by James Oakes
In late 1860 the influential New York Republican Thurlow Weed published an editorial proposing the extension of the Missouri Compromise line as a resolution to the sectional crisis, a proposal at odds with the Republican Party platform and stoutly rejected by most Republicans. Because Weed was close to Seward, historians often read this as evidence of Seward’s willingness to compromise, but Seward’s leading biographer says that there is “no real evidence” for this. Glyndon G. Van Deusen, William Henry Seward (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 242. Daniel Crofts, in Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), believes Seward represented a significant movement for compromise among leading Republicans. For similar interpretations, see Holzer, Lincon President-Elect; William J. Cooper, We Have the War upon Us: The Onset of the Civil War, November 1860–April 1861 (New York: Knopf, 2012). See also Russell McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
There is no doubt that Seward and other leading Republicans initially suggested a conciliatory posture, believing that a war was unnecessary to destroy slavery. The question is whether that posture indicated a willingness to make substantive compromises on slavery. The evidence for conciliation is strong; the evidence for substantive compromise is much weaker.
22 Salmon P. Chase to John Greenleaf Whittier, Nov. 23, 1860, in Niven, ed., Chase Papers, vol. 3, p. 35. William Howard Russell reported that in late March of 1861, Charles Sumner felt the same way. “I walked home with Mr. Sumner to his rooms and heard some of his views which were not so sanguine as those of Mr. Seward, and I thought I detected a desire to let the Southern States go out with their slavery if they so desired it. Mr. Chase, by the way, expressed sentiments of the same kind more decidedly the other day.” Quoted in William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South, ed. Eugene H. Berwanger (New York, 1863; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), entry for Mar. 31, 1861. Charles Francis Adams, An Autobiography, 1835–1915 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), pp. 73–75. In retrospect, Adams concluded, the “conciliators” underestimated the South’s determination to secede.
23 Van Duesen, William Henry Seward, p. 246.
24 Cong. Globe, 36th Cong., 2nd Sess., pp. 343–344.
25 Ibid., p. 342.
26 Ibid.
27 Indianapolis Daily Journal, Dec. 14, 1860; Iowa State Register (Des Moines), Jan. 23, 1861, in NES, vol. 1, pp. 117, 439–441; Salmon P. Chase to Ruhama Ludlow Hunt, Nov. 30, 1860, in Niven, ed., Chase Papers, vol. 3, p. 38.
28 Boston Daily Atlas and Bee, Nov. 12, 1860; Indianapolis Daily Journal, Dec. 14, 1860; Daily Illinois State Journal (Springfield), Mar. 6, 1861, in NES, vol. 1, pp. 117, 90, and NES, vol. 2, p. 640; Weekly Pantagraph (Bloomington, IL), Jan. 9, 1861, in Don Munson, ed., It is Begun! The Pantagraph Reports the Civil War (Bloomington, IL: McLean County Historical Society, 2001), p. 2.
29 CW, vol. 3, p. 454.
30 Springfield (MA) Daily Republican, Dec. 22, 1860; Iowa State Register (Des Moines), Jan. 23, 1861, in NES, vol. 1, pp. 482, 440, 118.
31 Indianapolis Daily Journal, Dec. 14, 1860.
32 Indiana American (Indianapolis), Nov. 21, 1860; Worcester Palladium, Jan. 16, 1861; Western Kansas Express (Manhattan City), May 11, 1861, in NES, vol. 1, pp. 97, 222, and NES, vol. 2,p.834; Stampp, And the War Came, pp. 250–252; Weekly Pantagraph (Bloomington, IL), Jan. 6, 1861, in Munson, ed., It is Begun! p. 2.
33 John Sherman to William T. Sherman, Nov. 26, 1860, in Rachel Sherman Thorndike, ed., The Sherman Letters: Correspondence between General and Senator Sherman from 1837 to 1891 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894), p. 87; Howard Kennedy Beale, ed., The Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1933), entry for Mar. 16, 1861, p. 179; Allan Nevins, ed., Diary of George Templeton Strong, vol. 3: 1860–1865 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), entry for Apr. 18, 1861, p. 124.
