstain from military interference with slavery,” that it would merely perpetuate “the subjugation of some four millions of loyal people [the slaves] to some three hundred thousand disloyal rebels.” The letter also indicated that the president was changing his mind as well. In the meantime, the secretary urged Butler to let everyone in Louisiana know that “you are no proslavery man.”35

  A few days later Lincoln weighed in on the side of slaves who ran to Union lines, effectively endorsing Phelps’s policy. The president, Stanton wrote Butler, “is
of the opinion” that fugitive slaves coming into Union lines “cannot be sent back to their masters; that in common humanity they must not be permitted to suffer for want of food, shelter, or other necessaries of life: that, to this end, they should be provided for by the Quartermaster’s and Commissary’s Departments; and that those who are capable of labor should be set to work and paid reasonable wages.”36 As he had done with the Sea Islands, Lincoln gave Chase—the most fervent opponent of slavery in his cabinet—effective control of emancipation in Louisiana. And as he had done with the Sea Islands, Chase appointed a dedicated abolitionist—George Denison—as the special Treasury agent in Louisiana. Denison soon began sending Chase glowing reports of General Butler’s enthusiastic support for emancipation.

  On July 22, Secretary of War Stanton, acting under instruction from Lincoln, issued General Orders No. 109 implementing Section 11 of the Second Confiscation Act, which authorized the president to employ as many of the former slaves as was consistent with the “public welfare.” Stanton directed all military commanders in the seceded states, including Louisiana, to “employ as laborers . . . so many persons of African descent as can be advantageously used,” and enjoined the commanders to pay the black workers “reasonable wages for their labor.” Butler clearly understood what all of this meant. “The Government have sustained Phelps about the Negroes,” Butler wrote his wife, “and we shall have a Negro insurrection here I fancy.” Blacks in the area were becoming “saucy and troublesome,” Butler added, “and who blames them?” Though a longtime Democrat, Butler had come to agree with the Republicans that the war would undermine southern slave society—“This people are doomed to destruction,” he said—and that as it did so, the slaves might well take advantage and rise in rebellion. For more than a year Butler had been among the most aggressive of antislavery generals, yet like so many other northerners in mid-1862, he felt a new determination to destroy slavery completely. “I am changing my opinions,” he wrote in late July. Fed up with recalcitrant rebels, he concluded that there was “nothing of the people worth saving. I am inclined to give it all up to the blacks.” He likened the fate of southern rebels to the rain of fire and brimstone that fell upon Sodom and Gomorrah, except that in this instance “the Lord will do so in the shape of the negroes.”37

  The timing could scarcely be more revealing. The two houses of Congress had passed the Second Confiscation Act on July 11 and 12. Lincoln signed the bill on July 17, drafted the implementation orders a few days later, and presented them to his cabinet on July 21 and 22. Stanton issued the orders that same day, July 22. Three days later, on July 25, Butler was explaining the new policy to his wife and preparing to implement it in Louisiana.

  If Lincoln’s endorsement of Phelps indicated the direction the government was taking, an even clearer indication was Lincoln’s response to the Maryland unionist Reverdy Johnson. Back in June, acting on diplomatic complaints about Butler’s treatment of foreign consuls in New Orleans, the State Department had dispatched Johnson to Louisiana to investigate the matter.38 Overstepping his mission, Johnson reported back to Lincoln on July 16 that Louisiana unionists were becoming alienated by the drift toward emancipation, especially by the policies of General Phelps—which Lincoln had already effectively endorsed. Loyal Louisianans were beginning to worry that it was the “purpose of the Govt to force the Emancipation of the slaves.” Johnson warned Lincoln that if Phelps was allowed to proceed unchecked, “this State cannot be, for years, if ever, re-instated in the Union.” Lincoln’s answer to Johnson was uncharacteristically blunt. He dismissed Johnson’s claim that unionist sentiment in Louisiana was being “crushed out” by Phelp’s policy. All they had to do to stop Phelps was stop the rebellion, Lincoln noted. “If they will not do this,” he wondered, “should they not receive harder blows rather than lighter ones”? Like his fellow Republicans in Congress, Lincoln had given up waiting for southern unionists to rise up against secession. They have “paralyzed me in this struggle more than any other one thing,” Lincoln declared. Then he made it unmistakably clear that the time for a more concerted assault on slavery had come. “I am a patient man,” Lincoln told Johnson, “but it may as well be understood, once for all, that I shall not surrender this game leaving any available card unplayed.”39

  Two days later Lincoln wrote another letter, this time to a prominent lawyer in New Orleans, indicating once again that he had no more patience for Louisiana unionists who claimed to represent the majority but who did nothing to stop their state from seceding. Now they were complaining “that in various ways the relation of master and slave is disturbed by the presence of our Army,” and that Congress was claiming “military necessity” as a spurious justification for suspending “constitutional guaranties.” But as long as the secessionists were prepared to “hazard all for the sake of destroying the government,” Lincoln wrote, he was willing to let them lose all. “What would you do in my position?” he asked. “Would you drop the war where it is? Or, would you prosecute it in future, with elder-stalk squirts, charged with rose water?” Rather than deal more lightly with slavery, the president warned, he was prepared to deal with it more heavily than before.40 Ensuring that his words would have an immediate impact, Lincoln authorized Chase to send copies of the letters to General Butler in New Orleans.

