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

by James Oakes

  In theory the Union was committed to universal emancipation in the seceded states, but in practice its armies could not possibly emancipate three million slaves in the areas covered by the Emancipation Proclamation. If nothing else the Confederate counterrevolution ensured that untold numbers of slaves would never make it to the freedom they were promised once they entered Union lines. Even without fierce resistance from the slaveholders, though, universal emancipation would have been impossible to achieve in practice. Congress could pass a law freeing the slaves of all rebels, and Lincoln could proclaim emancipation everywhere in the rebel states, but not even the Union army at full strength could make that happen. Most slaves never reached Union lines, and Union troops never reached most of the slaves. If Lincoln was right, if the only guarantee of postwar freedom was actual, physical emancipation during the war, most slaves would still be enslaved when the war was over.

  “WHAT SHALL I DO WITH THE NEGROES?”

  And yet black men enlisted by the tens of thousands. Families and communities uprooted themselves. For the chance of freedom they risked separation from their loved ones, reprisal by their masters, capture by the Confederates, and indifference or worse from their Union liberators. The Union army was never prepared for them. From the earliest months of the war Union officers were daunted by the numbers of contrabands coming into their lines. A steady stream of pleading letters flew up the military chain of command, all of them asking the same question: What am I to do with them? Many arrived half-starved after strenuous escapes or having borne the brunt of wartime shortages on their own farms and plantations. After complaining that most slaves seemed unwilling to escape to his lines, even General Sherman was soon overwhelmed by those who did come. A year earlier General Frémont had boldly declared the emancipation of all rebel-owned slaves in Missouri, Sherman noted ruefully, but how would he have responded to the vast number of “refugee negros” now streaming into Union camps? “What could he do with them?” They were “free,” he admitted, “but freedom don’ clothe them, feed them & shelter them.”30 From Louisiana, General Benjamin Butler sent letters to Washington wondering how he could provide food and shelter to the tens of thousands of freed people, even as his own commissary was providing rations for thousands of starving whites. John Eaton, farther up the Mississippi Valley, raised the same issue. Aware of the looming humanitarian disaster, Lincoln administration officials, including Lincoln himself, ordered Union generals to provide the freed people with food and shelter from army supplies. By the second year of the war the military was feeding tens of thousands of freed men and women and desperately trying to find shelter for them. It was the largest program to provide direct aid to individuals the federal government had ever undertaken.

  But it was never enough. There was no federal bureaucracy, not even the Union army, equipped to handle the numbers of desperate human beings arriving day after day at Union camps. Even the best medical care was often useless since no one yet understood the germ theory of disease. In September of 1862, General Butler asked one of his officers to explain reports that “some of the negro women and children who have sought protection within your lines, are not sufficiently provided with shelter from the inclemency of the weather.” The colonel responded frankly. “The report of a want of protection for the Negroes is correct,” he wrote, “and I have been trying to-day to secure suitable shelter for them, but they have come in upon me so fast I have found it very difficult.” Butler in turn acknowledged the problem to his superiors and detailed the lengths to which he went to supply desperate whites and blacks alike with food and shelter.31

  Union authorities, already overwhelmed by the scope of the humanitarian problem, were bedeviled by reports of individual Union soldiers, particularly from the Border States, who resisted federal emancipation policy and abused the contrabands. In one notorious case late in the war, Kentucky-born General Speed Smith Fry at Camp Nelson ordered the expulsion of the families of black soldiers during an especially harsh winter. As a direct result, Joseph Miller’s wife and their four children died from exposure and hunger. One of Fry’s own officers, Captain T. E. Hall, wrote desperate letters asking that something “be done for these poor women and children.” Four days after issuing his notorious edict, Fry was ordered to reverse it, to let those he expelled back into Camp Nelson, and “if necessary to erect buildings for them.” When Fry balked, Hall was given exclusive authority over the contrabands. Fry’s outrageous behavior caused a national scandal. The army launched an investigation and concluded that the expulsion order was entirely improper. New homes were built, and the families of black soldiers were given rations from the army commissary. Two months later, in the letter appointing General John Palmer as the new commander of the entire Department of the Ohio—which included Kentucky—Secretary Stanton indicated that Lincoln was “grieved” by the reports of “cruel and barbarous treatment” of blacks. “Your hand should be laid heavily upon all outrages of this nature,” Stanton wrote. “To the destitute women and children of soldiers in the service of the United States, without regard to color, protection and support should be given.” A few weeks later, Republicans in Congress, shocked by the scandal in Kentucky, passed a resolution reaffirming the emancipation of the wives and children of freed men who enlisted in the Union army.32

