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

by James Oakes

  The Confederate constitution advertised its proslavery character in a point-by-point repudiation of antislavery constitutionalism. Where Lincoln and the Republicans denied that the U.S Constitution protected slavery as a right of property, the Confederate constitution expressly recognized “the right of property in said slaves.” On the principle that the North was “free soil,” northern courts and legislatures had severely limited the right of southern masters to “sojourn” in their states. Confederates responded with a constitution protecting the slaveholders’ “right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property.” Several northern states had passed personal liberty laws in an attempt to limit the reach of the fugitive slave clause, but the Confederate constitution protected the right to recapture fugitive slaves in any state despite “any law or regulation therein.” Republicans argued that the federal government had every right to ban slavery from the territories, so the Confederate constitution not only empowered its government to “acquire new territory” but also declared that “the institution of slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and the territorial government.” It is hardly surprising, then, that from the founding charter of the proslavery nation, down through state constitutions, state laws, and local police regulations, the Confederacy threw all of its legal weight behind a concerted effort to thwart slave rebellion, which the Yankees euphemistically called “emancipation.”4

  The official Confederate view was that there was no meaningful distinction between “emancipation” and “servile insurrection.” There was some exaggeration in this—Republicans had no wish to repeat the “horrors” of the Haitian Revolution—but it wasn’t all hyperbole. Union antislavery policy depended on the willingness of slaves to claim their own freedom in various ways—by running to Union lines, by offering to work for the Union army, and eventually by taking up arms against their former masters. Maybe this wasn’t Haiti, but surely the slaveholders can be excused for calling it slave rebellion and for demanding that their government do what was necessary to suppress it. Throughout the southern war for independence major Confederate policies were invariably justified as a defense against slave uprisings or denounced for failing to protect white southerners against the atrocities of servile insurrection. It was in the nature of the Confederacy that this should be so.

  Southern policymakers observed the evolution of Union antislavery policies with increasing horror and at the same time saw it as proof of what they had always claimed: the Yankees were stirring up slave insurrection. The riotous behavior of blacks on the Sea Islands in the wake of Union occupation in November of 1861 was proof, Jefferson Davis declared, that the purpose of the Union invasion was “to incite a servile insurrection in our midst.” The following month when Lincoln’s first secretary of war, Simon Cameron, proposed enlisting blacks in the Union army, Virginia’s Governor John Letcher saw another effort to “incite them to hostility against their masters and the destruction of their families.” North Carolina’s Zebulon Vance read Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of September 1862 as evidence that the South’s “[a]bolition foes” were determined “to re-enact the horrors of Santo Domingo”—Haiti, again—“and to let loose the hellish passions of servile insurrection to revel in the desolation of our homes.” As always, Jefferson Davis agreed. It was now Union policy to “wrest” the slaves from their owners, he declared, “and thus to inflict on the non-combatant population of the Confederate States all the horrors of servile war.” Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation sealed the case. With “the late proclamation of the tyrant and usurper,” announced Confederate General Gideon Pillow in January of 1863, the Union was “proposing to free all our slaves and taking them into his Army, and inciting them to insurrection and massacre of their owners and their families.” Rhetoric of this sort strikes modern readers as extreme, but only because the North eventually won the war and successfully abolished slavery. Among slave owners who had been born and raised in the antebellum South, for whom slavery was justified by the annals of history, the laws of nature, and the will of God, for those men and women Lincoln’s proclamation was nothing less than a shattering descent into barbarism. The defense of the Confederacy was the defense of civilization itself.5

  Yet the clarity of the Confederacy’s purpose—the defense of slavery—masked the contradictions at its core. The one policy that might have allowed the Confederates to win their independence, for example, was all but foreclosed. Slave societies throughout history have strategically emancipated some slaves to secure military victory and thereby ensure that slavery itself would survive. But the southern Confederacy was created for the purpose of protecting slavery. To emancipate slaves was to violate the fundamental premise of the Confederacy’s existence. Not until the closing weeks of the war did the Confederate Congress offer to emancipate a minuscule number of slaves who might fight to ensure southern independence and with it the permanent survival of slavery. Even then the point was not to abolish slavery but to preserve it. What was true of Union policy was no less true of Confederate policy: emancipation was not the same thing as abolition. The would-be southern nation, precisely because it was a proslavery nation, deprived itself of one of the most powerful weapons at its disposal, an army of slaves fighting for their own freedom.6

