The Enemy at Home

A few days before Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, the Richmond Dispatch assured white Virginians that there was no need to fear their slaves. “The southern negro has no sympathies with Northern abolitionists,” wrote the paper’s editor. Despite the looming threat of civil war, there was “perfect order and quiet among the servile classes.” Newspapers across the South sent the same illusory message. But that message did little to calm slaveholder fears or to mask the reality of slave resistance. In January 1861, South Carolina plantation mistress Keziah Brevard wrote of the slaves generally, “I cannot tell whether they have any good feelings for their owners or not.” By February, she had no doubt of her own slaves’ feelings. Despite her efforts to “make my negroes happy,” Brevard was “awakened to the fact that they hate me – My God – My God – what are we to expect from slaves – when mine hate me as they do – it is nothing on earth – but that I am white & own slaves.”¹

“We cannot sleep sound at nights for fear of the niggers,” said one slaveholder early in the war. “We are compelled to mount guard at nights … this is the only thing that keeps them in check.” In April 1861, Danville, Virginia, authorities required all white males who were not in the militia to serve on local slave patrols. That same month, a terrified resident of Tippah County, Mississippi, begged Governor John Pettus not to call for any more volunteers. Already blacks in the area had committed arson and attempted murder. “If there should be another call it will leave our women and children in this section exposed to the black insurgents.” A resident of Jefferson County made the same request. “Nothing but eternal vigilance will keep down the enemy at home,” as the writer called enslaved blacks.²

Even as the Confederate army called for men to fill its ranks, some slaveholders urged them to remain at home and save their families “from the horrors of insurrection.” Reports from South Carolina’s Prince George District convinced one correspondent that “disaffection among the slaves is more general even than I had imagined.” In May, a Louisiana correspondent wrote to a friend of “very alarming disturbances among the blacks; on more than one plantation, the assistance of the authorities has been called in to overcome the open resistance of the slaves.” A Louisiana slaveholder overheard his slaves plotting to kill all the area’s white men and “march up the River to meet Mr. Linkum.” Slave rebellion was a very real threat to the editor of southwest Georgia’s Albany Patriot, who complained that it was no uncommon thing to see area blacks “congregate together contrary to law, exhibit their weapons, and no doubt devise their secret, but destructive plans.”³

During the late spring and early summer of 1861, a rebellion hysteria swept across large parts of the South’s plantation belt, southwest Georgia included. Panic spread through Decatur County in June after patrollers caught a slave named Israel away from his plantation without a pass. Israel’s capture led officials to believe that a general slave revolt was about to break out. Rumors spread that blacks in the county seat of Bainbridge were collecting guns and planning to “kill all of the men and old women and children and take the younger ones for their wives.” No guns were found, but two suspected insurrection leaders were imprisoned. An attempted rebellion that April near Charleston, South Carolina, resulted in seven slaves being hanged. In Monroe County, Arkansas, three slaves – two men and a girl – were hanged in June for helping plan an insurrection.⁴

Dozens of slaves in Adams County, Mississippi, tried to organize their own militia and end slavery around Natchez and Second Creek. The effort failed, and a self-appointed planter court staged a mock trial. Knowing they would be executed in any case, several of the conspirators made their feelings clear. One testified that they had planned a coordinated assault to “kill all the damn white people” when the Union army arrived. Another joined the rebellion because “master whips our children.” Still another insisted that “whipping colored people would stop.” Others wanted to join the Union army and see Winfield Scott, the Union’s commanding general, “eat his breakfast in New Orleans.” In a direct insult to southern white manhood, the slaves Simon and George told the planters that “Northerners make the South shit behind their asses.” To these men, Lincoln’s Union war was from the start a freedom war. And they were among the first casualties of that war. Simon, George, and at least three dozen others suffered death by hanging.⁵

In the summer of 1861, a Georgia overseer complained to his absentee employer that the slaves would not submit to physical abuse. One slave simply walked away when the overseer told him he was about to be whipped. Another Georgia slave drew a knife on an overseer who tried to whip him. His owner locked him up and forced him onto a bread and water diet. Such actions generally made slaves even more resistant. “I am satisfied that his imprisonment has only tended to harden him,” one overseer wrote soon after releasing an unruly slave. “I don’t think he will ever reform.”⁶

Besides being terribly painful, whipping was for slaves a symbol of their lowly status. It is hardly surprising that resistance to whipping became one of the main ways enslaved people sought to demonstrate a measure of independence. Such resistance could be very dangerous. One Troup County, Georgia, planter was noted for turning his dogs on slaves who refused to be whipped. A slave on the Hines Holt plantation near Columbus, Georgia, was shot when he resisted a whipping. He had beaten off six men who tried to hold him down.⁷

Despite such dangers, slaves continued to resist. According to freedwoman Celestia Avery of Troup County, Peter Heard whipped his slaves “unmercifully.” One day while hoeing in the fields, an overseer told her grandmother Sylvia to take her clothes off when she got to the end of a fence row. She was going to be whipped for not working fast enough. When the overseer reached for her, she grabbed a wooden rail and broke it across the man’s arms. A Russell County, Alabama, slave named Crecie, described as “a grown young woman and big and strong,” was tied to a stump by an overseer named Sanders in preparation for whipping. He had two dogs with him just in case Crecie gave any trouble. When the first lick hit Crecie’s back, she pulled up the stump and whipped Sanders and his dogs.⁸

Sanders was fortunate to escape Crecie’s wrath with his life. Some were not so lucky. When a Georgia overseer began beating a young slave girl with a sapling tree, one of the older slaves grabbed an axe and killed him. Such violent retaliation was even more common during the war than before. In March 1861, an Alabama overseer ordered a slave to take off his coat and prepare to be whipped. The young man refused, drew a knife, and started to walk away. The overseer grabbed him, and both men fell to the ground. Within seconds, the overseer lay dying of a stab wound. Later that year, Mary Chesnut of South Carolina wrote that her cousin Betsey Witherspoon had been murdered by her slaves. The incident opened Mary’s eyes to the danger from her own slaves. “I feel that the ground is cut away from under my feet. Why should they treat me any better than they have done Cousin Betsey?”⁹

Most threatened of all were the slaves themselves. Although some resorted to deadly retaliation, increasing numbers simply ran away. An enslaved Mississippi man, after being given 100 lashes, hid in a cave for the war’s duration. After his own severe beating, a Georgia man carried his family to the woods where they lived in a cave until the war was over. Some self-emancipated refugees lived in isolated communities of several dozen. Authorities discovered a fugitive camp in the swamps near Marion, South Carolina, that was “well provided with meal, cooking utensils, blankets, etc.” The residents had been there for some time, growing corn, squash, and peas on a fertile knoll.¹⁰

In Louisiana, Octave Johnson escaped early in the war and found refuge with a band of thirty men and women. They survived by appropriating livestock from nearby plantations, sometimes trading the meat to other slaves for corn meal. After living in the swamps for a year and a half, slavecatchers raided the camp. The refugees jumped into Bayou Faupron with twenty bloodhounds in hot pursuit. Aided by resident alligators that “preferred dog flesh to personal flesh,” Johnson and his friends escaped and fled to Union lines in southern Louisiana. Johnson soon joined the Union army.¹¹

Blind, Unreasoning Prejudice

That the Federals were allowing former slaves to serve as soldiers by the time Johnson escaped was a radical change from the war’s early years. Tens of thousands of southern refugees had tried to enlist and were turned down. Northern blacks had offered their services too. When Lincoln called for volunteers in April 1861, blacks in Boston held a mass meeting at the Twelfth Baptist Church and announced their readiness to “defend the Government as the equals of its white defenders – to do so with ‘our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor,’ for the sake of freedom.” Even the women were ready to take the field “as nurses, seamstresses, and warriors, if need be.” In Providence, blacks formed a company and asked to be attached to the First Rhode Island Regiment. In Philadelphia, blacks organized two regiments and waited for orders telling them where to report. Jacob Dodson, a black government employee in Washington, petitioned the War Department on behalf of 300 local free blacks who were ready to “enter the service for the defense of the City.”¹²

Blacks had compelling reasons to answer Lincoln’s call to arms. Some associated military service with citizenship, and they meant to get a uniform as a means of demanding their rights. Others saw an opportunity to strike out against slaveholders. Even if the struggle was not a war against slavery, it was at least a war against slave states. For most northern blacks, many of whom had family members still enslaved in the South, that was enough for the time being. To be handed a weapon and marched south would do for the moment. All they needed was the order to do it.

Nicholas Biddle did not wait for orders. Two days after Lincoln called for volunteers, the sixty-five-year-old former slave left with his white neighbors of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, when they were ordered south to the nation’s capital. Although not officially enlisted, Biddle donned a uniform and expressed his readiness to serve in whatever way he could. Along with four other Pennsylvania companies, Biddle and his comrades boarded a train for Washington. As they disembarked in Baltimore to change trains, the men marched past a jeering pro-Confederate mob. Shouts of “Nigger in uniform” rang out. Then someone yelled “Kill that —ed brother of Abe Lincoln.” Suddenly Biddle was hit in the face “with a missile” so hard that it exposed his cheek bone. Lieutenant James Russell caught Biddle as he

Figure 2.1. Although Lincoln and Congress promised to keep the conflict a white man’s war, blacks made it their fight from the start. Nicholas Biddle, a former slave living in Pennsylvania, was denied official enlistment, but he put on a uniform anyway. Passing through Baltimore, a pro-Confederate mob pelted his unit with rocks and bricks, cutting Biddle’s cheek to the bone. This photo is from a wartime carte de visite naming Biddle as “the first man wounded in the great American Rebellion.” Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

stumbled, and the troops hurried to their waiting train. Years later, his Pottsville friends engraved these words on a monument to Biddle:¹³

IN MEMORY OF

NICHOLAS BIDDLE.

Died 2d Aug., 1876, aged 80 years.

His was the proud distinction of shedding the First Blood in

The Late War for The Union. Being wounded while

marching through Baltimore with the First

Volunteers from Schuylkill County,

18th April, 1861.

Few northern whites were so generous in acknowledging the efforts of their black neighbors. For the most part, they meant to keep America a white man’s country and to keep the conflict a white man’s war. Neither rights for blacks nor emancipation for slaves were issues that most northern whites cared to touch. The Massachusetts legislature voted down a proposal to accept black troops. Police officials in Providence ordered local blacks to stop holding military drills, calling them “disorderly gatherings.” Republican Governor William Dennison of Ohio issued an edict declaring that no black troops would be accepted into state service.¹⁴

Frederick Douglass was appalled at the blatant racism that lay behind refusals to accept black troops.

Our President, Governors, Generals and Secretaries are calling with almost frantic vehemence for men. – “Men! men! send us men!” they scream, or the cause of the Union is gone … and yet these very officers, representing the people and Government, steadily and persistently refuse to receive the very class of men which have a deeper interest in the defeat and humiliation of the rebels, than all others. … What a spectacle of blind, unreasoning prejudice.¹⁵

Some black leaders argued that if the government declined their services and denied them citizenship, then they owed it no allegiance. Philadelphia’s Christian Recorder, official voice of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, made that point in a front-page editorial entitled “The Star Spangled Banner and the Duty of Colored Americans to that Flag.” The writer surveyed black military service from the American Revolution to the present, stressing that “men of color” had been “right by their country’s side.” In return, the nation had stolen their rights and declared them noncitizens. “To offer ourselves for military service now is to abandon self-respect, and invite insult.”¹⁶

If blacks could be neither citizens nor soldiers, then what was the legal status of slaves who escaped to Union lines? As far as Lincoln was concerned, the slave states were still part of the United States, subject to all laws thereof, including the Fugitive Slave Act. At the war’s outset, Lincoln assured slaveholders in both the rebellious and loyal slave states that his administration would uphold their property rights. In July 1861, as Maryland slaves fled to Union army camps in northern Virginia, Lincoln sent word that they were to be returned to their owners. The same applied to escaping Virginia slaves. A Union colonel assured Virginia slaveholders, who feared that he had come to free their slaves, “The relation of master and servant as recognized in your state shall be respected. Your authority over that species of property shall not in the least be interfered with.” Another Union officer in Virginia ordered his subordinates to make sure that any escaped slaves were promptly sent “back to the farm.”¹⁷

It was the same everywhere that slaves sought refuge with Union forces. In Missouri, Union General William Harney told worried slaveholders that it was firm government policy to return slaves to their owners. General George McClellan instructed one of his field commanders in western Virginia to “see that the rights and property of the people are respected, and repress all attempts at negro insurrection.” General Benjamin F. Butler promised the governor of Maryland that his forces, far from being any threat to slavery, were ready to cooperate “in suppressing, most promptly and effectively, any insurrection.” George Stephens, a black correspondent employed as an army cook, wrote from Virginia that so many refugees had been hauled back to their owners by Union troops that “the slaves are almost their enemies.”¹⁸

A Tennessee fugitive escaping to Canada reported similar abuse to a sympathetic Michigan Quaker named Willis. Willis relayed the disturbing news to Secretary of War Simon Cameron, writing that refugees were “badly treated by our officers altho the[y] offered to work or Fight for the Government, but w[e]re told to Clear out that the officers wanted no D—D Niggers about them &c &c & were actually Driven over to their old Homes.” Willis stressed that such treatment of the slaves “almost Sett them Cra[z]y. the[y] Expected Friends of us in Stead of Enemys.”¹⁹