34 Kentucky Statesman (Lexington), Nov. 20, 1860, in SES, p. 255.
35 Louisville Daily Journal, Jan. 26, 1861; Republican Banner (Nashville), Jan. 26, 1861, in SES, pp. 422–423, 425–426.
36 On the first inaugural address, see Harry V. Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), pp. 237–355; Ronald C. White, The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln through His Words (New York: Random House, 2005), pp. 62–97; Douglas L. Wilson, Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words (New York: Knopf, 2006), pp. 42–70; Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), vol. 2, pp. 45–68.
37 CW, vol. 4, pp. 263–264.
38 Ibid., pp. 156–157, 264.
39 Ibid., p. 267.
40 Ibid., pp. 268–269 (emphasis added). Lincoln seems to have accepted the premises of William Jay, Samuel May, and other abolitionists who argued—most famously in the Amistad case—that the U.S. government should not capture and return fugitive slaves from foreign countries. Once the slave states declared their independence, Lincoln seemed to be arguing, the federal government would no longer be obliged to enforce the fugitive slave clause. This was precisely the same logic General Benjamin F. Butler would use two months later to justify his refusal to return slaves to their owners at Fortress Monroe.
41 Philadelphia Evening Journal, Mar. 5, 1861, in NES, vol. 2, p. 635.
42 Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), entry for Apr. 27, 1861, pp. 12–13; George Field to Abraham Lincoln, May 9, 1861; Burt Van Horn to Lincoln, May 1861; “Pennsylvanicus” to Lincoln, May 8, 1861; Orville H. Browning to Lincoln, Apr. 30, 1861, ALP-LC.
43 Evansville (IN) Daily Journal [Lincoln], Apr. 20, 1861; Oxford Democrat (Paris, ME) [Independent], Apr. 26, 1861; Norfolk County Journal (Roxbury, MA), May 4, 1861, in NES, vol. 1, pp. 463–464, and NES, vol. 2, pp. 812–813, 821.
44 Madison (WI) Daily Argus and Democrat, May 4, 1861; Daily Capital City Fact (Columbus, OH), May 18, 1861, in NES, vol. 2, pp. 824, 839.
45 Russell, My Diary North and South, entry for Mar. 28, 1861.
CHAPTER 3: “FULFILLMENT OF THE PROPHECIES”
1 Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, Jan. 12, 1861, in NES, vol. 1, p. 481.
2 Orville H. Browning to Abraham Lincoln, Apr. 30, 1861, ALP- LC.
3 William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South, ed. Eugene H. Berwanger (London, 1863; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), entry for May 23, 1861, pp. 161–162.
4 Ibid., entry for May 15, 1861, p. 151.
5 Ibid., entry for May 13, 1861, p. 142.
6 See, for example, Susan O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 65.
7 William H. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, vol. 2: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 333ff.
8 Russell, My Diary North and South, entry for Apr. 22, 1861, p. 98.
9 On the policing of slavery in the antebellum South, see John Hope Franklin, The Militant South, 1800–1861 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956); John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 149–208; Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).
10 Daniel Crofts, ed., Cobb’s Ordeal: The Diaries of a Virginia Farmer, 1842–1872 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), entries for Jan. 13, Mar. 11, Apr. 7, Apr. 29, and June 9, 1861, pp. 181–198. On the government’s impressments of Cobb’s slaves, see the entries for Nov. 21, 24, and 25, 1861, p. 207.
11 Charles J. Mitchell to Jefferson Davis, Apr. 27, 1861, in Lynda Lasswell Crist et al., eds., The Papers of Jefferson Davis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), vol.
7, p. 134.
12 William H. Lee to Jefferson Davis, May 4, 1861, in ibid., p. 148.
13 George W. Gayle to Jefferson Davis, May 22, 1861, in ibid., p. 175.
14 Quoted in Clarence Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), pp. 36–37.
15 Thomas L. Johnson, Twenty-Eight Years a Slave in Virginia . . . (Bournemouth UK: W. Mate & Sons, 1909), p. 27.
16 Rawick, American Slave, orig. ser., 13 (pt. 4), p. 192, quoted in Steven V. Ash, The Black Experience in the Civil War South (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), p. 2.