  Where Union emancipation policy reinforced the goal of restoring the Union by undermining the Confederacy, the twin impulses that drove the southern war effort—the need to secure independence and the need to protect slavery—never quite meshed. The most famous example was the planter exemption, which immunized one white adult male from conscription in the Confederate army on any plantation with twenty or more slaves. The exemption was deemed necessary to suppress servile insurrection for, as South Carolina’s planter-politician James Chesnut argued, “[t]he masters or owners of negroes in this State are, for the most part, now in the Army.” Drafting the overseers who remained, Governor Joseph E. Brown of Georgia warned, would leave the plantations—not to mention the “peace and safety of helpless women and children”—to the mercy of “bands of idle slaves, who must be left to roam over the country without restraint.” Brown likewise resisted the conscription of those serving in Georgia’s militia because they were indispensable to “the suppression of servile insurrection which our insidious foe now proclaims to the world that it is his intention to incite.” Yet if the planter exemption was essential to the defense of slavery, it only exacerbated the tensions between slaveholders and non-slaveholders. Small farmers, many of them primed by decades of hostility to the disproportionate political power of the planters, denounced the exemption as evidence that the conflict with the North was a “rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight.”7

  The impressment of slaves by the Confederate government had equally ambiguous implications. It was clear from the earliest weeks of the war that the Confederacy could not sustain itself without the impressed labor of thousands of slaves. Yet almost immediately Confederate impressment became the catalyst for the Union’s wartime attack on slavery. Benjamin Butler’s original contraband policy was prompted by the fact that if he returned the slaves to their owners they would be put to work on Confederate fortifications. From that moment on stories of Confederate troops using impressed slave labor stoked the fires of northern antislavery sentiment. It became a cycle: the more slave labor the Confederates impressed the more determined the Yankees became to free the slaves and instead impress them into service for the Union. Soon enough the Confederates justified mass impressment as a means of keeping slaves away from the emancipating hands of Union troops. “Our able-bodied negro men are now being conscripted into the army of the enemy,” one southerner wrote to the Confederate inspector general in August of 1863. To “prevent more of our slaves from being appropriated by the enemy,” he suggested, “we should ourselves bring their services into requisition.” Slaves would not be enlisted as Confederate soldiers, but they
could easily serve the Confederates as “wagoners, pioneers, sappers and miners, &c.” The Union army naturally responded in kind. By the end of the war both sides were ruthlessly exploiting the labor of tens of thousands of black men impressed into the dangerous and demoralizing work of draining swamps, digging ditches, and building fortifications.8

  But Confederate impressments prompted the hostility of slaveholders whose loyalty to the southern cause was driven by their desire to protect their slave property, certainly not to hand it over to government authorities who had no personal stake in taking care of it. Eventually the slaveholders’ resistance to impressments forced the Confederate government to compensate southern masters for any loss of slave property, even as those same masters were sending their sons off to die for the Confederacy without so much as a hint of compensation. Of course, sons were family members whose lives could not be measured in dollars and cents. Slaves were personal property; almost by definition they were available for the right price.9

  Because impressed slaves were most often sent to work on Confederate lines they were particularly susceptible to enticement by nearby Yankee troops. The problem became acute in 1863 when the federal government began actively enlisting able-bodied black men for armed service in the Union army. Thereafter Confederates made concerted efforts to keep such men a safe distance from northern recruiters. As one Confederate general pointed out, “Every sound black male left for the enemy becomes a soldier we have afterward to fight.” In August of 1864, Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston ordered his subordinates to “bring off all male negroes of military age in danger of falling into the enemy’s hands.” In response, the governor of Mississippi warned that Johnston’s orders were counterproductive, for rather than keeping slaves from the Yankees’ impressment they prompted slaves to “fly to the enemy.” The state legislature resolved that Confederate impressments would “hasten the very evil this order is intended to prevent.” Johnston could not deny the validity of his critics’ claim. “We have never been able to keep the impressed negroes with an army near the enemy,” Johnston explained. “They desert.” Rather than return control of impressed slaves to their owners, however, Johnston urged the Confederate Congress to overrule the Mississippi legislature by giving his army full power to remove slaves from out of the way of Union troops.10

  At issue between General Johnston and the Mississippi legislature was the authority of states versus the central government to determine how best to protect the slaveholders’ interests. In the broadest sense protecting slavery was the first responsibility of the Confederate government in Richmond; nothing would ensure slavery’s survival as effectively as a successful war for southern independence. Yet in many ways individual southern states were better prepared to meet the specific challenge of thwarting emancipation. Policing slavery had always been the responsibility of state and local governments. So in addition to all the peacetime laws and policies aimed at thwarting escape and punishing runaways, southern states administered even stronger doses of repression to meet the contingencies of war. Early in the war the Georgia legislature passed a law prescribing the death penalty for any slave found guilty of sabotaging any part of the state’s railroad system. Other state legislatures passed draconian laws authorizing private citizens to shoot-to-kill any slave attempting to escape to Union lines.11

  Because slavery was ultimately policed locally, towns and counties across the South beefed up their militias, organized Home Guards, and stepped up slave patrols. State officials and private citizens alike often petitioned authorities in Richmond to exempt from conscription particular individuals who had proved themselves indispensable to the policing of slavery. Alfred W. Kidd of Lowndes County, Mississippi, was so diligent “in Police duty amongst the slaves” that his neighbors asked that he be exempted from conscription. Owners of dogs who specialized in capturing runaways were especially valued by the locals. William Hatton, for example, owned “a pack of negro dogs and has heretofore employed himself catching runaways.” Hatton’s neighbors declared that “his character for firmness and decision in the management of Slaves is so notorious . . . as to exercise a very salutary restraining influence on their conduct.” Twenty-seven citizens of Dallas County, Alabama, likewise petitioned to exempt Archibald Berrey from the draft on the grounds that he was “the only one that [has] a pack of dogs any where in reach for the purpose of catching negroes.”12