Faced with such treatment from Union forces, some blacks decided early on that cooperation with Confederates might be the quickest way to achieve some measure of freedom. There were at least a few willing to test the possibility. In early 1861, seventy free blacks in Lynchburg, Virginia, tried to join the militia. So did sixty in Richmond, who marched to the enrollment office carrying a Confederate flag. Charles Tinsley, spokesman for a group of blacks in Petersburg, said that he and his comrades were “willing to aid Virginia’s cause to the utmost extent of our ability.” In New Orleans, Creoles put together a force called the Louisiana Native Guards that became part of the state militia.²⁰

Blacks who tried to straddle the South’s racial divide walked a fine line. Those who appeared too eager to help white Confederates ran the risk of alienating friends and family. When a black Baptist preacher offered his services and those of his sons to Virginia, his parishioners began to avoid him. Afraid of losing his congregation, the preacher insisted that he was trying to do only what was best for his flock. He finally apologized, but church members turned a deaf ear. So did whites. Except for the Louisiana Native Guards, which were enrolled by the state but barred from Confederate service, no offers from blacks to bear arms were accepted. The very notion of black soldiers seemed ridiculous to most whites. In the words of Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, the Confederacy’s very “cornerstone” rested on the “great truth” that blacks were not the equal of whites. Slavery, insisted Stephens, was the “natural and normal condition” of black folk.²¹

If Confederates would not accept blacks as citizens or soldiers, they still demanded their service as laborers. The rebel army put thousands of slaves to work building forts, digging trenches, and clearing roads. Quartermasters used blacks as teamsters, boatmen, and stable hands. Commissary officers used them as cooks, butchers, and bakers. Medical officers had them serve as nurses, orderlies, and grave diggers. All this with their families held hostage in slavery lest they escape to Union lines. Nevertheless blacks did escape, so often that officers preferred not to work them near the front. When they did, the result was predictable. One officer wrote that his fortifications were “progressing slowly, my negro force diminishing rapidly. … Most of them have run away.”²²

Impossible to Keep Them Outside Our Lines

When escaped refugees arrived at Union lines, they were often welcomed by enlisted men as cheap labor. The drudgery of camp life was made much easier by harboring runaways who could do laundry and cook meals. Besides, the soldiers reasoned, why should blacks be returned to serve traitors when loyal Union men needed their services? Officers frequently had trouble enforcing orders to turn away escaping slaves because their men refused to cooperate. As more and more slaves entered Union lines, some officers themselves began to wonder why refugees should not be put to work for the Union cause.²³

One such officer was General Benjamin Butler, post commander at Fortress Monroe on Virginia’s Chesapeake shore. Butler was a politically appointed general, a Massachusetts Democrat, and no abolitionist. He was heavily invested in the Massachusetts textile industry, which depended on southern cotton and slave labor. As a delegate to the Democratic national convention in 1860, he had voted to nominate Jefferson Davis for president. But in May 1861, finding so many potential laborers entering his lines, he was reluctant to turn them away. He badly needed their

Figure 2.2. Tens of thousands of self-emancipated people flooded Union lines in the war’s early months and refused to be turned away. Each made a personal proclamation of freedom and forced the government to respond. Unable to return them to slavery, it first declared them “contraband of war” before finally recognizing that they had been right all along. They were indeed free. Pictured here are “contrabands” at Cumberland Landing, Virginia, May 1862. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

help. It did little good to return them to their owners in any case. They kept coming back. Butler wrote to his superiors: “As a military question it would seem to be a measure of necessity to deprive their masters of their services.” And in so doing, why not employ them for the Union? Slaves who might potentially be used by Confederates, argued Butler, should be subject to confiscation and use by the United States just as any other kind of property or “contraband of war” might be. Butler asked why Confederates should “be allowed the use of this property against the United States, and we not be allowed its use in aid of the United States?”²⁴

Secretary of War Simon Cameron found the argument convincing. In fact, he had little choice but to accept the labor of escaping slaves. His only other option would be to turn the entire army into a vast slave-catching operation, an effort that would be doomed to failure. Any returned slave could simply escape again. Cameron instructed Butler to employ refugees “in the services to which they are best adapted.” Within weeks, Cameron issued general orders that “slaves from states in rebellion … shall not be returned to the rebellious owners but kept and put at work.” Although not held in slavery, the refugees were not legally free. Cameron told his subordinates to “consider them as Contrabands.”²⁵ Frederick Douglass and other prominent blacks generally supported Cameron’s decision but strongly objected to calling fugitives “contraband.” The term, Douglass said, “will apply better to a pistol, than to a person.”²⁶ But “contraband” stuck and remained in common use for the rest of the war.

Congress supported Cameron’s decision as well, although in a more restricted way. With little debate and even less foresight, in August 1861, Congress passed the Confiscation Act. It was careful to specify that only slaves used directly to aid the Confederate war effort were subject to seizure. It made no mention of legal status, saying only that disloyal slaveholders whose “property” had been used against the United States would forfeit claim to that property, including slaves.²⁷

In their haste to strike a blow against slaveholding Confederates and protect slaveholding Unionists, most congressmen failed to see the larger implications of confiscation. The act ultimately raised far more questions about slavery’s future than it answered, a fact that Lincoln seemed to grasp. He signed the act, although with some reluctance because of its potential impact. A contraband order from the War Department was one thing; a confiscation act from Congress was a much larger step. Few realized at the time how far self-emancipated slaves had pushed the nation toward legal emancipation. Lincoln worried that it was much further than most northerners wished to go.²⁸

Still very much in the minority, abolitionists were the only whites willing to go further. And they had been pushing hard for Lincoln to do so from the war’s outset. General John C. Frémont, commander of the Western Department headquartered in St. Louis, pressed further still when on August 30 he declared slaves held by active pro-Confederates in Missouri to be free. In that Lincoln and Congress had, in his view, left open the legal status of confiscated slaves, Frémont filled the gap by defining them as free. That interpretation went much too far for Lincoln. He sent word to Frémont that his freedom order must be canceled. When Frémont refused, Lincoln removed him from command.²⁹

Abolitionists, especially blacks, reacted to Lincoln’s decision with anger and outrage. Frederick Douglass warned that Lincoln’s repudiation of Frémont could “only dishearten the friends of the Government and strengthen its enemies.” To Thomas Hamilton, editor of the Weekly Anglo-African, Lincoln’s war, far from being a war against slavery, was simply a war to keep it in the Union. Any man who would “reduce back to slavery the slaves of rebels in Missouri would order the army of the United States to put down a slave insurrection in Virginia or Georgia.” So long as Lincoln pursued a policy of appeasing slaveholders, wrote Hamilton, the Union cause was doomed.³⁰

Black leaders across the North repeatedly pointed out that Lincoln’s oft-stated goal of preserving both the Union and slavery was self-defeating. Slavery and resistance to it had brought on the war. There could be no Union victory with slavery left intact. The war, as Frederick Douglass noted in May 1861, had “bound up the fate of the Republic and that of the slave in the same bundle.” The editor of the Anglo-African agreed, writing soon after Fort Sumter fell that “no adjustment of the nation’s difficulty is possible until the claims of the black man are first met and satisfied. … If you would restore the Union and maintain the government you so fondly cherish, make way for liberty, universal and complete.”³¹ In August, Dr. James Pennington of New York, an escaped former slave and Presbyterian minister, headed a petition of black leaders urging Congress to end slavery. It was, they stressed, the only way to bring lasting peace.

The undersigned, Free Colored citizens of these United States, believing that African Slavery as it now exists at the South, is the prime cause of the present Crisis and that permanent peace cannot be restored until said cause be removed, most respectfully petition your honorable body to take such measures, or enact such a law as may, in your wisdom seem best for the immediate abolition of African Slavery.³²

The good sense of that approach seemed obvious to Harriet Tubman, who made the same point: “God’s ahead of Master Lincoln. God won’t let Master Lincoln beat the South till he do the right thing.”³³

No matter how hard Lincoln tried to keep the issues of Union and slavery separate, no matter how determined white northerners were to fight only against secession, no matter how specific Congress tried to be in delineating those slaves subject to confiscation from those who were not, this war was a freedom war. It had been so from the start, as most blacks well knew. They knew it because they made it a freedom war, none more so than the tens of thousands who escaped during the war’s early months and forced the government to react. Thus it was, as W. E. B. Du Bois observed, that “with perplexed and laggard steps, the United States Government followed the footsteps of the black slave.”³⁴

Officers charged with enforcing the Confiscation Act were especially perplexed. The act’s language was fairly clear, but enforcing it proved difficult. Most field commanders simply reiterated the act to their subordinates without being very specific about procedure. Union General George McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac, told his officers that any slaves employed by the enemy “for military purposes” were to be detained for labor. “Those simply fugitive” were to be “dismissed from your camp.”³⁵ But how were his men to tell which fugitives had been used by Confederates for military purposes? If dismissed, where were they to go? Back to their owners? Was the army obliged to return them? What if dismissed fugitives had escaped from behind enemy lines? What was to be done with them in such cases?

Some commanders accepted only those fugitives whose labor they needed. Others tried to exclude them entirely. General Henry Halleck attempted to “remedy this evil” of dealing with fugitives by ordering that “no such persons be hereafter permitted to enter the lines of any camp, or of any forces on the march, and that any now within such lines be immediately excluded therefrom.” But it was impossible to tell fugitives from free men. In the border slave states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, free blacks numbered in the thousands and often sought employment with the army. After questioning blacks in his camp near Rolla, Missouri, one officer reported that “all claim and insist that they are free. Some of them, I have no question, are so; others I have as little doubt have been slaves, – but no one is here to prove it.”³⁶

Some commanders chaffed at the notion of giving even indirect aid to slaveholders, whom they generally viewed as pro-Confederate no matter which side of the lines they were on. An officer in Missouri complained that orders to expel fugitives from federal lines “make us Slave Catchers, instead of Soldiers.” When one of his officers wrote from Kentucky asking what to do about slaveholders searching his camp for fugitives, General Ulysses S. Grant replied, “I do not want the army used as negro catchers, but still less do I want to see it used as a cloak to cover their escape.” He ordered his subordinates to assist owners in recovering their slaves.³⁷

In Kentucky, General William T. Sherman also assured slaveholders that state law was in full force and that fugitives would be “delivered up on claim of the owner or agent.” The same was true in all slave states under federal control, even in former Confederate states or parts thereof. As General Henry Halleck moved into western Tennessee in February 1862, he told his men to show “our fellow-citizens of these States that we come merely to crush out rebellion” and not to “oppress and to plunder.” Private property, including slave property, would be respected. Later that month, General Don Carols Buell made the same point when his men occupied Nashville. “We are in arms not for the purpose of invading the rights of our fellow-countrymen anywhere,” he insisted, “but to maintain the integrity of the Union.” When the Union military took control of New Orleans and its environs in the spring of 1862, General Benjamin Butler, with Lincoln’s backing, assured planters that their slave property was secure.³⁸

General Ambrose Burnside did the same that spring when Union forces occupied coastal North Carolina. But slaves still flocked to Union camps. Within weeks, their number had swelled to more than ten thousand. From New Bern, Burnside reported to the War Department that “the city is being overrun with fugitives. … It would be utterly impossible if we were so disposed to keep them outside of our lines as they find their way to us through woods & swamps from every side.” It was the same in Tennessee. After turning fugitives away, one commander near Nashville complained, “During the night the negroes instead of going home … secreted themselves until they could follow the Troops and get back into my camp.”³⁹ Their refusal to be reenslaved left officers frustrated and confused over how to proceed on both practical and legal grounds.

Secretary of War Simon Cameron had from the start worried about the Confiscation Act’s ambiguity regarding refugees’ legal status. Were they, as the act implied, simply government slaves-in-waiting, to be returned to their owners after the war? In the original draft of his December 1861 annual report, Cameron suggested that in light of the army’s need for manpower, confiscated slaves be permanently emancipated. He even suggested that it might become necessary to enlist blacks as soldiers. Worse yet, he made the report public before Lincoln saw the document. Lincoln, still trying to keep the war a white man’s affair and fearing public reaction if he did not, ordered Cameron to delete the emancipation and enlistment passages. A few weeks later, amid allegations of corruption and insubordination, Lincoln removed Cameron from office.⁴⁰

Even as Lincoln was sacking Cameron, in part over his loose interpretation of the Confiscation Act, slaves to whom the act never applied were imposing their own interpretation. In January 1862, John Boston, a refugee from Maryland who had fled to the Union army in Virginia, wrote to his wife Elizabeth, still held in slavery. Boston twice confidently referred to himself as a free man.

My Dear Wife it is with grate joy I take this time to let you know Whare I am I am now in Safety in the 14th Regiment of Brooklyn this Day I can Address you thank god a free man I had a little truble in giting away But as the lord led the Children of Isrel to the land of Canon So he led me to a land Whare fredom Will rain in spite Of earth and hell Dear you must make your Self content I am free from al the Slavers Lash … My Dear I Cant express my grate desire that I Have to See you I trust the time Will Come When We Shal meet again And if We don’t met on earth We Will Meet in heven Whare Jesas ranes … Dear Wife I must Close rest yourself Contented I am free I Want you to rite To me Soon as you Can Without Delay Direct your letter to the 14th Reigment New york State malitia Uptons Hill Virginea Your Affectionate Husban Kiss Daniel For me

John Boston⁴¹

More and more, army officers bowed to the impossibility of keeping refugees at bay whether the Confiscation Act applied to them or not. One officer near Union City, Tennessee, gave as his excuse that “Rebel Traitors … demanding the right to search our camp for their fugitive slaves” had “become a nuisance and will no longer be tolerated.” Another officer in Kentucky insisted that he was simply too busy with the war to waste time hunting refugees.⁴²

Congress bowed to the pressure as well. In March 1862, without altering its position under the Confiscation Act, Congress forbade the use of federal troops in capturing and returning fugitive slaves. The army could still confiscate those slaves used directly against the United States. And it could exclude slaves from entering its lines if commanders had the means to do so. The army was simply no longer faced with the impossible task of determining which slaves fell under protection of the Confiscation Act and returning to slavery those who did not. Escaping slaves had pushed the government a giant step further toward recognizing that they were slaves no more. General Abner Doubleday made that clear when he issued orders implementing Congress’s new act. Although the act said nothing of legal status, Doubleday read it to imply that fugitives were “to be treated as persons and not as chattels.”⁴³

They Say They Are Free

The pressure continued to grow as more refugees, in groups large and small, made their way to Union lines. By the summer of 1862, nearly 10,000 from South Carolina had escaped to occupying Union forces along the coast.⁴⁴ At the same time, self-emancipated slaves were flocking to federal camps in southern Louisiana. General Benjamin Butler reported late that summer, “They are now coming in by the hundreds nay thousands almost daily. … Many plantations are deserted along the coast.”⁴⁵ A planter in La Fourche Parish recorded the exodus in his diary.

