The “Faithful Slave” Is about Played Out

As the war entered its latter phase, enslaved southerners continued taking freedom for themselves – some outright, others by degree. In the summer of 1863, an Alabama newspaper editor complained of blacks becoming “so saucy and abusive that a police force has become positively necessary as a check to their continued insolence.” In Georgia, legislators had already introduced a bill “to punish slaves and free persons of color for abusive and insulting language.” Along with freedom of speech, blacks were taking freedom of assembly as well. In Blakely, Georgia, the Early County News reported that blacks were “almost nightly running around where they have no business.” A slaveholder in Columbus, Georgia, feared that blacks were forgetting their second-class status. “It is not uncommon,” he wrote, “to see two or three in one whiskey shop.”¹

Although cause for concern, slaves taking small liberties were among the least of slaveholder worries. Tension between slaves and slaveholders hung over the South like a storm cloud whose lightning could strike nearly anywhere, any time. Despite their public insistence that slaves were generally content, slaveholders knew better than anyone except the slaves themselves that discontent was the norm. July 1863 found one Alabama slaveholder frankly admitting to another that “the ‘faithful slave’ is about played out.”²

That was certainly clear to Jane Eubanks of Columbia County, Georgia, who wrote to Governor Joe Brown about needing more men assigned to slave patrols. There were 400 slaves in her vicinity and few white men to keep them subdued. John R. Edwards of Harris County wrote to the governor that in the vicinity of Waverly Hall there were only four men available to ride patrol over 700 slaves. Women in Schley County petitioned the governor to hire a local man who kept a pack of “Negro dogs” to hunt escaped slaves. Julia A. Brooks gathered signatures for a petition to have her husband, B. F. Brooks, sent home from the army to organize slave patrols.³

In December 1863, a Burke County woman wrote to Brown about the lack of white men in her area, most of them forced away by the draft. She urged Brown to create a police force for the protection of Georgia’s “planting interest.” Green insisted that Brown must “see to it, that [the planter] class of citizens are protected & not left to meet a fate worse than death.” The state assembly responded by reinforcing laws forbidding slaves to travel without a pass. It also canceled exemptions from patrol duty. Across the Confederacy, in frontline areas and larger towns, soldiers were diverted to augment slave patrols. In isolated rural regions, some slaveholders hired their own patrols.⁴

Nevertheless, patrols continued to lose their power of intimidation. Some slaves fought back. They tied ropes or vines neck-high across a dark stretch of road just before the patrollers passed by. These traps were guaranteed to unhorse at least one rider. When a group of patrollers broke in on a prayer meeting near Columbus, Georgia, one slave stuck a shovel in the fireplace and threw hot coals all over them. Instantly, the room “filled with smoke and the smell of burning clothes and white flesh.” In the confusion, every slave got away.⁵

Try as they might, slaveholders had an increasingly difficult time controlling slaves. It was with good reason that, as a Texas slaveholder wrote, “a great many of the people are actually afraid to whip the negroes.” In Choctaw County, Mississippi, slaves turned the tables on their owner’s grown son, subjecting him to 500 lashes before shooting him to death. Texas bondsmen killed an overseer known for his “meanness over the slaves.” In Virginia, slaves armed with shotguns killed two planters. After Mississippi slaveholder Jim Rankin returned from the army “meaner than before,” as freedman Charlie Moses told it, a slave “sneaked up in the darkness an’ shot him three times.” Rankin lingered in agony the rest of the night before he died the next morning. “He never knowed who done it,” Moses recalled. “I was glad they shot him down.”⁶

Slaves sometimes devised or participated in elaborate plots to kill their owners. Occasionally, they even worked with whites to do it. Two slaves belonging to Columbus Holley of Dale County, Alabama, assisted John Ward, leader of a local deserter band, in doing away with their owner. Holley made a habit of turning in every deserter he could, and Ward hatched a plan to kill him for it. Holley’s slaves were eager to cooperate. One evening, the slaves met Ward near Holley’s plantation house and carried him on their shoulders to a bedroom window that Holley always left open at night. With one shot, Ward killed the planter as he slept. The slaves then carried Ward back to his horse, and he made a clean getaway. Because his feet never touched the ground, there was no scent for the bloodhounds to follow. The mystery of Holley’s murder remained unsolved until years later when Ward finally confessed on his death bed.⁷

William Mansfield of Stewart County, Georgia, told Governor Brown that local planters were terrified of their slaves and feared that county militiamen were not “prepared to quell any riots that might begin.” In Richmond, a black saloon waiter named Bob Richardson was thrown in Castle Thunder prison for plotting a slave uprising. Eighteen slaves in Hancock County, Georgia, were jailed for inciting insurrection. Sometimes authorities did not move quickly enough. Slaves in Yazoo City, Mississippi, did rise up, setting a fire that destroyed the courthouse and fourteen other buildings. A similar plot was discovered in North Carolina’s Richmond and Montgomery Counties in which a number of whites were implicated.⁸

It was not uncommon to find whites involved with rebellious slaves. So strong was anti-Confederate sentiment among southern whites that some were perfectly willing to work with blacks in undermining the government. As early as July 1861, the Columbus Daily Sun reported that a vigilance committee in southwest Georgia’s Mitchell County had uncovered plans for a slave uprising, naming seven local whites as conspirators. According to the Sun, they planned to supply the slaves “with as much ammunition as [they] possibly could to butcher the good citizens of the county.” Five got the lash and were expelled from the county. Two escaped a whipping but were ordered never to set foot in Mitchell County again “under the penalty of death.”⁹

In December 1861, the governor’s office received news from north Georgia’s Gordon County of local Unionists holding secret meetings and organizing a military force to protect themselves from Confederate authorities. They swore to aid the Federals in any way they could. Most alarmingly, they promised that “in case of an insurrection they will help the Negroes.”¹⁰

The following spring, three white men in Georgia’s Calhoun County planned to instigate such an uprising. Mindful of the previous year’s failed attempt in Mitchell County, Harvell Scaggs, William Scaggs, and Giles Shoots, all citizens of Calhoun County, sought out federal help to back the venture. Traveling down to the Gulf Coast under pretense of making salt, the trio contacted Union blockaders. Soon they were running “superior new guns” to slaves in Calhoun County. The plot came to light in June, and the three men were sentenced “to receive a sound whipping, to be tarred all over, and then ordered to quit the State.” Some thought the punishment too light. Georgia’s Early County News editor asked, “Is it safe to the community to suffer such inhuman wretches, such dangerous animals, to go at large?” He suggested changing the sentence to life in prison or, better yet, execution.¹¹

John Vickery and three slaves got just that when they tried to organize a slave uprising in south Georgia’s Brooks County. Vickery was a local white man of modest means for whom no evidence can be found of prior trouble with the law. In fact, Vickery was listed on Brooks County jury rolls in 1863. However, he next appears in the records in August 1864 at the end of a hangman’s rope. Details of events leading to his execution vary, but all sources agree that Vickery, with the assistance of local slaves, organized an insurrectionary force that intended to murder some of the county’s wealthier planters.

