“I can just barely remember my mother.” That was what Tom Robinson, born into slavery on a North Carolina plantation, told an interviewer for the 1930s Federal Writers Project. He was only ten when sold away from his mother shortly before the Civil War began.

But I do remember how she used to take us children and kneel down in front of the fireplace and pray. She’d pray that the time would come when everybody could worship the Lord under their own vine and fig tree – all of them free. It’s come to me lots of times since. There she was a’praying, and on other plantations women was a’praying. All over the country the same prayer was being prayed.¹

Secession and war served only to make such prayers more expectant and intense. Despite efforts to conceal the war’s implications from them, slaves had many ways of learning about what its outcome could mean for them. Years after the war, Hattie Nettles of Opelika, Alabama, remembered climbing a fence as a young girl to watch Confederate soldiers pass by. She did not know where they were going at first, but it was not long before she found out. Mary Gladdy, a Georgia freedwoman, recalled “the whisperings among the slaves – their talking of the possibility of freedom.”²

Throughout the war, slaves met in secret to hold prayer meetings for freedom. According to Mary Gladdy, those on her plantation gathered in their cabins two or three nights a week. They placed large pots against the doors to keep their voices muffled. “Then,” she said, “the slaves would sing, pray, and relate experiences all night long. Their great, soul-hungering desire was freedom.” Those few slaves who could read kept up with events through pilfered newspapers and spread the word to their neighbors. Young Ella Hawkins of Georgia heard the older slaves whispering among themselves, “Us is gonna be free! Jes as sho’s anything. God has heard our prayers; us is gonna be free!” When a white minister preached that slavery was ordained by God and prayed aloud for Him to drive the Yankees back, Georgia slave Ella Hawkins prayed silently to herself, “Oh, Lord, please send the Yankees on.”³

In her reminiscences of the war years, Susie King Taylor wrote vividly of the excitement among her Savannah neighbors. “Oh, how those people prayed for freedom! I remember, one night, my grandmother went out into the suburbs of the city to a church meeting, and they were fervently singing this old hymn.”⁴

Yes, we all shall be free,

Yes, we all shall be free,

Yes, we all shall be free,

When the Lord shall appear.

Pray they did, but enslaved southerners were not simply waiting for either the Lord or the Yankees to give them freedom. They were taking it for themselves. Although Lincoln is often credited with having “freed the slaves,” his Emancipation Proclamation did little more than recognize a state of affairs that blacks had already created with what W. E. B. Du Bois later called their “general strike” against the Confederacy. Lincoln’s document, as Professor Ira Berlin points out, “heralded not the dawn of universal liberty but the compromised and piecemeal arrival of an undefined freedom. Indeed, the Proclamation’s flat prose, ridiculed by the late Richard Hofstadter as having ‘all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading,’ suggests that the true authorship of African American freedom lies elsewhere – not at the top of American society but at its base.”⁵

Georgia slaveholder Laura Comer illustrated Berlin’s point when she wrote in August 1862 that “the servants are so indolent and obstinate it is a trial to have anything to do with them.” Slaves resisted their plight by increasingly feigning ignorance or illness, sabotaging plantation equipment, and traveling freely in defiance of the law. A Confederate officer in Charleston complained that “gangs of negroes” who should have been at work on fortifications were “idle” on city streets. One disturbed white woman on a Georgia rail line was astonished to see “crowds of slaves in gayest attire” getting on and off the trains “at every country stopping place.”⁶

As for forced labor, what work slaves did was done with measured effort. Some refused to work at all. A Georgia plantation mistress wrote of one of her slaves, “Nancy has been very impertinent. … She said she would not be hired out by the month, neither would she go out to get work.” Another mistress wrote to her husband, “We are doing as best we know, or as good as we can get the Servants to do; they learn to feel very independent.” Kate Stone of Louisiana had similar problems with her slaves. According to her journal entry of June 1861, “The house servants have been giving a lot of trouble lately – lazy and disobedient. … The excitement in the air has infected them.”⁷

Such observations hardly squared with the “faithful slave” image, although slaveholders continued to press it publicly. But what they would not say in public, they had to admit among themselves. So pervasive and open was slave resistance that many slaveholders seemed resigned to it. A Texas woman admitted that it was useless to try to coerce her slaves, “so I shall say nothing and if they stop working entirely I will try to feel thankful if they let me alone.” In South Carolina, a plantation mistress wrote to her mother early in the war that slaves knew the crisis provided opportunities for them that “must be taken advantage of. … Times and slaves have changed.” Catherine Edmondston wrote from her North Carolina plantation, “As to the idea of a faithful servant, it is all a fiction.”⁸

Slavery Without Submission

The “faithful slave” notion had been a delusion from the start. Certainly the slaves knew it. And, as their actions made clear, slaveholders knew it too. Despite their claims to the contrary, the “wise master,” as historian Kenneth Stampp put it,

did not take seriously the belief that Negroes were natural-born slaves. He knew better. He knew that Negroes freshly imported from Africa had to be broken into bondage; that each succeeding generation had to be carefully trained. This was no easy task, for the bondsman rarely submitted willingly. Moreover, he rarely submitted completely. In most cases there was no end to the need for control – at least not until old age reduced the slave to a condition of helplessness.⁹

Control of elderly slaves was hardly a concern in any case. Few lived to see old age.

Figure 1.1. Harriet Tubman and the many enslaved people she led out of bondage made clear not only that slavery would be resisted but also that the slaves’ struggle would not be confined to the South. They kept mounting tension on the line between slavery and freedom and increasingly drew reluctant northerners into the conflict. Time and time again, northern failures to keep blacks and slavery locked in the South put them at odds with slaveholders’ expansionist demands. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Slave resistance took many forms, the most celebrated of which were various escape routes popularly called the Underground Railroad. Its earliest reference remains unclear. One tradition tells of an escaping Kentucky slave named Tice Davids who disappeared in southern Ohio almost within sight of his pursuing owner. The slaveholder quipped that Davids must have found an underground railroad. Another source relates the torture in Washington of a young refugee named Jim, who, after having his fingers pressed in a blacksmith’s vise, confessed that he was in the capital city looking for a railroad that “went underground all the way to Boston.”¹⁰ Whatever the case, by the early 1840s, nearly every escaping slave was said to be traveling via the Underground Railroad.

Harriet Tubman, the most famous of the railroad’s “conductors,” led hundreds of escapees to freedom. Rewards offered for her capture totaled as much as $40,000 but she was never caught. Neither was Arnold Gragston, an enslaved Kentuckian who ferried hundreds of fellow slaves across the Ohio River before making his own escape. Mary Stark, a black woman in Chesterfield County, Virginia, gave shelter to escaping slaves. So did Peter, a “tall, black African” in Petersburg, who, when his home was searched for refugees, proclaimed that he “would harbor as many negroes as he d—d well pleased.” A local court sentenced him to twenty lashes. Jacob Dill, a Richmond slave, was also whipped for sheltering refugees. Thanks to these men and women, and many others like them, perhap. 100,000 enslaved people escaped north in the first half of the nineteenth century.¹¹

Not all escape routes ran northward. Spanish Florida was a haven for refugees in the Deep South until it became a U. S. territory in 1821. In the Southwest, Mexico was attractive for those escaping bondage. “In Mexico you could be free,” recalled former slave Ben Kinchlow. “They didn’t care what color you was, black, white, yellow or blue.”¹²

Regardless of distance or direction, escaping slavery was dangerous work. Slavecatchers and bloodhounds were hot on the heels of nearly every escapee. Captured refugees could have toes or even half a foot cut off to discourage further escapes. Death could also result. One slave was whipped so badly after a failed attempt that he died three days later.¹³

Fear of bloodhounds, capture, and death weighed heavily on Henry Bibb before he fled Kentucky for freedom in Detroit. But the heaviest burden on his heart was his “strong attachments to friends and family.” For most enslaved people, the greatest deterrent to escape was the near certainty that they would never see loved ones again. Henry had planned to buy his wife out of slavery, but his former owner sold her away before Henry could raise the money. Most slaves did not want to take such a risk. “My pappy tried to get away,” recalled Mary Ella Grandberry, whose family was held in Alabama, “but he couldn’t see how to take all us children with him, so he had to stay with us.”¹⁴

Those torn between the burdens of slavery and the love of family often resorted to local escapes. “Sometimes slaves run away and hid out in caves,” remembered Georgia freedman Benny Dillard. Other slaves “would slip ’em something to eat at night.” Enslaved Georgian Willis Earle ran off to the woods and dug a cave where he spent fifteen years. Some escapees lived in small isolated groups and raided farms and plantations for hogs, chickens, corn, and vegetables. Others set up camp deep in the woods, swamps, and mountains, living off the land. It was not unheard of for these refugees, commonly referred to as maroons, to have communities with dozens of members. A few, such as those in the Great Dismal Swamp on the North Carolina–Virginia border and those in the Florida Everglades, numbered in the hundreds. Some communities lasted for generations.¹⁵

Local escapes were more often temporary affairs lasting days or weeks. It was not unusual for slaves to absent themselves overnight, especially on weekends, to visit friends or family, to attend dances or prayer meetings, or simply to get some rest. Such absenteeism carried risks, most notably from slave patrols. Slaves caught without a written pass from their owner could be severely whipped by the “paddyrollers,” as the slaves called them. “But us was young and spry,” recalled Virginia freedwoman Sis Shackelford, “an’ could outrun ’em.”¹⁶

Whipping and other physical abuse was often a reason for temporary escapes. “If they were treated too cruelly,” Virginia Shepard recalled, “our folks would always run away and hide in the woods.” Delicia Patterson told of running off after being mistreated by her owner. “He sent everybody he thought knew where I was after me, and told them to tell me if I would only come on back home, no one would ever bother me anymore. … So I went back home … and no one ever bothered me any more.” Such bargaining was not uncommon. After being sold to a slave trader, Fannie Berry’s father fled to the woods rather than be parted from his wife and three children, who lived on a neighboring plantation. A year later, his wife’s owner finally purchased the absent man, probably at a discount, and he soon showed up at his new owner’s place. Other reasons that slaves might escape temporarily included bargaining for better food, clothing, working conditions, housing, or visiting rights.¹⁷

Slaves who bargained in such ways walked a fine line. Punishments for unsuccessful attempts, or for any other conduct the owner disliked, could be severe. Owners and overseers frequently administered beatings to slaves in the “Buck” or “Rolling Jim” positions. In each case the slave was stripped naked and bound tight. One former slave remembered the Buck as “making the Negro squat, running a stout stick under his bended knee, and then tying his hands firmly to the stick – between the knees. Then the lash was laid on his back parts.” Rias Body recalled that with the Rolling Jim the slave was “stretched on his stomach at full length on a large log, about eight feet long. Into holes bored in the end of this log, wooden pegs were driven. The feet were securely tied to one set of these pegs … and the hands to the pegs at the other end. The victim was then ready to be worked on.”¹⁸

Another common torture involved hoisting slaves up by their thumbs, with only their toes touching the ground, and beating them with a stick or whip. A victim might be “further tormented by having his wounds ‘doctored’ with salt and red pepper.” Rhodus Walton remembered that his owner’s “favorite form of punishment was to take a man (or woman) to the edge of the plantation where a rail fence was located. His head was then placed between two rails so that escape was impossible and he was whipped until the overseer was exhausted. This was an almost daily occurrence, administered on the slightest provocation.” After recalling the variety of tortures inflicted on slaves, W. B. Allen, a former Alabama slave, told an interviewer, “Sir, you can never know what some slaves endured.”¹⁹

Slaves were defined as property by slave state courts and, in the Dred Scott case of 1857, by the U. S. Supreme Court. As such, slaves were subject to the absolute authority of slaveholders and to whatever controls they chose to employ. As one member of the Georgia Supreme Court insisted, “Subordination can only be maintained by the right to give moderate correction – a right similar to that which exists in the father over his children.”²⁰

There were, however, laws limiting the abusiveness of parents over their children. Slaves enjoyed few such legal protections. And the definition of “moderate correction” was left entirely to the slaveholder. “Should death ensue by accident, while this slave is thus receiving moderate correction,” recalled a British visitor, “the constitution of Georgia kindly denominates the offence justifiable homicide.”²¹ W. B. Allen personally knew some in bondage who were beaten, sometimes to death, for nothing more than being off the plantation without written permission. Other offenses that might result in extreme punishment were lying, loitering, stealing, and “talking back to – ‘sassing’ – a white person.”²²