  • • •

  BY 1862 THE NUMBER OF SLAVES flooding into Union lines was so great that the government was transferring them to “contraband camps” in all parts of the South occupied by the army. Freed people arrived in steady numbers, often in boatloads. On a single day in October of 1862, three hundred and sixty emancipated slaves arrived in Washington from Virginia, “having at different times made their way within our lines. They were immediately sent to the contraband camp.” In November there were reportedly more than five hundred contrabands in the camp. In May of 1863, six hundred and fifty more contrabands arrived in Washington from Aquia Creek in a single afternoon. Quickly overwhelmed, the camps soon became notorious for their filth, disease, and criminal violence. Drinking water polluted by the sewage led to outbreaks of dysentery. In December of 1862, the overcrowded contraband camp in Cincinnati, Ohio, was described as “disgraceful to barbarism.”33

  The Emancipation Proclamation only worsened the problems by increasing the numbers. In early 1863, visitors to the camp in the District of Columbia were warned “not to enter because smallpox was prevalent there.” By then there were three thousand people living in the camp, with as many as twenty dying each day. As long as the epidemic raged, no one was permitted to leave the camp, and the criminal element began preying on the desperate. Gangs of angry whites sometimes attacked the contraband camps. In June of 1862, the Union cavalry was dispatched to the camp in Washington to put down an assault by “some disorderly whites.” Conservatives complained that blacks were living in “idleness” at the expense of the taxpayer. More reliable accounts described the inhabitants of the camps as “suffering intensely, many without bed covering & having to use any bits of carpeting to cover themselves—Many dying of want.”34 By late 1863 and 1864, conditions in some of the camps improved as Union officials became familiar with the problems and as private relief agencies pitched in to help. Federal officials set up “model” camps, notably Freedman’s Village in Arlington, Virginia, on the confiscated estate of Robert E. Lee’s wife. It is not clear, however, that there was general improvement over time, if only because the numbers of contrabands grew exponentially and the army remained overwhelmed.35

  The alternative to the camps—or at least the alternative that came immediately to the minds of antislavery Republicans—was to put the former slaves back to work as free laborers. Though “able-bodied male contrabands” could enlist in the Union army, Lincoln admitted, “the rest are in confusion and destitution.” Rather than let them suffer in camps, it would be better for the Union army to locate abandoned plantations and “put as many contrabands on such, as they will hold—that is, as can draw subsistence from them.” Loyal ow
ners could employ them “on wages, to be paid to the contrabands themselves.” Responding to Lincoln’s suggestion in March of 1863, General Stephen Hurlbut ordered two large contraband camps on the Mississippi River “to be broken up, and all the negroes not in the actual service of the United States will be sent to Island No. 10 and set to work.” This, at least, was more consistent with general Republican Party principles. If emancipation meant anything, it meant not contraband camps or colonization but free labor.36

  Yet even as General Hurlbut was closing down contraband camps and sending the freed people to work for wages on abandoned plantations, other Union officers were rounding up unemployed freed people on the streets of New Orleans and Memphis and sending them to contraband camps to earn their own “subsistence.”37 In an attempt to prevent the recapture and re-enslavement of freed people, the Union army, especially in the Mississippi Valley, forcibly removed thousands of contrabands from their farms and plantations to areas at a safe distance from the Confederates—not only onto islands in the Mississippi River but also to Memphis and sometimes as far away as Cincinnati.

