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

by James Oakes

  20 William Birney, James G. Birney and His Times: The Genesis of the Republican Party with Some Account of the Abolition Movements in the South before 1828 (New York: D. Appleton, 1890), pp. 261ff.

  21 Ibid., pp. 262–263.

  22 Niven, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 50–54. For the legal context of the Matilda case, see Betty Fladeland, James Gillespie Birney: Slaveholder to Abolitionist (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1955), pp. 148–149, 152; tenBroek, Equal under Law, pp. 38–39; Thomas Morris, Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North, 1780–1861 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), pp. 88–90; Robert Cover, Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), pp. 162–174; Wiecek, Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism, pp. 191–192; Finkelman, Imperfect Union, pp. 160–162.

  23 These quotations come from the two cases arising from the escape, the first against Matilda Lawrence herself and the second against Birney. Both Lawrence and Birney were defended by Salmon P. Chase, and the quotes are all his. See In re Matilda, from Speech of Salmon P. Chase in the Case of the Colored Woman Matilda (Cincinnati: Pugh & Dodd, 1837); and Birney v. The State of Ohio, 8 Ohio 230, 232 (1837). For the legal context of Ohio v. Birney, see Finkelman, Imperfect Union, pp. 162–163.

  24 Finkelman, Imperfect Union, pp. 162–163.

  25 [Theodore Dwight Weld], The Power of Congress over the District of Columbia (New York: J. F. Trow, 1838), p. 39. For political context, see tenBroek, Equal under Law, pp. 21–23; Wiecek, Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism, pp. 189–191; Helen Knowles, “Slavery and the Constitution: A Special Relationship,” Slavery & Abolition 28 (2007), pp. 309–328. On Weld’s role in the antislavery movement, see Barnes, Antislavery Impulse; Benjamin P. Thomas, Theodore Weld, Crusader for Freedom (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1950); James M. McPherson, “The Fight against the Gag Rule: Joshua Leavitt and Antislavery Insurgency in the Whig Party, 1839–1842,” Journal of Negro History 48 (July 1963), pp. 188–195.

  26 Weld, Power of Congress, pp. 13, 41–43.

  27 New York Plaindealer, Sept. 22, 1838, quoted in Sean Wilentz, “Slavery, Antislavery, and Jacksonian Democracy,” in Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway, eds., The Market Revolution in America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), p. 216; Morris, Life of Thomas Morris, p. 155. See also Jonathan Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 17–48.

  28 Farrand, ed., Records of the Federal Convention, vol. 2, pp. 374, 416–417; Argument of John Quincy Adams, Before the Supreme Court of the United States, In the Case of the United States, Appellants, vs. Cinque, and Others, Africans, Captured on the Schooner Amistad . . . (New York: S. W. Benedict, 1841), p. 39.

  29 Groves v. Slaughter, 15 Peters (U.S.) 449 (1841). On the Groves case, see Paul Finkelman, “John McLean: Moderate Abolitionists and Supreme Court Politician,” Vanderbilt Law Review 62 (2009), pp. 552–554; Harold Melvin Hyman and William M. Wiecek, Equal Justice under Law: Constitutional Development, 1835–1875 (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 101–102.

  30 Philanthropist (Cincinnati), Nov. 3, 1841. See also David L. Lightner, Slavery and the Commerce Power: How the Struggle against the Interstate Slave Trade Led to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

  31 Glyndon G. Van Deusen, William Henry Seward (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 67; George E. Baker, ed., The Works of William H. Seward (New York: Redfield, 1853), vol. 1, p. 71; CW, vol. 2, p. 245.

  32 Daniel Webster to Edward Everett, Jan. 29, 1842, reprinted in William Jay, The Creole Case and Mr. Webster’s Dispatch . . . (New York: Redfield, 1842). Details of the insurrection are taken from Webster’s account, on pp. 5–6. Quotation is from p. 6. For background, see Edward Rugemeyer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), pp. 176ff.

  33 Speech of Salmon P. Chase, p. 8.

  34 Jay, Creole Case, p. 12; Charles Sumner to Jacob Harvey, Jan. 14, 1842, in Edward L. Pierce, ed., Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893), vol. 2, p. 200.