July 7, 1862: James Pugh’s estate lost 10 negroes last night.

July 8, 1862: There has been a perfect stampede of the negroes on some places in this vicinity.

October 28, 1862: The negroes are in a very bad way in the neighborhood and I fear will all go off.

October 30, 1862: Found our negroes completely demoralized. Some gone and some preparing to go. I fear we shall lose them all.

October 31, 1862: The negroes … run off. It looks probable that they will all go.

November 2, 1862: Our negroes … are still leaving, some every night. The plantation will probably be completely cleaned out in a week.

November 5, 1862: This morning there was a rebellion among the negroes at Mrs. G. Pugh.⁴⁶

Very often, escaping slaves brought news of Confederate fortifications, military movements, and troop strength. One evening near Fortress Monroe, six Virginia slaves arrived with detailed information on Confederate deployments in the region. There were “two artillery batteries on the Nansemond River about one and one-half miles apart – the first about four miles from the mouth – both on the left bank. Each mounts four guns, about 24-pounders. … The first is garrisoned by forty men … the second by eight. One gun in each fort will traverse; the chassis of the others are immovable.” The men also gave details of unit locations. “The Isle of Wight regiment is at Smithfield. The Petersburg Cavalry Company is at Chuckatuck. There are thirteen regiments of South Carolina troops at the old brick church near Smithfield. … At Suffolk there are 10,000 Georgia troops. They have been coming in for the past three weeks.”⁴⁷

Sometimes escaping slaves brought more than information. In May 1862, Robert Smalls ran the side-wheel steamer Planter, with its cargo of ammunition and artillery, out of Charleston and turned it over to the blockading Federals. Smalls was a skilled seaman whose owner had hired him out to serve as the Planter’s assistant pilot. On the night of May 12, after his captain and white shipmates went ashore, Smalls and other black crewmen fired up the boilers. They headed for a nearby wharf to pick up family members, then eased down the harbor and past Fort Sumter. Guards at outposts along the way, even those at Sumter, suspected nothing because Smalls knew all the proper signals. And in the darkness, no one ashore could tell that the crewmen waving to them were all blacks.

Once past Sumter, Smalls ordered full steam and made for the Federals, hoping they would see the old sheet he had hoisted as a white flag of truce. As Smalls approached the first Union vessel he sighted, a lookout yelled “All hands to quarters!” and the startled Federals brought their guns to bear on the Planter. A federal seaman later recalled:

Just as No. 3 port gun was being elevated, some one cried out, “I see something that looks like a white flag,” and true enough there was something flying on the steamer that would have been white by application of soap and water. As she neared us, we

Figure 2.3. Fugitives heading for Union lines brought their labor, their knowledge, and sometimes valuable property. In May 1862, harbor pilot Robert Smalls and his enslaved comrades on the armed transport Planter made a daring escape. Gathering their families aboard, they ran the steamboat past Fort Sumter and out of Charleston Harbor. Smalls remained aboard and was later named captain after he saved the boat from capture. He was the first African American to command a U. S. vessel. Image from Harper’s Weekly (New York), June 14, 1862.

looked in vain for the face of a white man. When they discovered that we would not fire on them, there was a rush of contrabands out on her deck, some dancing, some singing, whistling, jumping; and others stood looking towards Fort Sumter, and muttering all sorts of maledictions against it, and “de heart of de Souf,” generally.

As the Planter came alongside, Smalls stepped forward, took off his hat, and called out, “Good morning, sir! I’ve brought you some of the old United States guns, sir!”⁴⁸

Depriving the Confederacy of much needed labor, and sometimes equipment, escaping slaves made clear how devastating their attitudes and actions were to the Confederate war effort. So many slaves were escaping by summer 1862 that Confederate General John Pemberton, commander of the Department of South Carolina and Georgia, issued orders allowing only white soldiers to work close to Union lines. Slaves, he knew, “could not be trusted to work so near the enemy.” He also diverted troops to “prevent the escape of slaves and for protection of persons and property against insubordination of negroes.”⁴⁹

It was hardly unusual to see Confederate soldiers serving as slave patrols. Elements of the Nineteenth South Carolina Regiment roamed the streets of Charleston to keep local blacks under control. Civilians too, who might otherwise have been put in the army, were paid to do patrol duty. Officials in Early County, Georgia, hired extra patrols for each of its districts. When men could not be hired for slave patrols, they were drafted. The city council of Cuthbert, Georgia, divided the town into three wards and assigned all white males between the ages of sixteen and sixty to serve on patrols. In Barbour County, Alabama, the justice of the peace assigned men to patrol companies.⁵⁰

Although Confederate armies were constantly outnumbered by their Union counterparts by an average of two-to-one, tens of thousands of southern whites were kept at home to guard against escaping slaves and slave rebellion. To state and local officials, it seemed worth the cost. A grand jury in Baker County, Georgia, deemed slave patrollers as important as soldiers. Despite that importance, patrols were often left to incompetent or disinterested men. Consequently, patrol laws were often half-heartedly enforced or completely ignored. So badly was the job handled in Sumter County, Georgia, that slaveholders urged the local patrol commission to “appoint men to execute such duty as they know will do it in a proper manner.” Slaveholders in Lowndes County, Georgia, “aggrieved that the patrol law has been so much neglected,” repeatedly called for stricter enforcement. “We recommend,” they wrote, “that the patrol laws be strictly enforced. In fact we deem it indispensable to the protection of property in various sections of our county.” Officials in Georgia’s Thomas County complained that slaves “under the present want of discipline are an absolute evil” and ordered that every plantation supply the captain of the patrol commission with a list of all slaves.⁵¹

So resistant were nonslaveholders to serving not only on slave patrols but in the army as well that in April 1862, the Confederacy began drafting men into military service. Ultimately, conscription did the Confederacy more harm than good by helping turn southern plain folk against the war effort. They deeply resented the ways in which wealthy men avoided service, from hiring substitutes to bribing conscript officers. Most egregious was the “twenty slave law,” which exempted one white male for every twenty slaves owned. Jefferson Davis stressed that the law’s purpose “was not to draw any distinction of classes, but simply to provide a force, in the nature of a police force, sufficient to keep our negroes in control.” But nonslaveholders generally denounced the law as a favor to planters and called the conflict a “rich man’s war.”⁵²

Even men already in service despised the twenty slave law. “It gave us the blues,” wrote Tennessee Private Sam Watkins. “We wanted twenty negroes. Negro property suddenly became very valuable, and there was raised the howl of ‘rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.’” Watkins later recalled that “from this time on till the end of the war, a solider was simply a machine. We cursed the war … we cursed the Southern Confederacy.” Private O. Goddin of North Carolina wrote to Governor Zebulon Vance complaining of the law’s “distinction between the rich man (who had something to fight for) and the poor man who fights for that he never will have. The exemption of the owners of 20 negroes & the allowing of substitutes clearly proves it.”⁵³ One Georgia soldier called planters “the most contemptible of all our public enemies.”

These fellows talk loudly about their constitutional rights. … But listen again and you will hear them loud for the enforcement of the Conscript Law. Oh, yes! Their negroes must make cotton and whilst doing it the poor men must be taken from their families and put in the Army to protect their negroes. Was ever a greater wrong, or a more damning sin, perpetrated by men or devils?⁵⁴

Reaction to the draft in general, and planter exemption in particular, was just as vicious on the home front. A Lafayette, Alabama, man warned his senator that the twenty slave law was “considered class legislation & has given more dissatisfaction than any thing else Congress has done.” Many were so incensed that they simply ignored the law. One newspaper reported that not a single man appeared at the April 1862 draft call in Savannah, Georgia. The paper listed nearly 200 names of absentees. Around the same time, the entire Fourth Division of the South Carolina militia failed to report when called to service. Such displays of defiance could be dangerous. In the Alabama hill country, conscripts who declined to serve were tracked down with bloodhounds as if they were slaves. In Arkansas, General Joe Shelby sent his men after draft dodgers with orders to “use all force in your power, and when necessary shoot them down.”⁵⁵

Many deserters and draft dodgers formed anti-Confederate bands that controlled much of the southern countryside. They raided plantations, supply trains, and warehouse depots and did battle with conscript and home guard companies. By 1863, there was a full-blown inner civil war going on within the South. So violent was the conflict that a Georgia newspaper editor lamented, “We are fighting each other harder than we have ever fought the enemy.”⁵⁶ To anti-Confederate southerners, the Confederacy was the enemy. It drafted their men, confiscated their supplies, and starved them out. It excused from the draft wealthy men, whose slaves were escaping in such numbers and taking such liberties that whites had to be forced into slave patrols.

Even with slave patrols and the twenty slave law in place, whites in high slaveholding districts constantly feared slave rebellion. A resident of Jackson County, Mississippi, begged the governor to do what he could to end conscription. If the Confederacy kept drafting men from the county, he warned, “we may as well give it to the negroes … now we have to patrol every night to keep them down.” Governor John Milton of Florida asked Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon to exempt overseers from military service. “If left without the control of overseers … the result will probably be insubordination and insurrection.”⁵⁷

Confederate officials rarely agreed to suspend the draft, so state governments tried to deal with slave control on their own. The Georgia General Assembly mandated death for any black person found guilty of arson. Destroying railroad bridges or obstructing rail traffic carried the same penalty. It later forbade slaveholders to let slaves hire themselves out and required slaves to reside on their owners’ premises. The Alabama legislature imposed prohibitions on any sort of trade with slaves. Several times throughout the war, Alabama lawmakers increased funds awarded for the capture of runaway slaves. Other Confederate states enacted similar statutes or strengthened existing acts.⁵⁸

Despite efforts to keep them down, enslaved blacks were increasingly claiming freedom, or some degree of it, for themselves. “They say they are free,” wrote one Alabama slaveholder. “We cannot exert any authority. I beg ours to do what little is done.” Some refused to work at all. A South Carolina planter complained in the summer of 1862 that “the Negroes are unwilling to do any work, no matter what it is.” Some slaves demanded payment for their labor and threatened to escape if they did not get it. Others escaped to towns and cities, working as day laborers or even skilled professionals. An Alabama slave escaped and found employment as a blacksmith. By war’s end, he had a trunk full of cash, albeit in worthless Confederate notes.⁵⁹

One white passenger on a southwest Georgia railroad wrote in 1862 of being shocked to find “crowds of slaves in gayest attire” getting on and off the trains “at every country stopping place.” They held picnics, barbecues, dances, and church services. They gathered in town streets on Sunday afternoons to play games. Slaves were taking liberties in the countryside as well. They frequently took plantation stores at will, slaughtered livestock to feed themselves, and rode their owners’ horses as they pleased.⁶⁰

When a Texas planter tried to beat one of his slaves for insubordination, the bondsman “cursed the old man all to pieces,” walked off to the woods, and refused to return until his owner finally promised that there would be no more whipping. Three slaves on an Alabama plantation threatened to kill the overseer if he attempted any punishment at all. A Tennessee woman wrote to her husband that “overseers generally are doing very little good and they complain of the negroes getting so free and idle, but I think it is because most every one is afraid to correct them.” Such fears were well founded. On the Pugh plantation near Thibodeaux, Louisiana, slaves refused to work and assaulted Pugh and his overseer, “injuring them severely.”⁶¹

Thankful indeed were many slaveholders who were able to avoid violent encounters with their slaves. Some were not so fortunate. In October 1862, three armed whites tracking down a fugitive camp in Surry County, Virginia, were all killed in the effort. A July 1862 insurrection on one Mississippi plantation left an overseer with his throat cut. Florida slaves became so unruly that General R. F. Floyd, commanding state troops, asked the governor to declare martial law in Nassau, Duval, Clay, Putnam, St. Johns, and Volusia Counties. It was “a measure of absolute necessity,” Floyd insisted, because the region contained “a nest of traitors and lawless negroes.”⁶²

Even Jefferson Davis was not immune from slave insurrection. He and his brother Joseph owned a pair of plantations on a bend in the Mississippi River – Davis Bend – twenty miles south of Vicksburg. In May 1862, after Joseph moved some of the house servants to Vicksburg, the remaining

Figure 2.4. Black southerners increasingly took liberties during the war and resisted attempts to punish them for it. Many whites who tried were killed in the effort. “We cannot exert any authority,” admitted an Alabama slaveholder. Another in Tennessee confirmed that “most every one is afraid to correct them.” Still another in Texas found threats useless, “so I shall say nothing … I will try to feel thankful if they let me alone.” From a lithograph by Henry Louis Stephens entitled “Blow for Blow” (1863). Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

slaves forcibly took charge of the plantations. They ransacked the Davis residence, destroyed the cotton, and went to work for themselves, claiming collective ownership of the land that their families had worked for years. They managed the plantations on their own for months before federal troops arrived. In June, Davis received word from Brierfield, another of his plantations, that slaves there were ignoring the overseer, refusing to work, and generally “in a state of insubordination.” Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was still more than six months away and already the Confederate president’s own slaves, along with so many others, had effectively emancipated themselves.⁶³

