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

by James Oakes

  24 Peter Bruner, A Slave’s Adventures toward Freedom (Oxford, OH, [1919?]), pp. 32–33, 35ff. See also David Blight, A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2007).

  25 The information on Hughes in this and subsequent paragraphs comes primarily from Louis Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave: From Bondage to Freedom (Milwaukee: South Side Publishing, 1897). Hughes made a few minor errors of spelling and dating, but documentary evidence supports the basic outlines of his own account. Throughout his autobiography, Hughes spells his owner’s name “McGee,” for example, but the U.S. census records indicate that the planter spelled his name “McGehee.” Particularly helpful in clarifying the details of Hughes’s movements during the Civil War is Stephen V. Ash, A Year in the South: Four Lives in 1865 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). I would like to thank Professor Ash for generously sharing his research notes with me.

  26 Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long.

  27 On the experience of blacks in the Union army, see Dudley Taylor Cornish, The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861–1865 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966); Joseph Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 2000); Ira Berlin, Joseph Patrick Reidy, and Leslie Rowland, eds., Freedom’s Soldiers: The Black Military Experience in the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); John David Smith, ed., Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

  28 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), p. 293.

  29 John Hope Franklin, ed., The Diary of James T. Ayers: Civil War Recruiter (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1999), p. 46; Richard Sears, ed., Camp Nelson, Kentucky: A Civil War History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), pp. 156–157.

  30 Simpson and Berlin, eds., Sherman’s Civil War, p. 311.

  31 Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler (Norwood, MA: Plimpton Press, 1917), vol. pp. 244–245, 447–450.

  32 Sears, Camp Nelson, Kentucky, pp. 134–181.

  33 Philadelphia Inquirer, Oct. 25, 1862; Baltimore Sun, May 18, 1863.

  34 New York Herald, Jan. 4, 1863; Baltimore Sun, May 18 and June 3, 1863; Boston Herald, June 3, 1863; Louisville Daily Journal, June 2, 1863; Mary Todd Lincoln to Abraham Lincoln, [Nov. 3, 1862], ALP-LC. Cf. Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (New York: G. W. Carlton, 1868); Philadelphia Inquirer, Aug. 9, 1865.

  35 Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

  36 CW, vol. 6, p. 387; Boston Herald, Mar. 31, 1863. The editors of CW estimate the date of General Hurlbut’s memo as August 15, 1863, but if Hurlbut’s order was a response to Lincoln’s instructions, the president’s memo may have been written several months earlier.

  37 See, for example, the report in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Oct. 17, 1863, of a provost marshal in Cairo, Illinois, who issued an order “requiring all negroes who are not in possession of a certificate that they are in employment adequate for the support of themselves and families, to be placed in the contraband camp and provided for.”

  38 The Freedmen and Southern Society Project tabulations are in FSSP, ser. 1, vol. 3, pp. 77–80. The Project estimates that at war’s end, 271,000 blacks “lived in the plantation regions of the Lower South that came under Union control.” Another 203,000 worked under similar circumstances in the Upper South, which includes northern Alabama, eastern North Carolina, middle and eastern Tennessee, and parts of Virginia. Earlier estimates by Louis Gerteis, in From Contraband to Freedman: Federal Policy toward Southern Blacks, 1861–1865 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), pp. 193–194, were compiled differently and yielded a somewhat lower number. Of the 1,001,300 blacks living within Union lines, 237,800 were under the “organized control” of Union authorities by the end of the war. More recently Stephen V. Ash, in The Black Experience in the Civil War South (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), pp. 74–75, arrived at a much higher overall estimate of one million southern slaves who “became free before the Civil War ended.” Ash’s figure assumes that all slaves in the Border States had been freed.

  39 CW, vol. 6, p. 358.

  40 Henry Wilson, History of the Antislavery Measures of the Thirty-Seventh and Thirty-Eighth Congresses, 1861–1864 (Boston: Walker, Wise, 1864), pp. 116–117, 130.

