by James Oakes
Beneath the surface continuity of these official orders lay significant changes in the actual practice of self-emancipation. By late 1861 “voluntary” entry into Union lines had come to mean any slave who remained after the masters fled before the arrival of an invading Union army. With the passage of the Second Confiscation Act slaves of all rebels within the lines of Union occupation were emancipated, at least in theory, whether or not their masters had fled. It remained “self-emancipation” however, because Union troops were still technically forbidden to entice slaves away their plantations. To be sure, even that restriction was giving way by late 1862. In Louisiana, General Butler hoped that by offering wages to freed people on abandoned plantations enough slaves on nearby farms would be attracted away from their owners to force a general transition to free labor. Nevertheless as late as February in 1863, Grant was still warning his officers that “the enticing of negroes to leave their homes to come within the lines of the army is positively forbidden.” That was the last such order Grant ever issued.38
A careful observer might have seen this coming. By the middle of 1862 the advocates of a more aggressive antislavery policy were answering Lincoln’s skepticism by arguing that a presidential proclamation would entice slaves into Union lines and thereby undermine the rebellion. “You must weaken the enemy by depriving him of the service of the negro,” one citizen advised the president. “This can be easily done, promise them freedom & they will come to you by the 100,000.” Aware of the mysterious workings of the “grapevine telegraph” among slaves, many northerners counted on the slaves to spread news of an emancipation proclamation among themselves. Frederick Law Olmsted made the point when, in October of 1862, he urged President Lincoln to print up thousands of copies of his Preliminary Proclamation and let them circulate throughout the South. The “negroes would pass them from plantation to plantation,” Olmsted predicted, thereby ensuring that escaping slaves “would come to the hands of the class of men whom it is so desirable, and now so difficult to reach.” Benjamin Bannan, editor of a small Pennsylvania newspaper, assured Lincoln that the “Slaves would learn the decree nearly if not quite as soon as their Masters.” A presidential proclamation would prompt a mass exodus of slaves, slavery itself would collapse, and with it the rebellion. Enticement was the answer to Lincoln’s skepticism.39
The Emancipation Proclamation lifted the ban on enticement and instead made it the explicit policy of the Union army in the disloyal states. “Henceforth,” Lincoln’s secretary explained on January 2, 1863, the slave population will be used to suppress to rebellion “as rapidly as it can be brought within the Union lines.” “It is the policy of this Government,” General in Chief Halleck explained to Grant in March, “to withdraw from the enemy as much productive labor as possible.” Union troops must never “discourage the Negroes from coming under our protection.” This “is not only bad policy in itself,” Halleck explained, “but is directly opposed to the policy adopted by the Government.” The “character” of the war has changed, Halleck added. The “policy now adopted” by the government is “to withdraw from the use of the enemy all the slaves you can.”40
To promote the new policy, the War Department issued fifteen thousand copies of the Emancipation Proclamation as General Orders No. 1, for distribution throughout the army. Various state and local agencies in the North printed booklet-sized versions of the proclamation for soldiers to carry with them into the South. The State Department printed miniature copies of the proclamation that could be folded away and tucked into a pocket. Various private companies likewise printed different versions of the proclamation in editions ranging in quality from elaborate posters suitable for framing to handbills that could be easily and widely distributed. The point of distributing the proclamation was, at least in part, to get the “grapevine telegraph” clicking among slaves. Isaac Lane recalled the “studious effort” the slaveholders made to keep word of the Emancipation Proclamation from his fellow slaves. “But it could not be done,” Lane wrote. “[T]here were too many Negroes who were able to read and understand the trend of affairs.” Yet the various printed editions of the proclamation were intended less for the slaves than for Union soldiers, especially their officers. Union troops were not expected to entice slaves by reading the proclamation aloud. Instead, the War Department organized a cadre of 237 agents specifically authorized to go onto southern farms and plantations, where they announced to slaves that they had been freed by presidential proclamation.41
The highest-ranking “agent” of emancipation was Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas, dispatched by Secretary of War Stanton to the Mississippi Valley in late March with orders to oversee implementation of the new policy. Thomas was assigned several tasks. He was to “secure” the “humane and proper treatment” of “that class of population known as contrabands.” He was to meet with General Grant and his officers “and explain to them the importance attached by the Government to the use of the colored population emancipated by the President’s proclamation, and particularly for the organization of their labor and military strength.” Specifically, Thomas was to warn Union officers and soldiers that “any obstacle thrown in the way” of this policy would be regarded by the president as a violation of the acts of Congress and the purposes of the government. Stanton charged Thomas with recruiting and commissioning white officers who were willing to assume command of black troops.42