Desperate slaveholders frequently turned to the Union army for protection. In southern Louisiana, Union officers were inundated with requests for help. A planter from Plaquemines Parish told General George Shepley that local slaves were in a state of insurrection and begged him to bring them under control. Commanders were sometimes conflicted over whether to intervene, although they were technically obliged to enforce state and federal laws recognizing slavery. Some officers were perfectly willing to do so. In the summer of 1862, when an insurrection broke out a few miles north of New Orleans, General Benjamin Butler informed local slaves that attacks against their owners would be repelled.⁶⁴

On a plantation near Donaldsonville, enslaved blacks who heard that the Federals had arrived in Louisiana declared themselves free and refused to take orders. Their owner called on Union troops for help. When a federal gunboat arrived flying the U. S. flag, the blacks were overjoyed. They were sure that it was there to back them up in their claim to freedom. Instead, when they stepped forward to welcome their presumed allies, the officer in charge pointedly told them that if they thought the Union army had come to end slavery “they were very much mistaken.” The officer arrested several “ringleaders” and ordered the rest back to work. As they were being led away to the plantation stocks, one of the arrested slaves exclaimed, “My God! This is more worserer than Jeff Davis.”⁶⁵

Federal help with suppressing slave resistance was not always so forthcoming. In late 1862, the wife of Confederate General Braxton Bragg appealed to Union General Godfrey Weitzel for protection from her slaves. Weitzel was inclined to help but was overruled by his superior, Benjamin Butler. A few months’ experience with recalcitrant slaveholders had hardened Butler’s attitude toward them. It now seemed curious to Butler that families like the Braggs were both “in rebellion against the Government” and, at the same time, “in terror seeking its protection.” When such people recognized the U. S. government’s authority, Butler said, he was prepared to assist. Until then, they were on their own.⁶⁶

What Shall We Do with the Contrabands?

If some Union officers would not help put down slave rebellion, neither would they help blacks secure freedom. They too were on their own. Lincoln’s government still recognized slavery in every slave state whether Union or Confederate. The Confiscation Act legally deprived only disloyal slaveholders of their slaves, but nearly every slaveholder professed Union loyalty as soon as federal forces arrived. So slaves took what liberties they dared and continued escaping when they could, relying on each other for help. In that sense, the Underground Railroad operated much as it had before the war, with enslaved men and women giving refugees food, shelter, and sometimes escorts from one safe house to the next.

The help did not end when they reached Union lines. Blacks established refugee aid organizations all across the North. These were especially active in border cities such as Philadelphia and Washington. Working through churches, schools, and benevolent societies, black residents provided food and shelter to escapees and helped them find jobs. In April 1862, Philadelphia’s leading blacks set up an employment office for fugitives. William Still, who headed the city’s Underground Railroad, led the effort. In Washington, the Reverend Richard H. Cain, minister of a local African Methodist Episcopal church, took a leading role in caring for fugitives and helping them find work.⁶⁷

One of the most active refugee supporters was Elizabeth Keckley, a Washington seamstress who counted Mary Todd Lincoln among her clients. Keckley and forty other black women formed the Contraband Relief Association. Herself a former slave who had purchased her own freedom, Keckley led the organization in soliciting funds and supplies from dozens of black churches and relief organizations between Baltimore and Boston. She appealed for support from Wendell Phillips’s Twelfth Baptist Church in Boston and Henry Highland Garnet’s Shiloh Church in New York. During a stop-over in New York, Keckley told her story to a steward at the Metropolitan Hotel and raised “quite a sum of money” from the black dining room waiters. Frederick Douglass donated $200 to Keckley’s effort. So did Mary Todd Lincoln.⁶⁸

Washington became a magnet not only for slaves escaping from Virginia and points south but also from Maryland. Claiming to be refugees from disloyal slaveholders behind Confederate lines, Maryland slaves flooded into Washington. Although subject to reenslavement under the Fugitive Slave Act, it was impossible to tell who was subject to the law. That gave Maryland escapees some degree of safety, but it put all Washington blacks in danger of enslavement. Slavecatchers often kidnapped blacks at random and sold them in Maryland slave markets. Some escaped. Others never got the chance. One Maryland owner whipped a fugitive to death as a warning example to others.⁶⁹

So many slavecatchers roamed the streets of Washington, capturing free blacks, contrabands, and escapees without regard to status, that Congress was finally compelled to intervene. The first step toward a practical remedy, one that abolitionist leaders and “radicals” in Congress had been proposing for months, was simply to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. In April 1862, Congress did just that. Lincoln supported the bill in principle but had reservations about the message it would send to slaveholders in the border states and occupied South. He had wanted one of the border states to lead the way and had tried without success to have Delaware make the first move. He would also have preferred a more gradual approach, expressing his sympathy for slaveholders who would “at once be deprived of cooks, stable boys &c.” Nevertheless, Lincoln signed the bill into law.⁷⁰

The act contained two provisions that Lincoln fully supported. Congress offered nothing to former slaves for their years of unpaid service, but it did offer compensation of up to $1 million from the federal treasury to slaveholders for the loss of their property. In a move toward racial cleansing, Congress also authorized $100,000 for the deportation, or colonization, of blacks to Africa or the Caribbean or anywhere else as long as it was out of the United States. Both slaveholder compensation and black colonization would become the twin pillars of Lincoln’s early efforts to address the “negro question.”⁷¹

Neither compensation nor colonization curtailed the immediate problem of fugitives from Maryland flocking into Washington. These slaves were, in effect, freeing themselves, and there were so many that little could be done to stop them. Frustrated with their own inability to act and annoyed at Maryland’s constant complaints, administration officials most often turned a blind eye. When Maryland Congressman Charles Calvert asked Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton to help retrieve fugitive slaves, the War Department’s assistant secretary replied that Stanton had “more urgent and important business.”⁷²

Stanton’s field commanders faced much the same problem. They were authorized to employ refugees, but the numbers coming in were more than they could handle. “What shall I do with my niggers?” asked the exasperated commander of Louisiana’s Fort Macomb in early 1862. The commander at Fort Saint Philip was just as perplexed. “Darkies come flocking in here,” he told a correspondent, and he could not feed them all. “I am placed in an awkward dilemma. … I cannot have them in the fort, and know not what to do.” A New Hampshire officer wrote that Louisiana blacks were “coming into camp by the hundred and are a costly curse. They should be kept out or set at work, or freed or colonized, or sunk or something.”⁷³

General Ben Butler told the secretary of war that in light of the number of slaves escaping, trying to enforce the Confiscation Act was absurd. Of the thousands of blacks overcrowding his camps, loyal and disloyal owners had lost them alike. He had put as many to work as he could and tried to keep the rest out. “It is a physical impossibility to take all,” Butler stressed. “I cannot feed the white men within my lines. … What would be the state of things if I allowed all the slaves from the plantations to quit their employment and come within the lines.” Butler offered no solution beyond a growing awareness that slavery was a curse to the nation, mainly because of its “baleful effects” on whites. Butler’s increasing frustration with slavery and the “negro question” was plain to see.⁷⁴

General John Wool, commander of Virginia’s Fortress Monroe, also wrote to the secretary of war asking “what am I to do with the negro slaves that are almost daily arriving at this post from the interior.” The commander at Point Lookout, Maryland, complained that slaves were “continually crossing over from the Eastern shore of Va., and coming in from Md., all getting within our lines … until the number is greater than we know what to do with.” A naval officer wrote from Georgia’s St. Simons Island that he could not feed all the refugees coming into his lines. The quartermaster at Helena, Arkansas, had the same difficulty. “There is a perfect ‘Cloud’ of negroes being thrown upon me for Sustenance & Support. … What am I to do with them.”⁷⁵

To James Madison Bell, one of the great poets of the nineteenth century, the answer was obvious. Like so many other blacks, Bell pressed Lincoln to make freedom a Union war aim and accept the services of blacks as soldiers. In the Pacific Appeal, a black abolitionist newspaper based in San Francisco, Bell framed the question and added his response.

What Shall We Do with the Contrabands?

Shall we arm them? Yes, arm them! give to each man

A rifle, a musket, a cutlass, a sword;

Then on to the charge! let them war in the van,

Where each may confront with his merciless lord,

And purge from their race, in the eyes of the brave,

The stigma and scorn now attending the slave.

I would not have the wrath of the rebels to cease,

Their hope to grow weak nor their courage to wane,

Till the Contrabands join in securing a peace,

Whose glory shall vanish the last galling chain,

And win for their race an undying respect

In the land of their prayers, their tears and neglect.

Is the war one of Freedom? Then why, tell me why,

Should the wronged and oppressed be debarred from the fight?

Does not reason suggest, it were noble to die

In the act of supplanting a wrong for the right?

Then lead to the charge! for the end is not far,

When the Contraband host are enrolled in the war.⁷⁶

Although Washington still insisted that ending slavery was not a war aim, growing numbers of field commanders agreed with Bell. Among them was General David Hunter. He needed soldiers, and there were plenty of blacks available to serve. That became clear to Hunter in March 1862 when he took command of the Department of the South, operating along the southeastern Atlantic coast. Two months later, he declared all enslaved people in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida to be free and ordered conscription for all black males between the ages of eighteen and forty-five.⁷⁷

Blacks were enthusiastic about Hunter’s freedom declaration. They were less pleased, however, with his conscription order. Many were ready and willing to serve. For others, indiscriminate conscription imposed hardship on hardship. It was planting time, and families needed their men’s support. To some former slaves, involuntary military service seemed like another form of slavery. They had considered themselves free well before Hunter’s declaration. Now to have army press gangs force them from their homes evoked painful memories of slave traders and family separations. When one group of soldiers drafted several men on South Carolina’s St. Helena Island, a witness described the scene as “strange and affecting.”

Women and children gathered around the men to say ‘farewell.’ Fathers took the little children in their arms, while the Women gave way to the wildest expressions of grief. … a moaning and weeping, such as touches the hearts of strong men, burst forth – an evidence – and sure witness that there is a fountain of love and humanity in the hearts of the poor Negroes.⁷⁸

When Lincoln learned of Hunter’s freedom order, he issued a presidential proclamation making it “altogether void.” Lincoln stressed that no field commander had the authority to free slaves. Black leaders were sorely disappointed that Lincoln had once again revoked a freedom order issued by one of his generals. Could Lincoln not see that by doing so he only strengthened the rebellion and turned away the Union’s warmest friends? In the Pacific Appeal, editor Philip Bell openly wondered whether Lincoln was in fact a slavery supporter. Bell called Lincoln’s repudiation of Hunter a proslavery proclamation and alluded to Lincoln as a “Northern man with Southern principles.”⁷⁹

Although Lincoln was never proslavery, neither was he an abolitionist, at least not in an immediate sense. He wanted chattel slavery to end but feared ending it quickly. He feared opposition from whites, North and South. He feared the turmoil that might follow abrupt emancipation. He feared the consequences for the Republican Party and his own administration. He feared the question of what to do with former slaves once they were free. All that fear led him to favor a gradual approach spanning decades, with blacks yet unborn serving their parents’ owners into the twentieth century. Through late 1861 and 1862, he suggested such schemes, especially to the border states, advocating federal laws to release blacks in a measured way and federal funds to compensate slaveholders for their loss. “The change,” Lincoln assured slaveholders, “would come gently as the dews of heaven, not rending or wrecking anything.”⁸⁰ That change need not come, as Hunter would have it, at the point of gun.