Still, slaves resisted, most often cooperating with each other to do so. They had to balance their efforts, resisting enough to ease their burden but no so much as to bring on punishment. They organized work slowdowns. They played sick. They sabotaged or destroyed equipment to slow the pace of work. They pretended not to understand instructions. “Not that they often directly refused to obey an order,” wrote one observer, “but when they are directed to do anything for which they have a disinclination, they undertake it in such a way that the desired result is sure not to be accomplished.” Slaves on one plantation rid themselves of an especially cruel overseer by slipping a snake into his cabin. “Put in the snake and out went the overseer,” as Mattie Logan recalled. “Never no more did he whip the slaves on that plantation. … He was gone!”²³

Unfortunately, mitigating cruel treatment was rarely so simple. Slavery itself was the greatest cruelty of all, and, for some slaves, the ultimate resistance, the only escape, was death. One Georgia slave took her own life by swallowing strychnine. In Covington, Kentucky, two enslaved parents “sent the souls of their children to Heaven rather than have them descend to the hell of slavery.” After releasing their children’s souls, they released their own. Another enslaved mother killed all thirteen of her children in infancy to spare them a life of suffering as slaves. Two boatloads of Africans newly arrived in Charleston committed mass suicide by starving themselves to death.²⁴

Sometimes slaves killed their oppressors instead. Most famous for its violence was Nat Turner’s 1831 Virginia rebellion, in which more than fifty whites died. There were many others who fought back or conspired to do so. In 1800, more than a thousand slaves marched on Richmond. The governor called out armed militiamen to turn them back. There were similar efforts to gain liberty in Petersburg and Norfolk. When one slave conspirator was asked what he had to say in his defense, he calmly replied, “I have nothing more to offer than what General Washington would have had to offer, had he been taken by the British officers and put to trial by them. I have ventured my life in endeavoring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am a willing sacrifice to their cause.”²⁵

In 1811, 400 Louisiana slaves rose up for freedom. A year later, there was rebellion in New Orleans. In 1837, slaves near that city formed a rebel band and killed several whites before being captured. Slaves fought back individually too. In 1849, a slave in Chambers County, Alabama, shot his owner. In Macon County, another slave “violently attacked with a knife and cut to pieces” his overseer. After one overseer whipped her, an enslaved Florida woman took a hoe and chopped the man “to a bloody death.” When Edward Covey tried to bind and beat Frederick Douglass, he fought Covey off. From that day forward, Douglass later wrote, “I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.”²⁶

Douglass was fortunate to escape slavery before such defiance cost him his life. Most others who resisted violently were either shot or lynched. Some were burned alive.²⁷ What laws there were restraining whites from murdering slaves for whatever reason were in fact no restraint at all. State slave codes prevented slaves from testifying against whites in court, and few whites would testify against each other.

Aside from the brutality they sanctioned, slave codes defined legal limits for the late-antebellum South’s 4 million slaves far beyond their status as chattel. No slave could lawfully carry a gun, own property, travel without a written pass, or learn to read or write. Slave gatherings, even for religious services, were forbidden without a white person present.

The South’s quarter-million free blacks, most of whom lived in the upper South, labored under similar legal restrictions. They were free only in the sense that they were not chattel. But neither were they citizens. They could not vote or hold office. They could not testify against whites, could not own property in their own names, and were required to have a white guardian. Some slave states restricted their right of assembly, church services included. And they generally had to wear badges or carry papers testifying to their nonslave status. In the words of historian James Oakes, “it was like turning the Bill of Rights upside down.”²⁸

Slave codes also prevented municipal governments from issuing slave marriage licenses. To do so would have established a legally sanctioned bond between members of slave families, implicitly infringing on the “property rights” of slaveholders – specifically the right to deal with and dispose of slaves as the owner wished. Nevertheless, slaveholders allowed and even encouraged slaves to marry at an early age and have many children. This not only increased the slaveholder’s “property” but also provided an additional means of control. Besides the constant threat of physical violence, slaveholders found the institution of the family to be an effective means of intimidation. Any slave might be pushed to the point of disregard for his or her own safety and attempt to fight back or escape. But when slaveholders threatened family members, slaves were more likely to hold their anger in check. It was another way to drive home the point that the slaveholder was master. Some did not even allow parents to name their own children, reserving that privilege for themselves.²⁹

In naming the children of slave women, some slaveholders were actually exercising their own parental rights. For a planter to have any number of mistresses among his slaves was quite common. Slaveholders typically viewed rape as another method of enforcing psychological dominance within the slave community. Others simply viewed slaves as property to be used at their pleasure. The first sexual experience a planter’s son had was usually with a female slave. Robert Ellett, enslaved in King William County, Virginia, recalled that “in those days if you was a slave and had a good looking daughter, she was taken from you. They would put her in the big house where the young masters could have the run of her.” Pregnancy often followed. Little wonder that slaves of light complexion were present on nearly every plantation. William Craft, formerly enslaved in Georgia, wrote after his escape that “slavery in America is not at all confined to persons of any particular complexion; there are a very large number of slaves as white as any one.” Harriet Jacobs, herself abused as a young woman, recalled years later that she “once saw two beautiful children playing together. One was a fair white child; the other was her slave, and also her sister. When I saw them embracing each other, and heard their joyous laughter, I turned sadly away from the lovely sight. I foresaw the inevitable blight that would fall on the little slave’s heart.”³⁰

“Like the patriarchs of old,” wrote Mary Chesnut, “our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children – and every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds, or pretends so to think.” As the wife of one of South Carolina’s wealthiest planters, Chesnut’s words carried the authority of experience. In referring to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Chesnut wrote that the author “did not hit the sorest spot. She makes [Simon] Legree a bachelor.”³¹

“At that time it was a hard job to find a master that didn’t have women among his slaves,” recalled freedman Jacob Manson. “That was a general thing among the slave owners.”³² Even so, some enslaved women resisted to good effect. When a South Carolina overseer named Evans approached two women picking blackberries, he threatened to whip them if they refused his advances. As one of the women’s sons later told the story,

they act like they going to indulge in the wickedness with that ole man. But when he took off his whip and some other garments, my Mammy and ole lady Lucy grab him by his goatee, and further down, and hist him over the middle of them blackberry bushes. With that they call me and John. Us grab all the buckets and us all put out for the “big house” fast as our legs could carry us. Ole man Evans just hollering and cussing down in them briars.

When they told their mistress what had happened, she fired Evans on the spot.³³

An enslaved Maryland woman, taken to her owner’s room to “satisfy his bestial nature,” grabbed a knife and “sterilized” him. He died the next day. Fannie Berry of Virginia fought off her owner when he tried to rape her. “We tasseled and knocked over chairs and when I got a grip I scratched his face all to pieces; and there was no more bothering Fannie from him.” But Fannie noted that her success was uncommon. “Honey, some slaves would be beat up so, when they resisted, and sometimes … the overseer would kill you. Us Colored women had to go through a plenty, I tell you.”³⁴

Their misery was compounded when pregnancy followed. But no matter who the father was, more children meant greater control. Not only did slaves fear for the safety of family members, there was the additional terror that they might be sold off at any time. As slaves well knew, a slaveholder’s threat to sell spouses or children was not an idle one. One observer wrote that “such separations as these are quite common, and appear to be no more thought of, by those who enforce them, than the separation of a calf from its brute parent.”³⁵

The slaves’ monetary value made threats of selling family members all the more menacing. A field hand might bring a thousand dollars. A skilled slave brought much more. Even children commanded hefty sums. Jennie Kendricks remembered slave traders driving groups of children to market “the same as they would a herd of cattle.”³⁶ Slaves constantly feared seeing their families put through such misery. That fear helped keep overt resistance in check. Slaves with families were also less likely to escape since that too would mean permanent separation from their loved ones. Of the many thousands who did escape bondage, most were young, single, and childless.

Contesting Northern Slavery

Those slaves who escaped north rarely found themselves welcomed. By mid-century, there were roughly a quarter-million blacks in the North, and most white northerners wanted no more. Although they opposed slavery’s expansion into the western territories, hoping to keep the region free of blacks, they also tended to support slavery’s continued existence in the South. Working-class whites feared job competition from migrating blacks should slavery ever end. Those fears were flamed by northern industrialists who encouraged white workers to view blacks already in the North, and not ill-treatment by management, as the source of their economic woes.³⁷

Industrialists themselves generally supported slavery, fearing a sharp rise in the price of cotton should slavery ever end. Textile manufacturing was the North’s leading industry, and cotton was by far the leading textile. Nearly all the North’s moneyed families were invested to some extent in cotton. In 1835, participants in one of the largest assemblies ever held in Boston, led by some of the city’s most prominent businessmen, pledged their complete support for slavery. They further expressed “regret and indignation” at abolitionist activity. Slavery kept blacks in the South and in the fields, just where most white northerners wanted them. On a visit to America, the English journalist Charles Mackay observed that “northern men, who talk so much of liberty, and of the political equality of all men, turn up their scornful noses at the slightest possibility of contact with an African.”³⁸As Mackay’s observation suggests, the white North’s unwelcoming attitude toward those escaping slavery had as much to do with racism as economics. After his escape, Frederick Douglass lamented that “prejudice against color is stronger north than south. … I have met it at every step the three years I have been out of southern slavery.” An Indiana politician agreed: “Our people hate the Negro with a perfect if not a supreme hatred.” That was why, as freedman Tom Hawkins explained, so many slaves “didn’t run to no North … ‘cause them white folks up North was so mean to ‘em.”³⁹

During the antebellum era, it was nearly as dangerous to openly oppose slavery in the North as in the South. Few white northerners called themselves abolitionists. Those who did risked their reputations and sometimes their lives. In the 1830s, William Lloyd Garrison and Elijah P. Lovejoy, leading members of the abolitionist press, learned that the hard way. After Garrison insisted on immediate freedom for enslaved Americans in his periodical, The Liberator, a mob assaulted him in the streets of Boston. He barely escaped with his life. Elijah Lovejoy was not so lucky. Proslavery thugs in Alton, Illinois, killed him and threw his printing press into the Ohio River. Prudence Crandall, a white teacher, nearly met the same fate when a mob attacked her school for “young Ladies and little Misses of color” in Canterbury, Connecticut.⁴⁰

Blacks were special targets of anti-abolition violence. In July 1834, when abolitionists tried to convene in New York City, a mob broke up the meeting and went on a racist rampage. The crowd grew to several thousand, and rioting lasted for days. Soon after, there were riots in Buffalo and Palmyra; Newark, New Jersey; Norwich, Connecticut; and Columbia, Pennsylvania. There was rioting in Philadelphia as well, where white gangs roamed the streets “hunting the nigs.” Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Hall was burned to the ground in 1838 following an antislavery meeting there. In 1843, Frederick Douglass had his right hand fractured when an Indiana mob shouting “Kill the nigger, kill the damn nigger!” attacked him as he tried to deliver an antislavery speech. His broken hand was improperly set, and he suffered from the injury for the rest of his life. Douglass was attacked

Figure 1.2. Southerners escaping slavery were rarely welcomed in the North. Their reception could be violent, even deadly. In 1834, New Yorkers broke up an abolitionist meeting and went on a rampage, killing dozens of blacks. Soon after, Philadelphia gangs roamed city streets “hunting the nigs.” In 1843, Frederick Douglass, a fugitive from Maryland, had his right hand fractured when an Indiana mob attacked him as he tried to deliver an antislavery speech. Image from Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1882).

again in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he confronted a crowd armed with brickbats and rotten eggs shouting “Out with the damned nigger.”⁴¹

The law offered blacks little protection. Northern lawmen rarely intervened on behalf of blacks. Even when they did, convictions were rare. Most northern states forbade blacks to sit on juries. Several barred them from testifying against whites. In only five northeastern states, where they were a tiny fraction of the population, could black men vote. Blacks regularly faced discrimination when seeking employment. They were almost everywhere denied access to public education. They were restricted in their use of public transportation and denied admission to hotels, restaurants, and theaters. In 1839, at a meeting of the literary and antislavery African Clarkson Association of New York City, Peter Paul Simons rose to complain that “northern freedom is nothing but a nickname for northern slavery.”⁴²

Simons was hardly exaggerating. As he spoke, there remained slaves held in the free states. Not until 1846 did New Jersey transfer its remaining 700 slaves to “lifetime apprentices,” leaving them enslaved in all but name. Despite northern legislation dating back to the 1790s establishing gradual emancipation plans, most northern slaves were freed only by escape or death, and their children were released only after extended periods of indentured servitude or apprenticeship.⁴³

The lot of blacks in the North had hardly improved by 1854. In October of that year, William Wells Brown, speaking before the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, stressed that although he had escaped slavery in the South, he felt “scarcely more free” than he had twenty years earlier working on his old master’s plantation. He urged whites in the audience to fight not only against chattel slavery but also against the racial prejudice that underpinned the institution and infected whites even within the abolition movement. “Before you boast of your freedom and Christianity,” he urged, “do your duty to your fellow-man.”⁴⁴

Prejudice was, in the words of black minister Theodore Wright, “the spirit of slavery.” It was slavery’s foundation and life force, corrupting whites North and South. For black activist J. Theodore Holly, prejudice was “the great bulwark of American slavery.”⁴⁵ The Reverend Samuel Cornish, a black Presbyterian and founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, urged white abolitionists to combat not only slavery but prejudice as well, especially within themselves.