  41 Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

  42 FSSP, ser. 1, vol. 1, p. 259; OR, ser. 1, vol. 23, pt. 2, p. 291; Victor B. Howard, Black Liberation in Kentucky: Emancipation and Freedom, 1862–1884 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), pp. 42–44. Cf. Elizabeth Leonard, Lincoln’s Forgotten Ally: Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt of Kentucky (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

  43 Acts of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia, p. 72.

  44 See the exchange between Confederate Secretary of War John Seddon and President Jefferson Davis, in which Davis argues that captured blacks should not “be regarded as regular prisoners of war.” Crist et al., eds., Papers of Jefferson Davis, vol. 9, p. 355; vol. 10, pp. 359, 375; Jack Hurst, Born to Battle: Grant and Forrest: Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga (New York: Basic Books, 2012), p. 326.

  45 Edward L. Pierce, “Second Report,” June 2, 1863, in Frank Moore, ed., The Rebellion Record (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1869), vol. 12, p. 322; John Niven, ed., The Salmon P. Chase Papers, vol. 1: Journals, 1829–1872 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1993); entry for Mar. 13, 1862, p. 331; CW, vol. 5, p. 329.

  46 CW, vol. 5, pp. 421–422.

  47 CW, vol. 6, p. 357; OR, ser. 1, vol. 23, pt. 2, p. 291.

  48 The horror of the war is a familiar theme in the scholarship on the Civil War, most recently and vividly in Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008).

  49 Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 1203; Henry Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1877), vol. 3, p. 406.

  CHAPTER 12: “OUR FATHERS WERE MISTAKEN”

  1 Cong. Globe., 38th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 1203.

  2 Ibid., p. 17.

  3 Ibid., p. 1463.

  4 Richard Sears, ed., Camp Nelson, Kentucky: A Civil War History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), pp. 135–181; Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 1317.

  5 Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 1324, 20.

  6 Cong. Globe. 38th Cong., 1st Sess., pp. 83, 1421, 2978. Illinois Republican John Farnsworth accused Democrats of being willing to re-enslave black soldiers. The Democrats voted against black troops, wanted to strip black troops of their uniforms, and voted “universally” against the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act. Indiana Democrat William S. Holman denied that he would re-enslave those owned by disloyal masters, thus indirectly admitting that he approved of the re-enslavement of blacks owned by loyal masters—the tens of thousands who enlisted from the Border States.

  7 Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 1420.

  8 Ibid., pp. 1461–1463.

  9 Ibid., p. 1314.

  10 Ibid., p. 19.

  11 Ibid., p. 1313.

  12 Legal scholars studying the Thirteenth Amendment have focused almost exclusively on this second, “enforcement” clause, hoping to find there a justification for federal activism on behalf of civil rights. See, for example, the symposium on the Thirteenth Amendment in Maryland Law Review 71, no. 1 (2011). Cf. Michael Kent Curtis, No State Shall Abridge: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1986), pp. 48ff.

  13 Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess., pp. 1482–1483, 1488, 1489.

  14 Ibid., p. 1313.

  15 Ibid., pp. 1313–1314.

  16 Ibid., p. 2983.

  17 Ibid., pp. 1323–1324. Charles Sumner, who in 1852 explicitly denied that Congress could constitutionally abolish slavery in a state, had by 1864 become a most indefatigable advocate for the view that the Constitution was an antislavery document. Congress and the president already had the power to abolish slavery; hence for Sumner, the Thirteenth Amendment was largely superfluous because “nothing against slavery can be unconstitutional.” Yet in the end he supported the amendment because, he claimed, it did what Congress and the president refused to do. Ibid., pp. 1479–1481. Quote on p. 1481.

  18 Ibid., p. 2983.

  19 Ibid., p. 2949.

  20 Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 71. One reason we know about James Brooks’s speech, even though it is missing from the Congressional Globe, is that several Republicans responded to it, most notably Isaac Arnold in a speech entitled “Is Slavery Dead?” Arnold’s emphatic answer to his own question was no. “I am not yet willing to admit the fact that slavery is dead.” He accused Brooks of “playing ’possum,” pretending slavery was dead so that Republicans would leave it alone and abandon their proposed constitutional amendment. Republican Congressman Wilson of Iowa likewise claimed that Brooks was being disingenuous. Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess., pp. 1197, 1203. Vorenberg, however, believes Brooks was sincere, which may explain why his fellow Democrats were so anxious to disavow the speech. On the other hand, he voted against the Thirteenth Amendment the following January.