Still, if Lincoln made clear that Hunter’s blacks could not be free, he dodged the question of whether they could be soldiers. He left that issue to Congress, which passed a resolution demanding to know why Hunter had enlisted “fugitive slaves” without authority. Hunter sarcastically but accurately replied that “No regiment of ‘Fugitive Slaves’ has been, or is being organized in this Department. There is, however, a fine regiment of persons whose late masters are ‘Fugitive Rebels,’ men who everywhere fly before the appearance of the National Flag, leaving their servants behind them to shift as best they can for themselves.” Hunter also pointed to previous War Department orders authorizing him to “employ all loyal persons offering their services in defence of the Union and for the suppression of this Rebellion in any manner I might see fit.” Since the orders said nothing of skin color, Hunter saw his black soldiers as federally authorized recruits. Still, the War Department refused to recognize Hunter’s black regiment. Unable to pay the men or provide them with uniforms, Hunter disbanded all but one company in August 1862.⁸¹

Most white northerners supported keeping blacks out of the army. This was a war for Union, not against slavery, and both major parties, Republican and Democratic, had promised to keep it that way. It was, in large part, a matter of racist pride. Indiana’s leading Republican newspaper, the Indianapolis Daily Journal, expressed a contempt for blacks common among northern whites when it wrote that Lincoln should never shame the nation by using black soldiers: “Certainly we hope we may never have to confess to the world that the United States Government has to seek an ally in the negro to regain its authority.”⁸²

A New Departure for the President

As the war entered its second year, white attitudes toward enlisting blacks began to change. At the April 1862 Battle of Shiloh, the largest ever fought in the Western Hemisphere to that time, Union forces suffered more than 13,000 casualties. In June, there were 5,000 more at Seven Pines. The Seven Days battles in late June and early July saw nearly 16,000 Union casualties. Losses from disease were even greater. The war for the Union was not going well, and there was no end in sight. To Samuel Kirkwood, Republican governor of Iowa, it seemed obvious that blacks should be enlisted, mainly for the sake of whites. In the summer of 1862, he wrote to General-in-Chief Henry Halleck, “When this war is over & we have summed up the entire loss of life … I shall not have any regrets if it is found that a part of the dead are niggers and that all are not white men.”⁸³

There were plenty of black men willing to serve, as there had been from the war’s outset. W. T. Boyd and J. T. Alston of Cleveland, both “Colard men” who had voted for Lincoln, asked permission to raise a regiment of Ohio blacks. They promised that the men “would make as patriotic and good Soldiers as any other.” Captain Rufus Sibb Jones of the Fort Pitt Cadets, a black militia company in Pittsburgh, offered his men’s services, assuring Secretary of War Stanton that they were “quite proficient in military discipline.” G. P. Miller, a black physician from Battle Creek, Michigan, told the War Department that he could recruit up to 10,000 black men.⁸⁴

In May 1862, a letter arrived on Stanton’s desk from Garland H. White, formerly enslaved to Robert Toombs of Georgia. White was now a minister residing among fugitives in London, Canada, who wanted to return to the United States and serve as soldiers. He wrote that they were motivated by a desire to see “an eternal overthrow of the institution of slavery which is the cause of all our trouble.” White had more personal motives as well. “I want to see my friends at port royal [South Carolina] & other places in the South.” Like so many other exiles, White saw the war as a chance to claim for those left behind the freedom he had long claimed for himself.⁸⁵

Although the War Department shunned such offers, David Hunter was not the only field commander to see the need for black troops and to act on it. In southern Louisiana, General Ben Butler initially argued against both the necessity and wisdom of using black troops when his forces entered the region in spring 1862. But that summer, after a Confederate offensive forced him to evacuate Baton Rouge, Butler called up the Louisiana Native Guards, a regiment of New Orleans Creoles whose offer of service he had previously turned down. They were but the first of more than 24,000 black Louisianans who would serve during the war.⁸⁶

That summer in Kansas, Senator James H. Lane used his recruiting commission to enlist blacks. Lane was a former leader of the Jayhawkers, a Free Soil Kansas militia. Not only did he seek out the service of Kansas blacks, he also sent recruiters across the North drumming up black volunteers. Local recruiters complained that Lane’s efforts were hurting their own since whites were reluctant to serve alongside blacks. Both Secretary of War Stanton and General-in-Chief Halleck denied that Lane had authority to recruit black troops, but Lane ignored them and continued mustering blacks into service.⁸⁷

David Hunter also ignored the War Department. On August 5, 1862, he sent his black company under command of a white sergeant, T. C. Trowbridge, to root out rebel guerillas on Georgia’s St. Simons Island. When they arrived, they found that the island’s self-emancipated former slaves, led by freedman John Brown, had already been at the task for nearly two weeks. They had chased the Rebels all over the island, finally cornering them in a swamp. There the Rebels laid an ambush in which Brown was killed and several others wounded. After an exchange of gunfire, both sides withdrew. Trowbridge’s men took up the search, but their quarry managed to escape in a small boat, arriving on the mainland “tattered and dirty from head to foot.” The rebel band’s leader later wrote to a friend, “If you wish to know hell before your time, go to St. Simons and be hunted ten days by niggers.”⁸⁸

With the war going badly for the Union, and with so many blacks eager to help, the case for black enlistment seemed clear. Its main obstacle was racism. What would placing blacks in uniform mean for their enslavement in the South and their social status nationwide? Would making blacks soldiers also make freedom a war aim? Would it make blacks citizens? Could they serve on juries, cast ballots, and hold public office? Would they have equal access to public schools, restaurants, theaters, hotels, and transportation?

Such questions were at the heart of white northern resistance to blacks having anything to do with the war. Blacks were “unfit for freedom,” wrote the editor of the Chicago Times, “incapable of taking care of themselves as so many infants.” To end slavery, predicted the editor, would send two or three million “semi-savages” heading northward to become “a pestilence more destructive than ever yet walked the earth.” The Columbus Crisis editor was sure that ending slavery would force white northerners to “mix up four millions of blacks with their sons and daughters.” The pro-emancipation editor of the Chicago Tribune admitted with regret that “the greatest ally of slaveholders in this country is the apprehension in the Northern mind that if the slaves were liberated, they would become roaming, vicious vagabonds; that they would overrun the North.”⁸⁹

The quarter-million blacks already in the North were too many for most northern whites, who tried their best to keep blacks segregated. Most schools, hospitals, theaters, and churches denied access to blacks or pushed them off to inferior areas labeled “Colored.” Things were much the same in the judicial and political realms. In most free states, it was illegal for blacks to testify in court against whites or to serve on juries. Even where jury service for blacks was legal, they were rarely called. Only in five New England states did adult black males have unrestricted voting rights. Blacks could vote in New York but needed substantial wealth to qualify.

Even in Massachusetts, where black men could vote and black children could attend public schools, there was debilitating racism and segregation. In an open letter to The Liberator, John Rock wrote that the entire country, North and South, had conspired to crush black folk.

The masses seem to think that we are oppressed only in the South. This is a mistake; we are oppressed everywhere in this slavery-cursed land. Massachusetts has a great name, and deserves much credit for what she has done, but the position of the colored people in Massachusetts is far from being an enviable one. While colored men have many rights, they have few privileges here. To be sure, we are seldom insulted by the vulgar passers by, we have the right of suffrage, the free schools and colleges are open to our children, and from them have come forth young men capable of filling any post of profit or honor. But there is no field for these young men. … You can hardly imagine the humiliation and contempt a colored lad must feel by graduating the first in his class, and then being rejected everywhere else because of his color. … Even in Boston, which has a great reputation for being anti-slavery, he has no field for his talent. … It is five times as difficult to get a house in a good location in Boston as it is in Philadelphia, and it is ten times more difficult for a colored mechanic to get employment than in Charleston. Colored men in business in Massachusetts receive more respect, and less patronage, than in any place that I know of. In Boston we are proscribed in some of the eating houses, many of the hotels, and all the theaters but one. … You know that the colored man is proscribed in some of the churches, and that this proscription is carried even to the grave yards. This is Boston – by far the best, or at least the most liberal large city in the United States.⁹⁰

The question of social equality divided even abolitionists, mainly, although not exclusively, along racial lines. Prominent blacks such as John Rock and Frederick Douglass were relentless in their call for both freedom and the rights of equality associated with it. White abolitionists more often limited themselves to the specific goal of ending slavery. That was especially true of white abolitionists in elective office, who, knowing the racist views of their constituents and holding such views themselves, usually made their arguments on war-related grounds. Even Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a firm abolitionist of long standing, declared that emancipation should be “presented strictly as a measure of military necessity and the argument is to be thus supported rather than on grounds of philanthropy.”⁹¹

Like Sumner, blacks had long recognized that slavery and the war were inseparable. With white northerners beginning to make the same case from whatever motive, the connection between Union victory and ending slavery seemed increasingly obvious. In Pennsylvania, a “very full meeting of the citizens of West Middletown and vicinity, without respect to party or distinction,” resolved that since slavery was the war’s cause, there could be no permanent peace without slavery’s end.⁹² In speeches and print, from town halls to the halls of Congress, more and more whites pointed out that declaring an end to slavery would cripple the Confederate war effort, deny the Confederacy foreign recognition, punish slaveholders, demoralize secessionists, further encourage slave resistance, and bring the war to a quicker end.

As for the possibility of fugitives flooding the North, such fears, argued white emancipationists, were groundless. The reason slaves were escaping North was that they wanted freedom. Give it to them in the South, and they would stay put. Presenting emancipation as a means of racial containment, George Boutwell, former governor of Massachusetts, warned that if slavery were not abolished, the North would soon be “overrun by escaped fugitives from the South.” Massachusetts attorney E. H. Derby expressed the same fear, telling his readers that both the North and the West would be inundated with blacks if slavery survived the war. But end slavery and things would be different. “Once let liberty be established at the South,” promised the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, “and the North will be whiter than ever.”⁹³

Just a year earlier, Lincoln and the Republican Party had offered slaveholders a thirteenth amendment guaranteeing slavery forever. Now they were couching emancipation in terms of what was good for whites, appealing to northern racism in the process. It was a strategy they saw as necessary to limit the political fallout from an emancipation that was already an established fact, an emancipation that tens of thousands of fugitives had already forced on the nation. Desperate dispatches from field commanders had made that clear for months, stemming from ambiguities of the Confiscation Act. It had declared fugitives to be contraband of war but said nothing about their status beyond that. The result was a legal and practical mess that promoted confusion and hampered the war effort. With the war going so badly for the Union, that situation could not continue.

On July 17, 1862, Congress moved toward clearing up the mess and recognizing the inevitable. With the Second Confiscation Act, slaves belonging to disloyal slaveholders were declared “forever free of their servitude.” At the same time, Congress recognized the need for black military aid with the Militia Act. It was cautious regarding how blacks should be used, specifying “for the purpose of constructing intrenchments, or performing camp service, or any other labor.” But it also authorized Lincoln to use blacks “in any military or naval service for which they may be found competent,” leaving the door open for their use as soldiers and seamen.⁹⁴

Lincoln signed both acts into law with reservations, charged as he was with their enforcement. Freedom went only to slaves of disloyal slaveholders. Lincoln had “no objection” to the policy but pointed out that “a justly discriminating application of it, would be very difficult, and, to a great extent, impossible.” The problem was the same that had faced the army for nearly a year – how to tell the difference between blacks formerly held by disloyal slaveholders from those belonging to Unionists.⁹⁵

On July 13, as Congress hammered out the Second Confiscation Act, Lincoln disclosed to Secretary of State William Seward and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles his plan to simplify the act’s implementation. He would declare all slaveholders in rebellious states, or parts thereof not under Union control, to be disloyal. Their slaves would be free. Slaveholders in Union-held territory would be deemed loyal and could keep their slaves. Claiming military necessity, Lincoln would enforce the Second Confiscation Act and end slavery, at least in part, by presidential proclamation. “We must free the slaves,” Lincoln finally recognized, “or be ourselves subdued.” Welles later recalled that this was “a new departure for the President,” who had until then asserted that his government had no authority to interfere with slavery where it existed. But the war was not going well, and Lincoln needed all the help he could get.⁹⁶

Figure 2.5. With the war going badly, recruiting at a standstill, and confusion over the legal status of “contrabands” hampering operations, in July 1862 Congress passed, and Lincoln signed, acts declaring slaves of disloyal owners free and allowing blacks to serve in the military. “Why I du declare, it’s my dear old friend Sambo!” says Lincoln in the caption. “Course you’ll fight for us, Sambo. Lend us a hand, old hoss, du!” Some blacks refused in protest over unequal pay and the policy against black men serving as officers. Image from Punch (London), August 9, 1862.

There were other factors influencing Lincoln’s decision. With the lack of volunteers, there was talk that a military draft might be necessary. Lincoln hoped to avoid such a move, unpopular as it would be. Congress had taken a step toward conscription with the Militia Act, which, in addition to opening the door to black enlistment, hinted that a draft might be coming if the states did not send forward enough volunteers. Lincoln hoped that enlisting blacks might allow him to avoid conscripting whites. He also hoped that emancipation would ward off foreign recognition of the Confederacy, especially by Britain. The British Empire had outlawed slavery decades before. Making the war a freedom war would keep Britain, at least officially, out of the conflict.⁹⁷

In late July, Lincoln told his cabinet that he intended to release a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. It would cite the Second Confiscation Act as the basis of its authority. It would be a tentative document, giving slaveholders time to declare loyalty to the Union before it went into effect on January 1, 1863. It would be limited as well, freeing only those slaves it could not immediately reach. Slaves held in the border states would not be affected. Neither would those in former Confederate territory under Union control, such as Tennessee, northern Virginia, and southern Louisiana. The document would say nothing of plans to enlist blacks, and it would offer colonization as the ultimate solution to the “negro problem.” But Lincoln could not release the Proclamation yet. Doing so after a string of Union defeats that summer would make his government appear weak and desperate. So Lincoln set the plan aside and waited for a battlefield victory.