The time has come when the question has got to be met. When our friends must face it, if they are our friends; or do as some will, take to their heels and run. Prejudice against color, after all is the test question – at least among us. The mere and direct question of slavery is not. For every man here says – “I am as much opposed to slavery as you are. But as for these Niggers, we don’t want them here – let them go home to their own land.” This is what we hear, and this is the feeling. Here comes the tug; and here our friends have to grapple with slavery, not at arm’s length, but with a back-hold. Here the slimy serpent is among them, coiled up in their own hearts and houses.

We see it, and have long seen it – the real battle ground between liberty and slavery is prejudice against color. The friends of humanity have as yet but possessed a few out-posts upon its frontiers. They have not yet undisputed possession of the field, even in their own hearts, as time will show: and we have been a little surprised that the phalanx of our friends [has] been so slow to see this.⁴⁶

Black churches were a sustaining force in the fight against prejudice and slavery. Their ministers were leaders in the struggle. They supported abolitionist speakers, provided meeting places for abolitionist assemblies, and served as stations on the Underground Railroad. And they often did so on their own, with little or no support from white abolitionists. Although opposed to slavery, many white abolitionists also opposed equality for African Americans and even tried to limit their role in the antislavery movement. By the 1850s, disgusted blacks had abandoned the American Anti-Slavery Society, founded two decades earlier by both black and white abolitionists. In an 1855 editorial, James McCune Smith stressed that few blacks remained with the “old organization” because of racism among its white members. “The twain ought to be,” Smith lamented, “but are not, one flesh.”⁴⁷

Smith was a leading light of the antislavery movement. He was the first university-trained African American to practice medicine in the United States, although no American university would accept him as a student. He earned his medical degree at Scotland’s University of Glasgow, one of the finest medical schools of the day, where he graduated at the top of his class. When Smith returned to New York City, he went into private practice, served as physician at the Free Negro Orphan Asylum, and wrote extensive refutations of racist assumptions. He was a member of the American Anti-Slavery Society but became so incensed at the racism of white abolitionists that he, along with Frederick Douglass, founded the National Council of Colored People as a way to help blacks take control of their own destinies.⁴⁸

The rift between white and black abolitionists was not entirely a racial one. Some white abolitionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison, fully supported equal rights for blacks. His differences with most black abolitionists were of a more philosophical nature. Garrison saw the U. S. Constitution as proslavery and called on free states to leave the Union. “No union with slaveholders” was a common Garrison mantra. Garrisonians also discouraged direct political activism, arguing that to support any party that supported the Constitution was to back a slave regime.

But for most black activists, the struggle against slavery and prejudice was more personal. How could northern blacks advocate political separation from the slave states, leaving nearly 4 million fellow blacks, many of them family members, in bondage? Furthermore, to stand aside from the political process seemed to blacks a self-defeating prospect. After all, it was not simply the end of chattel slavery that they wanted but equal rights as well, including the right to vote. For men like Douglass and Smith, laying claim to the Constitution and its language of liberty was the surest road to success. As Douglass put it:

The Constitution of the United States – inaugurated to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty” – could not well have been designed at the same time to maintain and perpetuate a system of rapine and murder like slavery.⁴⁹

For blacks inclined toward political activism, it was not at all clear which party to back during the 1840s and early 1850s. Some sought to exert pressure from within the system, but neither of the two major parties, Whig nor Democrat, were antislavery in the least. Northern Democrats seemed actively supportive of slavery. Northern Whigs tried to avoid the question altogether. Freedom’s best hope seemed to lie with the Liberty Party, founded in 1840 by black and white abolitionists as the nation’s first antislavery organization dedicated to political activism. Prominent blacks such as Henry Highland Garnet and Samuel Ringgold Ward took leading roles as party organizers and stump speakers during the 1840 and 1844 presidential campaigns. In 1848, the New York state Liberty Party convention nominated Ward for a seat in the legislature.⁵⁰

The year 1848 also saw the Free Soil Party founded. The United States had just taken upper Mexico after a two-year war of conquest, putting the question of slavery’s expansion front and center. Mexico had abolished slavery years earlier. Would it now be reintroduced in the new U. S. territories? Northern splinter groups of both the Whigs and Democrats who trusted neither major party to resist slavery’s spread reacted by forming the Free Soil Party. Although opposed to slavery’s extension, the party was not antislavery. Some of its supporters were abolitionists, but many others backed the party not only as a means of keeping slavery out of the West but blacks as well. Even so, some Liberty Party men suggested casting their lot with the more broadly attractive Free Soilers. For most black abolitionists, to back a party that contained such a heavy racist element was too far a stretch. They tended to stand by the Liberty Party.⁵¹

The question of slavery in the new territories was pressing and divisive. For years, slaveholders had been demanding slavery’s expansion, partly as a way to keep the three-fourths of southern whites who did not own slaves supporting slavery. There was only so much prime farm land in the South, and slaveholders held most of it. The noted southern commentator J. D. B. De Bow wrote in 1852, “The non-slaveholders possess generally but very small means, and the land which they possess is almost universally poor and so sterile that a scanty subsistence is all that can be derived from its cultivation.”⁵² Cut out of the South’s dominant economic system and denied opportunities to acquire good land, continued support for slavery among nonslaveholding whites was hardly certain.⁵³

Increasing slave resistance also led slaveholders to push hard for expansion. Some did so as part of a wider demand for slavery’s security, others as a means of giving slaves less free territory into which they might escape. Slave escapes – distant and local, temporary and permanent – were on the rise throughout the late antebellum period, reaching perhap. 50,000 annually during the 1850s. Should that trend continue, slavery might inevitably be doomed. To slaveholders, it was clear that slavery must expand or die.⁵⁴

Northerners were just as firm in their opposition to slavery’s expansion. Although most white northerners had few qualms about slavery where it existed, they were determined to keep slavery confined to the South. Industrialists viewed the West as a region ripe for exploitation of natural resources. Working folk saw in the West a chance to escape their dismal urban lives. Neither group wanted to compete with slaveholders for western lands. Nor did they want to live among blacks. A major reason the white North moved to abolish slavery after the Revolution was to limit the growth of its black population. And so it did. Between 1790 and 1860, blacks as a percentage of population dropped in every northern state except New Hampshire, where the 1860 black population was only 0.15 percent.⁵⁵

Northern efforts to keep blacks at a distance were threatened by slaveholder insistence on slavery’s expansion. U. S. Senator Albert G. Brown of Mississippi suggested expanding slavery even to the North.⁵⁶ Although few northerners took the threat seriously in an immediate sense, some feared that if slavery could expand anywhere, it might eventually move northward too.

The controversy over slavery’s expansion had been brewing for decades. Congress reached a temporary settlement in 1820 with the Missouri Compromise. Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state and Maine as a free state, thus preserving the balance of free and slave states in the Senate. More significantly, a line extending westward from Missouri’s southern border established a dividing line between slavery and freedom. All future states created north of the line would be free. Those south of the line would be slave. That settled the issue as far as the federal government was concerned. There was even a “gag rule” forbidding any official discussion of slavery in Congress. But as the aggressively expansive United States pushed its way to the Pacific Ocean, politicians could not ignore slavery for long.

The issue again came to a head in 1848 after the Mexican War. During the presidential campaign that year, Whigs ignored slavery, Democrats favored compromise, and Free Soilers stood against slavery’s expansion, garnering more than 10 percent of the popular vote. The Liberty Party opposed both slavery’s expansion and slavery itself, but barely made a showing.⁵⁷

The successful Whig candidate, General Zachary Taylor, although elected on an evasive platform, found slavery impossible to ignore. California, part of the “Mexican Cession,” asked for admission to the Union as a free state in 1849. The next year, it gained statehood under the Compromise of 1850. Although enslaving Indians was common in California, blacks were effectively kept out, and the free states now had a two-seat advantage in the U. S. Senate.⁵⁸ As compensation to slaveholders, Congress passed a Fugitive Slave Act mandating the return of slaves who escaped north. As for the remaining areas of what had been upper Mexico, “popular sovereignty” would prevail. Voters in both the New Mexico and Utah territories, encompassing the modern states of New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado, would make the decision on slavery themselves.

For blacks, the most worrisome aspect of the compromise was the Fugitive Slave Act. Slaves escaping northward now had to reach Canada for safety. Blacks already in the North were at increased risk. For decades, professional slavecatchers, many of them northerners, had been kidnapping free blacks into slavery. Solomon Northup of New York was taken in 1841 and spent more than a decade enslaved on a Louisiana plantation before getting word to his family. He was finally released and wrote of his experience in Twelve Years a Slave.⁵⁹ Most other kidnap victims were not so fortunate. With open season now declared on fugitive slaves and free blacks generally, slavecatchers were more active than ever. A young girl named Viny Frazier was snatched on her way to school and carried to Mississippi. Her family never saw her again. Charlie and Anna Dorsey were bound, gagged, and carried on a ship that took them to slavery in Florida. There they remained for the rest of their lives.⁶⁰

Preparing to Meet the Crisis

The Fugitive Slave Act galvanized northern blacks. It was the immediate threat and the focus of resistance, including violent resistance, throughout the 1850s. The question of whether to resist slavery with violence had been a point of debate among black abolitionists for decades. To some it seemed self-defeating, even suicidal. David Walker of Boston, in his 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, had called for resistance by whatever means. The next year he was found dead at his door, likely poisoned by an unknown assassin. At the 1843 National Convention of Colored Citizens, in his “Address to the Slaves,” Henry Highland Garnet encouraged enslaved blacks to “die freemen” rather than “live to be slaves.” But Frederick Douglass opposed Garnet’s call to violence, and convention members refused to adopt Garnet’s views as representing their own.⁶¹

The mood among northern blacks began to change in 1850. Ministers who had counseled peace and patience turned to scripture in supporting opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act by whatever means. Former slave and New York Congregational minister Samuel Ringgold Ward, speaking at a rally in Boston, told the crowd that “if the fugitive slave is traced to our part of New York State, he shall have the law of Almighty God to protect him, the law which says, ‘Thou shalt not return to the master the servant that is escaped unto thee, but he shall dwell with thee in thy gates, where it liketh him best.’” William P. Newman – escaped freeman, former student at Oberlin College, and Baptist minister – renounced his Christian pacifism and declared his “fixed and changeless purpose to kill any so-called man who attempts to enslave me or mine.” Frederick Douglass fully agreed. “Every slave-hunter who meets a bloody death in his infernal business, is an argument in favor of the manhood of our race.”⁶²

It was the same all over the North. Martin Delany, an early proponent of black nationalism, told a crowd at Allegheny City, Pennsylvania:

My house is my castle; in that castle are none but my wife and children, as free as the angels of heaven, and whose liberty is as sacred as the pillars of God. If any man approaches that house in search of a slave, – I care not who he may be, whether constable or sheriff, magistrate or even judge of the Supreme Court … if he crosses the threshold of my door, and I do not lay him a lifeless corpse at my feet, I hope the grave may refuse my body a resting place and righteous Heaven my spirit a home. O, no! he cannot enter that house and we both live.⁶³

In Syracuse, the formerly enslaved Reverend Jermain Loguen railed against the Fugitive Slave Act. “I don’t respect this law – I don’t fear it – I won’t obey it! It outlaws me, and I outlaw it. … If force is employed to re-enslave me, I shall make preparations to meet the crisis as becomes a man.” Loguen called for collective resistance too, urging his audience to “stand by me … for your freedom and honor are involved as well as mine.” Philadelphia blacks vowed “to resist this law at any cost and at all hazards.” Blacks in New York promised not to allow any “blood-thirsty slaveholder” to lay hands on them “without resisting, even if need be, unto death.” A meeting of Boston blacks resolved to resist the Fugitive Slave Act “at every hazard.” J. B. Smith, himself a fugitive slave, urged the crowd never to leave their homes unarmed “and on the head of the slave dealer be the consequences.”⁶⁴

Black men in Milwaukee, many of them fugitives, pledged protection to each other and to their escaping brethren. At a meeting in Columbus, Ohio, city blacks formed a standing “vigilant committee” and advised all “colored citizens to go continually prepared, that they may be ready at any moment to offer defence in behalf of their liberty.” Blacks in Worcester, Massachusetts, determined to “brave all consequences” rather than yield themselves or any fugitive to the “threatenings of slave-drivers and women-whippers of the South, and their Northern allies.”⁶⁵

In 1855, black Bostonians petitioned the governor for weapons to arm a new militia company. When he denied their request, they armed themselves and formed the Massasoit Guards, under command of attorney Robert Morris. At an 1858 meeting of Massachusetts blacks in New Bedford, Morris promised help should anyone have trouble with slavecatchers. “You telegraph us in Boston, and we’ll come down three hundred strong.”⁶⁶

The business of slavecatching became ever more dangerous as blacks organized to protect themselves. Stealth was critical for a capture to succeed. “If you want to arouse our latent manhood, and see a grand development of moral courage in opposition to public sentiment and unjust laws,” thundered black abolitionist T. Morris Chester, “let it be announced that a fugitive slave is arrested by the revolting vampires who exist by sucking our blood, and you will witness a magnificent gathering together of the Afro-Americans in their physical strength.”⁶⁷ Time and again, such scenes as Chester warned of played out whenever the alarm was raised. Slavecatchers, and sometimes any law officers who dared to assist them, were run down, beaten, and deprived of their captives. Many slavecatchers were fortunate to avoid being killed. Some were not so fortunate.

