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

by James Oakes

  52 Charles Henry Ambler, Sectionalism in Virginia from 1776 to 1861 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1910), esp. pp. 175–339.

  53 George Ellis Moore, A Banner in the Hills: West Virginia’s Statehood (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1963), pp. 143–145.

  54 Ibid., pp. 195–199.

  55 U.S. Statutes at Large, 37th Cong., 3rd Sess., pp. 633–634.

  56 Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 2d Sess., p. 3309.

  57 Ibid., pp. 2942, 3034, 3038.

  58 Ibid., pp. 3038, 3316; 3rd Sess., p. 58. The final Senate vote was 23 to 17.

  59 For the House debate, see Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 3rd Sess., pp. 37–39, 41–51, 53–59. The House vote in favor of West Virginia statehood bill was 96 to 55. Of the 96 “yes” votes, 86 came from Republicans.

  60 Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 2d Sess., p. 3319; Wilson, Antislavery Measures, p. 76.

  CHAPTER 9: THE “PRELIMINARY” PROCLAMATION

  1 There are two accounts of the September 22, 1862, cabinet meeting. My quotations are from John Niven, ed., The Salmon P. Chase Papers, vol. 1: Journals, 1829–1872 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1993), pp. 393–396. The other account, a bit less detailed, is in Howard K. Beale, ed., Diary of Gideon Welles: Secretary of the Navy under Lincoln and Johnson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), vol. 1, pp. 142–145. Chase has Lincoln make a vow to “my Maker.” Welles has Lincoln making a promise to “God.”

  2 Charles Sumner to John Andrew, May 28, 1862, in Beverly Wilson Palmer, ed., The Selected Letters of Charles Sumner (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), vol. 2, p. 115.

  3 Salmon P. Chase to Benjamin Butler, June 24, 1862, in John Niven, ed., The Salmon P. Chase Papers, vol. 3: Correspondence, 1858–March 1863 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1996), p. 219.

  4 Beale, ed., Welles Diary, vol. 1, pp. 70, 144. This oft-quoted description is taken from the Beale edition of the Welles diary, but it is in fact a memoir reconstructed some years after the war. Nevertheless, the carriage ride itself is confirmed in a letter Welles wrote that evening to his wife. Two months later, on the day Lincoln issued the Preliminary Proclamation, Welles referred to the announcement in the carriage in an actual diary entry for September 22. In 1872 Welles published a more elaborate description of the carriage-ride conversation in an article, “The History of Emancipation,” reprinted in Albert Mordell, ed., Civil War and Reconstruction: Selected Essays by Gideon Welles (New York: Twayne, 1959), pp. 237–240. The details in these accounts vary, but not their substance. It seems most likely that on July 13, 1872, Lincoln told Welles and Stanton that he would issue the Emancipation Proclamation called for by the Second Confiscation Act adopted by the Senate the day before.

  5 Quoted in Eric Foner, Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), p. 217.

  6 Beale, ed., Welles Diary, vol. 1, p. 70.

  7 On the various recollections of Lincoln’s “decision” to emancipate, see Matthew Pinsker, “Lincoln’s Summer of Emancipation,” in Harold Holzer and Sara Vaughn Gabbard, eds., Lincoln and Freedom: Slavery, Emancipation, and the Thirteenth Amendment (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007), pp. 79–99.

  8 U.S. Statutes at Large, 37th Cong., 2nd Sess., p. 422; “Proclamation Concerning Taxes in Rebellious States,” in CW, vol. 5, pp. 298–299. Lincoln’s tax proclamation reads like his later Emancipation Proclamation, with much of it devoted to specifying the areas in rebellion as of the date it was issued.

  9 CW, vol. 5, pp. 434–436.

  10 Beale, ed., Welles Diary, vol. 1, entry for Oct. 1, 1862, pp. 159–160; Niven, ed., Chase Papers, vol. 1, entry for July 22, 1862, pp. 350–352.

  11 Francis B. Carpenter, Six Months in the White House with Abraham Lincoln (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1872), pp. 20–22. Carpenter’s account is his recollection of Lincoln’s recollection. Aspects of the passage seem to confuse the cabinet discussion of the first draft, on July 22, 1862, with the discussion a few months later of the Preliminary Proclamation. It remains Lincoln’s only account of the meeting, however, and most historians accept that Seward’s recommendation for postponing release of the proclamation was decisive. Chase’s diary entry for July 22 is clearly the most reliable. In his diary entry for October 1, Welles recalled some of the July discussions. There is nothing in Bates’s diary about the July 21–22 cabinet meetings. For a detailed account of the meeting, see Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), vol. 2, pp. 362–364.