In the meantime, Lincoln took steps to prepare whites for emancipation and blacks for deportation. Lincoln wanted northern whites to understand that when federally recognized emancipation came, it would not mean former slaves overrunning the North. If they went anywhere, it would be to some foreign land. Sending that message was in part a preemptive political tactic designed to head off criticism of his Proclamation. But colonization was not simply a ploy. Lincoln took the idea seriously. “Almost from the commencement of this administration,” Navy Secretary Gideon Welles wrote in his diary, Lincoln favored “deporting the colored race.” “The President was earnest in the matter; wished to send the negroes out of the country.”⁹⁸

Lincoln had Congress’s support for the project. The Second Confiscation Act authorized Lincoln to colonize all blacks willing to emigrate as soon as “some tropical country” could be induced to take them. At the same time, in its Report on Emancipation and Colonization, a House select committee bluntly stated that “the highest interests of the white race, whether Anglo-Saxon, Celt, or Scandinavian, require that the whole country should be held and occupied by those races alone. … The Anglo-American looks upon every acre of our present domain as intended for him, and not for the negro.” Congress allocated $600,000 as a down payment on black deportation and America’s racial cleansing.⁹⁹

As Congress called for deportation, Lincoln called for a delegation of Washington’s black leaders to meet at the White House. A committee quickly formed and drew up resolutions opposing colonization, instructing five representatives to present them to Lincoln. When they met with Lincoln on August 14, they found that the president had little interest in hearing what they had to say. They had been summoned to hear Lincoln’s prepared remarks, which would quickly be released to the press. Like so many white northerners, Lincoln was quick to blame slavery’s victims for the nation’s troubles. “But for your race among us,” he told his guests, “there could not be war, although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other. Nevertheless, I repeat, without the institution of Slavery and the colored race as a basis, the war could not have an existence. It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”¹⁰⁰

George B. Vashon, a black Pittsburgh educator and later attorney for the Freedmen’s Bureau, read Lincoln’s remarks with disgust. In an open letter to Douglass’ Monthly, Vashon wrote that although the black man may have brought on the war, he was not its root cause. “That cause must be sought in the wrongs inflicted upon him by the white man.” Frederick Douglass made the same point, writing that “a horse thief pleading that the existence of the horse is the apology for his theft or a highway man contending that the money in the traveler’s pocket is the sole first cause of his robbery are about as much entitled to respect as is the President’s reasoning.” Lincoln’s remarks, Douglass insisted, only fueled racism rather than helping overcome it. But Lincoln’s purpose was not to overcome racism. In fact, he employed racism as a means of turning opposition to his Proclamation back on its critics – to argue that emancipation was a necessary first step toward colonization, toward ridding the nation of blacks. It was necessary to undermine the Confederate war effort, preserve the Union, and avoid future civil war. The Proclamation was ultimately for the good of whites, not of blacks. But to announce the Proclamation, Lincoln needed a battlefield victory.¹⁰¹

His opportunity came on September 17 when Union forces turned back a Confederate advance in western Maryland at Antietam Creek. George McClellan, the Union commander, failed to follow up on his initial success, and the rebel army escaped into Virginia. Still, Lincoln could claim a victory. Five days later, on September 22, he issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

A Half-Way Measure

Black leaders knew that Lincoln’s primary aim was to weaken Confederates, not strengthen blacks. That his Proclamation said nothing of slavery in the Union-held South was a huge disappointment. James H. Hudson, a black abolitionist writing for the Pacific Appeal, called the Proclamation

a half-way measure, which purports to give freedom to the bulk of the slave population beyond the reach of our arms, while it ignores or defies justice, by clinching the rivets of the chain which binds those whom alone we have present power to redeem. The proclamation should have been made to include every bondsman on the soil of America; every chain should have been broken.¹⁰²

If it was not the end of slavery, the Proclamation was at least a recognition that self-emancipated fugitives had pushed the issue past its tipping point. “When Virginia is a free state, Maryland cannot be a slave state,” wrote Frederick Douglass. “Slavery must stand or fall together. Strike it at either extreme – either on the head or at the heel, and it dies.”¹⁰³

Reaction to the preliminary Proclamation was mixed among northern whites as well, although they leaned much more heavily toward a negative view. October and November saw huge demonstrations against emancipation in major urban areas. Mass meetings in New York and Brooklyn adopted resolutions condemning the Proclamation. The Chicago Times saw it as a hypocritical scheme to “save the Union … by overriding the constitution.” The editor was sure that Lincoln had “no constitutional power to issue the proclamation … none whatever.” In Philadelphia, even the Reverend Albert Barnes, president of the Pennsylvania Bible Society and a critic of slavery, preached against the Proclamation, saying that Lincoln had overstepped his authority. “Such power is not given to any individual or to any body of men under the constitution.”¹⁰⁴

On the front lines that summer and fall, events were taking shape that would further inflame racist fears among northern whites, supporters and opponents of emancipation alike. The numbers of fugitives flooding Union camps left field commanders with little choice but to seek other options for their care. In September 1862, General Ulysses S. Grant established a “Contraband Retreat” in northern Mississippi, then sent 600 of its inmates to military posts in Columbus, Kentucky, and Cairo, Illinois. With Secretary of War Stanton’s approval, the post commander at Cairo tried to hire fugitives out to local employers. As word of the attempt spread, northern whites howled in protest. This was exactly what they had long feared – blacks coming north to take their jobs. Democrats used the incident to fan racist fears and gain political advantage. An Illinois Democrat insisted that the North was “in great danger of being overrun with negroes set free by our army or by the President’s proclamation.” Republicans feared the consequences in the upcoming elections. Stanton cancelled the fugitive employment plan, but the political damage had been done.¹⁰⁵

In October, a meeting of white workers in Quincy, Illinois, issued a manifesto in which they gave

notice to those engaged in this business of attempting to ride down and crush out the free white workingmen of Illinois, by thus seeking to bring free negro labor into competition with white labor, that we cannot and will not tolerate it; that we will seek our remedy, first, under the law; second, at the polls; and third, if both these fail, we will redress our wrongs in such manner as shall seem to us most expedient and most practicable.

The message to blacks, with its veiled threat of violence, could hardly have been more clear.¹⁰⁶

White mobs sometimes made good on such threats. In July 1862, spurred by reports of whites being thrown out of employment and wages being reduced, gangs of Irish workers attacked black laborers at the Cincinnati docks. “No d—d niggers,” yelled the Irishmen, “should work on the levee.” Some victims, wrote one city newspaper, turned on their attackers, “the result being several Irishmen pretty well whaled.” Far outnumbered, most of the blacks took refuge on boats lining the wharves. It did little good. “On went the mob from boat to boat, in pursuit of every negro they could find. One poor ‘contraband’ … was finally overtaken and pelted with boulders. His teeth were knocked out, or down his throat, while his jaw bone was fractured, eight or ten of the rowdies having pounced on him at once.” Those who could get away headed for the city’s black tenements. Police never responded to calls for help, reported the press, “as is usual in such cases.”¹⁰⁷

Even when police did respond, it was as often to help the mobs as to hinder them. One morning in September 1862, an angry crowd of thirty to forty whites in Brooklyn, New York, gathered outside a tobacco factory where a handful of blacks were employed. Soon they began hurling bricks and paving stones at the building. Before long the crowd numbered more than a thousand, many of them screaming “Down with the nagers” and “Turn out the nagers.” Two police officers walking their beat happened on the scene, but, wrote the Brooklyn Eagle, “instead of attacking the white rioters they struck at the negroes with their clubs.” The trapped blacks, five men and fifteen women, barricaded themselves on the top floor and threw anything they could find down on rioters trying to follow them. Police finally arrived in force and dispersed the mob, but not before the building was nearly gutted. Although it was only a twenty-minute walk from City Hall, police took two hours to respond.¹⁰⁸

At the same time, a fugitive resettlement plan was taking shape in Virginia. General John A. Dix reported to Stanton that fugitives were suffering terribly. Poorly fed and clothed, crowded into broken-down shacks and tents, they were dying “by the hundreds and thousands.” The army was simply not equipped to care for them all. So Dix asked permission to contact Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts and governors of other northern states to arrange temporary asylum and employment for the refugees. When news of the plan reached Massachusetts, whites were outraged. Opposition was especially fierce among Republicans, who accused Dix of saddling their party with the stigma of encouraging black migration North. Within weeks of Dix’s request, Governor Andrew was in Washington telling administration officials face-to-face that Massachusetts would not be a haven for escaped slaves. Silence among white abolitionists confirmed the widespread hostility toward black refugees and went a long way toward defeating Dix’s plan. “Massachusetts don’t want them,” declared the editor of the Springfield Daily Republican. “No free state wants them.”¹⁰⁹

In Wisconsin that fall, when seventy-five Alabama blacks arrived at Fond du Lac to be employed as servants, the Daily Wisconsin News warned that the state would soon be “swarming with this black population.” A West Bend newspaper editor wrote that sending blacks north “to mix with … and compete with … free labor” was “most outrageous.” A Milwaukee editor agreed, insisting that “the North belongs to the free white man, not to the Negro.”¹¹⁰

Republicans countered with racism of their own, insisting that emancipation would keep southern blacks in the South and draw northern blacks to the South. The North would have fewer blacks than ever before. And they used contradictory arguments that would come to characterize Lincoln and other Republicans for the rest of the war. On the one hand, they pointed out that if slavery survived the war, the issue of slavery’s expansion would live on as well and would surely result in some future war. On the other hand, they stressed that the Emancipation Proclamation was a war measure only, temporary in nature, and subject to being altered or abolished at war’s end. “When the rebellion is suppressed,” wrote the Republican editor of Ohio’s Toledo Blade, “the same Constitution will be operative as before. … Then, of course, the same rights will exist under it that existed before the war, and among these will be the right of every State to have Slavery.”¹¹¹

Democrats took full advantage of anti-emancipation sentiment in the fall 1862 elections. It was no easy task, despite widespread racist apprehensions. The nation was at war, and Republicans used patriotism as a political weapon to blast any criticism of administration policies. Democrats shot back with emotionally charged rhetoric of their own. In New York, supporters of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Horatio Seymour told the electorate that “a vote for Seymour is a vote to protect our white laborers against the association and competition of Southern negroes.” Ohio Democrat William Allen told an audience that “every white laboring man in the North, who does not want to be swapped off for a free nigger, should vote the democratic ticket.”¹¹²

Republicans had done their best to gerrymander opponents out of office. They had succeeded in some cases, which helped them retain control in Congress. Still, Democrats managed a net gain of thirty-two seats in the House of Representatives. They also took back the governor’s seats in New York and New Jersey and regained control of the Illinois and Indiana legislatures. Their victories would surely have been even greater had not the Pennsylvania and Ohio state legislative elections been scheduled for odd years and had the governors of Indiana and Illinois not been holding four-year terms that began in 1861. An unsuccessful congressional candidate from Ohio complained bitterly that Lincoln’s Proclamation had come just in time to defeat him and many other Republicans. “I had thought until this year,” he wrote to a friend, “the cry of ‘nigger’ & ‘abolitionism,’ were played out but they never had as much power & effect in this part of the state as at the recent elections.”¹¹³

Stung by losses to his party that fall, Lincoln did what he could to minimize the political damage. Although he could hardly have canceled his Emancipation Proclamation, he did take steps to back-track on it before it even went into effect. On December 1, 1862, in his annual message to Congress, Lincoln proposed three Constitutional amendments. The first would promise federal compensation to states that abolished slavery by 1900, but it would not require any state to do so. The second would state that only those slaves who happened to have attained “actual freedom by the chances of war, at any time before the end of the rebellion” would legally be free and would offer compensation to all but disloyal owners for their loss. The third would require Congress to fund black colonization to any location outside the United States.¹¹⁴

Lincoln himself set the example by following through on colonization. By the end of 1862, he had contracted with a shady promoter named Bernard Kock to employ 5,000 deported blacks as timber cutters on Ile à Vache, a small island off the coast of Haiti. After evidence came to light in January 1863 that Kock was a notorious swindler, Lincoln gave up on the venture but not on the idea of colonization.¹¹⁵

At the same time his timber scheme was taking shape, Lincoln laid plans for sending blacks to work coal mines in Panama. Ambrose Thompson of the Chiriqui Improvement Company headed the project. Although Navy Secretary Gideon Welles and others warned that Thompson’s operation was “a swindling speculation,” Lincoln lobbied hard to get support for the project.¹¹⁶

Reaction among African Americans to Lincoln’s colonization plan was overwhelmingly hostile. At a mass meeting in Queens County, New York, blacks drafted a letter to Lincoln informing him that “this is our native country; we have as strong attachment naturally to our native hills, valleys, plains, luxuriant forests, flowing streams, mighty rivers, and lofty mountains, as any other people.” Blacks in Philadelphia felt the same way. They had “produced much of the wealth of this country,” the country from which Lincoln wanted them exiled. “Shall we sacrifice this, leave our homes, forsake our birth-place, and flee to a strange land to appease the anger and prejudice of the traitors now in arms against the Government?”¹¹⁷

A. P. Smith of Saddle River, New Jersey, in a biting public letter, asked Lincoln why “must I crush out my cherished hopes and aspirations, abandon my home, and become a pander to the mean and selfish spirit that oppresses me?”

Pray tell us, is our right to a home in this country less than your own, Mr. Lincoln? … Are you an American? So are we. Are you a patriot? So are we. Would you spurn all absurd, meddlesome, impudent propositions for your colonization in a foreign country? So do we. … But you say: “Coal land is the best thing I know of to begin an enterprise.” … Coal land, sir! If you please, sir, give McClellan some, give Halleck some, and by all means, save a little strip for yourself. … Good sir, if you have any nearer friends than we are, let them have that coal-digging job.¹¹⁸

Blacks also criticized Lincoln’s plan to compensate slaveholders instead of slaves. At a Philadelphia meeting, they stressed that far from deporting blacks, Lincoln should be granting them the lands on which they had worked without pay for so long.¹¹⁹ At a gathering in Abington, Massachusetts, John Rock asked the crowd:

Figure 2.6. John Rock – teacher, doctor, linguist, lawyer, antislavery activist, and first African American admitted to practice before the bar of the U. S. Supreme Court – was outraged at Lincoln’s efforts to compensate slaveholders for the loss of their slaves with funds from the U. S. treasury. “Compensate them for what?” Rock asked a crowd in Massachusetts. “What does society owe them? … It is the slave who ought to be compensated.” Image from Harper’s Weekly, February 25, 1865.