17 Russell, My Diary North and South, entry for May 4, 1861, p. 117.
18 Quoted in Winthrop D. Jordan, Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: In Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy, rev. ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), p. 11.
19 Levi Branham, My Life and Travels (Dalton, GA: A. J. Showalter, 1929), p. 45.
20 Quoted in Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), p. 183.
21 OR, ser. 2, vol. 1, pt. 1, p. 750.
22 Ibid.
23 Hans Louis Trefousse, Ben Butler: The South Called Him Beast! (New York: Twayne, 1957), pp. 34–41. For a more skeptical view of the Massachusetts Free Soil coalition, see David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 1960), pp. 205–237.
24 Trefousse, Ben Butler, pp. 42–64.
25 Benjamin F. Butler, Butler’s Book, (Boston: A. M. Thayer, 1892), pp. 228–242.
26 The coincidence of slavery beginning to end where it began was widely noted at the time and has been ever since. For a recent example, see Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening (New York: Knopf, 2011), pp. 295–296.
27 Edward L. Pierce, Enfranchisement and Citizenship (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1896), p. 3. The private’s letter from Fortress Monroe was dated Apr. 26, 1861.
28 OR, ser. 1, vol. 2, pt. 1, p. 862.
29 Robert F. Engs, Freedom’s First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861–1890 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), pp. 5–16.
30 OR, ser. 2, vol. 1, p. 752.
31 Pierce, Enfranchisement and Citizenship, p. 23.
32 Butler, Butler’s Book, p. 258. Butler’s recollection of his reasoning is consistent with arguments he would put in writing in July of 1861, two months after his interview with Major John Cary.
33 OR, ser. 2, vol. 1, p. 753. Cary’s account of Butler’s reasoning, sketchy though it is, tends to confirm the version Butler himself recalled in his autobiography many years later.
34 OR, ser. 2, vol. 1, pp. 752, 754.
35 Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler (Norwood, MA: Plimpton Press, 1917), vol. 1, p. 114.
36 Montgomery Blair to Benjamin Butler, May 29, 1861, in Private and Official Correspondence of Butler, vol. 1, pp. 116–117. It is unclear from Blair’s letter whether the joke about “Butler’s fugitive slave law” was Lincoln’s or Scott’s.
37 CW, vol. 3, p. 454.
38 Ibid., pp. 268–269.
39 The second set of War Department instructions was issued on August 8, 1861. For months thereafter Union commanders moving into the seceded states were routinely issued copies of both the May 30 and August 8 instructions. See chapter 4.
40 OR, ser. 2, vol. 1, pp. 754–755.
41 New York Times, May 31, 1861, p. 8.
42 FSSP, ser. 1, vol. 1, pp. 75–76, 76n.
43 OR, ser. 2, vol. 1, pp. 754–755.
44 Private and Official Correspondence of Butler, vol. 1, pp. 111–112.
45 Ibid., pp. 185–188. The absence of any reference to “contraband of war” in Butler’s first letters later gave rise to speculation that someone else originated the use of the term. This is unlikely. In press reports from Fortress Monroe dated the same day as Butler’s meeting with Major Cary, reporters—who appear to have taken their notes from Butler—called the refugees “contraband of war.” Postmaster General Montgomery Blair referred to “contraband of war” in a letter he wrote to Butler in late May informing the general that the cabinet was about to meet to discuss the matter. Butler himself claimed to have used the term from the start, and some years later Cary, in a letter to Butler, recalled that “contraband” was “the term . . . employed by you at a conference held between us on the Hampton side of Mill Creek Bridge, on the evening of May 24th, 1861.” John B. Cary to Benjamin F. Butler, Mar. 9, 1891, in Private and Official Correspondence of Butler, vol. 1, p. 102. Butler’s later reconstruction of the events is in Butler’s Book, pp. 256ff.
46 New York Times, May 31, 1861, p. 1.
47 OR, ser. 2, vol. 1, p. 752.
48 Ibid., p. 751.
49 Ibid., p. 753. Russell, My Diary North and South, entry for July 7, 1861, p. 234.
50 Allan Nevins, ed., Diary of George Templeton Strong, vol. 3: 1860–1865 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), entry for June 4, 1861, p. 156.