After killing the planters and stealing whatever weapons they could find, the conspirators planned to set the county seat of Quitman afire and seize the rail depot. From there, they would head south toward Madison, Florida, then seize and burn that town. Hoping to be reinforced by deserters and Union troops on the Gulf Coast, the men would return to Quitman and take Brooks County for the Union. On the eve of the planned uprising, local authorities learned of its details from a slave arrested for theft. After forcing information out of other slaves, the Brooks County police patrol arrested Vickery and three of the leading slave coconspirators.

It is hardly surprising that Vickery’s plan involved Confederate deserters and Union troops from Florida. As early as January 1863, Confederate officials were warned that Dead Man’s Bay on the Gulf Coast could be a prime landing site for Union forces. Dead Man’s Bay was in Taylor County, a stronghold of Unionists and deserters who were willing to help Union troops. The ground was firm, no natural obstructions blocked the roads between the bay and the interior, and there was a direct route from the bay to Madison, Florida. Just such a landing occurred one week prior to the planned Vickery uprising. Eight hundred Union troops disembarked at the mouth of the Aucilla River, with another 500 at Dead Man’s Bay. It is possible that these were the men that Vickery and his allies were to meet at Madison and lead back into Georgia.

After Vickery’s arrest, the Brooks County home guard determined to use the conspirators as warning examples against further plots. Although not authorized to do so, a home guard court quickly convened. Governor Brown had specified that either county inferior courts or state militia courts would try such cases, but, for that day at least, the home guard controlled Brooks County. Vickery and his three co-conspirators stood little chance of acquittal. After a mock trial, the guardsmen rendered their judgment: John Vickery – guilty of arson, inciting slaves to insurrection, and aiding slaves to flee to the Federals; Sam – guilty of insurrection and inducing slaves to insurrection; Nelson – guilty of insurrection; George – guilty of insurrection. All were condemned to death by hanging. At six o’clock that evening, the sentence was carried out on the courthouse square.¹²

Despite the dangers, some white southerners continued to help blacks when they could. Some did so for pity’s sake, others for profit, still others because they would take any chance to undermine planter rule. Robert Bezley of Atlanta was arrested in December 1862 for giving fraudulent passes to slaves. Lawmen in Shelby, North Carolina, hanged a white man for the same crime. A white stone cutter was found heading a slave insurrection plot in Columbia, South Carolina. Officials in Adams County, Mississippi, discovered a cache of guns that slaves had stored in preparation for a rebellion. At least one white man was implicated in the affair.¹³

White farmers sometimes gave escaped slaves safe haven in exchange for work. Others gave them cash for stolen plantation supplies. A white merchant in Plymouth, North Carolina, worked out a deal with local slaves to buy goods stolen from their owners. The deal fell through when word of it leaked out. Georgia’s Early County News reported in April 1864 that blacks were selling stolen goods to whites “who bought them in the dead hour of night” [emphasis in original]. In some cases, blacks were such valuable trading partners that whites would take great risks to preserve the connections. In Granville County, North Carolina, two whites helped a free black named Archibald Kearsey break out of jail so he could maintain his extensive trade network.¹⁴

Illicit networks frequently involved deserter and draft-dodger gangs, some of them containing or cooperating with black fugitives. Elderly freedwoman Jane Lee recalled that in central North Carolina, “the woods was full of runaway slaves and Rebs who deserted the army.” A number of black escapees hid out with Jeff Anderson’s deserter band in the mountains around Dahlonega, Georgia. Farther south, the wiregrass region of southern Georgia, southern Alabama, and northern Florida was, as one Confederate official complained, “the common retreat of deserters from our army, tories, and runaway negroes.”¹⁵

In August 1864, a band of 500 “Union men, deserters, and negroes” in central Florida was reported to be raiding toward Gainesville. Another Florida officer sent word to his superiors that deserters had gathered “in the swamps and fastnesses of Taylor, LaFayette, Levy and other counties, and have organized, with runaway negroes, bands for the purpose of committing depredations upon the plantations and crops of loyal citizens and running off their slaves.” They had even threatened the cities of Madison, Marianna, and Tallahassee.¹⁶

Such cooperation, although not uncommon, was hardly the norm. Most white southerners never wanted secession and eventually turned against the war, but they remained largely committed to keeping the South a white man’s country and to keeping blacks “in their place.” That some whites were willing to help blacks usually said more about their attitudes toward slaveholders than slaves. Southern blacks were most often left to help each other or help themselves.

Nathaniel Evans, enslaved to an officer of the Sixth Alabama, forged a pass and made his way from Richmond to federal lines near Fredericksburg. Missouri slaves escaped to the neighboring free states of Iowa and Kansas throughout the war. For slaves in Texas, the route to freedom often led south to Mexico. Freedman Jacob Branch remembered that slave patrols constantly rode the Rio Grande during the war, but hundreds of refugees got through their lines and crossed the river.¹⁷

Slaves trapped farther east, in the heart of Dixie, had a much harder time making their way to free territory. That had always been true but was even more so during the war. With whites taking greater precautions, escaping slaves took greater risks. In South Carolina, William and Anne Summerson risked suffocation by having themselves packed in rice casks and driven out of Charleston. Then, in a small boat, they made their way past rebel sentries by night and made it to federal gunboats on the Stono River. In March 1864, several slaves struck out from Floyd County, Georgia, headed for the Federals in Tennessee. Slavecatchers cornered two of the fugitives just short of the state line. Both were suffering from exposure and frostbite. One later died from the ordeal.¹⁸