Why talk about compensating masters? Compensate them for what? What do you owe them? What does the slave owe them? What does society owe them? Compensate the master? No, never. (Applause) It is the slave who ought to be compensated. The property of the South is by right the property of the slave. You talk of compensating the master who has stolen enough to sink ten generations, and yet you do not propose to restore even a part of that which has been plundered. This is rewarding the thief. Have you forgotten that the wealth of the South is the property of the slave?¹²⁰

George Williams of North Carolina made the same point, insisting that “the country around about me, or the Sunny South, is the entailed inheritance of the Americans of African descent, purchased by the invaluable labor of our ancestors, through a life of tears and groans, under the lash and the yoke of tyranny.”¹²¹

Among the most disappointed in Lincoln was Frederick Douglass, especially with regard to colonization. “If the black man cannot find peace from the aggressions of the white race on this continent,” Douglass wrote, “he will not be likely to find it permanently on any part of the habitable globe. The same base and selfish lust for dominion which would drive us from this country would hunt us from the world.” Although Douglass had hoped for better from Lincoln, this deportation plan made it clear that the president was “quite a genuine representative of American prejudice and Negro hatred and far more concerned for the preservation of slavery, and the favor of the Border Slave States, than for any sentiment of magnanimity or principle of justice and humanity.”¹²²

Regardless of how Lincoln and Congress played to white racism, blacks had made huge strides in taking their own freedom and forcing recognition of that fact. And if the Emancipation Proclamation was a half-way measure, blacks would take ownership of it and expand its scope far beyond its restricted wording.

¹ Richmond Dispatch, April 2, 1861; John Hammond Moore, ed., A Plantation Mistress on the Eve of the Civil War: The Diary of Keziah Goodwyn Hopkins Brevard, 1860–1861 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 81, 86–87.

² Allan Pinkerton, The Spy of the Rebellion; Being a True History of the Spy System of the United Sates Army during the Late Rebellion (New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1883), 187; Hadden, Slave Patrols, 173; Robinson, Bitter Fruits of Bondage, 49; J. D. L. Davenport to Gov. John J. Pettus, May 14, 1861, Executive Papers, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, in Aptheker, Slave Revolts, 364.

³ George W. Gayle to Jefferson Davis, May 22, 1861, in Crist and Dix, Papers of Jefferson Davis, 7: 175; New York Tribune, April 2, 1861; London Daily News in New York Tribune, July 3, 1861; Wiley, Southern Negroes, 82; Albany (Ga.) Patriot, May 23, 1861.

⁴ G. H. Davis to D. C. Barrow, June 21, 1861, and J. H. Taylor to D. C. Barrow June 16, 1861, David Crenshaw Barrow Papers, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in Bryan, Confederate Georgia, 127; Springfield (Mass.) Daily Republican, May 4, 1861; The American Annual Cyclopedia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1861 (New York: D. Appleton, 1864), 25.

⁵ Winthrop D. Jordan, Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 291, 298, 278, 292.

⁶ J. H. Taylor to D. C. Barrow, October 27, 1861, Barrow Papers, in Bryan, Confederate Georgia, 124–25; G. F. Bristow to Alexander H. Stephens, January 22, 1862, Alexander H. Stephens Papers, Library of Congress, in ibid., 125.

⁷ Celestia Avery, Georgia Narratives, part 1, 24; Mary Gladdy, Georgia Narratives, part 2, 17.

⁸ Celestia Avery, Georgia Narratives, part 1, 25; Samuel S. Taylor, Arkansas Narratives, part 4, 18.

⁹ Charlie Pye, Georgia Narratives, part 3, 186; Columbus (Ga.) Times in Macon (Ga.) Telegraph, March 12, 1861; Woodward, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, 198–99.

¹⁰ Dora Franks, Mississippi Narratives, 51; Celestia Avery, Georgia Narratives, part 1, 24; Marion (S.C.) Star, June 18, 1861, in H. M. Henry, The Police Control of the Slave in South Carolina (Emory, Va.: n.p., 1914), 121.

¹¹ Testimony of Corporal Octave Johnson, American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, February [?], 1864, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 217.

¹² Liberator, April 26 and May 31, 1861, and August 22, 1862; Douglass’ Monthly, May 1861; Jacob Dodson to Simon Cameron, April 23, 1861, United States War Department, War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901), series 3, vol. 1, 107 (hereafter cited as Official Records).

¹³ Wallace, Memorial of the Patriotism of Schuylkill County, 77–78; Thompson, First Defenders, 14; Annie Wittenmyer, Under the Guns: A Woman’s Reminiscences of the Civil War (Boston: E. B. Stills, 1895), 90–91.

¹⁴ Springfield (Mass.) Daily Republican, May 25, 1861; Liberator, August 22, 1862; Boston Evening Transcript, May 8, 1861.

¹⁵ Douglass’ Monthly, September 1861.

¹⁶ Christian Recorder, April 27, 1861.

¹⁷ Lt. Col. Schuyler Hamilton to Brig. Gen. [Irvin] McDowell, July 16, 1861, Official Records, series 2, vol. 1, 760; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 60; D. S. Miles, Endorsement, July 15, 1861, Official Records, series 1, vol. 2, 299–300.

¹⁸ McClellan to Col. F. B. Kelly, May 26, 1861, Official Records, series 1, vol. 2, 46; Butler to Gov. Thomas H. Hicks, April 23, 1861, ibid., series 1, vol. 2, 593; Weekly Anglo-African, November 23, 1861. For abolitionist reaction to Butler’s offer see National Anti-Slavery Standard, May 11, 1861.

Stephens was from an active black abolitionist family in Philadelphia. He later served with the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, was wounded in the assault on Fort Wagner, and rose to the rank of first lieutenant. After the war, he worked with the Freedmen’s Bureau to educate former slaves in Virginia. See Donald Yacovone, ed., A Voice of Thunder: The Civil War Letters of George E. Stephens (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).

¹⁹ H. Willis to Cameron, December 5, 1861, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 269–70.

²⁰ Lynchburg (Va.) Republican in Alexandria (Va.) Gazette, May 7, 1861; Charleston (S.C.) Mercury, April 26, 1861; Petersburg (Va.) Express in Charleston (S.C.) Courier, April 29, 1861; New Orleans Daily Picayune, August 29 and September 17, 1861. The Louisiana Native Guards later served in the Union army. See James G. Hollandsworth Jr., The Louisiana Native Guards: The Black Military Experience during the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995).

²¹ “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe,” Atlantic Monthly 8 (November 1861): 638; Henry Cleveland, Alexander H. Stephens in Public and Private (Philadelphia: National Publishing, 1866), 721.

²² Capt. P. Robinson [chief engineer, Confederate Army of Mississippi] to Lt. Gen. J. C. Pemberton [commanding, Confederate Department of Mississippi and East Louisiana], January 4, 1863, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 703.

²³ For examples see Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 334, 342, 400.

²⁴ Butler to Gen. Winfield Scott [commanding general, U. S. Army], May 24, 1861, Official Records, series 1, vol. 2, 650.

²⁵ Cameron to Butler, May 30, 1861, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 72; J. K. F. Mansfield [commanding, Department of Washington] to Mr. Justice Dunne [a District of Columbia justice of the peace], July 4, 1861, in ibid., 167.

²⁶ Douglass’ Monthly, February 1862.

²⁷ John Syrett, The Civil War Confiscation Acts: Failing to Reconstruct the South (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 4; U.S., Statutes at Large, Treaties, and Proclamations of the United States of America (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1863), 12: 319. For the most complete treatments of the evolution and impact of confiscation see Syrett, The Civil War Confiscation Acts, and Silvana R. Siddali, From Property to Person: Slavery and the Confiscation Acts, 1861–1862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005).

²⁸ Syrett, Confiscation Acts, 4.

²⁹ Proclamation, Headquarters, Western Department, August 30, 1861, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 415; Official Records, series 1, vol. 3, 469–70, 477–78.

³⁰ Douglass’ Monthly, October 1861; Weekly Anglo-African, September 21, 1861.

³¹ Douglass’ Monthly, May 1861; Weekly Anglo-African, May 11, 1861.

³² Weekly Anglo-African, August 17, 1861. Significantly, Pennington and his associates claimed citizenship for themselves, a status that the Supreme Court in Dred Scott had denied to African Americans.

³³ Tubman quoted in Lydia Maria Child to John G. Whittier, January 21, 1862, Letters of Lydia Maria Child, 161.

³⁴ Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 81.

³⁵ Lt. Col. James A. Handie [Headquarters, Army of the Potomac] to Brig. Gen. J. Hooker [division commander, Army of the Potomac], December 1, 1861, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 174.

³⁶ General Orders No. 3, Headquarters, Department of the Missouri, November 20, 1861, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 417; Major George E. Waring [commanding, Frémont Hussars] to Acting Maj. Gen. Asboth [commanding, Fourth Division, Department of the Missouri], December 19, 1861, in ibid., 421–22.

³⁷ Lt. Col. R. A. Cameron [commanding an Indiana regiment] to Hon. S. Colfax [congressman], May 11, 1862, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 432–33; Brig. Gen. U. S. Grant [commanding, District of Cairo] to Col. J. Cook [commanding, Fort Holt, Kentucky], December 25, 1861, in ibid., 522.

³⁸ Sherman to Col. Turchin, October 15, 1861, Official Records, series 2, vol. 1, 774; General Orders No. 46, Headquarters, Department of the Missouri, February 22, 1862, ibid., series 1, vol. 8, 563–64; General Orders No. 13a., Headquarters, Department of the Ohio, February 26, 1862, ibid., series 1, vol. 7, 669–70; Butler to Sec. of War Edwin M. Stanton, June 10, 1862, ibid., series 1, vol. 15, 466; General Orders No. 41, Headquarters, Department of the Gulf, June 10, 1862, ibid., 483–84; Edwin M. Stanton to Col. George F. Shepley [military gov. of Louisiana], June 10, 1862, ibid., series 3, vol. 2, 141.

³⁹ Burnside [commanding, Department of North Carolina] to Edwin M. Stanton, March 21, 1862, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 80–81; Brig. Gen. James S. Negley [commanding a brigade, Army of the Ohio] to Gen. Don Carlos Buell [commanding, Department and Army of the Ohio], March 9, 1862, in ibid., 524.

⁴⁰ Edward McPherson, ed., The Political History of the United States of America, during the Great Rebellion (Washington, D.C.: Philip and Solomons, 1865), 249. See also Erwin Stanley Bradley, Simon Cameron, Lincoln’s Secretary of War: A Political Biography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966).

⁴¹ John Boston to Elizabeth Boston, January 12, 1862, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 357–58.

⁴² General Orders No. 26, Headquarters, Mitchell’s Brigade, First Division, Central Army of the Mississippi, June 18, 1862, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 276; Summary of a speech by Col. Smith D. Atkins [commanding an Illinois regiment], November 1862, in ibid., 530–31.

⁴³ E. P. Halsted [acting assistant adjutant-general] to Lt. Col. John D. Shaul [commanding, Seventy-Sixth New York Regiment], April 6, 1862, Official Records, series 2, vol. 1, 815.

⁴⁴ Edward L. Pierce, “The Freedmen of Port Royal,” Atlantic Monthly 12 (September 1863): 299.

⁴⁵ Butler to Gen. Henry Halleck, September 1, 1862, Benjamin F. Butler Papers, Library of Congress, in William F. Messner, “Black Violence and White Response: Louisiana, 1862,” Journal of Southern History 41 (1975): 31. See also Junius P. Rodriguez, “‘We’ll Hang Jeff Davis on the Sour Apple Tree’: Civil War Era Slave Resistance in Louisiana,” Gulf Coast Historical Review 10 (Spring 1995): 7–23.

⁴⁶ Alexander F. Pugh Diary, Alexander F. Pugh Papers, Louisiana State University, in C. Peter Ripley, Slaves and Freedmen in Civil War Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), 17.

⁴⁷ Gen. John E. Wool to Gen. George B. McClellan, with enclosure by William J. Whipple, November 11, 1861, Official Records, series 1, vol. 4, 629–31.

⁴⁸ James M. Guthrie, Camp-Fires of the Afro-American (Philadelphia: Afro-American Publishing Co., 1899), 306–14. Reports on the Planter incident can be found in United States War Department, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1894–1922), series 1, vol. 12, 820–26. After the war, Smalls served several terms as a congressman from South Carolina. In 1899, he was appointed customs collector for Beaufort and held the position until 1913. Two years later, he died of natural causes in the home where he and his mother had once been enslaved. See Okon Edet Uya, From Slavery to Public Service: Robert Small, 1839–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).

⁴⁹ Pemberton to Col. Colquitt, June 14, 1862, Official Records, series 1, vol. 14, 565; Pemberton to Maj. W. P. Emanuel, June 4, 1862, ibid., 541.

⁵⁰ Special Order No. 28, August 13, 1863, Confederate States Army Records, South Carolina Historical Society, in Hadden, Slave Patrols, 186; Early County (Ga.) News, March 16, 1864; Cuthbert City Council Minutes, in Annette McDonald Suarez, A Source Book on the Early History of Cuthbert and Randolph County, Georgia (Atlanta: Cherokee Publishing, 1982), 130–31; Walker, Backtracking in Barbour County, 178.

⁵¹ Albany (Ga.) Patriot, May 30, 1861; Sumter County (Ga.) Superior Court, Minute Book, 47; Lowndes County (Ga.) Superior Court, Minute Book A, 234, 277, 291; Thomas County (Ga.) Superior Court, Minute Book 1858–1865, 494.

⁵² Speech at Jackson, Mississippi, December 26, 1862, in Lynda L. Crist, Mary S. Dix, and Kenneth H. Williams, eds., The Papers of Jefferson Davis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 8: 569. For an examination of the “rich man’s war” attitude’s impact on the Confederate war effort see David Williams, Teresa Crisp Williams, and David Carlson, Plain Folk in a Rich Man’s War: Class and Dissent in Confederate Georgia (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), and Williams, Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War.

⁵³ Sam R. Watkins, Co. Aytch: Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment (1882; reprint, Wilmington, N.C.: Broadfoot Publishing, 1987), 69; Goddin to Vance, February 27, 1863, Governor’s Papers, North Carolina Division of Archives and History, Raleigh, in Paul D. Escott et al., eds., Major Problems in the History of the American South, vol. 1, The Old South (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 365–66.