  12 John Gregory to Abraham Lincoln, Mar. 12, 1862, ALP-LC. See Fitchburg Massachusetts Citizens to Lincoln, Monday, Mar. 17, 1862 (Petition), ALP-LC, in which the identical wording is used but is printed; and General Synod of Reformed Presbyterian Church to Lincoln, Tuesday, May 20, 1862 (Resolutions); From Religious Society of Progressive Friends to Abraham Lincoln, June 7, 1862, ALP-LC.

  13 Robert Dale Owen to Edwin M. Stanton, July 23, 1862; James W. White et al. to Abraham Lincoln, July 24, 1862; Sydney H. Gay to Lincoln, Aug. 15[?], 1862, ALP-LC.

  On certain policies—the arming of black troops was one of them—Lincoln made it clear that he was waiting for the people to be “educated up” to support it, but he never made that claim about emancipation. As early as September in 1861, Lincoln noted that General Frémont’s emancipation edict was far more popular than his order to revise it, for example. Montgomery Blair claimed that emancipation hurt the Republicans in the November 1862 election, but Lincoln discounted that explanation and attributed Republican losses to the poor performance of the Union army. There is abundant evidence that emancipation was widely popular among Republicans from the very start of the war. If his incoming mail was any indication, Lincoln was subjected to far more pressure in favor of emancipation than in opposition to it.

  For further evidence of pressure on Lincoln, see the petition from the citizens of Quaker Bottom, Ohio, Jesse B. Kimball and James McVey to Lincoln, Aug. 2, 1862; Samuel L. Casey to Lincoln, Aug. 4, 1862; Indiana Methodist Convention to Lincoln, Sept. 12, 1862, ALP-LC.

  14 CW, vol. 5, pp. 370–375.

  15 Ibid., p. 374.

  16 On the debate over emigration and evidence of support for it among African Americans, see Kate Masur, “The African American Delegation to Abraham Lincoln: A Reappraisal,” Civil War History 56, no. 2 (June 2010), pp. 117–144. Stephen Hahn, in A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), emphasizes support for emigration among blacks.

  17 Douglass’ Monthly, Sept. 1862.

  18 Horace Greeley to Abraham Lincoln, Aug. 1, 1862, ALP-LC.

  19 Abraham Lincoln to Horace Greeley, Aug. 22, 1862, in CW, vol. 5, pp. 388–389.

  20 Wendell Phillips to Sydney Howard Gay, Sept. 2, 1862, Gay Papers, Columbia University, quoted in Foner, Fiery Trial, p. 228.

  21 Gerrit Smith, Gerrit Smith to His Townsmen [flier] (Petersboro, NY, Oct. 6, 1862).

  22 John B. Henderson to Abraham Lincoln, Sept. 3, 1862, ALP-LC.

  23 Foner, Fiery Trial, p. 228.

  24 James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 526–533.

  25 Ibid., pp. 538–544. See also Bruce Catton, The Army of the Potomac: Mr. Lincoln’s Army (New York: Doubleday, 1951), pp. 265–332, a harrowing account of Antietam and a devastating critique of the incompetence of the Union officers.

  26 Niven, ed., Chase Papers, vol. 1, Sept. 22, 1862, p. 396.

  27 Ibid., entry for Sept. 22, 1862, pp. 393–396; Beale, ed., Welles Diary, vol. 1, entry for Sept. 22, 1862, pp. 142–145.

  28 CW, vol. 5, pp. 433–434.

  29 Ibid., pp. 434–435.

  30 Ibid., p. 441n.

  31 W. B. Lowry, H. Catlin, and J. F. Downing to Abraham Lincoln, Sept. 23, 1862; B. S. Hendrick to Lincoln, Sept. 23, 1862; James W. Stone to Lincoln, Sept. 23, 1862; Abiel A. Livermore to Lincoln, Sept. 24, 1862; Henry Asbur
y to Lincoln, Sept. 29, 1882, ALP-LC; Smith, Gerrit Smith to His Townsmen. For a survey of reactions to the Preliminary Proclamation, see John Hope Franklin, The Emancipation Proclamation (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1995), pp. 48–65.