In September 1851, several men escaped from Maryland slaveholder William Gorsuch and headed for Pennsylvania. They sought refuge on William Parker’s Lancaster County farm, not far from Christiana. Parker

Figure 1.3. Slaveholders had a difficult time retrieving their “property” despite the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Northern blacks responded to the act by forming unofficial militias and self-protection societies. In 1851, members of the Lancaster Black Self-Protection Society in Pennsylvania killed Maryland slaveholder William Gorsuch and wounded others in his party when they tried to take three fugitives by force. Image from William Still, The Underground Railroad (1872).

was a farmer, former slave, and founding member of the Lancaster Black Self-Protection Society. He and other society members had already thwarted several attempts to reenslave escaping blacks. Within a few days, Gorsuch, backed by perhaps half a dozen armed men and a federal deputy marshal from Philadelphia, arrived at the Parker farm to claim his slaves. Members of the Self-Protection Society were there as well. One of the men yelled to Gorsuch, “You had better go away if you don’t want to get hurt.” Gorsuch responded with a pistol shot. Society members returned fire and rushed the Gorsuch party. Within seconds, Gorsuch lay dead, his son was wounded, and the rest of his companions had scattered. Parker, along with his wife, fled to Canada to avoid arrest. But local officials arrested more than two dozen others and charged them with treason, riot, and murder. The effort was useless. The jury refused to convict them. Some of the jurymen later admitted that they had made up their minds to acquit before the defense even presented its case.⁶⁸

Although a few jurors may have sympathized with the accused, such acquittals largely reflected a growing sentiment among northern whites that the Fugitive Slave Act was turning their towns and cities into battlegrounds over slavery. Some of the Christiana jurors surely hoped to send the message to slaveholders, slavecatchers, and kidnappers that they were unwelcome. They would receive no sympathy should they be maimed or killed trying to kidnap free blacks or capture fugitives.

Such attitudes were reflected in more than sentiment. Northern states had long tried to keep the struggle over slavery beyond their borders, some by enacting personal liberty laws designed to discourage slaveholders and slavecatchers from entering their states. Pennsylvania went so far as to declare that slaves brought into the state could legally claim freedom. Such laws prevented state officials from assisting bounty hunters, forbade the use of state jails in confining captured fugitives, and provided trial by jury and the right of appeal for accused fugitives. Personal liberty laws were not always enforced, but they sent a clear signal to slaveholders and slavecatchers that northerners wanted no part of the trouble they brought.

Nor did they want more blacks in their states, likely as they were to attract slavecatchers and kidnappers. Although northern blacks accounted for barely 1 percent of the total population, that was enough for most whites. Legal restrictions and economic discrimination had for decades made it clear that blacks were unwelcome. To stress the point, during the 1850s Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa made it illegal for blacks to settle there. Other states kept blacks out by requiring proof of freedom and posting bonds to guarantee “good behavior.” One Ohio congressman insisted that his state would never allow blacks to immigrate with or without a law forbidding it. “Three hundred thousand freemen of Ohio would line the banks of the Ohio river to receive them on the points of their bayonets.” It was hardly an idle threat. When a group of nearly 400 free blacks from Virginia tried to settle in southern Ohio, locals quickly drove them out.⁶⁹

That white northerners wanted blacks and slavery confined to the South was patently clear. It was not clear enough, however, to northern congressional leaders, who greatly underestimated the fears northerners held about the potential for slavery’s spread. The depth of those fears became apparent after Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. In exchange for southern votes favoring organization of these territories, through which northerners hoped to build the first transcontinental railroad, they were opened to the possibility of slavery under popular sovereignty. Nebraska and Kansas both lay north of the old Missouri Compromise line, which for more than three decades had barred slavery from the area. But northern congressmen wanted their railroad, and they needed southern votes to get it. Repealing the Missouri Compromise was the price for those votes. It seemed at the time a small price to pay. Most northern legislators were certain that there was no real danger of either territory becoming a slave state since the region was suited neither to large-scale cotton nor tobacco cultivation.⁷⁰

But Kansas was just west of Missouri, a slave state. That alone was enough to concern most northerners. Free Soilers and abolitionists rushed settlers into Kansas. Proslavery men did the same. During elections for the legislature, thousands of “border ruffians” crossed over from Missouri to vote, giving the proslavery faction a victory. The territorial governor called the election a fraud but let the results stand anyway. The new proslavery legislature quickly expelled its few antislavery members and proposed a state constitution allowing slavery. Under the new government, to question slavery’s legality was a felony. To aid or encourage an escaping slave was a capital offense. Antislavery men responded by forming their own competing government and drafting a constitution that excluded both slavery and free blacks from the territory.

The controversy was by no means limited to political bickering. A proslavery raid on the town of Lawrence left one man dead. In retaliation, an antislavery band led by John Brown, later of Harpers Ferry fame, killed five proslavery men along Pottawatomie Creek. Violence spread quickly. By the end of 1856, more than 200 people were dead.⁷¹

Bloodshed in Kansas further polarized the politics of slavery’s expansion. It drove a firm wedge between the Democratic Party’s northern and southern wings. It destroyed the Whigs as a national party. And it gave rise to a new political force, the Republican Party, dedicated to keeping slavery out of the territories. Republicans ran their first presidential candidate, Georgia-born John C. Frémont, in 1856. He lost to Democrat James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, but Republicans established a firm sectional base by capturing all but five of the free states.⁷²

Although Democrats won largely on a racist platform, calling their rivals “Black Republicans” at nearly every turn, Republicans appealed to racism as well. In a speech at the 1858 Republican national convention, Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois assured voters that the new party was “a white man’s party. … We wish to settle the Territories with free, white men. … It is better that [blacks] should not be among us.”⁷³ A vote for Democrats, said Republicans, was a vote for blacks and slavery in the territories. Republicans promised to keep the territories free of both and to give free western land to free white men. For most white abolitionists, that platform was enough to ally them with Republicans.

Black abolitionists found the alliance harder to stomach. Many refused to support men whose distaste for slavery was limited by geography. In June 1855, black leaders such as Frederick Douglass, along with several white abolitionists, Gerrit Smith and John Brown among them, met in Syracuse, New York, and helped form the Radical Abolition Party as successor to the defunct Liberty Party. Even so, there were black leaders who saw Republicans as the more practical alternative. William J. Watkins – free-born Bostonian, abolitionist speaker, and Underground Railroad activist – saw Republicans as the best hope for at least limiting slavery. Such pragmatism seemed justified after the Radical Abolitionists garnered few votes in the 1856 presidential race.

Still, for some black activists, going Republican was going too far. Henry Highland Garnet was “deeply grieved” when a Colored Men’s State Suffrage Convention at Troy, New York, backed the Republican candidate for governor in 1858. Garnet was astonished that black men could be “so blind to their best interests.” He and other black leaders supported white abolitionist Gerrit Smith, former Liberty Party presidential candidate and supporter of full social and political equality for blacks, on the Radical Abolition ticket. Smith received only 5,000 votes.⁷⁴

Equal rights supporters, Radical or not, were used to such disappointments. The previous year, they had suffered a devastating blow when the U. S. Supreme Court attempted to settle the slavery question once and for all with its Dred Scott v. Sandford decision. The only issue at hand had been whether Scott’s temporary residence in free territory had made him a free man. The southern-dominated court ruled that it did not, but the justices went further than that. By a seven-to-two margin, they denied Scott, or any black, the right to sue in federal court. Blacks could not be U. S. citizens, they said, because the founders, when they drafted the Constitution, had not intended them to be so. Black folk, said Chief Justice Roger Taney, had no rights that whites were bound to respect. Dissenting Justice John McLean reminded his colleagues that blacks held voting rights, and hence citizenship, in ten of the thirteen states in 1789 when the Constitution was ratified, although five of those ten states later revoked or restricted black voting. Still, the notion that blacks could not be citizens was, said McLean, “more a matter of taste than of law.”⁷⁵

McLean further insisted that, by the majority’s reasoning, the Court had no authority in the case at all. If Scott was not a U. S. citizen and had no access to the federal courts, then the Supreme Court had no jurisdiction. Nevertheless, hoping to lay the issue of slavery’s expansion to rest, the majority cited the Fifth Amendment, which stated in part, “No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” Slaves were not persons but property, claimed the majority, and could not be barred from the territories. By implication, slaveholders could not be barred from taking their “property” anywhere the Constitution held force, including the free states.⁷⁶

Ironically, the Dred Scott decision was a tremendous boost to the Republican Party. It pushed more northern whites into the Republican camp, and that push brought a Republican majority to the U. S. House of Representatives with the 1858 mid-term elections. Republicans were riding high on the expectation that their next presidential nominee, whomever he might be, would almost assuredly win enough of the more populous free states to become president.

For most blacks, even black Republicans, it was hard to see anything positive in the Dred Scott outcome. Paraphrasing Roger Taney, a gathering of New York blacks declared the ruling “a foul and infamous lie which neither black men nor white men are bound to respect.” Respected or not, it was the law of the land, and blacks held little hope for positive change in the near future. William Still, a son of former slaves and chief organizer of the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia, wrote that blacks in his city felt either “hopelessly doomed” or saw only a “faint prospect” that their legal status would ever improve. Charles Lenox Remond, a black Bostonian and tireless antislavery orator, nearly gave up on the United States ever becoming a true land of liberty. “We owe no allegiance to a country which grinds us under its iron hoof and treats us like dogs,” Remond told a gathering at Israel Church in Philadelphia. “The time has gone by for colored people to talk of patriotism.”⁷⁷

A few black leaders even suggested that it might be time for blacks to leave the country. In the fall of 1858, Henry Highland Garnet founded the African Civilization Society to help blacks immigrate to Africa. Few took Garnet up on his offer. The great majority of African Americans had never sought immigration to any foreign land. Whatever the United States was, it was still home. But in the wake of Dred Scott, it seemed an increasingly hostile home.⁷⁸

More Cases of Insubordination than Ever

If despondency was on the rise, so was resistance. Across the North, blacks stepped up efforts to form unofficial militias, neighborhood patrols, and other self-protection societies. But it was in the South that rising resistance stoked slaveholder fears and pressed the slavery issue to a breaking point. “It is useless to disguise the fact, its truth is undeniable,” wrote a Virginia newspaper editor in 1852, “that a greater degree of insubordination has been manifested by the negro population, within the last few months, than at any previous period in our history.” A year later, one observer noticed that newspapers throughout the South were reporting “complaints of growing insolence and insubordination among the negroes.” A South Carolina editor complained of having “seen the deadly rifle in the hands of blacks in the District, and expertness exhibited in its use that would not dishonor the famous Kentucky marksman.” He called on authorities to clamp down on such dangerous conduct.⁷⁹

Reports of rising resistance, up to and including murder, became more and more common throughout the 1850s. A Missouri slave stabbed his owner to death in 1853 and escaped to Canada. In 1855, another slave from Missouri slashed his owner nearly in half and fled to Iowa. An Alabama bondsman killed his owner and boasted of the murder. A Georgia slave named Lash, after some “rough handling,” murdered his owner. A Florida woman chopped her overseer’s head off with a hoe. In Maryland, a slave killed his owner with a knife, took flight, and was never seen again. After seeing his sister whipped, a Kentucky slave beat the overseer to death with a club and escaped on the Underground Railroad.⁸⁰

In July 1859, The Liberator reported a rash of violence occurring in the spring and early summer. A slave near Grand Cone, Texas, bashed his owner’s brains out with an axe, then burned the body. Another slave in Union County, Kentucky, used an axe to kill an overseer who was trying to

Figure 1.4. Enslaved people resisted bondage in many subtle and overt ways, becoming increasingly violent in the late antebellum era. Nat Turner’s 1831 revolt saw more than fifty whites killed. More common were individual acts of violence, which were epidemic by the 1850s. One slave-state newspaper reported in 1859 that stabbing, clubbing, and death by the axe were “alarmingly frequent.” Image from Samuel Warner, Authentic and Impartial Narrative of the Tragical Scene Which Was Witnessed in Southampton County (1831).