Fugitives often banded together for mutual support and protection. They sustained themselves by living off the land and making raids against local plantations – the very plantations on which they had labored without pay for years. In their view, it was time for back pay. S. S. Massey of Chattahoochee County, Georgia, complained to the governor that runaway slaves were “killing up the stock and stealing ever thing they can put their hands on.” An April 1864 report from Blakely, Georgia, told of “more stealing, and rascality generally, going on … for the past few months, than has ever been known … negroes are doing a great deal of this stealing.”¹⁹

For slaves in the tidewater regions of North Carolina and Virginia, the Great Dismal Swamp served as a refuge. In North Carolina’s swamp counties of Camden and Currituck, a band of fugitives numbering between 500 and 600 made frequent raids on area plantations and Confederate supply depots. Swamps in South Carolina’s Darlington District were home to refugees who, according to a petition signed by twenty-two slaveholders, lived by “under[min]ing meat houses, robbing hen houses, Killing Cattle Hogs &c and stealing everything the[y] can lay their hands on.”²⁰

Some of these refugee bands armed and organized themselves into militia companies. Near the mouth of Florida’s Withlacoochee River, a detachment of Confederates fired on one company of escapees led by a “captain.” The blacks returned fire “very cool and deliberately.” Near Baldwin, Florida, four blacks were hanged for trying to form a company. They had planned to take Baldwin and Lake City, then head for the Atlantic coast and enlist with the Federals at Fernandina.²¹

Those slaves who did not escape gave aid to those who did. They funneled food and supplies to their fugitive friends and relatives, passed information to them, and provided a much needed support network. It would have been difficult if not impossible for many fugitive bands to operate effectively without such support.

Ready to Help Anybody Opposed to the Rebels

Support from local slaves was crucial also for bands of white deserters, draft evaders, and their families. Like so many other enslaved blacks, Jeff Rayford did whatever he could to help deserters hiding in the bottomlands of Mississippi’s Pearl River. As he told an interviewer years after the war, “I cooked and carried many a pan of food to these men.” Another Mississippi freedman recalled carrying food to hideouts where deserters and their families had taken up residence. In Jones County, Rachel Knight, a slave of both white and black ancestry, was a key ally of the deserter gang led by Newton Knight, her owner’s grandson. She supplied food and served as a spy in their operations against local Confederates.²²

Slaves sometimes helped their owners avoid Confederate service. Riley Tirey, one of twelve slaves owned by Robert Guttery of Walker County, Alabama, carried blankets and other supplies to Guttery, who was hiding in the woods, “to help him keep out of the way of the rebel cavalry.” Another Alabama slave, Benjamin Haynes, took provisions to his owner’s son who was “hid out to prevent his being conscripted.” Although slaves’ motives for rendering such aid were often mixed, among them was the knowledge that every effort to help keep anyone out of Confederate service put them a step closer to freedom.²³

Slaves also helped strangers trying to avoid Confederate service. Deserters traveling home through the plantation belt knew that slave cabins were their safest bet for food, shelter, and support. One deserter killed Georgia planter William McDonald when the slaveholder discovered him hiding in his slave quarters. McDonald’s slaves did not intervene. Nancy Johnson, enslaved on a Georgia plantation during the war, told how “some of the rebel soldiers deserted & came to our house & we fed them. They were opposed to the war & didn’t own slaves & said they would die rather than fight. Those who were poor white people, who didn’t own slaves were some of them Union people. I befriended them because they were on our side.”²⁴

Defining white Unionists as being on “our side” became easier for southern blacks as word of the Emancipation Proclamation spread. Increasingly, blacks came to identify with the Union cause, with white southern Unionists, and with Union soldiers. Taught from birth, however, to deal cautiously with whites, blacks did not always know what to make of their new allies’ motives. Nor did they trust them entirely. Still, with freedom and Union joined together, blacks were ready to join with whites in whatever

Figure 4.1. Southern blacks constantly undermined the Confederate war effort. They worked with white anti-Confederates, supported fugitive slaves, and spied for the Union army. And they aided anyone headed for Union lines. As former Union prisoner of war Albert Richardson wrote, “They were always ready to help anybody opposed to the Rebels. Union refugees, Confederate deserters, escaped prisoners – all received from them the same prompt and invariable kindness.” Image from Junius Henri Browne, Four Years in Secessia (1865).

effort might serve the interests of both. As an escaping Union prisoner of war put it, “They were always ready to help anybody opposed to the Rebels. Union refugees, Confederate deserters, escaped prisoners – all received from them the same prompt and invariable kindness.”²⁵

Black women in Savannah took great risks in smuggling food to Union prisoners. Susie King Taylor, a Savannah native, wrote of the city’s prison stockade as an awful place. “The Union soldiers were in it, worse than pigs, without any shelter from sun or storm, and the colored women would take food there at night and pass it to them through the holes in the fence. The soldiers were starving, and these women did all they could toward relieving those men, although they knew the penalty should they be caught giving them aid.”²⁶

Blacks sometimes helped imprisoned anti-Confederates escape. In December 1863, Robert Webster, a black barber in Atlanta, helped an aging Tennessee Unionist named William Clift break out of the city’s military prison. Clift had served as a courier for the Federals in his home state until being arrested by his own son, a Confederate cavalry officer. Webster supplied the old man with a rope to use in making his escape. Along their routes of escape, people like Clift could expect safe haven and escorts among the slaves. Nancy Johnson later told of a federal fugitive who showed up at her doorstep one evening. After keeping him hidden through the next day, “my husband slipped him over to a man named Joel Hodges & he conveyed him off so that he got home.”²⁷

John Kellogg, a Union prisoner escaping through the Georgia mountains with the help of local blacks, was impressed by what he called their “telegraph line.” They told Kellogg and his comrades of Union troop movements, some at a distance of 150 miles, between Chattanooga and Atlanta. The intelligence was essential to planning the safest route back to federal lines. Kellogg found his black associates “better informed of passing events” than most southern whites. Union captains Alured Larke and R. H. Day were similarly impressed with blacks in Charleston, South Carolina. After escaping from a Confederate prison, they hid out in the city for two months, sheltered by local blacks, before escaping to Union lines. They described their saviors as “remarkably intelligent, thoroughly comprehending their own Status in the Rebellion.”²⁸

