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

by James Oakes

  Within weeks the War Department opened seventeen black recruitment stations in Maryland, over the renewed protests of Governor Bradford. The Board of Claims, established to determine the loyalty of masters whose slaves had been recruited, was stacked with radicals hostile to slavery. As the federal government engaged in its not-so-veiled assault on slavery in Maryland, state politics shifted in ways that reflected the severely weakened power of the slaveholding class. The victory of the unionists in the 1861 elections had prompted a large number of Maryland slaveholders to defect to the Confederacy. Once in power the unionists imposed loyalty oaths that effectively disfranchised many more slaveholders. Over the course of 1863 long-simmering anti-slaveholder politics mushroomed into antislavery politics. With the hard-core proslavery element effectively squashed, politics in Maryland was no longer a struggle between secessionists and unionists, but between conservative and radical unionists.48

  In the 1863 state elections conservatives struggled to restrain antislavery radicalism. At first they dismissed all talk of emancipation as “unwise and impolitic.” Pressured to go further, conservatives ended up calling for a “sound” and “practical” emancipation,” by which they meant gradual abolition with compensation for the owners. With each passing month, though, the radical opponents of slavery grew bolder in their demands. By November the radical unionists had staked out a position in favor of immediate, uncompensated abolition of slavery. In rhetoric that fused hostility to slaveholders with hostility to slavery, Maryland radicals denounced “the domination of an interest over free men; of property over people; of aristocratic privilege over republican equality, of a minority over a majority.” It was in these 1863 canvasses that Henry Winter Davis emerged as a leading voice of Maryland radicals, and his own shifting position reflected the general drift of the state’s politics. If compensation “can be gotten, let it come,” he declared, but “if it can not be gotten, Emancipation will come without it.” The radicals, in league with the Union army, did what they could to suppress the conservative vote—test oaths, arbitrary arrests, and voter intimidation—resulting in a lopsided victory for the supporters of abolition. But the conservatives seemed to grasp that even without electoral chicanery the radicals would have won anyway. By December conservative unionists like Governor Bradford were abandoning their support for gradual emancipation and endorsing a constitutional convention that would abolish slavery immediately. Lincoln repeated to Maryland emancipationists the same thing he had told Louisianans the year before—that notwithstanding his preference for gradual abolition, his primary concern was to get slavery abolished by whatever means garnered the most support within the state.49

  In early February of 1864, Maryland unionists in the legislature endorsed a referendum for a constitutional convention, and the elections for delegates offered the state’s voters a straight-up choice between the unionists who supported immediate abolition by means of a new state constitution and Democrats who opposed both. “If you are opposed to free-loveism, communism, agrarianism,” Democrats declared, “vote against a Convention.” Not surprisingly the slaveholding districts in the southern part of the state rejected the convention by two-to-one-margins, but they were swamped by the antislavery votes from Baltimore and the northern counties.50

  The constitutional convention met at Annapolis on April 27, 1864, but it did not complete its work until September 6, when the delegates sent to the people a new constitution that duplicated the language of the Thirteenth Amendment passed by the U.S. Senate the previous spring: “Hereafter, in this State, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except in punishment of crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted; and all persons held to service or labor, as slaves, are hereby declared free.” Democrats denounced emancipation as “robbery.” They tried to secure compensation but, failing that, tried instead to establish an apprenticeship system. All such halfway measures were easily swept aside by the emboldened antislavery forces.51

  Their boldness, however, did not command a majority of votes in the constitutional referendum held on October 12. Lincoln made his own position clear two days before the ballot. “[I]t is no secret, that I wish success to this provision,” he declared. “I desire it on every consideration. I wish all men to be free.” Nevertheless, when they went to the polls on October 12, it looked as though Maryland voters had defeated the new constitution by a tally of 27,541 to 29,536. Only the uncounted soldiers’ ballots, which split ten to one in favor, saved the antislavery constitution. On October 29, Governor Bradford announced that Maryland’s new constitution had been ratified by a mere 263 votes. Slavery was finally abolished in Maryland.52 When news arrived in Washington, Lincoln congratulated “Maryland, and the nation, and the world, upon the event.”53

  At that point the fate of slavery was still undecided in Tennessee. As with Arkansas, Lincoln pressed for the organization of a loyal antislavery government as soon as the Confederates were expelled from the state, months before he issued his Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction. His strongest ally in the struggle to get slavery abolished in Tennessee was the state’s military governor, Andrew Johnson. “Not a moment should be lost” organizing a loyal government, Lincoln urged in September of 1863. But loyalty would not be enough. “Get emancipation into your new State government,” Lincoln told Johnson, “and there will be no such word as fail for your case.” To help ensure that Tennessee would remain secure against further Confederate military incursions, Lincoln also urged Johnson to “do your utmost to get every man you can, black and white, under arms at the very earliest moment.”54