whip him. A slaveholder in Spencer County, Kentucky, was clubbed to death after whipping two of his slaves. In Lincoln County, Missouri, an enslaved man stabbed his owner to death. An Arkansas slave crept up behind his overseer and laid on with an axe, “the blade entering the brain up to the handle, splitting the head entirely open.” Commenting on one murder, a St. Louis paper remarked that reports of slaves killing whites had become “alarmingly frequent.”⁸¹

Collective resistance was also becoming more frequent. In 1856, a North Carolina posse succeeded only in getting one of its number killed when it attacked a settlement of black escapees hiding in Big Swamp. That same year, Governor Henry Wise of Virginia moved arms into Alexandria to head off a feared insurrection. Thirty-two slaves were arrested. In Tennessee, more than sixty slaves belonging to Senator John Bell were implicated in a rebellion conspiracy. Nine were hanged – four by court order, five by a lynch mob. In Dover, Tennessee, six slaves were hanged and one was whipped to death on accusations of plotting insurrection. The incident stoked rebellion rumors throughout Stewart County, Tennessee, and neighboring Christian County, Kentucky. A newspaper editor in Galveston, Texas, wrote in 1856 that “never has there been a time in our recollection when so many insurrections, or attempts at insurrection, have transpired in rapid succession as during the past six months.” In December, Georgia’s Albany Patriot called for more slave patrols and warned that “citizens should always have their arms ready for service.”⁸²

In 1857, a group of Carter County, Kentucky, slaves were tried on suspicion of plotting insurrection. One was burned to death for refusing to confess. February 1858 saw a “fearful insurrection” in Arkansas. Blacks were said to have attacked two settlements and killed twenty-three whites. A newspaper editor in Franklin, Louisiana, reporting the murders of two slaveholders by their own slaves, noted that there were “more cases of insubordination among the negro population … than ever known before.” In August, more than fifty slaves on a Mississippi plantation declared that “they would die to a man before one of their party should be whipped.” It took seventy-five armed whites to put down the resistance.⁸³

Rebellion of another kind rocked the nation in October 1859 when John Brown and twenty other abolitionists tried to seize the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and arm local slaves. The effort failed, and a Virginia court sentenced Brown to hang for treason. Several of Brown’s compatriots were killed in the raid, among them a former Virginia slave named Dangerfield Newby. Found in his vest pocket were letters from his wife, enslaved in Prince William County, Virginia, just forty miles from Harpers Ferry. The last, dated August 16, 1859, brought urgent and disturbing news.

Dear Husband,

your kind letter came duly to hand and it gave me much pleasure … I want you to buy me as soon as possible for if you do not get me somebody else will … it is said Master is in want of monney if so, I know not what time he may sell me an then all my bright hops of the futer are blasted for there has ben one bright hope to cheer me in all my troubles that is to be with you for if I thought I shoul never see you this earth would have no charms for me … I want to see you so much the Children are all well the baby cannot walk yet … you mus write soon and say when you think you Can Come.

Your affectionate Wife

Harriet Newby

Newby attempted to buy his family and initially worked out a deal. But the owner reneged and bumped the purchase price out of Newby’s reach. In desperation, he had tried to rescue his wife and children.⁸⁴

Four other blacks were with Brown on the raid. Osborne Anderson, a fugitive slave, escaped and fled to Canada. Lewis Leary of Oberlin, Ohio, died during the raid. Shields Green and John Copeland Jr., both also of Oberlin, were captured and sentenced to hang. Shortly before his execution, Copeland wrote to his family:

Dear Parents,

my fate so far as man can seal it, is sealed, but let not this fact occasion you any misery; for remember the cause in which I was engaged; remember it was a holy cause, one in which men in every way better than I am, have suffered & died. Remember that if I must die, I die in trying to liberate a few of my poor and oppressed people from a condition of servitude against which God in his word has hurled his most bitter denunciations. … I am content … I beg of you not to grieve about me. … meet me in heaven. I remain your most affectionate son,

John A. Copeland⁸⁵

If Harpers Ferry gave abolitionists martyrs for their cause, it gave the South’s secessionist “fire-eaters” something just as valuable. After Dred Scott and its resulting political realignments, they knew that the next president would likely be a Republican. In that event, they were prepared to take the South out of the Union. But secessionists in the South, like abolitionists in the North, were a small minority. To build support for their cause, fire-eaters tried to paint all northerners, especially Republicans, as violent abolitionists bent on ending slavery by inciting rebellion. In the aftermath of Brown’s raid, they easily played on southern whites’ fears of northern-backed slave revolt. Fire-eaters pointed to Brown’s black allies and described them as organized and led by “blatant freedom shriekers.” There was more to come, they warned. The whole South was infested with “agents of the Black Republican Party.”⁸⁶

Although slaveholders tried to suppress the news among their slaves, word of events at Harpers Ferry quickly traveled along what Booker T. Washington later called “the ‘grape-vine’ telegraph.” “It was impossible to keep the news of John Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry from spreading,” recalled former slave George Albright of Mississippi.⁸⁷ That news was certainly welcome. Whether it spurred more resistance than there might otherwise have been is an open question, but certainly the tide of resistance that had long been rising continued to swell in the winter of 1859–60.

Fires that swept through cotton warehouses and gin presses were blamed on blacks and northern abolition agents. In November, fire destroyed six-thousand dollars’ worth of corn, fodder, and cotton on one Georgia plantation. Another fire razed a gin house two miles from Columbus. A local newspaper called it “Kansas work in Georgia.” There was Kansas work in Virginia too. In the Berryville neighborhood, authorities charged two slaves named Jerry and Joe with setting several fires. December found blacks in Bolivar, Missouri, attacking whites with stones and threatening to burn the town. Wrote one southern editor, it was all part of a northern-backed “conspiracy to murder and plunder the free white citizens of the South.”⁸⁸

This volatile atmosphere of panic and paranoia framed the 1860 presidential campaign. When Democrats could not agree on a policy regarding slavery in the territories, most southern delegates walked out. Those who stayed nominated Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. The splinter delegates held their own convention, called themselves the Southern Rights Party, and nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. Southern politicos, many of them old-line Whigs, who refused to support the secession-leaning Southern Righters formed the Constitutional Union Party and nominated John Bell of Tennessee. The party’s only platform was the “Constitution of the Country, the Union of the States, and the Enforcement of the Laws.” Republicans met in Chicago and agreed on nearly everything except a candidate. Of the leading contenders, none had enough delegates to ensure nomination going into the convention. The party finally settled on Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, who seemed to be nearly everyone’s second choice. As for slavery, the platform promised to halt its spread and keep it locked in the South.

Black northerners were conflicted over whether to support Republicans that year. The Weekly Anglo-African pointed out that Republicans constantly referred to blacks as “inferior beings.” Lincoln himself, despite his distaste for slavery, had said publicly on more than one occasion, “I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. … I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.” Lincoln vowed to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. He stressed his support, and that of most other Republicans, for “colonizing” free blacks to Latin America or Africa. One black abolitionist wrote that voting for such a man and his party was to support slavery “where it is, and endorse a policy which looks to the expulsion of the free black American from his native land.”⁸⁹

Those blacks who found Republicans too off-putting gravitated toward Gerrit Smith, who was again running for president on the Radical Abolition ticket. There was no hope of his winning, but, unlike Lincoln, he was an avowed abolitionist and equal rights supporter. Still, northern blacks could hardly help but look on Lincoln as a better alternative than his major rivals for the presidency. Frederick Douglass, a friend and supporter of Gerrit Smith, probably best expressed the general feeling of northern blacks when he told an audience:

While I see … that the Republican party is far from an abolition party, I cannot fail to see also that the Republican party carries with it the anti-slavery sentiment of the North, and that a victory gained by it in the present canvass will be a victory gained by that sentiment over the wickedly aggressive pro-slavery sentiment of the country. … Abolitionist though I am, and resolved to cast my vote for an Abolitionist, I sincerely hope for the triumph of that party over all the odds and ends of slavery combined against it.⁹⁰

Southern blacks hoped for a Lincoln victory as well, believing as they did that his election would bring freedom with it. How could they think otherwise, with Southern Rights men ranting throughout the South that Lincoln meant to end slavery and bring on black equality? In September 1860, a Georgia paper complained that “every political speech that has been delivered in Macon has attracted a number of negroes, who, without entering the Hall, have managed to linger around and hear what the orators say.” In Columbus, blacks attended so many public campaign rallies that white residents became alarmed at their “unusual interest in politics, and the result of the Presidential election.” The mayor banned blacks from attending future rallies. In Eufaula, Alabama, “vigilant committees” kept a close watch on blacks who gathered in the streets to discuss politics. James Henry Hammond of South Carolina wrote to a friend that at least a tenth of the people attending political rallies in his area were black.⁹¹

Some blacks, mainly house servants, did not have to leave home to hear about the campaign. Hammond admitted that “daily at our tables and our firesides we discuss these matters with Negroes all around.” What blacks heard was what slaveholders generally feared – that Lincoln was a direct threat to slavery. That impression was more than enough to make enslaved people Lincoln supporters. Alabama freedman Louis Meadows remembered that slaves “hoped and prayed he would be elected. They wanted to be free and have a chance.”⁹²

Slaves increasingly acted on their hopes for freedom in the summer and fall of 1860. Rebellions and rumors of rebellions pervaded the South. Whatever their nature or degree, they all reflected black ambitions and white fears. Some whites blamed “black Republicans” or “abolition emissaries” for stirring up trouble. Others tried to ignore the upsurge of resistance, uncomfortable with admitting how widespread resistance really was. “We dislike to allude to the evidences of the insurrectionary tendency of things” wrote a Georgia newspaper editor in August. Nevertheless, he felt compelled to mention a conspiracy in Floyd County.⁹³

There was also trouble in other Georgia towns. One “insurrectionary plot” called for slaves to burn Dalton and crash a train into Marietta. At least thirty-six slaves were implicated and imprisoned. Nearby Rome saw attempts “to incite insurrection among the slaves.” Arson caused rampant fear of slave rebellion in Texas that summer as fires set by slaves swept through several towns. In September, Winston County, Mississippi, officials arrested thirty-five slaves for a rebellion plot. October found slaves in Virginia’s Norfolk and Princess Anne Counties planning revolt. According to one report, they aimed to begin a war for freedom using their shovels, axes, and hoes as weapons.⁹⁴ That month in Washington County, North Carolina, authorities uncovered a planned rebellion in which 300 slaves were to

march towards Plymouth, murder and destroy all they might encounter on the road, set fire to the town, kill all the inhabitants that might oppose them, seize what money there might be, also what ammunition and weapons they might acquire, then take possession of such vessels as they required for their purpose and go in them where they might think proper.⁹⁵

Insurrection and the Knell of Slavery

In the November presidential election, as most had expected, Lincoln carried the day. Still, he gained only a plurality of the popular vote. More than 60 percent of voters nationwide preferred candidates other than Lincoln. Even in the free states, where many white voters feared “Black Republican” intentions, 46 percent voted for someone other than Lincoln. But Lincoln’s slight majorities in nearly all the free states were enough to give him an overwhelming advantage in the electoral college.

With Lincoln poised to enter the White House, slaves became ever more rebellious. Most held at least a vague assumption that Lincoln’s election might mean their freedom, but they knew slaveholders would not give up slavery without a fight. If it was to be war over slavery, slaves were not waiting for Lincoln. They would start the war themselves.

At 2:30 a.m. on election day, fire consumed much of Fort Gaines, Georgia. After townspeople brought the flames under control, two blacks were shot trying to restart the blaze. Georgia newspapers also reported an election-day slave insurrection in Crawford County, just west of Macon. More than twenty slaves, perhaps many more, had gone on a rampage, intending to kill their owner “and all the white folks.” Well-armed whites quickly subdued the freedom fighters and prepared to mete out summary justice. “Some will be burnt,” wrote a Milledgeville paper, “others hung.”⁹⁶

There were more uprisings in the Alabama black belt counties of Montgomery, Autauga, and Marengo. They collectively involved hundreds of slaves. In December, the Montgomery Advertiser reported a “deep laid plan among the negroes of our neighborhood, and from what we can find out from our negroes, it is general all over the country. … Their plan is to kill the families they live with on a certain night, and then get together and take the country.” Perhaps most ominously, the editor wrote, “They look for aid from Lincoln and the Northern people.” In South Carolina, according to one report, blacks formed “a secret and widespread organization of a Masonic character, having its grip, pass-word, and oath. It has various grades of leaders, who are competent and earnest men and its ultimate object is FREEDOM.”⁹⁷

Some whites doubted the veracity of so many rebellion and conspiracy reports. They clung to the myth that slaves were loyal servants who were so lacking in intelligence that organized revolt was beyond their capability. One Virginian called news of revolt in Norfolk and Princess Anne Counties “idle reports … manufactured out of whole cloth by those who wished to play upon the fears and anxieties of the timid and credulous.” If so, it was an effective strategy. A North Carolinian wrote that fear among slaveholders had reached levels “almost inconceivable.”⁹⁸ Certainly such fear played into secessionist hands. But that fear was also grounded in reality. Slaveholders knew, even if they were reluctant to admit it openly, that slaves wanted freedom. They knew that slave resistance had been on the rise for years. And they knew that slaveholders were being killed with increasing frequency. Many feared meeting the same fate.