John Ennis, a captured Union officer, escaped with a small band of comrades from a South Carolina prison. Near Spartanburg, they happened upon an enslaved man who took them to the home of a white Unionist couple. There they were fed and sheltered. Next evening, their black friend escorted them to a river crossing and directed them north toward the Blue Ridge Mountains. Henry Estabrooks, a Union prisoner escaping through Virginia, recalled seeking shelter at “negro-cabins.” He remembered one black couple who gave him “a small piece of miserable stuff they called bread, and some sour syrup, which I ate ravenously. The food was not fit for swine; but it was the best they had, and I was very thankful for it.”²⁹

Shortly after the war, Estabrooks made his gratitude public in a manuscript about his adventures. His publisher, Edmund Kirke, was eager to get it into print. Wrote Kirke of the book,

It tells what the North does not as yet fully realize, – the great fact that in the very heart of the South are four millions of people, – of strong, able-bodied, true-hearted people, – whose loyalty led them, while the heel of the “chivalry” was on their necks, and a halter was dangling before their eyes, to give their last crust, and their only suit of Sunday homespun, to the fleeing fugitive, simply because he wore the livery and fought the battles of the Union.³⁰

Junius Henri Browne, a special correspondent for the New York Tribune who spent many months in Confederate prison camps, also gratefully remembered southern blacks as reliable allies.

“God bless the Negroes,” say I, with earnest lips. During our entire captivity, and after our escape, they were ever our firm, brave, unflinching friends. We never made an appeal to them they did not answer. They never hesitated to do us a service at the risk even of life, and under the most trying circumstances revealed a devotion and a spirit of self-sacrifice that were heroic. … they always cherished a simple and a beautiful faith in the cause of the Union and its ultimate triumph, and never abandoned or turned away from a man who sought food or shelter on his way to freedom.³¹

Freedom was the driving force behind black aid to the Union cause. Alonzo Jackson repeatedly ferried escaped Union prisoners across Mingo Creek to federal outposts in South Carolina, knowing he would be killed if he were caught in the act. To Jackson, it was worth the risk. “I sympathized with the Union cause,” he later testified. “I wanted to be free – and wanted my race to be free – I knew this could not be if the rebels had a government of their own.”³²

Blacks commonly helped Union forces whenever and however they could. In March 1863, seven escapees described as bright and intelligent arrived at Union lines in Mississippi with word of artillery positions around Vicksburg. A fugitive from the same area told of Confederate cavalry operations below Jackson. In Missouri, information from escaping slaves saved Union troops at Jefferson City from a surprise attack.³³

On July 18, 1864, as a Union raiding party approached the outskirts of Auburn, Alabama, a group of blacks hurried out to warn its commander, Colonel William Hamilton, of Rebels hidden among the thickets ahead. In a charge that “could be better heard than seen,” Hamilton and his men rushed the surprised Confederates, who, as Hamilton reported, “broke on our first fire and scattered in every direction.” Toward the war’s end, a slave named Percy from Troup County, Georgia, led a detachment of Union cavalry to a nearby swamp where his owner had hidden the family’s fortune.³⁴

“It is a matter of notoriety,” lamented a Confederate official, “in the sections of the Confederacy where raids are frequent that the guides of the enemy are nearly always free negroes and slaves.” Jim Williams, an escaped former slave from Carroll Parish, Louisiana, led federal troops in an ambush of a small rebel force, during which he killed one Confederate and captured two more.³⁵ In North Carolina, Colonel S. H. Mix of the Third New York Cavalry expressed appreciation to his guide in the form of a certificate that read:

Samuel Williams, colored man, served the United States Government as guide to my Regiment on an expedition out of Newbern, N.C., in the direction of Trenton, on the morning of the 15th of May, and performed effectual service for us, at the imminent risk and peril of his life, guiding my men faithfully and truthfully, until his horse was shot down under him.³⁶

North Carolina slaveowner Sarah Edmondston wrote in her journal in September 1863, “I wish sometimes that there was not a negro left in the country, for they keep the Federals informed of everything.”³⁷

Samuel Williams was but one of many North Carolina blacks who risked their all to help bring down the Confederacy and slavery with it. One grateful northerner reported that of those slaves who escaped to Newbern,

upwards of fifty volunteers of the best and most courageous, were kept constantly employed on the perilous but important duty of spies, scouts, and guides. In this work they were invaluable and almost indispensable. They frequently went from thirty to three hundred miles within the enemy’s lines; visiting his principle camps and most important posts, and bringing us back important and reliable information. … often on these errands barely escaping with their lives. They were pursued on several occasions by blood-hounds, two or three of them were taken prisoners; one of these was known to have been shot, and the fate of the others was not ascertained. … They usually knelt in solemn prayer before they left, and on their return from these hazardous errands, as they considered the work as a religious duty.³⁸

Harriet Tubman, famous for her antebellum service on the Underground Railroad, headed a ring of spies and scouts operating along the South Carolina coast. Mary Louveste, an employee at Virginia’s Gosport Navy Yard where the Confederacy’s ironclad warship Virginia was under construction, gathered plans and other documents related to the new secret weapon. She smuggled the material to Washington, D.C., where she delivered it to Navy Secretary Gideon Welles. “Mrs. Louveste encountered no small risk in bringing this information,” Welles recalled years later in support of her pension application. “I am aware of none more meritorious than this poor colored woman whose zeal and fidelity I remember and acknowledge with gratitude.” There may even have been a black Union spy named Mary Bowser working as a maid in President Jefferson Davis’s Richmond household.³⁹

A black Virginia couple proved to be one of the most innovative spy teams of the war. In early 1863, as Union and Confederate armies eyed each other across the Rappahannock River, the refugees entered Union lines where the husband, known only as Dabney, found work as a cook and horse groomer. He became interested in the army’s telegraph system and asked some of the soldiers how it worked. Soon after, his wife went back across the river and was put to work doing laundry for Confederate officers. Within a short time, Dabney began updating Union officers on movements of the three corps comprising Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. The officers were astonished at how accurate the information was and asked Dabney how he knew such things. He took one of them to a hill overlooking the river and pointed across to Lee’s encampment.