51 New York Times, May 31, 1861, p. 8.
CHAPTER 4: AUGUST 8, 1861: EMANCIPATION BEGINS
1 Edward L. Pierce, Enfranchisement and Citizenship (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1896), pp. 24–25.
2 Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler (Norwood, MA: Plimpton Press, 1917), vol. 1, pp. 185–188.
3 Ibid.
4 OR, ser. 2., vol. 1, pp. 755, 757, 760.
5 Stephen W. Sears, ed., The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), p. 26. The timing of McClellan’s order—May 26—is important. Four days later, on May 30, Lincoln’s cabinet met and endorsed Butler’s contraband policy. By August, after Congress passed the First Confiscation Act, McClellan’s orders changed to reflect the new policy.
6 Theodore Calvin Pease and J. G. Randall, eds., The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning (Springfield: Trustees of the Illinois State Historical Library, 1925–1933), entry for July 8, 1861, p. 478; Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 32. The question of who should be responsible for enforcing the fugitive slave clause is discussed more fully in chapter 6.
7 Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 186.
8 Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), p. 20.
9 Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 1st Sess., pp. 151, 153, 77.
10 Ibid., p. 119.
11 Ibid., p. 187.
12 Ibid., pp. 189, 191.
13 Ibid., pp. 187, 189.
14 Ibid., p. 194.
15 The standard accounts of the two confiscation acts passed by Congress in 1861 and 1862 pass over the First Confiscation Act on the assumption that it did nothing and was never enforced. This is the historiographical legacy of James Garfield Randall, a leading “revisionist” historian who—as part of his effort to deny the antislavery origins of the Civil War—dismissed evidence that Republican policymakers were interested in attacking slavery as early as July in 1861. See his Constitutional Problems under Lincoln (New York: D. Appleton, 1926), pp. 275–292. One of Randall’s most misleading points was that the confiscation acts were so legally incoherent that the attorney general never bothered to issue the instructions for implementing the law. In fact, the two statutes legalized military emancipation and were therefore implemented by the secretary of war, not the attorney general. Even scholars unsympathetic to Randall’s revisionism repeat the error. The best recent studies devote little attention to the First Confiscation Act. See, for example, Silvana R. Siddali, From Property to Person: Slavery and the Confiscation Acts, 1861–1862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); Daniel W. Hamilton, The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Stephen C. Neff, Justice in Blue and Gray: A Legal History of the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). An exception is Robert Fa
brikant, “Emancipation and the Proclamation: Of Contrabands, Congress, and Lincoln,” Howard Law Journal 49, no. 2 (June 2006), pp. 321–329.
16 Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 1st Sess., pp. 216–217.
17 Salmon P. Chase to Green Adams, Sept. 5, 1861, in John Niven, ed., The Salmon P. Chase Papers, vol. 3: Correspondence, 1858–March 1863 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1996), p. 96.
18 Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 269.
19 Ibid., pp. 411, 190.
20 In February of 1862, the provost marshall for the Department of Missouri asked the U.S. district attorney whether emancipation under the First Confiscation Act required judicial proceedings. The district attorney said no. Although the first three sections of the statute established judicial procedures for confiscating rebel property, he pointed out, Section 4 “makes no provision for the case of slaves whose services have been forfeited by reason of their being employed in hostile services against the government.” The “evident intention of the act,” the district attorney pointed out, “was to make the slave eo instant free.” FSSP, ser. 1, vol. 1, pp. 425–426. Neff, in Justice in Blue and Gray, pp. 135–136, notes that under the First and Second Confiscation Acts, slaves were emancipated “automatically,” without judicial proceedings.
21 Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 1st Sess., pp. 218–219.
22 Samuel S. Cox, Three Decades of Federal Legislation, 1855–1885 (1885; Providence: Reid, 1888), p. 157.
23 There are numerous accounts of First Manassas, but three of the best brief treatments are Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative (New York: Random House, 1958), vol. 1, pp. 72–86; Bruce Catton, The Coming Fury (New York: Doubleday, 1961), pp. 436–473; James M. McPherson, The Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 334–350.
24 Cox, Three Decades of Federal Legislation, p. 158.