Thomas proved remarkably diligent and effective in carrying out his instructions. In a speech at Lake Providence, Louisiana, on April 8, 1863, he explained the logic of enticement to Union troops. The Confederates were able to send a large proportion of military-age men into battle because the slaves remained behind “for the raising of subsistence for their armies in the field.” To undermine this Confederate advantage, the Lincoln administration “has determined to take from the rebels this source of supply—to take their Negroes, and compel them to send back a portion of their whites to cultivate their deserted plantations.” The Confederates “must do this,” Thomas added, “or their armies will starve.” Accordingly, slaves coming into your lines should not only be welcomed, they “are to be encouraged to come to us.” Thomas reiterated the point several weeks later in a letter to General William Rosecrans. By depriving the rebels of their slaves we weaken the enemy while we “add to our own strength. They are to be encouraged to come within our lines,” Thomas ordered. Lincoln was so impressed with Thomas’s recruitment of black soldiers that by July he concluded that “General Thomas is one of the best, if not the very best, instruments for this service.”43
On April 11, 1863, less than two weeks after receiving his new instructions from Halleck, Grant reversed his earlier prohibition on enticement and instead directed General Frederick Steele, at Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana, to “encourage all negroes, particularly middle-aged males, to come within our lines.” For Grant the new policy fit neatly into a broader shift toward “hard war” that began in mid-1862 and was implemented most fully under his command in the western theater. Hard war meant several different things, including the widespread resort to foraging to feed Union armies on the march through Confederate territory, as well as the systematic destruction of railroads, factories, and stores that might otherwise be used to sustain the Confederate war effort. In the spring of 1863, Grant began issuing orders that folded enticement of slaves into the practice of hard war. On May 26, for example, he instructed Brigadier General Peter J. Osterhaus to “let” his cavalry “destroy all the railroad bridges as far out as they go” beyond the Black River. “All forage” beyond the river “should be destroyed. All negroes, teams, and cattle,” Grant concluded, “should be brought in.” In June, Grant ordered Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Nasmith, near Vicksburg, to “bring away all negroes disposed to follow you.” Similar orders were issued by other generals. “[B]ring in all able-bodied negroes that choose to come,” General Stephen A. Hurlbut instructed one of his own generals in LaGrange, Tennessee, in mid-May. “It is hard warfare,” Hurlbut adm
itted, “but my orders from General Halleck are to pursue this course.”44
It is from this point in the war that evidence of truly large numbers of slaves “collected” or “captured” by Union troops begins to appear in official reports as well as in the letters and diaries of individual soldiers. In early June, General Hurlbut reported to Halleck from Memphis that in a recent skirmish his men “killed and wounded 60, captured 150 prisoners, 500 horses and mules, 200 negroes, burned cotton factories. . . .” A few days later a colonel near Holly Springs “brought in 50 negroes” after another skirmish. At almost the same moment but hundreds of miles away on the southern Atlantic coast, Union Colonel Robert Gould Shaw was sent on an expedition to Darien, Georgia, “taking all the negroes to be found, and burning every planter’s house” along the way. Some orders maintained the distinction between loyal and disloyal areas. For as long as he remained in Tennessee, Major John Henry was ordered not to disturb private property, “but in Mississippi you will seize all the horses and mules and able-bodied male negroes that you can find.”45
Slaveholders in the path of the Union army felt the impact of the new enticement policy. From the earliest weeks of the war they had been ruefully recording the escapes of individual slaves who ran away as soon as Union forces approached, but not until the middle of 1863 did southern masters begin noting the wholesale capture of large numbers of slaves. At Greenwood Plantation in South Carolina the overseer’s journal traced the approach of the Union army in its campaign to capture Charleston. On June 2, 1863, the Yankees moved up the Combahee River, burning plantation homes, mills, and crops as they went. “Middleton’s Place at the Ferry they burned,” the overseer wrote. “House and Mills, Carrying off all of the Negroes,” 180 from one plantation and 270 from another. Two days later “they landed at Blufton and had it in ashes, they brought Negroes each time with them.” There were “750 negroes carried off” as the Yankees continued up the Combahee River. Comparable reports appeared throughout the second half of the war, wherever the Union army approached. “The Yankees lately made a Raid,” one Alabama planter wrote in October of 1864. They “committed great destruction of property & carried off over 800 negroes. I begin to fear that we are not safe.”46
The systematic enticement of slaves reached its peak during General William Tecumseh Sherman’s various “marches” through the Deep South. Sherman himself was contemptuous of blacks, had little interest in emancipation beyond its military utility, and resisted constant pressure from Washington to enlist blacks into the army. Yet by the end of the Meridian Campaign, five thousand freed men and women were trailing Sherman’s army. Another ten thousand accompanied him on the march to Savannah in late 1864, and seven thousand more joined Sherman’s men as they marched through South Carolina. “We burn every thing,” one Iowa soldier wrote as Sherman’s army pushed from Atlanta to the sea, “& took all the Horses Mules & Niggars that we came acrost.” Another of Sherman’s men boasted that along the march they “[d]estroyed all we could not eat, stole their niggers, burned their cotton & gins, spilled their sorghum, burned & twisted their R. Roads and raised Hell generally as you know an army can when ‘turned loose.’ ”47 The numbers of slaves freed by coming within Union lines during Sherman’s various marches dwarfed the number of emancipations that had taken place earlier in the war.