That clothes-line tells me in half an hour just what goes on at Lee’s headquarters. You see my wife over there; she washes for the officers, and cooks, and waits around, and as soon as she hears about any movement or any thing going on, she comes down and moves the clothes on that line so I can understand it in a minute. That there gray shirt is Longstreet; and when she takes it off, it means he’s gone down about Richmond. That white shirt means Hill; and when she moves it up to the west end of the line, Hill’s corps has moved upstream. That red one is Stonewall. He’s down on the right now, and if he moves, she will move that red shirt.

During the weeks leading up to the Battle of Chancellorsville, Confederates could not make a move without the Federals knowing about it thanks to the “clothes-line telegraph.”⁴⁰

Southern blacks so effectively helped undermine the Confederacy that some white southerners began to imagine what had once seemed unimaginable – freeing the slaves and arming them. By mid-1863, half the army’s men were absent with or without leave. None were coming to take their places. If a way could not be found to fill the ranks, the war would be lost. In September 1863, the Montgomery Weekly Mail insisted that although making soldiers of blacks would mean “practical equalization of the races,” it had to be done “for the sake of preserving our very existence.” Any means to defeat the Yankees had to be used, and “one of these, and the only one which will checkmate him, is the employment of negroes in the military service of the Confederacy.”⁴¹

Irish-born General Patrick Cleburne, commanding a division in the Army of Tennessee, was the first high-ranking Confederate to urge filling depleted ranks with black troops. In January 1864, Cleburne and several fellow officers pointed out that “for many years, ever since the agitation of the subject of slavery commenced, the negro has been dreaming of freedom. … To attain it he will tempt dangers and difficulties not exceeded by the bravest soldier in the field.” Already blacks were fighting for their freedom in the Union army. Why not give blacks freedom at home and use them to Confederate advantage?⁴²

Southern whites were generally reluctant to place weapons in the hands of blacks. Military service, especially in local militias, had long been a mark of citizenship. Proslavery doctrine held that only white men could be citizens because only white men possessed the qualities of duty and fortitude necessary to stand in battle. General Howell Cobb of Georgia warned that “if slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” Tens of thousands of black men had already proven Cobb wrong, and more were eager for the chance. An enslaved man named Tom told a federal lieutenant, “Just put the guns into our hands and you’ll soon see that we not only know how to shoot but who to shoot. My master wouldn’t be worth much if I was a soldier.”⁴³

Although slaveholders rightly feared arming blacks, by the fall of 1864 they were running out of options. More than a quarter-million Confederate soldiers were already dead and two-thirds had deserted. In January 1865 General Robert E. Lee wrote to a friend that although he considered “the relation of master and slave … the best that can exist between the white and black races while intermingled as at present in this country,” blacks were being used to crush the Confederacy. Might the Confederacy not use them in its own defense? He urged the Confederate Congress to authorize black enlistments and to adopt “at once” a plan for “gradual and general emancipation.”⁴⁴

Lee’s men had mixed views on the matter. A month after their commanding general penned his sentiments, a North Carolina sergeant wrote that men in his company were deserting rapidly over talk of freeing blacks and putting them in the army. He too was considering it. “I did not volunteer my services to fight for a free negroes country.” But a Louisiana sergeant took a more practical view. “If we continue to lose ground as we have for the last 12 months, we will soon be defeated, and then slavery will be gone any way, and I think we should give up slavery and gain our independence.”⁴⁵

In February 1865, the Eighteenth Virginia Infantry, entrenched at Petersburg, passed a resolution supporting Lee’s move to arm blacks. Of the 325 officers and men present, only fourteen dissented. The four regiments of Thomas’s Georgia Brigade declared their support as well. General John B. Gordon polled his entire corps and found its officers and men overwhelmingly favored enlisting blacks. General Howell Cobb suspected that the men favored black enlistment mainly because they thought it might better their chances of getting a furlough or discharge.⁴⁶

Still there were those would not support making blacks soldiers for any reason, although they were no less eager to get home. Confederate soldier Grant Taylor wrote to his wife, “To think we have been fighting four years to prevent the slaves from being freed, now to turn round and free them to enable us to carry on the war. The thing is outrageous. … I say if the worst comes to the worst let it come and stop the war at once and let us come home.”⁴⁷ One way or another – with or without black enlistment, with or without victory – soldiers simply wanted the war to end.

On March 13, 1865, at the urging of General Lee and President Davis, the Confederate Congress by a one-vote margin finally authorized recruitment of up to 300,000 blacks. The act made no mention of freedom for those who agreed to serve, insisting that both the states and slaveholders must consent to any alteration in the legal standing of slave-soldiers. But in his General Orders No. 14 implementing the program, Davis went a step further, stating that “no slave will be accepted as a recruit unless with his own consent and with the approbation of his master by a written instrument conferring, as far as he may, the rights of a freedman.” It was hardly an Emancipation Proclamation. But it was a startling admission that blacks had long since become, as an editorial from Columbus, Georgia, put it, “a sort of balance power in this contest, and that the side which succeeds in enlisting the feelings and in securing the active operation and services of the four millions of blacks, must ultimately triumph.”⁴⁸

That observation had merit enough, but the Confederacy came to realize it far too late. No more than a few dozen blacks were ever enlisted under its banner. On very rare occasions throughout the war, blacks had been unofficially pressed into combat service with guns at their backs and their families held hostage in slavery. But no blacks ever saw combat as congressionally authorized Confederate soldiers. By contrast, roughly 200,000 blacks had joined Union land and naval forces by March 1865 to fight for freedom. Hundreds of thousands more were already free. They needed no favors from a near-dead Confederacy to secure that freedom. They were taking full measure of it themselves, especially black Union soldiers. James Jones of the Fourteenth Rhode Island Heavy Artillery wrote with pride to the Christian Recorder that “for once in his life, your humble correspondent walked fearlessly and boldly through the streets of a southern city! And he did this without being required to take off his cap at every step, or to give all the side-walks to those lordly princes of the sunny south, the planters’ sons!”⁴⁹

Another point of pride that former slaves generally shared was the opportunity to become literate. “Children love the school as white children love a holiday,” wrote one teacher at Port Royal, South Carolina. Older blacks loved the school too. One of its pupils was a 105-year-old man who had once served Revolutionary War General Nathanael Greene. An elderly black woman was asked why she took the trouble to learn to read at her advanced age. She replied, “Because I want to read the Word of the Lord.”⁵⁰