  35 Pierce, ed., Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, vol. 2, p. 200; Jay, Creole Case, pp. 18–19.

  36 Journal of the House of Representatives, vol. 37, p. 567. See also James Brewer Stewart, Joshua R. Giddings and the Tactics of Radical Politics (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970), esp. pp. 62–78.

  37 Barnes, Antislavery Impulse, pp. 161–170; Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–1850 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), pp. 118–136; Richard H. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 24–79; Louis S. Gerteis, Morality and Utility in American Antislavery Reform (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), pp. 37ff.

  38 The 1844 platform appears as Appendix C in Johnson, Liberty Party, pp. 315–322.

  39 Ibid., pp. 56–61.

  40 Quotations from the 1848 Free Soil Party platform, reprinted in Schlesinger, ed., History of American Presidential Elections, vol. 2, pp. 902–905. On the antislavery critique of the “Slave Power,” see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 73–102. On the Slave Power as a political reality, see Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000). For a different but complementary approach to the influence of slaveholders on American politics, see Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

  41 On the Free Soil Party, see Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, pp. 170–253; Frederick J. Blue, The Free Soilers: Third Party Politics, 1848–1854 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973); John Mayfield, Rehearsal for Republicanism: Free Soil and the Politics of Antislavery (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1980); Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, pp. 163–192. On the determination of the Whigs and Democrats to exclude antislavery from national politics, see David Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), pp. 121ff.; Donald J. Ratcliffe, “The Decline of Antislavery Politics, 1815–1840,” in John Craig Hammond and Matthew Mason, eds., Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), pp. 267–290.

  42 Baker, ed., Works of William H. Seward, vol. 1, pp. 73–74. The 1844 Liberty Party platform explicitly declared that the antislavery principles of natural and common law were embedded in the Constitution—exactly the point Seward would make in his 1850 “higher law” speech.

  43 Ibid., pp. 78, 60–62.

  44 Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, pp. 190ff.; Johnson, Liberty Party, p. 57; Wilentz, “Slavery, Antislavery, and Jacksonian Democracy,” pp. 216–217.

  45 Baker, ed., Works of William Seward, vol. 1, pp. 86–87.

  46 Ibid., p. 87.

  47 Sumner, Freedom National; Slavery Sectional, p. 31.

  48 On the legal issues prompted by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, see Morris, Free Men All; Steven Lubet, Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).

  49 Howard Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Davis, Inhuman Bondage, pp. 12–26.

  50 Argument of John Quincy Adams, pp. 6, 8–9.

  51 On the relationship of slavery to the diplomatic history of the early republic, see Fehrenbacher, Slaveholding Republic.

  52 Quotations in Burrus M. Carnahan, Act of Justice: Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Laws of War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), pp. 8–9. See also William Lee Miller, Arguing about Slavery: John Quincy Adams and the Great Battle in the United States Congress (New York: Knopf, 1996).

  53 Carnahan, A
ct of Justice, pp. 10–18. On the military use of slaves, see Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan, Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, pp. 289–293; Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, pp. 331–380; Laird W. Bergad, The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 251–290.

  54 Carnahan, Act of Justice, p. 14.

  55 Weld, Power of Congress, pp. 45–47; Johnson, Liberty Party, p. 321; Baker, ed., Works of William H. Seward, vol. 1, pp. 85, 86, 88.

  56 Joseph Story, The Conflict of Laws (Boston: Redfield, 834), pp. 92–93; David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), p. 388.

  57 Schlesinger, ed., History of American Presidential Elections, vol. 2, pp. 1037, 1125. On the Republicans in the 1850s, see Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men; William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, pp. 521–796. On the Democrats, see Joel Silbey, A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, 1860–1868 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977); Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983).