  Johnson made repeated attempts to organize a loyal government on the basis of Lincoln’s plan. He called for elections to state offices on March 5, 1864, but almost no “loyal” citizens appeared at the polls. In May, Johnson made another attempt, this time in Knoxville, to organize a loyal convention, but the majority opposed abolition and the movement died. Another convention met in Nashville in September. This time military raids kept numerous delegates from attending, and those who participated endorsed abolition by means of amendments to the Tennessee state constitution. To that end, the delegates called for a constitutional convention to assemble in Nashville on January 9, 1865. As the 1864 elections approached, though, it was not clear what Tennessee would do.55

  In Missouri, a familiar combination of loyalty oaths and slaveholder defections to the Confederacy might not have been enough to undermine the political power of Missouri’s slave owners, but their financial self-beheading finished them off. They had invested heavily in an insecure pro-Confederate state government by borrowing heavily from insecure pro-southern banks. When Union forces expelled the rebels and took over the state they installed unionist bankers who called in the loans and foreclosed on the rebel investors. In an unusual real-world test of land confiscation, the slaveholders’ farms were expropriated and sold off in lots. The slaveholding class was thereby destroyed.56 There had been a current of antislavery politics in antebellum Missouri, but when the war came the subtraction of planter power and the addition of federal pressure gave the opponents of slavery an unusual opportunity.

  Federal pressure was already apparent in early September of 1862, when Secretary of War Stanton informed General John M. Schofield that “disloyal persons” in Missouri were “subject to the provisions of the [Second] Confiscation Act.” Stanton was effectively ordering Schofield to emancipate all slaves owned by rebel masters, something General John Frémont had tried to do a year earlier, before Congress had authorized it. Schofield issued the appropriate orders, but in the autobiography he published after the war he all but boasted that he had done nothing to implement Stanton’s instructions. Schofield’s replacement, General Samuel Curtis, had very different views “in regard to the negro question.” On November 1, 1862, he distinguished between the slaves of loyal owners—who should be left alone—and “the negroes of men in rebellion or giving encouragement to rebellion that are free.” Since the majority
of Missouri’s slaveholders were probably disloyal, Curtis’s policy represented a direct federal threat to slavery in the state.57

  As in Maryland, Missouri’s conservative unionists—led by Governor Hamilton Gamble—initially pushed back against federal antislavery policies. But radical gains in the 1862 elections persuaded Gamble to support gradual abolition as the alternative to the immediate abolition endorsed by the radicals. In July of 1863, the provisional government approved a gradual abolition statute, but it would not be submitted to voters in a referendum until a year and a half later. Meanwhile, as Missouri’s slaveholding class was dying, the radicals were gaining ground. In November they elected B. Gratz Brown to the Senate. By 1864 both of Missouri’s senators in Washington were avowed supporters of the Thirteenth Amendment. The presidential election in 1864 finally split the unionists apart. The most conservative among them went over to the Democrats and endorsed George McClellan. Gradual and immediate emancipationists sent competing delegations to the National Union (Republican) convention in June. Since the Republicans were by then committed to a thirteenth amendment, the radical delegation was seated. Back in Missouri, however, the fate of the radicals—and with it the future of slavery in the state—depended on the outcome of the November elections for a new governor and legislature, the first such elections to be held in Missouri since before the war began.58

  LIKE MILITARY EMANCIPATION, state abolition was a limited success rather than an abject failure. No state had abolished slavery in more than half a century until, in 1864 alone, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Maryland did so. By the end of the year there was a good chance that Missouri and Tennessee would do so as well. But—again like military emancipation—state abolition was not enough to destroy slavery. In some states all of the Union efforts to force abolition had failed. In early 1864, Lincoln’s representatives in Florida gave up any hope of finding even 10 percent of the 1860 electorate willing to take the loyalty oath. In Delaware, opposition to abolition seemed to strengthen rather than weaken over the course of the war, despite the fact that a substantial number of Delaware blacks enlisted in the Union army. Most disconcerting of all to Republicans was Kentucky, where the slaveholders resisted all federal pressure and instead launched legal challenges that threatened to undermine the basis of Union antislavery policy. In all but one of the most heavily populated slave states of the Deep South, the federal government was in no position whatsoever to force the issue of abolition. And even in those states that had succumbed to federal pressure, wartime abolition was sorely lacking in democratic and constitutional legitimacy. Slavery could be abolished only if secessionist voters—often electoral majorities that included the wealthiest, most powerful men in the state—were somehow disfranchised. But they could not be disfranchised forever, and so the question Republicans began asking in 1862 was more salient than ever in 1864: What will happen to slavery when the war is over, even in the states that had abolished slavery? The answer—which is to say the fate of slavery—depended on the outcome of the election of 1864.