Charlotte Forten saw that passion up close. The daughter of escaped slaves who had fled to Philadelphia years before, Forten volunteered as a teacher for the Philadelphia Port Royal Relief Association. It was one of dozens of refugee aid societies, many run by blacks themselves, that funneled money, supplies, and teachers to the South. Soon after Forten arrived at Port Royal, she wrote to The Liberator, “I wish some of those persons at the North, who say the race is hopelessly and naturally inferior, could see the readiness with which these children, so long oppressed and deprived of every privilege, learn and understand.” It was all part of a rapid transformation that had taken place in Union-occupied areas of the South. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who knew Forten while at Port Royal, remarked in a letter home, “Can you imagine anything more wonderful than a coloured-Abolitionist meeting on a South Carolina plantation? … two years ago, their masters were still here, the lords of the soil & of them. Now they all own a little themselves, go to school, to church, and work for wages. It is the most extraordinary change.”⁵¹

We Has a Right to the Land

Although Shaw may have assumed too little about antebellum worship practices among Sea Island blacks, to attend school and be paid wages was certainly a new thing for them. So was owning land. Unfortunately, Shaw’s observation did not reflect the experience of most southern blacks. Planters often did run off as the Federals closed in. When that happened, slaves commonly assumed that the land on which their families had lived and died, sometimes for generations, was theirs. After planter Charles Pettigrew fled his estate in North Carolina, resident blacks divided the land and livestock among themselves and kept on farming. So did former slaves on nearby Somerset plantation. When Union troops showed up at the Mississippi plantations of Jefferson Davis and his brother Joseph, the overseer had long since been driven off and former slaves were running the property as their own.⁵²

They were doing a good job of it too, as were so many other blacks who now considered themselves freeholding farmers as well as free people. “The dogma of the ‘Lords of the Lash,’” as one report put it, that blacks were “unable to take care of themselves is now exploded.” That dogma was held by many white northerners as well. When a northern philanthropist expressed such views to Moses Battle of Tennessee, the freedman seemed puzzled. “Don’t know what for, sir, anybody think that. The colored folks [are] what been a keepin’ up the country. When they had to work all day for the masters, they work all night and Sundays to make a little somethin’ for themselves. Now when its all day to themselves, don’t know what for they lie down and starve.”⁵³

“The Freedmen do best for themselves as independent cultivators of small farms” reported Superintendent of Contrabands John Eaton. “Those who worked for themselves, have raised on the average the most cotton per acre.” Just as impressed was a Union soldier stationed at Plymouth, North Carolina, who went “among the negroes” to see for himself how they were getting along. “They were very intelligent,” he recalled, “although they could neither read nor write.” They were certainly not, as he had otherwise so often heard, lacking in good sense. His visit dispelled other myths as well. “There is no use in repeating that they are not capable of taking care of themselves and that they do not desire their freedom, for it is wholly false.”⁵⁴

Unfortunately for former slaves, the notion that they held title to their land was just as false. As far as the Lincoln administration was concerned, plantations held by formerly enslaved people were “abandoned” lands subject to federal confiscation. Although the Second Confiscation Act entitled the government to take rebel property, Lincoln’s December 1863 Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction promised to restore that property to its former owners as soon as they took an oath of allegiance to the Union. In the meantime, under the Direct Tax Act of 1862, abandoned

Figure 4.2. Former slaves, such as those seen here working an “abandoned” South Carolina plantation in Union-held territory, claimed the land as hard-earned compensation for years of unpaid labor. But Lincoln’s reconstruction plan returned both land and political power to slaveholders. Federal troops enforced labor contracts that practically reenslaved southern blacks. Dr. James McCune Smith, the first African American to earn a medical degree, denounced Lincoln’s plan as an effort to preserve “all the wrongs of slavery, without its name.” Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

plantations were to be leased, sold, or operated by the government itself. In any case, there would be no land grants for former slaves. A few congressmen proposed such grants, but most doggedly opposed distributing land to former slaves.⁵⁵

Blacks protested vigorously at the injustice of such a policy. If they owned no land, how could they make a living? How could they truly be free? They had worked the land all their lives. The land, they insisted, was theirs by right.

We has a right to the land where we are located. For why? I tell you. Our wives, our children, our husbands has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locates upon; for that reason we have a divine right to the land. … And then didn’t we clear the land, and raise the crops of corn, of cotton, of tobacco, of rice, of sugar, of everything. And then didn’t them large cities in the North grow up on the cotton and the sugars and the rice that we made? Yes! … they has grown rich and my people is poor.⁵⁶

Such was the heart-felt reasoning of Virginia freedman Bayley Wyat, who reflected a sentiment so often repeated as Union forces pushed south. But the government was not listening to ex-slaves. In 1862, federal authorities began selling and leasing abandoned plantations, usually to favored clients. Most wound up in the hands of northern investors and cotton textile companies. Many went to army officers and government officials. What little was left sometimes went to those few freedmen who could afford to buy small plots. In South Carolina’s Sea Islands auctions, the smallest parcels went to groups of blacks who pooled their scarce funds for the purchases.⁵⁷

“The disappointment to them is almost unbearable,” wrote one northern minister after a land sale, mostly to northern speculators, in the South Carolina tidewater. “They see neither justice nor wisdom in such treatment.” What former slaves did see, what they had seen all their lives, was that “the white man loves power & money, and is sharp enough to grasp both, when he can.” General Rufus Saxton told the Lincoln administration that the South Carolina sales were putting blacks “at the mercy of men devoid of principle.” Wrote another officer in Louisiana of the new landlords, “Cotton closes their eyes to justice just as it did in the case of the former slave masters.” Francis Bird, a white abolitionist who toured government farms in tidewater Virginia, insisted that “truly loyal and prosperous” communities would inevitably spring up if only “the men and women who have watered the soil with their tears and blood should be allowed to own it.”⁵⁸

Blacks often adopted a “squatter sovereignty” plan, refusing to give up their land or recognize anyone else’s right to it. At Beaufort and Hilton Head in South Carolina, they threatened violence against white speculators to deter them from leasing or purchasing lands. Some blacks made good on their threats when speculators tried to occupy their claims. In such cases, the army intervened on behalf of the speculators.⁵⁹