  • • •

  THE GREAT PARADOX OF military emancipation was that although the Union army was overwhelmed by the numbers of contrabands entering its lines, those numbers were never more than a small fraction of the slaves in the rebel states. The Yankees swept through plantation districts like a tornado, destroying deserted farms and uprooting slavery along the way. Like a tornado, though, the severity of the damage ended abruptly at the edge of the storm’s track. Sherman’s men cut a ten-mile path of destruction wherever they went, but their marches traced a thin ribbon over Georgia’s vast terrain and so swept up only a fraction of the state’s slaves. By the time it reached Savannah, Sherman’s army had ten thousand freed slaves marching with it, but there were 462,230 slaves in Georgia according to the 1860 census. Another seven thousand slaves joined Sherman’s army as it marched through South Carolina, but South Carolina had 402,541 slaves when the war began. In the most concerted attack on slavery during the most deliberately destructive campaign of the war, Sherman had dislodged only about 2 percent of the slaves in Georgia and South Carolina.

  Of the nearly four million slaves living in the South in 1860, approximately 525,000—just over 13 percent—were freed by the end of the war and living under the rubric of federal authority in various capacities, as free laborers on farms and plantations, as military laborers or soldiers in the Union army, or as inhabitants of the contraband camps. Of that number, approximately 50,000 were from the four Border States. In 1860 the U.S. census counted 3,520,116 slaves in the eleven states that went on to form the Confederacy, and approximately 474,000 of those were freed by the end of the war. These figures—compiled by the Freedmen and Southern Society Project—are naturally subject to various qualifications, but they are the best, most carefully compiled numbers we have.38 They are particularly apt because they closely track the criteria Lincoln and many Republicans had set for the freed people whose emancipations were most legally secure: those who were actually freed by the war.

  “Those who shall have tasted actual freedom,” Lincoln said, “I believe can never be slaves, or quasi-slaves again.”39 When the Civil War ended, however, no more than 14 percent of the slaves in the eleven Confederate states had “tasted actual freedom.” Lincoln had proclaimed them “forever free.” But were they?

  RE-ENSLAVEMENT

  On March 11, 1862, during the congressional debate over the Second Confiscation Act, Virginia Senator John Carlile warned that when the war ended, “self-preservation would compel the States within which slavery now exists, if the slaves were emancipated, either to expel them from the State, or re-enslave them.” One month later, on April 10, Senator Waitman Willey—also of Virginia—repeated the threat. Emancipation would “increase the free negro population” of the state, Willey declared, and Virginia “will be driven not only to re-enslave those who may be manumitted under the operation of the present bill, but also to re-enslave the sixty-thousand free negroes already there.” How would this be possible? Delaware’s Senator Willard Saulsbury explained. By 1870 this war will be over, and unless state governments are destroyed in the process, power over slavery will be returned to the states. When that happens, Saulsbury warned, the southern states “will not only re-enslave every person that you attempt to set free, but they will re-enslave the whole race.”40

  It had happened before, elsewhere. During the upheavals of the French Revolution slavery was abolished not only on San Domingue—later Haiti—but also on the Caribbean island Guadeloupe, in 1794. Invoking the revolutionary language of citizenship, black insurgents on Guadeloupe established a republic, allying themselves with the French in their war against Great Britain. From the start, however, the fragile republic was beset by internal divisions between former slaves demanding greater equality and former masters allied with merchants intent on suppressing black discontent. When Napoleon came to power in 1799 he tilted the French state against the former slaves, reasserted its colonial authority, defeated the black rebels, and in 1804 reestablished slavery on Guadeloupe. For another four decades, slavery survived on the island.41