  Where policing proved inadequate there was always terror. The slaveholders had never been squeamish about suppressing slave insurrection, but with the war they redoubled their efforts. Instances of wartime terror would loom large in the autobiographies freed men and women later wrote about their experience of slavery. Years afterward Harry Smith recalled the fate of twelve of his fellow slaves who were caught “giving information” to the Yankees about the whereabouts of pro-Confederate guerillas. “The men were taken down to salt river, a hole cut in the ice and they were singled out, shot and pushed under the ice.” In another case—as Smith remembered it—patrollers caught up with and massacred fifty slaves “on their way to join the Union army.” Yet another group of escapees had “their ears cut off” when they were caught trying “to join the Yankees.” Fearing no reprisal southern rebels killed slaves caught escaping to Union lines. As a warning to others who might have considered escaping white southerners lined the roadsides with the bodies of slaves suspected of rebellion. Officials in Richmond all but winked at reports of black troops slaughtered by their Confederate captors.13

  If the slaves learned early on that they could secure their freedom by escaping to Union lines, they just as quickly learned that they could lose their lives in the attempt. “During the years of 1860 and 1861,” Henry Clay Bruce recalled, he and his fellow slaves “had to keep very mum and always on their masters’ land, because patrols were put out in every township with authority to punish slaves with the lash, if found off their masters’ premises after dark without a written pass from them.” Levi Branham likewise recalled that the masters beefed up the slave patrols during the war to thwart potential escapes. “In 1862,” Branham wrote, “the slave owners had paddle rollers that they used to whip their slaves with when they were caught away from home.”14

  There is no way to fully assess the effect of the Confederate counterrevolution, but it would be foolish to assume that it was ineffective. We have fairly solid estimates for the number of slaves who were emancipated by the war, but cannot even guess at the number of slaves who failed in the attempt, not to mention those who were inhibited from making the attempt. Lincoln launched an aggressive campaign to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation in the seceded states, but the slaveholders did not wilt before the challenge. Throughout the war they commented on the fact that their slaves were “restless” or “unfaithful,” but they also claimed that notwithstanding the restlessness of the slaves their plantations remained “secure.” The slaveholders had gone to war to protect slavery; they would not give it up without a fight.

  MAKING ESCAPE DIFFICULT

  The slaveholders themselves were the first line of defense against military emancipation. With or without the support of the local police, state officials, or the Confederate army, most slaveholders managed to hold their plantations together despite the disruptions of wartime. The simplest and most effective way to thwart emancipation was to “refugee” the slaves, moving them away from enemy lines and out of the way of an advancing Union army. For wealthy masters who owned more than one plantation “refugeeing” could be relatively simple, however painful for the slaves. Charles Heyward, a wealthy South Carolina slaveholder who in 1860 owned three plantations, felt the approach of Union troops in late spring of 1862. “In consequence of the war,” he admitted, his plantations were in a “deranged state of affairs.” In March, he wrote 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.” But Heyward owned 471 slaves when the war began, and he was able to prevent most of them from es
caping. A few days after the fifteen slaves escaped, Heyward “considered it necessary to move away.” He sent most of his slaves to another of his plantations farther inland, where they remained, largely undisturbed, until the closing months of the war.15

  Such moves were common in those parts of the Confederacy threatened by Union occupation—areas like the southern Atlantic coast and the Mississippi Valley. After several of John Screven’s slaves escaped to the Yankees in September of 1862, the South Carolina planter moved the remaining slaves to another one of his plantations, Brewton Hill, farther inland “where they stand but little chance of running away.” Having been safely removed from the coast the slaves “work very cheerfully,” Screven wrote his wife, “though I have no confidence in their fidelity.”16 Farther west slaveholders in the Mississippi Valley often refugeed their slaves to Texas, where there were few Union troops to harass them.17

  Louisa Alexander, a Georgia plantation mistress, was distressed by the reports of slaves near Savannah running to Union lines, but what outraged her even more were reports of slaves who refused to be moved inland beyond the reach of the Yankees. “It seems to me in such a case,” she suggested, Confederate troops should be brought onto the plantations to “march” the slaves off “at the point of the bayonet.” Meanwhile, “companies of cavalry [should] scour the whole woods about the neighborhood with the understanding that every negro out will be shot down. This seems dreadful doctrine to preach,” Alexander admitted, “but it does seem to me it must come to that. It is we or they must suffer.”18 This was war. And just as Union authorities were coming to the conclusion that the slaves were the only reliably loyal southerners, the slaveholders were coming to the conclusion that the slaves had to be treated like the enemy.