Blacks employed on government-run or leased plantations often lived in thrown-together structures or old out-buildings that hardly kept out the rain or cold. At Downey Plantation in Virginia, former slaves occupied a tobacco barn that was, wrote an army inspector, “wholly unfit for human beings to occupy.” Such living conditions, he felt, were “a disgrace to the ‘peculiar institution’ in its better days.”⁶⁰

Residents on government lands worked with a promise of wages to be distributed when the crop was sold. Frequently, however, they saw no income at all. One official reported that blacks on government plantations in southern Louisiana “were generally cheated out of their pay.” Another wrote that black employees in South Carolina, although they had been promised twenty-five cents a day, had not been paid for some time. As of June 1863, blacks on St. Helena Island had gone six months without pay. For more than a year there had been “a very general complaint among the hands on these estates that they have received no compensation.”⁶¹

One group of Louisiana freedmen wrote to the army’s Department of the Gulf complaining that a Union officer had “told us to go on and cultivate the land on the Plantation, and do something for ourselves, until the Government could do something for us.” Shortly after, with no consideration for the former slaves, government agents leased out their lands. “Now a Mr Wright comes on the plantation with Authority from the Government to work it and claims the results of our labor – We have had a hard struggle to get along and we feel it hard now that we have succeeded in making ourselves in a measure independent, to have to [turn] it all over to someone else.” The freedmen received no reply.⁶²

Most plantations in Union territory remained in the hands of planters who quickly disavowed any Confederate loyalties when the Federals arrived. Those who had the opportunity to do so before January 1, 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, kept title to their land and their slaves. In areas reclaimed for the Union after that date, slaves were technically free. But in fact – whether plantations were government-run, leased out, or privately owned – to black folk, the new freedom seemed much like the old slavery. Government lands were supervised by appointed overseers, most of them local whites who drove blacks with the whip and club. Leased plantations hired the same type of men. “They treat the Negroes brutally,” wrote one federal officer, “and chastise them worse than their former masters did.” Harsh treatment, along with infrequent or nonexistent pay, led many blacks to seek other options. In late 1863, one northern observer in the Mississippi Valley wrote that blacks were engaged in a “general stampede” away from the plantations.⁶³

To counter that stampede and keep much-needed labor on the land, planters often negotiated with their workers, sometimes giving in even to the demands of those still technically enslaved. Blacks “know their rights,” wrote one observer, “and, knowing, dare maintain.” The result saw whites making “extraordinary efforts” to keep blacks on the land, often with the help of government-authorized labor contracts. Under these contracts, landowners promised not to engage in physical abuse. They offered shorter working hours and Saturdays as well as Sundays off. They granted larger garden plots on which blacks could raise their own produce and livestock, making them less dependent on wages. And they offered crop shares in lieu of wages, which often went unpaid in any case.⁶⁴

To the dismay of blacks, white landowners quickly turned the sharecropping system against them. Resistant as whites were to keeping blacks at work through bargaining, perhaps debt might accomplish the same end. Labor contracts normally called for landowners to provide housing, shoes, clothing, and tools as part of the deal, but such stipulations were easily ignored. Basic supplies, as well as the “luxuries” of tobacco and coffee, were doled out from plantation stores to penniless blacks on credit, always with profit margins and interest rates controlled by planters. Those markups, which ranged as high as 200 percent, were designed to total more than any income black workers could earn through crop shares. Inevitably, when crops were harvested and sold, workers’ profit share rarely covered their debt. At one northern-leased plantation in Louisiana, former slaves ended their first year of freedom with debts ranging from four cents to more than twelve dollars. One of the families showed earnings of $184. Their debt at the plantation store was $190.⁶⁵

Thus it was that black folk became trapped in debt slavery, sometimes called the “new slavery,” and it was backed by federal force. Government-sanctioned contracts made it illegal for workers to leave the plantations without their employers’ permission. Military provost marshals rounded up “vagrant” blacks under orders that forbade them to “wander … without employment.” And officials were authorized to discipline blacks who resisted the new labor arrangement. One federal officer wrote that the freedman had been reduced to a “more servile and pitiable condition than when a slave.” Another blamed the situation on “our over-careful President” who “was desirous to conciliate” former slaveholders. A petition from New Orleans blacks called Lincoln’s new system “disguised bondage.”⁶⁶

Despite lack of federal support and threats of punishment, blacks continued fighting for their rights as free people. One federal officer wrote that former slaves could hardly be restrained from demonstrating “a spirit of independence – a feeling that they are no longer slaves, but hired laborers; and demand to be treated as such.” When that feeling was ignored, the result was “trouble, immediately – and the negroes band together, and lay down their own rules, as to when, and how long they will work.” Workers sometimes drove off their overseers and demanded more humane supervisors. In a few cases, they refused supervision of any kind. If their demands were not met, they simply walked away and resisted any attempt to force them back. One former slave told a federal officer, “you may shoot me before I will return to the old plantation.” Blacks on one Louisiana plantation laid down their tools and “left in a body.” When blacks on another Louisiana plantation complained about a newly hired overseer who “was in the habit of wielding the whip pretty freely,” the planter refused to fire him. So the blacks packed their bundles and started down the road. They had not gone far before the planter ran after them, saying they could have “any overseer they wanted.”⁶⁷

The main problem blacks faced when considering whether to leave was where to go. The most immediate opportunities for employment lay with the army, but blacks were often as likely to be turned away as taken in. Even when they did find government employment, wages were low by design. General Benjamin Butler, commanding the Department of Virginia and North Carolina, issued orders that the government not compete with itself by paying black refugees more than the $10 a month it paid black soldiers. Often, blacks could not even get the $10 rate. One report from Arkansas told of blacks “in numerous instances” receiving counterfeit money for their services or no pay at all. Virginia freedman Abraham Cannaday, after working at a government sawmill for more than a year, complained to the Lincoln administration that he had never “recevd a cent of money and my famley is aseffring for the sorport of my labor for I Can not by inney thing without money.”⁶⁸

Lack of pay was hardly the only worry blacks had in government work camps. At Kenner, Louisiana, former slaves assigned to labor on the levees “worked from sunrise till dark, Sundays included.” The majority had no shoes, and their clothing was in “the most ragged state.” They were forced to live in an old barn, shacks made from old fences, or tents that had been declared unfit for soldiers. A report from nearby Bonnet Carre reflected similar conditions. Wrote the inspecting officer, “My cattle at home are better cared for than these unfortunate persons.”⁶⁹