  Re-enslavement was no abstract threat. Once again Kentucky proved especially zealous in its determination to thwart emancipation. When slaves from Alabama and Tennessee followed the Union army as it retreated into Kentucky, authorities in that state imprisoned them as runaway slaves. Those who were not claimed by their owners in Alabama and Tennessee were instead sold to new owners in Kentucky. This was an obvious violation of the Second Confiscation Act and the Emancipation Proclamation, and soon enough Lincoln’s judge advocate general, Joseph Holt, ruled that the re-enslavement of blacks in Kentucky was illegal. Outraged by reports of freed people being re-enslaved, Lincoln instructed Secretary of War Stanton to put a stop to it. Stanton in turn fired off a telegram to General Ambrose Burnside ordering him, on behalf of the president, to “take immediate measures” to prevent any persons freed by the war “from being returned to bondage.”42

  If re-enslavement was possible in the loyal slave state of Kentucky—where federal pressure to free slaves was particularly intense—it was routine in the Confederate states wherever the Union army was pushed back. Among blacks in the rebel states, re-enslavement was a familiar wartime experience. Slaves learned about the threat of re-enslavement as quickly as they learned about the Emancipation Proclamation. Beginning with some of the earliest Union invasions of the Confederacy, southern slaves worried about their fate should their masters return. In the first year of the war, the contrabands on the Sea Islands wanted assurance from Union officials that they would be “protected against their rebel masters.” Not even free blacks were safe. Free blacks who left the state of Georgia were forbidden to return lest they “be sold as a slave.”43

  Slaves had good reason to be concerned. Why would the slaveholders ever acknowledge the legitimacy of a Union-decreed emancipation? To a slaveholder an “emancipated” slave was nothing more than a fugitive slave. As far as military and political leaders of the Confederacy were concerned, there were no emancipated slaves; there were only runaways. Indeed, what northerners called “re-enslavement,” the slaveholders called “recapture.” Even in the North, Democrats insisted that military emancipation was unconstitutional; under the Confederate constitution it had no meaning whatsoever. Confederate political and military leaders could not recognize captured black soldiers as anything other than runaway slaves, and the first obligation of southern officials—forcefully decreed by the Confederate constitution—was to return runaway slaves to their owners. When Confederate General Leonidas Polk asked Jefferson Davis what to do with captured black Union soldiers, Davis’s answer was unambiguous: “If the negro soldiers are escaped slaves they should be held safely for recovery by their owners.” Polk wrote back that all of the captured soldiers were “escaped slaves.” Should I “inform their owners & deliver them to them?” Polk asked. Once again Davis was clear: “Cap
tured slaves should be returned to their masters.” On May 31, 1863, the Confederate Congress passed a law requiring the same thing: black soldiers who had been slaves were to be treated as escaped slaves and returned to their masters.44

  But to northerners this was re-enslavement, and as outrageous as it was on its own terms, what disturbed Lincoln and the Republicans at least as much were the inescapable implications of re-enslavement for the fate of southern blacks once the war ended. Clearly the southern states never recognized the legality of any emancipations justified by the Union under the laws of war. There was good reason to believe that when peace was restored and federal war powers evaporated, the former Confederate states would re-enslave those who had been emancipated by the Union.

  When Union officials first addressed the issue of re-enslavement they were concerned to discount the possibility that the Union might renege on its promise of freedom by returning freed blacks to slavery. Writing from the Sea Islands in the first year of the war, Edward Pierce, charged with supervising the contrabands, declared that it would be immoral for the federal government to allow re-enslavement. It was not “possible to imagine any rulers now or in the future,” Pierce wrote, “who will ever turn their backs on the laborers who have been received, as these have been, into the service of the United States.” Likewise Treasury Secretary Salmon 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.” Eventually Union policymakers took the broader position that slaves actually freed by the war could never be re-enslaved. Lincoln said this repeatedly. Slaves whose labor had been “forfeited” by their owners and subsequently emancipated by the government could never be re-enslaved, he explained in March of, 1862. “I do not believe it would be physically possible, for the General government, to return persons so circumstanced, to actual slavery,” he explained. “I believe there would be physical resistance to it, which could neither be turned aside by argument, nor driven away by force.” This remained Lincoln’s baseline position until the end of the war.45