Slave control had never been easy. By the 1850s, it was getting more difficult. A Lincoln presidency could only make it harder. Widespread fear of slave rebellion was, in fact, secessionists’ most valuable ally. If the slave states remained in the Union, most slaveholders feared that their chattel would be nearly impossible to control. Outside the Union, control might be easier. Other factors helped fuel the crisis, but at its core, slaveholders’ fear of their slaves was a primary force driving secession during the weeks after Lincoln’s election.

South Carolina was the first to go on December 20, 1860. In its “Declaration of Immediate Causes” justifying its move, the state’s secession convention frankly admitted its fear of “servile insurrection.” The delegates blamed northern abolitionists for inciting slaves, but they well knew that their slaves needed little inducement from the North.⁹⁹ Abolitionism was the excuse for secession. Slave resistance was the underlying cause.

Still, slaveholders were not entirely united behind the secession movement. The same fear that led most to support secession led others to oppose it. If war followed secession, would not slaves become even more resistant? The danger seemed clear enough to Alexander Stephens of Georgia, who considered slavery “much more secure in the Union than out of it.” So did Texas Governor Sam Houston. “The first gun fired in the war,” he predicted, “will be the knell of slavery.” Plantation mistress Mary Ann Whittle wondered how slaveholders could even think of secession “when we have an enemey in our bosoms who will sho[o]t us in our beds.” Raleigh’s North Carolina Standard warned that “the negroes will know … that the war is waged on their account. They will become restless and turbulent. … The end will be – Abolition!”¹⁰⁰

Nonslaveholding whites also knew that a secessionist war would be waged on slavery’s account, and most of them voted against it. Although secessionists lost the popular vote, they were able to sway enough delegates in separate state conventions to take the Deep South out of the Union.¹⁰¹ In February, representatives from South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas met in Montgomery to form the Confederate States of America.

Everywhere justifications for secession were much the same. Mississippi blamed northerners for promoting “insurrection and incendiarism in our midst.” Georgia’s excuse was that northerners were trying to “excite insurrection and servile war among us.” For Texas, northerners were attempting to “stir up servile insurrection and bring blood and carnage to our firesides.”¹⁰² There were other causes listed, but they all revolved around slavery. And at their heart lay a deep-seated fear that increasingly resistant slaves, certain that they now had a friend in the White House, might be impossible to manage.

In the North, most leading black abolitionists welcomed secession. They were among the first to see it for what is was – the catalyst for a war that would surely end slavery. The last thing they wanted was to abandon their southern brethren to slavery without a fight. The time for talk was over. It was time for action. As the Weekly Anglo-African put it, “We want Nat Turner – not speeches; Denmark Vesey – not resolutions; John Brown – not meetings.” Frederick Douglass felt the same way. “The contest must now be decided, and decided forever, which of the two, Freedom or Slavery, shall give law to this Republic. Let the conflict come, and God speed the Right.”¹⁰³

Most white northerners, including most white abolitionists, were hardly eager for war. Garrisonians, who had long urged the free North to secede, had no difficulty letting the South go. Wendell Phillips argued that if southern slaves wanted their freedom, they should rise in rebellion and fight their own battle. The North need not intervene. Many white northerners expressed relief when South Carolina cut its ties to the Union. They were glad to see the troublesome state go. The Indianapolis Daily Journal rejoiced. “We are well rid of South Carolina, if we are only wise enough to count it a riddance, and nothing worse. … If all the South follows her, let it.” On January 16, 4,000 people attended a mass meeting in Philadelphia carrying banners reading “NO CIVIL WAR.” Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune and one of Lincoln’s staunchest supporters, wrote that if southerners were “satisfied that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace.” It seemed clear to the New York Herald’s editor that “the citizens of the free States are not prepared for civil war.”¹⁰⁴

But northern industrialists and financiers vigorously pressed to keep the Deep South in the Union – by compromise if possible, by war if necessary. How else could they guarantee continued access to southern markets and cheap cotton? It was a question that united elites across party lines. Most had direct business ties to the cotton South or investments in cotton textiles. The Boston Herald warned that an independent South could “impose a heavy tax upon the manufactures of the North, and an export tax upon the cotton used by Northern manufacturers.” Such taxes would drive up both the price of cotton and the cost of doing business in the South, thus cutting into profits and reducing stock values. Under threat of secession, stock prices in nearly four dozen textile mills had already dropped by more than 40 percent. Besides, secession would make it impossible for northern creditors to collect on the millions of dollars in debt southerners owed. And that was only a fraction of what northern businessmen stood to lose. The South pumped $60 million annually into the pockets of Boston businessmen. For New York City, the figure was $200 million. As far as these men were concerned, secession could not be allowed to stand.¹⁰⁵

Congress responded with the Crittenden Compromise, which would have extended the old Missouri Compromise line between free and slave territory all the way to California. The measure failed, due mainly to Republican intransigence on expanding slavery. But Congress was able to pass the Corwin Amendment, authored by Ohio Republican Representative Thomas Corwin. This proposed thirteenth amendment would have prevented Congress, or any future amendment, from tampering with slavery in any slave state. With majority votes of slightly more than two-thirds in the Senate and an even greater margin in the House, Congress sent the amendment out to the states for ratification on March 2. Several states ratified it, but the process moved too slowly to avert war.¹⁰⁶

When compromise failed, northern elites put intense pressure on the incoming president and his party. “At present,” wrote a group of New York merchants to Lincoln, “there are no means of collecting any portion of [southern] debts, nor can there be, until the authority of the United States government is re-established in the rebellious states.” Many such men, like Philadelphia banker Jay Cooke, had backed Republicans financially in the previous year’s campaigns and now expected their payoff.¹⁰⁷

“Thus by March,” as historian Kenneth Stampp writes, “it was evident that northern businessmen had carefully measured the consequences of disunion and the collapse of central authority and decided that they were intolerable.”¹⁰⁸ So had Lincoln. Like other Republicans, he knew that to let secession stand and lose the support of financial backers would undermine the party as surely as would compromising on slavery’s expansion.

In the face of widespread opposition to civil war, and in light of his silence since the November election, Lincoln’s remarks in his March 4 inaugural address came as something of a surprise. Although he promised no war against slavery, he did promise war against secession. “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with slavery in the states where it exists,” Lincoln said. “I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” He had stressed the same point many times during his presidential campaign. He even announced his support for the Corwin Amendment, saying he had “no objection” to slavery and the rights of slaveholders “being made express and irrevocable.” For the first time, however, he publicly made clear that secession was unacceptable. Under his administration, it would be “the declared purpose of the Union that it WILL Constitutionally defend and maintain itself.”¹⁰⁹

Although bitterly disappointed with Lincoln’s promise to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act and his positive comments on the Corwin Amendment, leading blacks were generally supportive of his stand against secession. Most of them knew, even if Lincoln would not admit it, that war against slaveholders meant war against slavery. Blacks themselves – North and South, free and enslaved – would see to that. One enslaved South Carolinian was sure that if it came to war, the Confederacy was bound to lose. While fighting the North with one hand, it would have to hold down blacks with the other. South Carolina’s governor confirmed that prediction in March 1861 when he wrote to President Jefferson Davis that in the event of war, he would need to keep enough men at home to staff local slave patrols.¹¹⁰

Now that Lincoln had proclaimed secession unacceptable, could he hold the cotton states by force? There was little popular support for such a move. “It cannot be denied,” wrote the New York Times in March, “that there is a growing sentiment throughout the North in favor of letting the Gulf States go.” The New York Herald agreed. “Nine out of ten of the people of the Northern and Central States repudiate [Lincoln’s] coercive policy.” To the disappointment of black leaders, including Frederick Douglass, the North, which had put Lincoln in office, now seemed willing to “desert him and leave him a potentate without power.”¹¹¹

Although Lincoln was committed to upholding the Union, he had scant means of doing so. The army was only a few thousand strong, and volunteering was almost nonexistent. Lincoln needed men, willing men, to establish federal authority in the Deep South. To get those men, he needed an incident.

On April 12, the Confederacy obliged Lincoln by firing on Fort Sumter, providing him with the incident he had sought when he threatened to resupply the facility.¹¹² Lincoln immediately called for 75,000 volunteers and appealed “to all loyal citizens to … maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union.” Four more slave states – Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia – left the Union, but newspapers across the North echoed Lincoln’s appeal. “The American Flag – the flag of our Union,” cried the Pittsburgh Post, “has been fired into by American citizens, disloyal to the government. … No American of true heart and brave soul will stand this. No American ought to stand it.” Such words stirred thousands of young men with patriotic fervor as they rushed to uphold and redeem the honor of their flag. Pennsylvania’s Erie Weekly Gazette wrote that the “uprising of the Northern people in response to the President’s appeal for volunteers to avenge the insult to our national flag and vindicate the honor of the National character, constitute the most remarkable event of this and probably of any age.”¹¹³

That uprising of the people did not include quite all of the people. Many remained concerned, despite Lincoln’s assurance to the contrary, that the conflict might become a war against slavery. Although most white northerners now seemed willing to make war on southern slaveholders, they had little desire to do so on behalf of slaves. The New York Tribune, a staunchly pro-Lincoln paper, was quick to remind its readers that this was “a War for the preservation of the Union, not for the destruction of Slavery. … Slavery shall receive no damage from a Union triumph.” Lincoln had said much the same in his inaugural address, and Congress agreed. In a near unanimous vote, it passed the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution, stressing that the war effort was not to overthrow or interfere “with the rights or established institutions” of the slave states but only “to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and to preserve the Union.” Never would white soldiers be asked to put their lives on the line for blacks. The war would have no impact on slavery. It would be strictly a white man’s war.¹¹⁴

Blacks had other ideas. What they wanted was freedom, and they were taking it for themselves. Within days of the firing on Fort Sumter, self-emancipated people were pouring into Union lines. Many offered their services as soldiers for the Union army. Harry Jarvis volunteered at Fortress Monroe on Virginia’s Chesapeake shore, where General Benjamin Butler was in command. “I went to him,” recalled Jarvis, “an’ asked him to let me enlist, but he said it warn’t a black man’s war.” Jarvis replied boldly. “I tol’ him it would be a black man’s war ‘fore they got through.”¹¹⁵ In fact, it already was.

At the height of the secession crisis, a newspaper editor in Augusta, Georgia, wrote an ominous warning. “Disguise it as we may, the greatest danger to the new confederacy arises not from without, not from the North, but from our own people.” Virginia’s Richmond Examiner agreed, admitting that the South was “more rife with treason to her own independence and honour than any community that ever engaged before in a struggle with an adversary.”¹¹⁶ It was clear even in those early days that the Confederacy was in for a two-front war – one against northerners and another against southerners, especially those it enslaved.

¹ Tom Robinson, Arkansas Narratives, part 6, 64. At age eighty-eight, a favorite pastime for Robinson was visiting an elementary school for black youth near his home in Hot Springs. “Almost every day I comes up to sit here and watch the children. It does me good to see ’em. Makes me feel good all over to think about all the fine chance they has to get a good education” (68).

² Hattie Anne Nettles, Alabama Narratives, 297; Mary Gladdy, Georgia Narratives, part 2, 17.

³ Mary Gladdy, Georgia Narratives, part 2, 26–27; Ella Hawkins, in Rawick et al., The American Slave, supplement, series 1, vol. 3, Georgia Narratives, part 1, 315. Enslaved people of the late antebellum period built multiplantation communities that would keep them connected well into the war years and beyond. See Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). For special treatment of community and resistance in upland regions see Wilma A. Dunaway, Slavery in the American Mountain South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 198–240.

⁴ Susie King Taylor, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp (1902; reprint, with new introduction by Catherine Clinton, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 8. Two excellent treatments of slave religion and its significance before and during the war are Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), and Daniel L. Fountain, Slavery, Civil War, and Salvation: African American Slaves and Christianity, 1830–1870 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011). For a fascinating look at the survival of African folkways in spirituality among the enslaved see Jennifer Hildebrand, “‘Dere Were No Place for Him in Heaven, an’ He Were Not Desired in Hell’: Igbo Cultural Beliefs in African American Folk Expression,” Journal of African American History 91 (2006): 127–52.