  There are many surveys of the “crisis” of the 1850s. See, for example, Potter, Impending Crisis; Michael Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978); Bruce Levine, Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of the Civil War (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992); John Ashworth, The Republic in Crisis, 1848–1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). On the origins of secession, see Avery O. Craven, The Growth of Southern Nationalism, 1841–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1953); William L. Barney, The Road to Secession: A New Perspective on the Old South (New York: Praeger, 1972); William J. Cooper Jr., The South and the Politics of Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978); William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, vol. 2: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  58 Cong. Globe, 36th Cong., 2d Sess., pp. 1038, 1040. The Liberty platform insisted that it was “not a Sectional party, but a National party,” the “party of 1776” representing “the true spirit of the Constitution.” Johnson, Liberty Party, p. 316.

  59 Lynda Lasswell Crist et al., eds., The Papers of Jefferson Davis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), vol. 6, pp. 140, 122, 274. See also p. 158. The now-standard biography of Davis is William J. Cooper Jr., Jefferson Davis, American (New York: Knopf, 2000). Cf. Huston, Calculating the Value of the Union, pp. 127–128.

  60 Dred Scott v. Sandford. 60 U.S. 393 (Howard). Fehrenbacher, in The Dred Scott Case, argues that the case was wrongly decided. Mark A. Graber, in Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), argues that the case was correctly decided.

  61 CW, vol. 3, pp. 80, 257.

  62 Rodney O. Davis and Douglas L. Wilson, eds., The Lincoln-Douglas Debates (Urbana and Chicago: Knox College Lincoln Studies Center and University of Illinois Press, 2008), pp. 31, 115, 198, 286.

  63 CW, vol. 3, p. 545. For the background and significance of the Cooper Union speech, see Harold Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004); Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), vol. 1, pp. 582ff. On the evolution of Lincoln’s views on slavery, see Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).

  64 CW, vol. 3, pp. 542 n. 31, 543–545.

  65 Schlesinger, ed., History of American Presidential Elections, vol. 2, pp. 1124–1125.

  66 Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 2d Sess. p. 2043. Alexander Diven’s reference to antislavery constitutionalism as the “corner-stone” of the Republican Party may have been a deliberate response to the famous speech in which Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens declared that the subordination of blacks to whites was the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy. Donald G. Nieman, in Promises to Keep: African Americans and the Constitutional Order, 1776 to the Present (New York: 1991), pp. 30–49, traces the evolution of antislavery constitutionalism as it moved from radical abolitionism to the political mainstream. Wigfall is quoted in Shearer Davis Bowman, At the Precipice: Americans North and South during the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), p. 267.

  CHAPTER 2: “DISUNION IS ABOLITION”

  1 Springfield (MA) Daily Republican, Dec. 22, 1860, in NES, vol. 1, p. 483.

  2 Herman Belz, Emancipation and Equal Rights: Politics and Constitutionalism in the Civil War Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), pp. 26–28.

  3 Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 115–123, 207–211.

  4 Rodney O. Davis and Douglas L. Wilson, eds., The Lincoln-Douglas Debates (Urbana and Chicago: Knox College Lincoln Studies Center and University of Illinois Press, 2008), p. 166.

  5 Chicago Daily Democrat, Oct. 31, 1860, in NES, vol. 1, pp. 77, 509.

  6 Gunja Sengupta, For God and Mammon: Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs, Masters and Slaves in Territorial Kansas, 1854–1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), p. 129; Shearer Davis Bowman, At the Precipice: Americans North and South during the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), p. 241; Salmon P. Chase to Charles A. Dana, Nov. 10, 1860, in John Niven, ed., The Salmon P. Chase Papers, vol. 3: Correspondence, 1858–March 1864 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1996), p. 32; Seward quoted in Morning Pennsylvanian, Feb. 9, 1861, in NES, vol. 1, p. 447.

  7 New York Tribune, Jan. 19 and Feb. 27, 1861, in NES, vol. 1, pp. 288, 300–302. Seward had made a similar proposal in his “higher law” speech of 1850. Horace Greeley’s version has gone largely unnoticed, though it helps to explain his willingness to let the cotton states secede. Like William Lloyd Garrison, Greeley assumed that if the slave and free states separated, it would be easier for the North to surround the South and squeeze slavery to death. For Greeley’s views on slavery, see Mitchell Snay, Horace Greeley and the Politics of Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), pp. 117–121. For his thoughts during the secession crisis, see Glyndon G. Van Deusen, Horace Greeley, Nineteenth Century Crusader (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953), pp. 255–270.