  In his own cover letter, Chase underscored the president’s point: either we abandon all hope of bringing the Gulf States back into the Union, “or we must give freedom to every slave within our limits.” As far as Chase was concerned, the recent “acts of Congress” did not leave “much room for choice.” Universal emancipation was effectively the law of the land, and the new policy was to have “practical application in Louisiana.” Butler was to use whatever authority he had to shift the plantations to a system of free labor. “[I]f I were in your place,” Chase told Butler, I would “respectfully notify the slaveholders of Louisiana that henceforth they must be content to pay their laborers wages.” Before the month of July was out, the various new laws forbidding military enforcement of the fugitive slave clause and establishing universal emancipation were being implemented in Louisiana. “How these acts can be enacted and slavery maintained,” Chase wondered, “I am at a loss to conceive.”41

  If anything remained unclear in August, it was settled beyond doubt on September 22 when Lincoln issued a “Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation” in which he quoted verbatim the entire Section 9 of the Second Confiscation Act. All rebel-owned slaves “within any place occupied by rebel forces and afterwards occupied by the forces of the United States, shall be deemed captives of war, and shall be forever free of their servitude and not again held as slaves.” Chase rushed a letter off the very next day urging Butler to “anticipate a little the operation of the Proclamation” in southern Louisiana. “The law,” Chase pointed out, “frees all slaves of rebels in any city occupied by our union troops and previously occupied by rebels. This is the condition of New Orleans.” Only “clear proof of continuous loyalty” could thereafter overcome the “presumption of freedom” in Louisiana.42

  Butler declared himself “satisfied that Slavery must be abolished,” and promised to “do his part at such time as he thinks proper.” By late September he was instructing one of his generals that slaves voluntarily entering their lines could not be returned to their owners. When another Union general complained of the number of slaves running into his lines, Butler insisted that “[b]y the Act of Congress they are clearly free.” In a follow-up note, Butler stressed that the slaves were freed “[b]y the Act of Congress, independent of the president’s proclamation.” On November 1, Butler ordered all police and prison officials to release “from confinement” all the slaves of disloyal owners. No other Union officer, as George Denison reported in mid-October, “appreciates, like Gen. Butler, the importance of freeing and arming the colored people—and he is not afraid to do it. All the pro-slavery influence in this State cannot change him in this matter.”43

  Wherever plantations wer
e abandoned, Butler reorganized them on the basis of free, wage labor. In one case, the general put his brother in charge of a sugar plantation where he “hired negroes at a fair rate per day.” Butler’s brother—known as “Colonel,” though he was a civilian—was involved in a number of shady financial deals that caused endless trouble for the general, but in his dealings with the former slaves the Colonel “deserves credit,” Denison reported to Chase. Butler was “the first man bold and enterprising enough to undertake the raising of a large crop of sugar by free labor.” As Chase’s agent in Louisiana and a devoted opponent of slavery, Denison was inclined to look favorably on the “experiment” of sugar produced by free labor. Not surprisingly his observations on various plantations in late 1862 persuaded him that blacks worked “with more energy and industry” once they were freed and paid wages. Denison noted that several plantations in the area had switched over to free labor and “met with the same success” as Colonel Butler’s.44

  Although the Second Confiscation Act distinguished between loyal and disloyal masters, the distinction broke down almost immediately under the free labor system Butler instituted. Plantations owned by disloyal planters were to be confiscated by the U.S. government, and the freed people would be paid wages to continue working, but the same terms were effectively imposed on loyal owners who remained on their plantations. The model contract Butler drew up required plantation owners to pay their black workers wages of ten dollars per month, with three dollars deducted for food, clothing, medicine, and care of the sick and elderly. “No cruel or corporal punishment” was allowed, and the United States promised to enforce the contracts and protect the black workers. If any planter “refuses to entertain this arrangement,” Butler’s contract stipulated, “his slaves may hire themselves to any other loyal planter, or any person whom the United States may elect.”45 In this way, de facto free labor was being established on plantations owned by loyal whites in southern Louisiana.