  21 Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess., pp. 2940–2941, 2952, 1366.

  22 Ibid., pp. 2978, 2944, 1437ff.

  23 Ibid., p. 2952, 2982.

  24 Ibid., pp. 2616, 2957.

  25 Ibid., Appendix, p. 113.

  26 Ibid., pp. 1424, 5.

  27 Ibid., p. 2940.

  28 Ibid., pp. 2981, 2940; Appendix, p. 105.

  29 Ibid., pp. 2942, 2983, 2988, 2615; CW, vol. 8, p. 149; Henry Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1877), vol. 3, p. 387.

  30 Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 1490.

  31 Ibid., p. 2995. The final vote was 93 yeas, 65 nays, and 23 abstentions. James Ashley, the antislavery radical, changed his vote to no so that he could move for a reconsideration of the resolution when Congress returned after the November elections.

  32 Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States of America during the Great Rebellion, 4th ed. (Washington, DC: James J. Chapman, 1882), p. 318. On the same day the Senate passed the Wade-Davis Bill, it rejected Charles Sumner’s bill, which would have made the Emancipation Proclamation a statute, thus legislatively emancipating all the slaves in all the areas in rebellion.

  33 CW, vol. 7, p. 433.

  34 Ibid., Annual Message to Congress, Dec. 8, 1863, vol. 7, pp. 49–52.

  35 Ibid., “Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction,” Dec. 8, 1863, vol. 7, pp. 53–56.

  36 West Virginia had also abolished slavery as a condition for admission to the Union. Technically, the “loyal” state government of Virginia did so as well, but nobody took that vote seriously since it represented only twelve of the northernmost counties, near Washington. In 1866 the restored Virginia government rejected the Thirteenth Amendment after the “loyal” wartime legislature had abolished slavery.

  37 CW, vol. 7, Jan. 30, 1864, p. 161.

  38 Ibid., [Abraham Lincoln to John A. J. Creswell], vol. 7, p. 226.

  39 Lynda Lasswell Crist et al., eds., The Papers of Jefferson Davis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), vol. 10, p. 129.

  40 CW, vol. 6, p. 358; vol. 7, pp. 145, 155; Francis Newton Thorpe, The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the States, Territories, and Colonies . . . (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909), vol. 1, pp. 295–296.

  41 CW, Abraham Lincoln to E. E. Malhiot et al., June 19, 1863, vol. 6, pp. 287–289.

  42 Ibid., Abraham Lincoln to Nathaniel Banks, Aug. 5, 1863, vol. 6, p. 365.

  43 Ibid., Abraham Lincoln to Nathaniel Banks, Nov. 5, 1863, vol. 7, p. 1.

  44 Peyton McCrary, Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 186–270; LaWanda Cox, Lincoln and Black Freedom: A Study in Presidential Leadership (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1981).

  45 Thorpe, Federal and State Constitution, vol. 3, p. 1429.

  46 OR, ser. 3, vol. 3, pp. 855–856.

  47 Lincoln’s memo appears in the Official Records as his response to Stanton’s explanation of the policy, dated October 1, 1863. The editors of Lincoln’s Collected Works guessed incorrectly that the memo was dated from July 22, 1862. See CW, vol. 5, p. 338.

  48 Charles L. Wagant, The Mighty Revolution: Negro Emancipation in Maryland, 1862–1864 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964), p. 131.

  49 Ibid., pp. 133–196. Quotations on pp. 135, 142, 143, 147.

  50 Lew Wallace, An Autobiography (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1906), vol. 2, pp. 670ff. Wallace was the Union commander in charge of Maryland during the delegate elections for the constitutional convention. The “problem,” as Wallace remembered it, was “to get a majority of delegates in the convention friendly to the abolition amendment without subjecting the national administration to a charge of military intervention.” Quotation on p. 680.