  THE ELECTION OF 1864

  On June 17, 1864, two days after the proslavery minority in the House blocked passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, the New York Times observed that the Democrats had thereby confronted voters with “a first-class civil question, at the coming election.” The campaign might otherwise have focused exclusively on the Lincoln administration’s conduct of the war, but now the Republican Party had “two momentous objects before it.” The first was the reelection of Abraham Lincoln, which, the Times said, would “insure that the war shall be prosecuted until the last rebel soldier lays down his arms.” That was always going to be an issue. Now, though, there was a second one: “the election of two-thirds of the members of the next Congress,” giving the Republicans the votes they needed to send to the states “the amendment abolishing all Slavery in the land forever.” By their action the Democrats ensured that the 1864 election would do the very thing they most objected to: render inseparable the issues of slavery and the conduct of the war.59

  Actually, the Republicans had made the amendment a partisan political issue even before the June 15 vote in the House. Rechristening themselves the Union Party, Republicans had met in Baltimore on June 7 and 8 and easily nominated Abraham Lincoln for reelection on a platform forthrightly endorsing the unconditional and immediate abolition of slavery everywhere in the United States. Although the party had never before endorsed such a proposal, the Republicans nonetheless fitted it into their traditional theme of liberty and Union. The primary purpose of the war remained the same. It is “the highest duty of every American citizen” to maintain the “integrity of the Union and the paramount authority of the Constitution,” the party platform announced. Republicans would accept nothing less than the “unconditional surrender” of the rebels to federal authority. As they had done from the outset of the war, however, Republicans linked the fate of the Union directly to slavery. Slavery “was the cause, and now constitutes the strength of this Rebellion.” Hence all congressional laws and presidential proclamations aimed at slavery were more than justified. Determined to aim “a deathblow at this gigantic evil,” Republicans endorsed “an amendment to the Constitution” that would “terminate and forever prohibit the existence of Slavery” in the United States.60 This was the only plank Lincoln responded to after his renomination. “I approve the declaration in favor of so amending the Constitution as to prohibit slavery throughout the nation,” he said.61

  Democrats likewise reiterated their long-standing denial that slavery was the cause of the war and continued to insist that slavery should have been left alone. They most strenuously objected to the Republican policy of making abolition a condition for terminating the war. This meant, of course, that Democrats strongly opposed the Thirteenth Amendment. They would maintain the Constitution “as it is” and restore the Union “as it was.” To be sure, the party was divided between War Democrats, who favored the armed struggle for the restoration of the Union, and Peace Democrats, who were willing to negotiate an armistice recognizing Confederate independence. But just as the antislavery consensus prevailed despite the divisions among Republicans, Peace and War Democrats generally agreed that slavery was not the cause of the war and abolition should not be a condition for reunion.

  Hoping to overcome the divisions between the factions within the party, the Democrats postponed their convention until late August, nearly three months after the Republicans renominated Lincoln. In those three months a new war weariness spread over the North. The brutal slugfest in Virginia between Grant and Lee—which many northerners hoped would end the war very shortly—had instead ended inconclusively, with Lee’s army besieged within the seemingly impregnable defenses at Petersburg. Astounded by huge numbers of casualties that had produced no definitive outcome, more and more northerners began to wonder if the Democrats might be right after all. Maybe holding out for unconditional surrender and the abolition of slavery had prolonged the war unnecessarily. By August some Republicans were wondering if Lincoln was electable, and even Lincoln came to doubt that he would win in November.62

  Lincoln knew that if he lost to a Democrat—any Democrat—slavery would almost certainly survive the war. All he could do was weaken slavery further by putting added pressure for abolition on the loyal slave states and by increasing the number of slaves actually emancipated by the time he left office. In late August—when he and his fellow Republicans were most pessimistic about his chances for reelection—Lincoln invited the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass to the White House to discuss the matter. They had met a year earlier when Douglass, disturbed by reports of abusive treatment of black soldiers by the Confederates, visited Washington to urge Lincoln to issue a retaliation order. In 1864 the invitation came from Lincoln, and when Douglass arrived he found the president in an “alarmed” state, disturbed by calls for a negotiated peace sounded not only by Democrats but also by moderates within Lincoln’s own party. Even Horace Greeley, a strong advocate of emancip
ation, was calling on Lincoln to broker a speedy end to the war by sending emissaries to Niagara Falls to meet with representatives of the Confederacy. The peace conference was a southern setup, and when it failed the Confederates released a letter Lincoln had written “To Whom it May Concern,” making it clear that he would not consider any restoration of the Union that did not also include the complete abolition of slavery. The letter had provoked another wave of Democratic denunciations of Lincoln, but even a few skittish Republican conservatives were urging Lincoln to withdraw the condition. Lincoln would not do that, but he was considering issuing a public statement of clarification. He would reiterate the standard Republican position—that it would be impossible for him to wage a war purely for the purpose of abolishing slavery. Slavery was the cause of the rebellion and abolition was a precondition for its suppression—but abolition could never be the purpose of the war. The public would not stand for it, Congress would not authorize it, and the Constitution did not sanction it. He showed Douglass a draft of the statement and asked whether it should be published. No, Douglass said. It would be misconstrued, by friends and enemies alike, as an indication that Lincoln was not as committed to abolition as he actually was. Lincoln never did publish the letter. Nevertheless, the president worried that if the Democrats won, they would swiftly abandon abolition as a condition for reunion. Convinced that slaves actually freed by the war could never be re-enslaved, Lincoln wanted Douglass to help ensure that as many slaves were emancipated as possible.63