The goal of the new emancipation policy was to transfer the productive labor of the slaves from the Confederacy to the Union, but many northerners were aware that enticement would further undermine the rebellion by sowing discontent among slaves who remained on southern farms and plantations. One Republican editor predicted that long before Union troops actually penetrated the Deep South, thousands of slaves would hear about the Emancipation Proclamation and “would refuse to work” and “demand wages.” In turn “thousands in the Rebel Armies would go home to protect their families and to take care of the negroes.” The Confederate forces will be decimated, “and as our Armies approached freedom would be declared to the Slaves.” With that “the Power of the Rebels would be broken.” The non-slaveholders “would immediately spring up to support the Government—and the Rebellion so far as fighting, would be at an end.” Slaves might run away, or they might go on strike, but either way the Confederacy would be deprived of its main source of labor and the slaveholders’ rebellion would quickly collapse. Union generals sometimes acted on the same assumption. In Louisiana, Butler believed that if wages were offered to freed people on abandoned plantations, the slaves on nearby farms would quit their owners unless they, too, were paid for their labors. Blacks who chose to return to their homes could help the Union cause, Grant argued, “by spreading dissatisfaction among the negroes at a distance by telling that the Yankees set them all free.” Enticement was designed to take advantage of the disruptive potential of slave resistance.48
If “spreading dissatisfaction” was one of the goals of enticement, the new policy seems to have succeeded. Plantation mistresses complained that when the masters and overseers went off to war, the slaves became insolent and “saucy.” The approach of the Union army invariably set off a wave of escapes, especially among young unmarried men, and the slaves who stayed behind often demanded shorter hours, improved working conditions, and better rations. House servants refused to perform menial chores. Some slaves refused to be whipped; often mistresses dared not use the lash for fear of the reaction it might now provoke. As conditions on farms and plantations deteriorated, women wrote desperate letters to their husbands and sons, begging them to leave the army and return home to restore order—precisely as antislavery northerners had predicted. Several scholars have attributed Confederate defeat to the “internal” collapse of southern society, but the fact that Union policymakers were trying to disrupt the internal workings of the slave regime suggests that the distinction between “internal” and “external” causes of Confederate collapse may be artificial. The slaveholders understood as much. Six months after the proclamation was issued, a South Carolina planter explained the new Union policy as well as anyone in the Lincoln administration. We are dealing with an “Enemy,” Louis Manigault wrote, “whose only aim is to spread desolation and ruin over our land.” He cited the two Union policies designed for that purpose: “to arm our own Negroes against their very Masters; and entice by every means this misguided Race to assist them in their diabolical program.”49
Lincoln’s proclamation had profoundly altered both the nature and the scale of emancipation in the rebellious states. The war on the ground was looking more and more like a revolutionary upheaval, and the clearest indication of the change was Lincoln’s announcement, toward the end of the Emancipation Proclamation, that in addition to being freed, enslaved black men were to be armed, uniformed, and sent into battle against their former masters.50
BLACK TROOPS
Prominent black leaders and radical abolitionists argued from the earliest months of the war that the surest way to suppress the rebellion was to let blacks join the fight. As Frederick Douglass noted, black men had a powerful interest in the outcome of the war, and slaves had the most powerful interest of all, for they would be fighting for their own freedom. You can let slave laborers work for the Confederates and thus sustain the rebellion, Douglass argued, or you can arm slave men and thus transform them into revolutionary agents for the overthrow of the slaveholders’ regime. He was not alone. Free blacks across the North offered their military services as soon as the war began, but for more than a year—long after the federal government had begun emancipating slaves—the Lincoln administration rejected all such offers of black service in the Union army, in part because there were legal obstacles that had to be removed.51
Lincoln himself was more willing to emancipate slaves than to enlist blacks in the Union army. Like many Americans Lincoln wondered whether men reared in bondage could become good soldiers. Raised within the terrors of slavery, schooled in fear, slaves—or so many northerners worried—would make for a sullen and cowardly armed force for the sam
e reason they were a sullen and undisciplined labor force. More than that, though, Lincoln feared a white backlash, particularly in the Border States. As late as August of 1862, he told a delegation of visitors that “the nation could not afford to lose Kentucky at this crisis, and gave it as his opinion that to arm the negroes would turn 50,000 bayonets from the loyal Border States against us that were for us.”52 By the time Lincoln wrote those words, however, the connection between military emancipation and military service was already being established. Like wartime emancipation, the history of black enlistment in the Union army is a tale of gradual evolution as much as sudden transformation.