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

by James Oakes

  33 Lincoln never explained why his proclamation applied to slaves in rebel areas rather than to all slaves owned by rebels. The shift was already in the first version of the proclamation he presented to his cabinet on July 22, 1862, less than a week after signing the Second Confiscation Act. Lincoln cited Section 6 of the statute—the passage calling for a presidential proclamation—and the wording of the law is slightly ambiguous. It refers to “any person within any State or Territory of the United States . . . engaged in armed rebellion.” Previous statutes required proclamations specifying areas in rebellion, and Lincoln seems to have read the new law that way. For Lincoln’s July draft, see CW, vol. 5, pp. 336–337.

  It is widely assumed that in shifting to a territorial standard Lincoln expanded the scope of emancipation beyond the limits of the Second Confiscation Act, but this is not obviously true. For one thing, Lincoln never made such a claim, and he seemed to be implementing what he took to be the requirements of the statute itself. Then, too, Republicans in Congress made it quite clear that they considered virtually all slaveholders to be rebels and that emancipating their slaves amounted to universal emancipation. Interestingly, two years later, during the debates over the Thirteenth Amendment, Senator Lyman Trumbull criticized Lincoln’s shift from “rebels” to “areas in rebellion” on the grounds that it narrowed the scope of emancipation. If Lincoln had retained the wording of the statute, Trumbull argued, the slaves of disloyal owners in the Border States would have been emancipated by then.

  34 Harry Smith, Fifty Years of Slavery in the United States of America (Grand Rapids: West Michigan Printing Co., 1891), pp. 122–124.

  35 J. Vance Lewis, Out of the Ditch: A True Story of an Ex-Slave (Houston: Rein & Sons, 1910), pp. 12–13.

  36 Sgt. Edmund Evarts, Eighth New York Artillery, Federal Hill, Baltimore, Sept. 9, 1863, in Lydia Mintura Post, ed., Soldiers’ Letters, from Camp, Battle-Field and Prison (New York: Bunce & Huntington, 1865), pp. 191–192.

  37 Michael Burlingame, ed., Lincoln’s Journalist: John Hay’s Anonymous Writings for the Press, 1861–1864 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), p. 309 (emphasis added); OR, ser. 2, vol. 1, pp. 754–755; John Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen: Reminiscences of the Civil War (New York: Longmans, Green, 1907), p. 27.

  38 OR, ser. 1, vol. 24, pt. 3, p. 46. Historians can tally the number of slaves in the territory covered by Union emancipation policy, but there is no way to know how many of the slaves in those areas were actually emancipated, though it is clear that many were not freed until after the war ended.

  39 Thomas A. Marshall to Abraham Lincoln, July 27, 1862; Frederick Law Olmsted to John G. Nicolay, Oct. 10, 1862; Benjamin Bannan to Lincoln, July 24, 1862, ALP-LC.

  40 Michael Burlingame, ed., With Lincoln in the White House: Letters, Memoranda, and Other Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860–1865 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), p. 100; Henry Halleck to U. S. Grant, Mar. 31, 1863, in OR, ser. 1, vol. 24, pt. 3, pp. 156–157; G. W. Williams, A History of Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1888), pp. 106–108.

  41 On the various editions of the proclamation published up to 1865, see Charles Eberstadt, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (New York: Duschness Crawford, 1950). Harold Holzer points out that there was very little iconographic representation of the proclamation before Lincoln’s assassination in 1865. See Harold Holzer, Edna Greene Medford, and Frank J. Williams, The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), pp. 89–90; Isaac Lane, Autobiography of Bishop Isaac Lane (Nashville: Pub. House of the M.E. Church, South, 1916), p. 56.

  The history of the agents organized by the War Department remains to be written, but for helpful indications of their work, see the introduction to John Hope Franklin, ed., The Diary of James T. Ayers: Civil War Recruiter, new introduction by John David Smith (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), pp. xxi–xxxv.

  42 OR, ser. 3, vol. 3, pp. 100–101. On the white officers Lorenzo Thomas and others recruited, see Joseph T. Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990).

  43 Williams, History of Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, p. 109; Lorenzo Thomas to W. S. Rosecrans, June 15, 1863, National Archives, Record Group 94, entry 363, Records of the Adjutant Generals office, 1780’s 1917, Letters Sent by Lorenzo Thomas, General’s Papers and Books; CW, vol. 6, p. 342.

  44 OR, ser. 1, vol. 24, pt. 3, pp. 186–187, 330, 351, 437–438. See also Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

  45 OR, ser. 1, vol. 24, pt. 3, pp. 377, 400, 416–417; Russell Duncan, ed., Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), p. 345. Post, ed., Soldiers’ Letters, p. 254.

  46 Entries for June 2 and June 4, 1863, Greenwood Plantation Journal, Beaufort District, South Carolina, Library of Congress. Records of Antebellum Southern Plantations, ser. C, pt. 2, real 1, Oct. 8, 1864. George Washington Allen Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Records of Antebellum Southern Plantations, ser. J, pt. 7, reel 4.