⁵ Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 57; Berlin, “Who Freed the Slaves?,” 109–10. Berlin’s quoted reference is from Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Vintage, 1948), 132.

⁶ Laura Beecher Comer Diary, August 16, 1862, Laura Beecher Comer Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Correspondence Relating to Fortification of Morris Island and Operations of Engineers, Charleston, S.C., 1863 (New York: John J. Caulon, 1878), 27; Catherine C. Hopley, Life in the South; From the Commencement of the War (London: Chapman and Hall, 1863), 2: 336.

⁷ Mary Ann Harden to son, September 27, 1863, and Sally Jackson to Ashbury Jackson, August 23, 1862, Edward Harden Papers, Duke University Library, in T. Conn Bryan, Confederate Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1953), 125; John Q. Anderson, ed., Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861–1868 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1955), 33.

⁸ Lizzie S. Neblett to William H. Neblett, August 13, 1863, in Erika L. Murr, ed., A Rebel Wife in Texas: The Diary and Letters of Elizabeth Scott Neblett, 1852–1864 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 135; Mary Elliott Johnstone to Mamma [Mrs. William Elliot], [December?] 15 [1861?], Elliot and Gonzales Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Beth G. Crabtree and James W. Patton, eds., Journal of a Secesh Lady: The Diary of Catherine Anne Devereaux Edmondston, 1860–1866 (Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1979), 463.

⁹ Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), 144. For a comprehensive study of resistance in the colonial and antebellum periods see Walter C. Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007). See also Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013).

¹⁰ William H. Siebert, The Underground Railroad From Slavery to Freedom (New York: Macmillan, 1898), 45; Eber M. Pettit, Sketches in the History of the Underground R.R. (Fredonia, N.Y.: W. McKinstry and Son, 1879), 35–36; Tocsin of Liberty in New York Spectator, September 28, 1842; Boston Emancipator and Free American, April 20 and May 11, 1843.

¹¹ Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 2004), 142; Arnold Gragston, Florida Narratives, 146–54; Link, Roots of Secession, 104–05; J. F. H. Claiborne, Life and Correspondence of John A. Quitman (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1860), 2: 28; Siebert, Underground Railroad, 341, 346. Siebert estimates that at least 40,000 refugees passed through Ohio alone between 1830 and 1860.

¹² Ben Kinchlow, Texas Narratives, part 2, 265.

¹³ Caroline Holland, Alabama Narratives, 186.

¹⁴ Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb (New York: the author, 1849), 47; Mary Ella Grandberry, Alabama Narratives, 161.

¹⁵ Benny Dillard, Georgia Narratives, part 1, 292; Tom Hawkins, Georgia Narratives, part 2, 131; Charles Crawley, Virginia Narratives, 8; Julia Brown, Georgia Narratives, part 1, 147.

¹⁶ Sarah Wells, Arkansas Narratives, part 7, 90; Sis Shackelford, in Charles L. Perdue Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips, eds., Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976), 253.

¹⁷ Virginia Hayes Shepard, in Perdue et al., Weevils in the Wheat, 261; Delicia Patterson, Missouri Narratives, 272; Fannie Berry, in Perdue et al., Weevils in the Wheat, 42.

¹⁸ W. B. Allen, in Rawick et al., American Slave, supplement, series 1, vol. 3, Georgia Narratives, part 1, 6–7; Rias Body, in ibid., 71.

¹⁹ Rhodus Walton, Georgia Narratives, part 4, 124; W. B. Allen, in Rawick et al., American Slave, supplement, series 1, vol. 3, Georgia Narratives, part 1, 6–7.

²⁰ Thomas R. R. Cobb, comp., Reports of Cases in Law and Equity, Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of the State of Georgia (Athens, Ga.: Reynolds and Bro., 1855), 15: 542.

²¹ James Stuart, Three Years in North America (Edinburgh, Scotland: Robert Cadell, 1833), 2: 164. Stuart refers to that section of Georgia’s constitution that purported to give slaves protection from murder “unless such death should happen by accident in giving such slave moderate correction.” See Meyers, Empire State of the South, 56.

²² W. B. Allen, Georgia Narratives, part 1, 14–15.

²³ Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (New York: Dix and Edwards, 1856), 198; Mattie Logan, Oklahoma Narratives, 190.

²⁴ Cuthbert (Ga.) Reporter, September 23, 1856; George W. Carleton, The Suppressed Book About Slavery (New York: Carleton Publishers, 1864), 138; C. G. Parsons, An Inside View of Slavery (Boston: Jewett and Co., 1855), 212; Charles Winslow Elliott, Winfield Scott: The Soldier and the Man (New York: Macmillian, 1937), 18.

²⁵ Robert Sutcliff, Travels in Some Parts of North America in the Years 1804, 1805, and 1806 (York, England: C. Peacock, 1811), 50. See also Stephen B. Oates, Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion (New York: Harper and Row, 1975); Kenneth S. Greenberg, ed., The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1996); Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); James Sidbury, Ploughshares Into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730–1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Michael L. Nicholls, Whispers of Rebellion: Narrating Gabriel’s Conspiracy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012).

²⁶ New Orleans Daily Picayune, July 19, 1837; James Benson Sellers, Slavery in Alabama (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1964), 246–47, 248; John Henry Kemp, Florida Narratives, 185; Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 71–73. For the 1811 New Orleans uprising see Daniel Rasmussen, American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt (New York: Harper Perennial, 2012).

²⁷ Mabel Farrior, Alabama Narratives, 47; Jennie Kendricks, Georgia Narratives, part 3, 5.

²⁸ James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New York: Vintage, 1990), 69. For the most complete study of southern free blacks available see Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Pantheon, 1974).

²⁹ Celestia Avery, Georgia Narratives, part 1, 26; Charlie King, Georgia Narratives, part 3, 16; Charlie Pye, Georgia Narratives, part 3, 187.

³⁰ Robert Ellett, in Perdue et al., Weevils in the Wheat, 84; William Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (London: William Tweedie, 1860), 2; Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, edited by L. Maria Child (Boston: Published for the Author, 1861), 47–48. For a general treatment of enslaved women and the conditions they faced see Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).

³¹ C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 29, 168.

³² Jacob Manson, North Carolina Narratives, part 2, 97.

³³ Gus Feaster, South Carolina Narratives, part 2, 66. Italics added in quote.

³⁴ Richard Macks, Maryland Narratives, 53; Fannie Berry, Virginia Narratives, 2.

³⁵ James Silk Buckingham, The Slave States of America (London: Fisher, Son, and Co., 1842), 1: 249. The horrifying experience of being driven through the domestic slave trade system is related in Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), which examines the New Orleans slave market where at least 100,000 people were bought and sold.

³⁶ Jennie Kendricks, Georgia Narratives, part 3, 1.

³⁷ For examples see Anthony Gronowicz, Race and Class Politics in New York City Before the Civil War (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), xvi, 60–61.

³⁸ Boston Morning Post in Washington Extra Globe Weekly, September 4, 1835; Charles Mackay, Life and Liberty in America (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1859), 2: 43. The financial ties between northern industrialists and southern planters are explored in Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005), 3–41.

³⁹ Pennsylvania Freeman (Philadelphia), October 20, 1841; George W. Julian, Speeches on Political Questions (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1872), 127; Tom Hawkins, Georgia Narratives, part 2, 131.

⁴⁰ Liberator (Boston), November 7, 1835; New York Evening Post, November 20, 1837; Philadelphia Public Ledger, November 21, 1837; Liberator, August 3, 1833; Newburyport (Mass.) Herald, September 26, 1834. For various ways in which northern whites expressed hostility toward abolitionism see Farrow et al., Complicity, 155–77.

⁴¹ New York Evening Post, July 8 and 10, 1834; New York Spectator, July 10 and 14, 1834; New York Commercial Advertiser, July 25, 1834; Rochester Daily Advertiser in New York American, August 19, 1834; New York Emancipator, August 12, 1834; Washington (Penn.) Examiner, August 2, 1834; Columbia (Penn.) Spy in New York Evening Post, August 27, 1834; Philadelphia Inquirer, August 2, October 16, 21, and 27, 1834; Philadelphia National Gazette, October 16, 1834; Pennsylvania Freeman, May 10, 1838; Philadelphia Inquirer, May 18 and 19, 1838; Liberator, October 13, 1843; Liberator, August 20, 1847. See also William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 108–12, 148. For the 1834 New York and Philadelphia riots see Linda K. Kerber, “Abolitionists and Amalgamators: The New York City Race Riots of 1834,” New York History 48 (1967): 28–39, and John Runcie, “‘Hunting the Nigs’ in Philadelphia: The Race Riot of August 1834,” Pennsylvania History 39 (1972): 187–218.

⁴² Colored American, June 1, 1839. A valuable portrait of blacks in the antebellum North remains Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).

⁴³ Graham Russell Hodges, Freedom and Slavery in the Rural North: African Americans in Monmouth County, New Jersey, 1665–1865 (Madison, Wisc.: Madison House, 1997), 175; James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 74. The earliest years of the American antislavery movement, mainly the 1770s to the 1830s, are chronicled in Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

⁴⁴ National Anti-Slavery Standard (New York), November 4, 1854. Brown authored what became one of the most famous escape sagas of the age. See William W. Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown, An American Slave (London: Charles Gilpin, 1849).

⁴⁵ Utica (N.Y.) Friend of Man, October 27, 1836; J. Theodore Holly, “Thoughts on Hayti,” Anglo-African Magazine 1 (1859): 363.

⁴⁶ Colored American, June 9, 1838.

⁴⁷ National Anti-Slavery Standard, January 13, 1855; Frederick Douglass’ Paper (Rochester, N.Y.), January 26, 1855. In Frederick Douglass’ Paper, Smith signed his editorial “Communipaw,” a pseudonym that he used regularly. A fine study of blacks in the antislavery movement remains Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).

⁴⁸ Thomas M. Morgan, “The Education and Medical Practice of Dr. James McCune Smith (1813–1865), First Black American to Hold a Medical Degree,” Journal of the National Medical Association 95 (2003): 603–14.

⁴⁹ Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford, Conn.: Park Publishing, 1882), 323.

⁵⁰ Cortland (N.Y.) Democrat, September 16, 1848, in C. Peter Ripley et al., eds., The Black Abolitionist Papers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985–1992), 4: 27–29.

⁵¹ Frederick Douglass’ Paper, September 25, 1851. See also Frederick J. Blue, The Free Soilers: Third Party Politics, 1848–1854 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973).

⁵² J. D. B. De Bow, The Industrial Resources, Etc. of the Southern and Western States (New Orleans: Offices of De Bow’s Review, 1852), 2: 108.

⁵³ The most complete and reasoned expression of why white southerners should have opposed slavery was written by a native North Carolinian, Hinton Rowan Helper, in The Impending Crisis of the South (New York: Burdick Brothers, 1857). The book sent shockwaves of dread through slaveholding ranks, becoming what historian James Oakes called, “the most important single book, in terms of its political impact, that has ever been published in the United States. Even more perhaps than Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it fed the fires of sectional controversy leading up to the Civil War.” See Oakes, Slavery and Freedom, 76.

⁵⁴ Franklin and Schweninger, “Quest for Freedom,” 38. Slaveholders did not limit their expansion demands to territories controlled by the United States. “I want Cuba,” insisted Senator Albert Gallatin Brown of Mississippi in 1858. “I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican states; and I want them all for the same reason – for the planting or spreading of slavery. And a footing in Central America will powerfully aid us in acquiring those other States. … Yes, I want these Countries for the spread of slavery. I would spread the blessings of slavery, like the religion of our Divine Master, to the uttermost ends of the earth.” See M. W. Cluskey, ed., Speeches, Messages, and Other Writings of the Hon. Albert G. Brown (Philadelphia: Smith and Co., 1859), 595. The best study of efforts to expand slavery south is Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002).

⁵⁵ Karen Wilson, “Safety in the Briar Patch: Enslaved Communities in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” in Haggard, African Americans in the Nineteenth Century, 50.

⁵⁶ Cluskey, Speeches, Messages, and Other Writings of the Hon. Albert G. Brown, 595.

⁵⁷ For Liberty Party efforts through 1848 see Rienhard O. Johnson, The Liberty Party, 1840–1848: Anti-Slavery Third Party Politics in the United States (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009).

⁵⁸ For a brief description of Indian slavery in California see Alvin M. Josephy, 500 Nations: An Illustrated History of North American Indians (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 347.

⁵⁹ Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (Auburn, N.Y.: Derby and Miller, 1853). For a discussion of the northern kidnapping business see Farrow et al., Complicity, 139–53.

⁶⁰ Rosanna Frazier, Texas Narratives, part 2, 63; Douglas Dorsey, Florida Narratives, 93. For an overview see Stanley W. Campbell, The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970).