⁵⁴ Milledgeville (Ga.) Confederate Union, March 31, 1863.

⁵⁵ E. G. Edwards to C. C. Clay, February 19, 1863, Clement Caliborne Clay Papers, Duke University, Durham, N.C.; Atlanta Southern Confederacy, April 10 and 16, 1862; W. Scott Poole, South Carolina’s Civil War: A Narrative History (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2005), 52; Paul Horton, “Submitting to the ‘Shadow of Slavery’: The Secession Crisis and Civil War in Alabama’s Lawrence County,” Civil War History 44 (1998): 133; W. H. Ferrell to Col. S. D. Jackman, May 21, 1864, Official Records, series 1, vol. 34, part 3, 835.

⁵⁶ Milledgeville (Ga.) Confederate Union, November 24, 1863.

⁵⁷ C. F. Howell to Gov. John J. Pettus, August 23, 1862, in Wiley, Southern Negroes, 36; Milton to Seddon, February 17, 1863, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 746–47.

⁵⁸ Acts of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia, 1861 (Milledgeville: Boughton, Nisbet, and Barnes, 1862), 68, 69; Journal of the Senate of the State of Georgia, 1863 (Milledgeville: Boughton, Nisbet, Barnes, and Moore, 1863), 120; Acts of the Called Session of the General Assembly of Alabama (Montgomery: Shorter and Reid, 1861), 34; Acts of the Second Called Session, 1861, and of the First Regular Annual Session of the General Assembly of Alabama (Montgomery: Montgomery Advertiser Book and Job Office, 1862), 15–16; Acts of the Called Session, 1863, and of the Third Regular Annual Session of the General Assembly of Alabama (Montgomery: Saffold and Figures, 1864), 63.

⁵⁹ Susanna Clay to C[lement] Caliborne Clay, September 5, 1863, Clay Papers, Duke University; Greenwood Plantation Records [South Carolina], entry of August 8, 1862, in Wiley, Southern Negroes, 73–74; Magnolia Plantation Records [Louisiana], entry of August 11, 1862, in ibid., 74–75; Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 677; W. B. Allen, Georgia Narratives, part 1, 12.

⁶⁰ William Harrison Ainsworth, ed., “The Negroes of the South,” New Monthly Magazine 128 (1863): 14; Wiley, Southern Negroes, 75. Examples of increasing liberties that enslaved southerners took during the war can be found throughout Stephen Ash, The Black Experience in the Civil War South (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Preager, 2010).

⁶¹ Lizzie S. Neblett to William H. Neblett, August 13, 1863, in Murr, Diary and Letters of Elizabeth Scott Neblett, 135; Wiley, Southern Negroes, 75–76; Brig. Gen. G. Weitzel [commanding, Reserve Brigade, U. S. Volunteers] to Maj. George C. Strong [assistant adjutant-general, Department of the Gulf], Official Records, series 1, vol. 15, 172.

⁶² Calendar of Virginia State Papers (Richmond: n.p., 1893), 11: 233–36; J. W. Boyd to Gov. John J. Pettus, August 1, 1862, in Wiley, Southern Negroes, 82; Floyd to Gov. John Milton, April 11, 1862, Official Records, series 1, vol. 53, 233.

⁶³ Joseph E. Davis to Jefferson Davis, May 22, 1862, in Crist et al., Papers of Jefferson Davis, 8: 196–97; William Porterfield to Jefferson Davis, June 5, 1862, in ibid., 227; Charles J. Mitchell to Jefferson Davis, June 7, 1862, in ibid., 231–33.

⁶⁴ See documents 71–73 in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 232–35; John C. P. Wederstrandt to Shepley, September 19, 1862, in ibid., 219–21; Butler to Edwin M. Stanton, August 2, 1862, Official Records, series 1, vol. 15, 534.

⁶⁵ William Watson, Life in the Confederate Army: Being the Observations and Experiences of an Alien in the South During the American Civil War (London: Chapman and Hall, 1887), 397–98.

⁶⁶ Weitzel [commanding, District of the Teche] to Maj. George C. Strong [Headquarters, Department of the Gulf], November 5, 1862 [two dispatches], and Strong to Weitzel, November 6, 1862, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 225–30.

⁶⁷ Report by William Still, May 22, 1862, Pennsylvania Abolition Society Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, in Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 5: 140–41; Ann J. Edwards, Texas Narratives, part 2, 10–11.

⁶⁸ Christian Recorder, August 22, 1863; Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (New York: G. W. Carleton and Co., 1868), 111–16. Keckley’s son George, whose freedom she had purchased along with her own, died in combat on a Missouri battlefield.

⁶⁹ Attorney General Edwin Bates to Maryland Gov. A. W. Bradford, May 10, 1862, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 366; Gen. Charles H. Howard [assistant commissioner, District of Columbia Freedmen’s Bureau] to Hon. John P. C. Shanks [congressman], [November 20] 1867, in ibid., 347–48.

⁷⁰ Statutes at Large, 12: 376–77; Theodore C. Pease and James G. Randall, eds., Diary of Orville Hickman Browning (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1925), 1: 541. For an overview of how blacks and abolitionist whites in Washington undermined slavery see Stanley Harrold, Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington, D.C., 1828–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003). A fine collection of essays dealing primarily with how blacks contributed to and took advantage of freedom is Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, ed., First Freed: Washington, D.C., in the Emancipation Era (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 2002). See also Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

⁷¹ Statutes at Large, 12: 376–77. By far the best analysis of Lincoln and colonization is Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page, Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011).

⁷² Assistant sec. of war to Calvert, April 14, 1862, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 363–64.

⁷³ O. W. Lull to Benjamin Butler, May 11, 1862, Butler Papers, in Messner, “Black Violence,” 21; New York Times, June 23, 1862; John M. Stanyan, A History of the Eighth Regiment of New Hampshire Volunteers (Concord, N.H.: Ira C. Evans, 1892), 107.

⁷⁴ Butler to Edwin M. Stanton, May 25, 1862, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 203–207.

⁷⁵ Wool to Simon Cameron, September 18, 1861, Official Records, series 1, vol. 4, 614; Capt. H. J. Van Kirk to Capt. R. W. Dawson, September 8, 1862, Records of the U. S. Army Continental Commands, in Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 116; S. W. Godon [commanding, USS Mohican] to S. F. Du Pont [commanding, South Atlantic Squadron], March 30, 1862, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 119–20; B. O. Carr [quartermaster, Helena, Ark.] to Capt. F. S. Winslow [chief quartermaster, Army of the Southwest], July 24, 1862, in Berlin et al., eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, series 1, vol. 3, The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 659 (hereafter cited as Lower South).

⁷⁶ Pacific Appeal (San Francisco, Calif.), May 24, 1862.

⁷⁷ Hunter to Edwin M. Stanton, April 3, 1862, Official Records, series 1, vol. 6, 263–64; General Orders No. 7, Headquarters, Department of the South, April 13, 1862, in ibid., series 1, vol. 14, 333; General Orders No. 11, Headquarters, Department of the South, May 9, 1862, in ibid., series 1, vol. 14, 341; Ed. W. Smith to Gen. H. W. Benham, May 9, 1862, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 38.

⁷⁸ G. M. Wells [plantation superintendent] to E. L. Pierce [Treasury Dept. special agent], [May 1862], in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 49–50.

⁷⁹ Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln, May 19, 1862, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 123–25; Pacific Appeal, June 14, 1862.

⁸⁰ Appeal to Border State Representatives, July 12, 1862, in Basler et al., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 5: 317–19; Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862, in ibid., 5: 529–30; Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln, May 19, 1862, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 125. For an excellent overview see William C. Harris, Lincoln and the Border States: Preserving the Union (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011).

⁸¹ Edwin M. Stanton to Hon. Galusha A. Grow [speaker of the House of Representatives], June 14, 1862, Official Records, series 3, vol. 2, 147–48; Hunter to Edwin M. Stanton, June 23, 1862, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 50–53; ibid., 38–39.

⁸² Indianapolis Daily Journal, November 26, 1861.

⁸³ Kirkwood to Halleck, August 5, 1862, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 85–86.

⁸⁴ Boyd and Alston to Simon Cameron, November 15, 1861, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 80; Jones to Edwin M. Stanton, May 13, 1862, in ibid., 83–84; Miller to Simon Cameron, October 30, 1861, in ibid., 79.

⁸⁵ White to Edwin M. Stanton, May 7, 1862, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 82–83.

⁸⁶ Butler to Edwin M. Stanton, May 25, 1862, Official Records, series 1, vol. 15, 441–42; General Orders No. 63, Headquarters, Department of the Gulf, August 22, 1862, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 65–67; Testimony of Butler, American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, May 1, 1863, in ibid., 312–15.

⁸⁷ Gov. Thomas Carney of Kansas to Abraham Lincoln, June 5, 1863, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 44.

⁸⁸ Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment (Boston: Fields, Osgood, and Co., 1870), 274–75.

⁸⁹ Chicago Times, October 8, 1861; Columbus (Ohio) Crisis, August 22, 1861; Chicago Tribune, August 12, 1861.

⁹⁰ Liberator, August 15, 1862.

⁹¹ Edward Lillie Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1887–93), 4: 49.

⁹² Washington (Penn.) Reporter, June 26, 1862.

⁹³ Lowell (Mass.) Daily Citizen and News, August 9, 1862; E. H. Derby, “Resources of the South,” Atlantic Monthly 10 (October 1862): 508; Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, December 3, 1862.

⁹⁴ Statutes at Large, 12: 589–92, 597–600.

⁹⁵ Lincoln to the Senate and House of Representatives, July 17, 1862, in Basler et al., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 5: 328–31.

⁹⁶ Diary of Gideon Welles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 1: 70–71.

⁹⁷ The complex and conflicted attitudes of people in England toward the war are explored in Duncan Andrew Campbell, English Public Opinion and the America Civil War (Suffolk, Eng.: Royal Historical Society, 2003).

⁹⁸ Diary of Gideon Welles, 1: 150. Historian David Blight makes much the same point, writing that Lincoln “had long viewed colonization as the ultimate solution to America’s race problem.” See David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith with Jubilee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 135.

⁹⁹ Statutes at Large, 12: 589–92; U. S. House of Representatives, Report of the Select Committee on Emancipation and Colonization, Thirty-Seventh Congress, Second Session, Report No. 148 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1862), 14, 16; Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 5: 155 n. 1.

¹⁰⁰ Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 5: 155 n. 1; Address on Colonization to a Deputation of Negroes, August 14, 1862, in Basler et al., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 5: 370–75.

¹⁰¹ Douglass’ Monthly, October and September 1862; Address on Colonization to a Deputation of Negroes, August 14, 1862, in Basler et al., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 5: 372.

¹⁰² Pacific Appeal, March 7, 1863.

¹⁰³ Douglass’ Monthly, March 1863.

¹⁰⁴ Chicago Times, September 23, 1862; Albert Barnes, The Conditions of Peace: A Thanksgiving Discourse (Philadelphia: William B. Evans, 1863), 53.

¹⁰⁵ Berlin et al., Lower South, 626; Bruce Tap, “Race, Rhetoric, and Emancipation: The Election of 1862 in Illinois,” Civil War History 39 (1993): 116.

¹⁰⁶ Quincy (Ill.) Herald in Chicago Times, October 26, 1862.

¹⁰⁷ Cincinnati Daily Commercial, July 11, 1862.

¹⁰⁸ Douglass’ Monthly, September 1862.

¹⁰⁹ For an overview of the Dix plan and reaction to it see V. Jacque Voegeli, “A Rejected Alternative: Union Policy and the Relocation of Southern ‘Contrabands’ at the Dawn of Emancipation,” Journal of Southern History 69 (2003): 766–87. See page 786 for quote from the Springfield (Mass.) Daily Republican, November 15, 1862.

¹¹⁰ Edward Noyes, “The Negro in Wisconsin’s Civil War Effort,” in Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh, eds., The Price of Freedom: Slavery and the Civil War (Nashville: Cumberland House, 2000), 2: 157.

¹¹¹ Toledo Blade in Cincinnati Daily Gazette, October 17, 1862.

¹¹² The World and Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, November 4, 1862; Springfield Daily Illinois State Register, October 22, 1862.

¹¹³ Republicans did manage a net gain of five seats in the U. S. Senate, primarily because senators were selected by state legislatures. They served staggered six-year terms, and those seats up for renewal were filled by Republican-dominated state legislatures. Only after 1913, with ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment, did the Constitution provide for election of senators by popular vote. For an examination of the 1862 congressional elections see Jamie L. Carson et al., “The Impact of National Tides and District-Level Effects on Electoral Outcomes: The U. S. Congressional Elections of 1862–63,” American Journal of Political Science 45 (2001): 887–98.

¹¹⁴ Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862, in Basler et al., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 5: 529–30.

¹¹⁵ National Anti-Slavery Standard, March 19, 1864; Lincoln to William H. Seward, January 6, 1863, in Basler et al., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 6: 41–42.

¹¹⁶ Diary of Gideon Welles, 1: 150–53.

¹¹⁷ Liberator, September 12, 1862; An Appeal from the Colored Men of Philadelphia to the President of the United States (Philadelphia: Semi-Weekly Clarion, 1862), 4–6.

¹¹⁸ Douglass’ Monthly, October 1862. The letter refers to General George B. McClellan, commanding the Army of the Potomac, and General Henry H. Halleck, the Union army’s general-in-chief.

¹¹⁹ An Appeal from the Colored Men of Philadelphia, 6.

¹²⁰ Liberator, August 15, 1862

¹²¹ Christian Recorder, June 20, 1863.

¹²² Douglass’ Monthly, September 1862.