  47 Quoted in Grimsley, Hard Hand of War, pp. 152–169.

  48 Benjamin Bannan to Abraham Lincoln, July 24, 1862, ALP-LC; OR, ser. 1, vol. 24, pt. 3, p. 479.

  49 James M. Clifton, ed., Life and Labor on Argyle Island: Letters and Documents of a Savannah River Rice Plantation, 1833–1867 (Savannah: Beehive Press, 1978), p. 341.

  50 Pioneering works on slave discontent during the Civil War include W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in American (New York: Atheneum, 1935); Bell Irvin Wiley, Southern Negroes, 1861–1865 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938); Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953); James M. McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War (New York: Random House, 1965).

  The theme of wartime disruption on the plantations reemerged in the 1970s. See especially James Roark, Masters without Slaves (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977); Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long (New York: Knopf, 1979); Ira Berlin et al., Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). See also Stephen V. Ash, When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Jacqueline Jones, Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008), for the urban dimension.

  For the slaveholders, in addition to the books by Roark and Litwack, see the relevant chapters in Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988); William Kauffman Scarborough, Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth Century South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003); Erskine Clark, Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

  On the experience of slave women, see Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds., Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); LeeAnn Whites and Alecia P. Long, Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009); Leslie Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

  Among those arguing that slave resistance contributed to the defeat of the Confederacy, see Armstead Robinson, Bitter Fruits of Bondage: The Demise of Slavery and the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861–1865 (Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 2004); Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). Drew Gilpin Faust, in Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), attributes southern defeat to the plantation mistresses who turned against the Confederacy under the hardships of war. Stephanie McCurry, in Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), stresses the resistance of both women and slaves.

  Several state studies are cited elsewhere, but see also John Cimprich, Slavery’s End in Tennessee, 1861–1865 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985); Larry Eugene Rivers, Slavery in Florida: Territorial Days to Emancipation (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), pp. 229–249.

  51 For examples of free blacks offering to take up arms in defense of the Union, see FSSP, ser. 2, pp. 79ff.

  52 CW, vol. 5, p. 357.

  53 U.S. Statutes at Large, 37th Cong., 3d Sess., p. 599.

  54 FSSP, ser. 2, pp. 46–53. General David Hunter believed that emancipation would be validated by black men serving in the Union army, but Edward Pierce believed that a successful “experiment” in free labor would vindicate emancipation. It was Pierce’s letter of complaint to the Treasury Department that undermined Hunter’s precocious attempt to enlist black men. When Thomas Wentworth Higginson arrived in early December of 1862, he was struck by “the legacy of bitter distrust” among Sea Island blacks caused by General Hunter’s ruthless approach to recruitment. See Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), p. 40.

  The various moves toward black enlistment prior to January 1, 1863, are surveyed in Dudley Taylor Cornish, The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861–1865 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), pp. 29–103. For documentation of such efforts in Louisiana and Kansas, see FSSP, ser. 2, pp. 62–73.

  55 CW, vol. 6, p. 30; FSSP, ser. 2, p. 143.

  56 OR, ser. 3, vol. 3, pp. 14–15, 20–21.

  57 CW, vol. 6, p. 357; James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 566–567, 792–793, 798–800; McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2007).

  58 Joseph Glatthaar, “Black Glory: The African American Role in Union Victory,” in Gabor S. Boritt, ed., Why the Confederacy Lost (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 133–162; William W. Freehling, The South versus the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 188–196. For a more skeptical view of the significance of black troops, see Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).

  59 Franklin, ed., Diary of James T. Ayers, pp. 24–33.

  60 OR, ser. 3, vol. 3, pp. 215–216; Michael T. Meier, “Lorenzo Thomas and the Recruitment of Blacks in the Mississippi Valley, 1863–1865,” in John David Smith, ed., Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), pp. 249–275; Franklin, ed., Diary of James T. Ayers, pp. xxi–xxxv. See also Glatthaar, Forged in Battle.

  61 FSSP, ser. 2, pp. 55–56, 139, 146, 164, 101.

  62 Ibid., pp. 46–53, 61, 101, 145, 158, 168.

  63 U.S. Statutes at Large, 37th Cong., 2d Sess., p. 599.

  64 CW, vol. 6, pp. 149–150.

  65 The figures were compiled by the Freedmen and Southern Society Project and are summarized in a chart at FSSP, ser. 2, p. 12. The Project estimates that a total of 178,975 blacks served in the Union army during the war. Of these, 146,304 blacks were recruited from the slave states. Six of those states—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, and large portions of Louisiana—were technically exempt from the Emancipation Proclamation but accounted for 85,904. These figures are only approximations because not all of Louisiana was exempted. Slaves were also recruited from the portions of northern and western Virginia that were exempt.

  66 Peter Bruner, A Slave’s Adventures toward Freedom: Not Fiction, but the True Story of a Struggle (Oxford, OH, [1919?]), pp. 42–46.

  67 H. C. Bruce, The New Man: Twenty-Nine Years a Slave. Twenty-Nine Years a Free Man (York, PA: P. Anstadt, 1895), p. 107.