  51 Wagant, Mighty Revolution, pp. 221–230, quotation on p. 223.

  52 Ibid., pp. 231–268.

  53 CW, vol. 8, pp. 41, 52.

  54 CW, Abraham Lincoln to Andrew Johnson, Sept. 11, 1863, vol. 6, p. 440; Sept. 18, 1863, vol. 6, p. 462.

  55 Hans L. Trefousse, Andrew Johnson: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), pp. 152–175; FSSP, ser. 1, vol. 1, pp. 262ff.

  56 Mark W. Geiger, Financial Fraud and Guerilla Violence in Missouri’s Civil War, 1861–1865 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Dennis K. Boman, “All Politics Are Local: Emancipation in Missouri,” in Brian R. Dirck, ed., Lincoln Emancipated: The President and the Politics of Race (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), pp. 130–154.

  57 John M. Schofield, Forty-Six Years in the Army (New York: Century Company, 1897), p. 57; OR, ser. 1, vol. 13, pp. 772–773.

  58 William E. Parrish, Turbulent Partnership: Missouri and the Union, 1861–1865 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1963), pp. 123–207.

  59 New York Times, July 17, 1864.

  60 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968 (New York: Chelsea House, 1971), vol. 2, p. 1180.

  61 CW, vol. 7, p. 380. Years later, in retrospective accounts, Noah Brooks and Isaac Arnold claimed that Lincoln urged the convention ahead of time to endorse the Thirteenth Amendment, but there is no contemporary evidence to support them. On the contrary, on the day before the convention opened, Lincoln’s secretary recorded in his diary that “[t]he President positively refuses to give even a confidential suggestion in regard to Vice. Prest. Platform or organization.” 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. 200. The Republicans hardly needed Lincoln’s urging, and nobody needed to tell Lincoln that his party was already committed to the Thirteenth Amendment.

  62 James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 718–750; Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), vol. 2, pp. 665–680.

  63 This account is from James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), pp. 229�
�232. See footnotes 18–21 for the sources on which it is based.

  64 Schlesinger, ed., History of American Presidential Elections, vol. 2, pp. 1179–1180; Stephen W. Sears, ed., The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), p. 584.

  65 David Alan Johnson, Decided on the Battlefield: Grant, Sherman, and the Election of 1864 (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2012).

  66 CW, vol. 8, p. 149.

  67 Michael Vorenberg, “The Thirteenth Amendment Enacted,” in Harold Holzer and Sara Vaughn Gabbard, eds., Lincoln and Freedom: Slavery, Emancipation, and the Thirteenth Amendment (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007), pp. 180–194.

  68 Lincoln’s lobbying efforts are detailed in Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, pp. 745–751. The classic reconstruction of “The Seward Lobby” is LaWanda Cox and John H. Cox, Politics, Principle, and Prejudice, 1865–1866 (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1963), pp. 1–30. The lobbying campaign is summarized in Vorenberg, Final Freedom, pp. 176–197.

  69 The remaining 18 votes in favor of the amendment came from “Unionists” (4 votes) and “Unconditional Unionists” (14 votes). There were 56 “nay” votes: 50 from Democrats and 6 from “Unionists.” Eight Democrats abstained.

  70 CW, vol. 8, p. 254.

  71 Journal of the Assembly of the State of New York, 88th Sess., 1865, pp. 225–226; A Documentary History of the Constitution of the United States of America (Washington, DC: Department of State, 1894), pp. 522–637.

  72 E. G. Baker Diary, May 31, 1865, Southern Historical Collection, Records of Antebellum Southern Plantations, ser. J, p. 6, reel 16; Shirley Plantation Journal, Library of Congress, ser. C., p. 1, Records of Antebellum Southern Plantations; New York Tribune, June 10, 1865; OR, ser. 1, vol. 48, p. 2, p. 929. One gauge of emancipation during the summer of 1865 is the spate of labor contracts signed and new labor regulations posted between June and September. See Steven Hahn et al., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, ser. 3, vol. 1: Land and Labor, 1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), pp. 332–391.

  73 Edward McPherson, ed., The Political History of the United States of America during the Period of Reconstruction (Washington, DC: Philip & Solomons, 1871), pp. 9ff., 19.