  8 Columbus Crisis, Feb. 7, 1861, in NES, vol. 1, p. 444; Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States of America, during the Great Rebellion . . . (Washington, DC: Philip & Solomons, 1865), p. 209. See also Jon L. Wakelyn, ed., Southern Pamphlets on Secession (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 289.

  9 Hartford Evening Press, Oct. 25 and 26, 1860; Chicago Daily Democrat, Oct. 31, 1860; Cincinnati Daily Commercial, Nov. 3, 1860, in NES, vol. 1, pp. 62, 75, 109.

  10 Iowa State Register (Des Moines), Dec. 12, 1860, in NES, vol. 1, p. 156, and in general pp. 125–157; Morning Pennsylvanian (Philadelphia), Feb. 18, 1861, in NES, vol. 2, p. 610. See also Philadelphia Public Ledger, June 7, 1861, in NES, vol. 2, p. 845.

  11 OR, ser. 4, vol. 1, pp. 5–7, 34, 36, 40–41.

  12 Cong. Globe, 36th Cong., 1st Sess., pp. 1155ff. Quote on p. 1158.

  13 Message of Jefferson Davis to the Confederate Congress, Apr. 29, 1861, in Frank Moore, ed., The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events (New York: Putnam, 1861), vol. 1, “Documents and Narratives,” pp. 4, 168; New Orleans Daily Crescent, Nov. 13, 1860; Daily Constitutionalist (Augusta, GA), Dec. 1, 1860; Examiner (Gallatin, TN), Dec. 1, 1860, in SES, pp. 237, 283, 287.

  14 Kentucky Statesman (Lexington), Jan. 6, 1860, in SES, p. 4.

  15 New Orleans Daily Crescent, Dec. 14, 1860; Richmond Enquirer, July 10, 1860, in SES, pp. 141, 333; Cong. Globe, 36th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 1162.

&nb
sp; 16 Daily Illinois State Register (Springfield), Sept. 28, 1860; Philadelphia Press, Dec. 21, 1860; New York Daily News, Jan. 9, 1861, in NES, vol. 1, pp. 43, 124, 299.

  17 Charleston Mercury, Oct. 11 and Nov. 3, 1860; Daily True Delta (New Orleans), Oct. 12, 1860, in SES, pp. 179, 185–186, 204.

  Northern Democrats agreed that the Republicans in power would try to abolish slavery. If they are victorious, one Washington editor predicted, the Republicans will “push their aggressive policy to its legitimate conclusion” by attempting to “expel slavery from the Union.” The influential Springfield Daily Illinois State Register, the editorial voice of Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas, warned that Lincoln “proposes to legislate so that slavery must soon be extinguished.” Another Douglas paper declared, on the eve of the election, that the Republicans were “making war upon the Southern people” so as to “make them ultimately forego that system of labor which they prefer.” See Constitution (Washington, DC), Sept. 6, 1860; Daily Illinois State Register (Springfield), Sept. 28, 1860; Daily Ohio Statesman (Columbus), Nov. 2, 1860, in NES, vol. 1, pp. 33, 43, 68.

  18 In some ways the best brief narrative of secession remains Dwight Lowell Dumond, The Secession Movement, 1860–1861 (New York: Macmillan, 1931). See also David Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, vol. 2: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  19 For a comprehensive narrative of Lincoln during the interregnum, see Harold Holzer, President-Elect Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008). For an older but still useful account, see William E. Baringer, A House Dividing: Lincoln as President Elect (Springfield, IL: Abraham Lincoln Association, 1945).

  20 John Gilmer to Abraham Lincoln, Dec. 10, 1860, ALP–LC, Lincoln to John Gilmer, Dec. 15, 1860, in CW, vol. 4, pp. 151–153.

  21 David Potter, in Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942), was critical of Lincoln for derailing the compromise “movement” led by William H. Seward. Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, p. 246; Kenneth M. Stampp, in And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana state University Press, 1950), doubted there was any meaningful support for compromise among the Republicans.