  68 Samuel Hall, Forty-Seven Years a Slave: A Brief History of His Life before and after Freedom Came to Him (Washington, IA, 1912), pp. 22–25.

  69 CW, vol. 6, pp. 48, 63.

  CHAPTER 11: “THE SYSTEM YET LIVES”

  1 Abraham Lincoln to James C. Conkling, in CW, vol. 6, p. 409; James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 627–636.

  2 McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, pp. 308–388; CW, vol. 6, p. 410.

  3 CW, vol. 6, p. 176. On the Confederacy as a proslavery nation, see Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: How the Civil War Remade the American South (New York: Random House, 2013).

  I borrow the term “counter-revolution of property” from W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Russell & Russell, 1956), pp. 580–636. See also McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, pp. 202–275, who describes the electoral victory of Lincoln and the Republicans as the “Revolution of 1860,” and secession as “The Counter-Revolution of 1861.”

  The Confederate treaties with Native Americans are in OR, ser. 4, vol. 1, p. 433. See also pp. 520 (Seminoles), 643 (Osage), 653 (Seneca and Shawnee), 663 (Quapaw), and 678 (Cherokee). Two older studies explore this history: Annie Heloise Abel, The American Indian as Slaveholder and Secessionist (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1915; repr. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992); Abel, The American Indian and the End of the Confederacy: 1863–1866 (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1925; repr. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992).

  4 OR, ser. 4, vol. 1, p. 145.

  5 Lynda Lasswell Crist et al., eds., The Papers of Jefferson Davis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), vol. 7, p. 417; OR, ser. 4, vol. 1, p. 848; OR, ser. 4, vol. 2, pp. 190, 211, 362.

  6 Bruce Levine, Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

  7 OR, ser. 4, vol. 1, pp. 1084, 1106; ser. 4, vol. 2, p. 128; also vol. 3, p. 385.

  8 Ibid., ser. 1, vol. 24, pt. 3, p. 1044.

  9 In early 1864 the Confederate Congress passed a supplemental appropriation to compensate masters “[f]or the loss of slaves which have been impressed by Confederate authorities, or under State laws for the use of the Confederate Government, and while engaged in laboring on the public defenses, have escaped to the enemy, or died, or contracted diseases which have, after their discharge, resulted fatally, three million one hundred and eight thousand dollars.” OR, ser. 4, vol. 3, p. 139.

  10 OR, ser. 1, vol. 22, pt. 2, p. 990; Crist et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson Davis, vol. 10, pp. 125–126, n. 3.

  11 Acts of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia (Milledgeville, GA: Boughton, Nisbet & Barnes, 1862), pp. 68–69.

  12 Crist et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson Davis, vol. 9, pp. 359, 384; vol. 10, p. 19; Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 167–202.

  13 Harry Smith, Fifty Years of Slavery in the United States of America (Grand Rapids: West Michigan Printing, 1891), p. 121. See Winthrop Jordan, Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1993); John Cimprich, Fort Pillow: A Civil War Massacre and Public Memory (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); Andrew Ward, River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War (New York: Viking Press, 2005); George S. Burkhardt, Confederate Rage,
Yankee Wrath: No Quarter in the Civil War (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007).

  14 H. C. Bruce The New Man: Twenty-Nine Years a Slave. Twenty-Nine Years a Free Man (York, PA: Anstadt & Sons, 1895), p. 96; Levi Branham, My Life and Travels (Dalton, GA: A. J. Showalter, 1929), p. 22.

  15 Charles Heyward Diaries, Colleton District and Charleston; Rose Hill Plantation diary, June 1, 1861; Lewisburg and Amsterdam diary, entry for 1862; Charleston diary, entries for Dec. 1861, Feb. 1862, and June 1862, South Carolina Library, Records of Antebellum Southern Plantations, ser. A, pt. 2, reel 7.

  16 John Screven to Mary Screven, Sept. 12, 1862, Arnold and Screven Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Records of Antebellum Southern Plantations, ser. J, pt. 4, reel 9.

  17 In February of 1862 even Jefferson Davis urged his brother, Joseph, to “be ready to move your negroes” should the Union invasion penetrate much farther South. See Crist et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson Davis, vol. 8, p. 53. On “refugeeing” of slaves during the war, see James Roark, Masters without Slaves (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977); Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long (New York: Knopf, 1979); Clarence Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986).

  18 Louisa Alexander to Adam Leopold Alexander, Nov. 17, 1861, Alexander and Hillhouse Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Records of Antebellum Southern Plantations, ser. J, pt. 4, reel 13.

  19 James M. Clifton, ed., Life and Labor on Argyle Island: Letters and Documents of a Savannah River Rice Plantation, 1833–1867 (Savannah: Beehive Press, 1978), pp. 313, 314, 319–320. On the antebellum history of Gowrie, see William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996).

  20 Clifton, ed., Life and Labor on Argyle Island, pp. 327, 320.

  21 Ibid., pp. 320–323.

  22 Ibid., pp. 325, 328, 331, 337, 339, 324.

  23 Ibid., pp. 340, 343, 348, 350.