  32 OR, ser. 3, vol. 2, pp. 584–585

  33 Ibid., ser. 1, vol. 19, pt. 2, pp. 395–396.

  34 See the order issued on February 22, 1862, in which General Halleck reasserts the general policy spelled out in Order No. 3 but incorporates the language of his congressional critics by declaring that the military was not competent to judge the status of fugitives running to Union lines. OR, ser. 1, vol. 8, pp. 563–564. The March 13 law was supposed to bury Halleck’s policy, but it persisted in parts of the Mississippi Valley.

  35 John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, vol. 5: April 1–August 31, 1862 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), p. 51n.

  36 U. S. Grant to Julia Dent Grant, June 12, 1862; Alvin P. Hovey to Major John A. Rawlins, July 10, 1862, in ibid., pp. 143, 199n.

  37 Elihu Washburne to U. S. Grant, July 25, 1862, in ibid., p. 226n. On Grant’s use of “contrabands” as workers, see Grant to Gen. William Rosecrans, Aug. 17, 1862, in ibid., p. 272.

  38 FSSP, ser. 1, vol. 3, pp. 667–671.

  39 John Sherman to William T. Sherman, Aug. 24, 1862, in Brooks D. Simpson and Jean V. Berlin, eds., Sherman’s Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, 1860–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 260, 286, 292–294; FSSP. ser. 1, vol. 3, p. 658; OR, ser. 1, vol. 17, pt. 2, pp. 113, 158–160.

  40 For General Buell’s policy and the tensions it provoked within the army, see FSSP ser. 1, vol. 1, pp. 271–289.

  41 Quincy A. Gilmore to William L. Utley, Oct. 18, 1862; Utley to Gillmore, Oct. 18, 1862, ALP-LC.

  42 Cleveland Plain Dealer, Nov. 13, 1862.

  43 FSSP, ser. 1, vol. 3, pp. 667–671; John Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen: Reminiscences of the Civil War (New York: Longmans, Green, 1907), pp. 5, 12, 20.

  44 Eaton, Lincoln, Grant and the Freedmen, pp. 24, 27.

  45 W. T. Sherman to Thomas Tasker Gantt, Sept. 23, 1862; W. T. Sherman to John Sherman, Oct. 1, 1862 in Simpson and Berlin, eds., Sherman’s Civil War, pp. 303, 311–312, 320.

  46 W. T. Sherman to John Sherman, Nov. 24, 1862, in ibid., p. 337.

  47 W. T. Sherman to Hon. Judge [John T.] Swayne, Nov. 12, 1862, in ibid., pp. 324–327.

  48 On March 19, 1864, Congressman Wilder praised Lincoln’s recent reconstruction proposal in part because it required the rebel states “to corroborate and enforce the proclamation of emancipation which has made the 22d of September, 1862, a date never to be forgotten through the ages.” Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 1204.

  49 Springfield Republican, Aug. 30, 1862.

  50 Cleveland Plain Dealer, Nov. 13, 1862; New York Herald Tribune, Dec. 9, 1862.

  51 Robert Dale Owen to Edwin M. Stanton, July 23, 1862, ALP-LC.

  52 Niven, ed., Chase Papers, vol. 3, pp. 38, 218.

  53 New York Times, Aug. 20, 1862.

  54 R. W. Emerson, “The President’s Proclamation,” Atlantic Monthly 10, no. 61 (Nov. 1862), pp. 638–642.

  55 Benjamin Bannan to Abraham Lincoln, July 24, 1862, ALP-LC.

  56 Thomas A. Marshall to Abraham Lincoln, July 27, 1862, ALP-LC.

  57 James Speed to Abraham Lincoln, July 28, 1862, ALP-LC.

  58 All quoted in the Liberator, Oct. 3, 1862. Most but not all of this skepticism came from Democrats opposed to emancipation. See, for example, Boston Daily Advertiser, July 20 and Sept. 25, 1862; Wisconsin Daily Patriot, Aug. 28, 1862.

  59 CW, vol. 7, pp. 281–282; vol. 8, p. 333.

  60 CW, vol. 7, pp. 301, 281–228.

  CHAPTER 10: THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION

  1 CW, vol. 5, pp. 278–279, 420–421, 438–439, 444.

  2 Ibid., vol. 6, pp. 28–31. Accounts of the final drafting and signing of the proclamation can be found in John Hope Franklin, The Emancipation Proclamation (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963); Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), pp. 201–210; Douglas L. Wilson, Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words (New York: Knopf, 2006), pp. 105–142; Harold Holzer, Emancipating Lincoln: The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); Louis P. Masur, Lincoln’s Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). On the constitutional issues, see Mark E. Neely Jr., Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), pp. 113–159.

  3 Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), vol. 2, pp. 462–473.