⁶¹ See Henry Highland Garnet, Walker’s Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life, and also Garnet’s Address to the Slaves of the United States of America (New York: J. H. Tobitt, 1848).

⁶² Liberator, April 5, 1850; North Star (Rochester, N.Y.), October 24, 1850; Frederick Douglass’ Paper, June 2, 1854.

⁶³ Frank A. Rollin, Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1868), 76.

⁶⁴ J. W. Loguen, The Rev. J. W. Loguen as a Slave and as a Freeman (Syracuse, N.Y.: J. G. K. Truair, 1859), 393–94; Liberator, November 8, 1850; North Star, October 24, 1850; Boston Emancipator and Republican, October 10, 1850.

⁶⁵ Milwaukee Daily Sentinel and Gazette, October 11, 1850; Columbus Daily Ohio Statesman, October 15, 1850; Worcester Massachusetts Spy, October 9, 1850.

⁶⁶ Boston Herald, August 25, 1855; Boston Semi-Weekly Courier, August 27, 1855; Liberator, September 14, 1855; Liberator, August 13, 1858.

⁶⁷ Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, and Philip Lapsansky, eds., Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature, 1790–1860 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 307.

⁶⁸ William Still, The Underground Rail Road (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1872), 348–68; W. U. Hensel, The Christiana Riot and Treason Trials of 1851 (Lancaster, Penn.: New Era Printing, 1911), 90. See also Thomas P. Slaughter, Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

⁶⁹ Congressional Globe, Thirty-first Congress, First Session (1850), Appendix, part 1, 241; Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, July 13, 1846; St. Mary’s (Ohio) Sentinel in Liberator, August 7, 1846.

⁷⁰ For an excellent overview of the rising sectional controversy from the end of the Mexican War through secession see John Ashworth, The Republic in Crisis, 1848–1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

⁷¹ For an overview of the Kansas issue and its national implications see James A. Rawley, Race and Politics: Bleeding Kansas and the Coming of the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), and Paul Wallace Gates, Fifty Million Acres: Conflicts Over Kansas Land Policy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997). Kansas was not admitted to the Union until 1861 after most of the slave states had seceded.

⁷² Popular sovereignty’s inherent shortcomings are explored in Christopher Childers, The Failure of Popular Sovereignty: Slavery, Manifest Destiny, and the Radicalization of Southern Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012).

⁷³ “Great Speech of Senator Trumbull,” in Facts for the People (Springfield, Ill.: Daily Journal Office, 1860), 12.

⁷⁴ For letters that reflect this division see Henry Highland Garnet and James W. Duffin to Gerrit Smith, September 16, 1858, and William J. Watkins to Gerrit Smith, September 27, 1858, Gerrit Smith Papers, Syracuse University, in Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 4: 398–402.

⁷⁵ Stephen K. Williams, comp., Reports of Cases Argued and Decided in the Supreme Court of the United States, Book 15, Lawyer’s Edition (Rochester, N.Y.: Lawyer’s Cooperative Publishing Company, 1884), 754.

⁷⁶ For an overview of Dred Scott and its impact see Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in Law and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

⁷⁷ Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 4: 391, 362; Liberator, April 10, 1857.

⁷⁸ Circular by the African Civilization Society, February 16, 1859, Gerrit Smith Papers, in Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 5: 3–6.

⁷⁹ Fredericksburg (Va.) Herald in Pennsylvania Freeman, August 7, 1852; Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, 29; Spartanburg (S.C.) Spartan in Liberator, June 26, 1857.

⁸⁰ St. Louis Sunday Morning Republican, October 2, 1853; Henry Clay Bruce, The New Man: Twenty-Nine Years a Slave, Twenty-Nine Years a Free Man (York, Penn.: Anstadt and Sons, 1895), 34–36; Martha Bradley, Alabama Narratives, 47; Jennie Kendricks, Georgia Narratives, part 3, 5; Irene Coates, Florida Narratives, 76; Richard Macks, Maryland Narratives, 55; Un-named narrator, Kentucky Narratives, 71. James Patrick Morgans identifies the Missouri slave as John Anderson, who eventually immigrated to Liberia. See Morgans, The Underground Railroad on the Western Frontier (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2010), 66–67, 203 nn. 8–15. See also Patrick Brode, The Odyssey of John Anderson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989).

⁸¹ Liberator, July 8, 1859.

⁸² Wilmington (N.C.) Daily Journal, August 14, 1856; New York Tribune, December 16, 1856; Boston Herald, December 17, 1856; New York Tribune, December 17, 1856; Canton (Ky.) Dispatch in Philadelphia Public Ledger, January 2, 1857; Galveston News in Clarksville (Tex.) Standard, January 17, 1857; Albany (Ga.) Patriot, December 25, 1856.

⁸³ Liberator, January 23, 1857, and February 12, 1858; Franklin (La.) Sun in Liberator, January 29, 1858; Coffeeville (Miss.) Intelligencer in Washington National Era, August 26, 1858.

⁸⁴ Governor’s Message and Reports of the Public Officers of the State (Richmond, Va.: William F. Ritchie, 1859), 116–17.

⁸⁵ John A. Copeland Jr. to John A. Copeland Sr. and Delilah Copeland, November 26, 1859, Oswald Garrison Villard Collection, Columbia University, in Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 5: 43–45.

⁸⁶ Columbus (Ga.) Daily Sun, October 19 and 21, 1859; Opelika (Ala.) Southern Era, December 6, 1859, and September 15, 1860.

⁸⁷ Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery: An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, 1901), 8; Louis Davis, in Rawick et al., American Slave, supplement, series 1, vol. 7, Mississippi Narratives, part 2, 581; George Washington Albright, in Rawick et al., American Slave, supplement, series 1, vol. 6, Mississippi Narratives, part 1, 11.

⁸⁸ Columbus (Ga.) Daily Sun, November 5, 15, and 16, 1859; P. Williams to Gov. John Letcher, January 5, 1860, and C. C. Larue to Gov. John Letcher, January 17, 1860, Executive Papers Archives Division, Virginia State Library, Richmond, in Aptheker, Slave Revolts, 353; St. Louis Missouri Democrat in New York Principia, January 7, 1860; Opelika (Ala.) Southern Era, November 29, 1859.

⁸⁹ Weekly Anglo-African (New York), February 25, 1860; Speech at Columbus Ohio, September 16, 1859, in Basler et al., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 3: 402; Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 5: 71.

⁹⁰ Douglass’ Monthly, September 1860.

⁹¹ Macon (Ga.) Daily Telegraph, September 8, 1860; Columbus (Ga.) Daily Sun, September 27, 1860; Anne Kendrick Walker, Backtracking in Barbour County: A Narrative of the Last Alabama Frontier (Richmond, Va.: Dietz Press, 1941), 173; Hammond to F. A. Allen, February 2, 1861, Hammond Papers, Library of Congress, in Steven A. Channing, Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), 39.

⁹² Hammond to F. A. Allen, February 2, 1861, in Channing, Crisis of Fear, 39–40; Louis Meadows, in Rawick et al., American Slave, supplement, series 1, vol. 1, Alabama Narratives, 255.

⁹³ Augusta (Ga.) Dispatch in Liberator, August 24, 1860.

⁹⁴ Executive Committee, Twenty-Eighth Annual Report of the American Anti-Slavery Society (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1861), 200–14. See also White, “Texas Slave Insurrection of 1860,” and Reynolds, Texas Terror: The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860 and the Secession of the Lower South.

⁹⁵ William S. Pettigrew to James C. Johnston, October 25, 1860, Pettigrew Papers, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in Aptheker, Slave Revolts, 356.

⁹⁶ Columbus (Ga.) Enquirer, November 13, 1860; Macon (Ga.) Daily Telegraph, November 9, 1860; Milledgeville (Ga.) Southern Recorder in Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle and Sentinel, November 10, 1860; Executive Committee, Twenty-Eighth Annual Report of the American Anti-Slavery Society, 213.

⁹⁷ Montgomery Advertiser, December 13, 1860; Executive Committee, Twenty-Eighth Annual Report of the American Anti-Slavery Society, 210–11; Edmund Kirke, Among the Pines: or, South in Secession Time (New York: J. R. Gilmore, 1862), 90–91.

⁹⁸ Norfolk Herald in Christianburg (Va.) New Star, October 13, 1860; William S. Pettigrew to James C. Johnston, October 25, 1860, Pettigrew Papers, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in Aptheker, Slave Revolts, 356.

⁹⁹ Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union, and the Ordinance of Secession (Charleston: Evans and Cogswell, 1860), 8–9.

¹⁰⁰ Stephens to J. Henley Smith, July 10, 1860, in Urlich Bonnell Phillips, ed., The Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell Cobb (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1913), 487; John H. Reagan, “A Conversation with Governor Houston,” Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association 3 (1900): 280; Whittle to Lewis Neale Whittle, December 1, 1860, Lewis Neale Whittle Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in James L. Roark, Masters without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 4; Raleigh North Carolina Standard, February 5, 1861.

¹⁰¹ In his seminal study of the secession crisis, David Potter looked at the popular vote for state secession conventions throughout the South and concluded: “At no time during the winter of 1860–1861 was secession desired by a majority of the people of the slave states. … Furthermore, secession was not basically desired even by a majority in the lower South, and the secessionists succeeded less because of the intrinsic popularity of their program than because of the extreme skill with which they utilized an emergency psychology, the promptness with which they invoked unilateral action by individual states, and the firmness with which they refused to submit the question of secession to popular referenda.” See David M. Potter, Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1942), 208. A more recent examination of the ways in which secessionists maneuvered a reluctant South into secession can be found in Williams, Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War, 29–47.

¹⁰² Journal of the State Convention and Ordinances and Resolutions Adopted January 1861 (Jackson, Miss.: E. Barksdale, 1861), 87; Journal of the Public and Secret Proceedings of the Convention of the People of Georgia (Milledgeville, Ga.: Boughton, Nisbet, and Barnes, 1861), 112; Journal of the Secession Convention of Texas, 1861 (Austin: Austin Printing Co., 1912), 64.

¹⁰³ Weekly Anglo-African, April 27, 1861; Douglass’ Monthly, March 1861.

¹⁰⁴ Wendell Phillips, Disunion: Two Discourses at Music Hall (Boston: Robert F. Wallcut, 1861), 18; Indianapolis Daily Journal, December 22, 1860; Philadelphia Inquirer, January 17, 1861; Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, January 17, 1861, in Arnold M. Shankman, The Pennsylvania Antiwar Movement, 1861–1865 (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980), 42; New York Tribune, November 9, 1860; New York Herald, February 5, 1861.

¹⁰⁵ Kenneth M. Stampp, And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860–1861 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 127; Boston Herald, November 12, 1860; Philip S. Foner, Business and Slavery: The New York Merchants and the Irrepressible Conflict (New York: Russell and Russell, 1968), 302; Potter, Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis, 117.

¹⁰⁶ Congressional Globe, Thirty-sixth Congress, Second Session (1861), 1284; Basler et al., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 4: 262–71.

¹⁰⁷ Foner, Business and Slavery, 302; Stampp, And the War Came, 220–21.

¹⁰⁸ Stampp, And the War Came, 222.

¹⁰⁹ Basler et al., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 4: 262–71.

¹¹⁰ Douglass’ Monthly, April 1861, Christian Recorder (Philadelphia), March 9, 1861; Kirke, Among the Pines, 20; Gov. Francis W. Pickens to Davis, March 17, 1861, in Lynda Lasswell Crist and Mary Seaton Dix, eds., The Papers of Jefferson Davis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 7: 70–72.

¹¹¹ New York Times, March 21, 1861; New York Herald, April 11, 1861; Douglass’ Monthly, April 1861.

¹¹² For a study of Lincoln’s Sumter strategy see Richard Nelson Current, Lincoln and the First Shot (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963). See also Charles W. Ramsdell, “Lincoln and Fort Sumter,” Journal of Southern History 3 (1937): 259–88.

¹¹³ Lincoln’s Proclamation Calling Militia and Convening Congress, in David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History, vol. 5, Documents and Appendices (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO Press, 2000), 2300–2301; Pittsburgh Post, April 15, 1861; Erie Weekly Gazette, May 2, 1861.

¹¹⁴ New York Tribune, May 14, 1861; Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States, Thirty-seventh Congress, First Session (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1861), 58: 123; Journal of the Senate of the United States, Thirty-seventh Congress, First Session (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1861), 53: 91.

¹¹⁵ Mrs. M. F. Armstrong and Helen W. Ludlow, Hampton and its Students (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1874), 111–12. Jarvis later served with the Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, United States Colored Troops (USCT).

¹¹⁶ Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle in Frank Moore, ed., The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events, vol. 1 (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1861), part 2: “Documents and Narratives,” 30; Richmond Examiner, July 19, 1861.