  4 CW, vol. 6, p. 29.

  5 Ibid.

  6 Ibid.

  7 Ibid., pp. 29–30.

  8 Ibid., p. 30.

  9 Ibid.

  10 All quotations are from the survey of reactions to the proclamation in Franklin, Emancipation Proclamation, pp. 85ff.

  11 Robin Blackburn, Marx and Lincoln: An Unfinished Revolution (New York: Verso Books, 2011), p. 199.

  12 CW, vol. 7, p. 49.

  13 Burrus M. Carnahan, Act of Justice: Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Laws of War (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2007), pp. 5–23.

  14 Benjamin Robbins Curtis, Executive Power (Boston: Little, Brown, 1862), reprinted in Frank Friedel, ed., Union Pamphlets of the Civil War, 1861–1865 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), vol. 1, p. 461.

  15 Grosvenor P. Lowrey, “The Commander in Chief: A Defense upon Legal Grounds of the Proclamation of Emancipation; and an Answer to Ex-Judge Curtis’ Pamphlet . . . ,” in Friedel, ed., Union Pamphlets, vol. 1, pp. 490–491.

  16 William Whiting, War Powers under the Constitution of the United States (Boston: Little, Brown, 1864), p. 21.

  17 On the Lieber Code, see Frank Friedel, “General Orders 100 and Military Government,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 32, no. 4 (Mar. 1946), pp. 541–556; pp. 127–130; Matthew J. Mancini, “Francis Lieber, Slavery, and the ‘Genesis’ of the Laws of War,” Journal of Southern History 77, no. 2 (May 2011), pp. 325–348; John Fabian Witt, Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History (New York: Free Press, 2012).

  18 Francis Lieber, Instructions for the Government of the Armies of the United States in the Field (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1863), p. 13.

  19 Carnahan, Act of Justice, pp. 126ff.

  20 The re-enslavement issue is discussed a greater length in chapters 11 and 12.

  21 Lowrey, Lieber, and other wartime commentators were undoubtedly relying on a theory of black citizenship that had long since become a staple of antislavery politics. See, for example, the discussion of “paramount citizenship” in Jacobus tenBroek, Equal under Law (New York: Collier Books, 1965), pp. 71–93. The best study of the relationship between citizenship and the personal liberty laws is Thomas D. Morris, Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North, 1780–1861 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).

  For a more detailed examination of the issue of black citizenship, see James Oakes, “Natural Rights, Citizenship Rights, States’ Rights, and Black Rights: Another Look at Lincoln and Race,” in Eric Foner, ed., Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), pp. 109–134. The literature on citizenship in early America is vast. The analysis in this and subsequent paragraphs derives primarily from the following: James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); William M. Wiecek, The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760–1848 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 154–171; Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); William J. Novak, “The Legal Transformation of Citiz
enship in Nineteenth Century America,” in Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian Zelizer, eds., The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 85–119. For a recent examination of the importance as well as the limits of citizenship for former slaves, see Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

  22 CW, vol. 2, p. 233n. Lincoln’s concerns about the political wisdom of calling for repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 were expressed in an 1859 exchange of letters with Salmon P. Chase of Ohio. See ibid., vol. 3, pp. 41, 384, 386.

  23 Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (How.)

  24 CW, vol. 2, pp. 403, 453.

  25 Ibid., vol. 4, pp. 156–157.

  26 Ibid. Quote from p. 157n.

  27 Ibid., p. 264.

  28 All quotations of Bates in this and subsequent paragraphs are taken from Opinion of Attorney General Bates on Citizenship (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1862) (quotes are from pp. 3, 8, 17); Attorney General Edwards Bates to Robert C. Winthrop [Massachusetts], Jan. 5, 1863, quoted in Bruce Catton, Never Call Retreat, vol. 3: The Centennial History of the Civil War (London: Phoenix Press, 1965), pp. 56–57.

  29 Lowrey, The Commander in Chief, in Friedel, ed., Union Pamphlets, vol. 1. p. 493–494 (emphasis added); Lieber, Instructions for the Government, p. 13.

  30 Daniel Yacovone, ed., A Voice of Thunder: A Black Soldier’s Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), p. 254; Stephen Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 108–109.

  31 U.S. Statutes at Large, 2d Cong., 1st Sess., p. 271; Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 19 How. 393 (1856).

  32 U.S. Statutes at Large, 37th Cong., 2d Sess., pp. 597, 599; U.S. Statutes at Large, 37th Cong., 3d Sess., p. 731–737, quotation on p. 731.