Worse still, physical abuse was common in government work camps. Lewis Johnson, a freedman at one Virginia facility, complained that Danforth Nichols, the superintendent, frequently beat and kicked blacks under his supervision. “I speak from my heart before the Lord when I say that the conduct of Mr Nichols was worse than the general treatment of slave owners.” Freedmen on Roanoke Island in North Carolina wrote a petition to Lincoln informing him that their white bosses “have done every thing to us that our masters have done except b[u]y and Sell us.” One refugee at a Washington refugee camp, disgusted with mistreatment of every kind, declared, “I am going back to my old master – I never saw hard times till since I called myself a freeman.”⁷⁰

Few refugees ever willingly returned to their former owners. When they did, it was usually under threat of arrest and forced labor. Under federally sanctioned vagrancy and impressment policies, former slaves not working on private plantations could be rounded up and made to work on government projects. In January 1863, at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, General William Rosecrans ordered his subordinates to “procure and employ negroes … found free and roaming at large.” That same month in New Orleans, General Nathaniel Banks ordered that blacks “without visible occupation … be arrested as vagrants, and put to labor upon the public works or the Quartermaster’s plantations.”⁷¹

That summer in Washington, quartermasters encouraged the use of “forcible persuasion” to obtain the services of some 2,000 “idle negroes.” In Memphis, Tennessee, Federals ordered that blacks “without lawful occupation … be arrested and confined at hard labor.” November found 3,000 blacks being impressed at Nashville for work on fortifications without pay. And in Natchez, Mississippi, General J. M. Tuttle expelled all blacks from the city who were not employed “by some responsible white person.” Those not so employed were impressed – hauled off to labor in a government work camp.⁷²

The labor status of blacks, whether self-employed or not, mattered little to officers charged with carrying out impressment. In March 1863, under orders from General James Bowen, provost marshal-general of the Department of the Gulf, soldiers swept through New Orleans detaining blacks “with no regular habitation or Employment.” Dozens of self-supporting men and women were picked up in the rush and marched off to forced labor. In Baton Rouge, black businessmen who had been free all their lives were herded out of the city along with former slaves, some of them their employees. When Federals at Virginia’s Fortress Monroe received orders from Washington for “contraband” labor, they trolled the streets of nearby Norfolk taking black men at will. At a local African Methodist Church, just as the sermon was ending, soldiers burst through the door and began hauling men away.⁷³

Neither age nor infirmity seemed to matter to impressing officers. One impressed man from Norfolk was later declared too old for heavy labor. Another had a “rupture,” probably a hernia, which rendered him unfit. Blacks at Roanoke complained to General Benjamin Butler that Union soldiers had combed the island, taking up “every man that could be found indiscriminately[,] young and old[,] sick and well.” One Roanoke man later wrote that “they treated us mean a[s] our owners ever did they taken us just like we had been dum beast.”⁷⁴

Figure 4.3. Blacks who refused to work for their former owners could be arrested under federally sanctioned vagrancy laws and sent to government plantations or work camps to labor without wages. When Virginia blacks, such as those seen here, refused to work, protesting inadequate food and lack of pay, officials had them jailed or whipped. In a letter to President Lincoln, a North Carolina freedman complained that federal agents “treated us mean as our owners ever did.” Photo courtesy of the National Archives.

Protests through official channels did little good and could sometimes result in physical abuse. When Virginia blacks held in service by the Union army refused to work over lack of pay and inadequate food, officials had them jailed or whipped. Some were “knocked down senseless with shovels and clubs.” Little wonder that blacks frequently tried to escape from federal forced labor just as they had from slavery. To them, there seemed little difference between the two. Some hired themselves as servants and cooks to officers and soldiers. Pay for such service often went lacking, but it shielded blacks from harsher unpaid labor. Others ran off to cities near or far, hoping to find work and avoid any sort of government labor.⁷⁵

Deserting black labor hampered work on essential military projects, as Lieutenant George Burroughs discovered while directing construction at Nashville’s fortifications. He asked the city’s chief of police to help impress more black men, but the only place left to get them was from local plantations. The chief was hesitant to work against planter interests. Clearly, harsh treatment and nonpayment of black workers had taken their toll. Hoping to improve the army’s reputation in middle Tennessee and draw black workers, General Rosecrans asked his superiors to authorize immediate wage payments, pointing out that “from want, say, nine-tenths have deserted, and I think justly.”⁷⁶

Southern Negroes Must Stay Where They Are

As a mark of freedom, the right to be paid for their work was one that blacks struggled for constantly. The need for their labor, coupled with their own persistence, sometimes brought success. The fall of 1863 saw workers in Washington, black and white, demanding higher wages to keep up with rampant inflation. Threatening a strike that might throw the war effort into “utter confusion,” black workers at the Quartermaster Department received a 20 percent salary increase.⁷⁷

In Beaufort, South Carolina, a “poor old lame colored man” named Charles Gelston made a living by collecting discarded army clothes and blankets from trash heaps, then cleaning and selling them as rags. In March 1864, Treasury Department officials confiscated the rags, calling them government property. Gelston, with the help of an army surgeon, complained by letter to Austin Smith, the Treasury agent at Beaufort. Smith was sympathetic, but refused to take responsibility. He forwarded the letter to Washington for a final decision with his endorsement. “This is a small matter, but it is one which may be distorted. … I should be sorry to have the government represented as competing with the negroes in the rag picking business.” A response finally arrived in October from Treasury Secretary William Fessenden saying that Gelston could keep his rags. This “small matter” had taken seven months to resolve.⁷⁸

Economic justice could take much longer, when it arrived at all. Samuel Larkin, a refugee from Alabama, fled to Nashville and used his small savings to buy two wagons, a dray, a mule, and four horses, one of them blind. With these, he started an express service, hauling goods for merchants in the Nashville area. In August 1863, Union troops under orders to confiscate “all serviceable stock” took Larkin’s whole inventory. After complaining of the seizure, Larkin had his wagons and blind horse returned as unserviceable. He was promised pay for the rest, but no money came, at least not right away. Nine years later, in 1872, the Southern Claims Commission, a U. S. agency set up to compensate loyal southerners for property lost during the war, paid Larkin $350 for his mule and three horses.⁷⁹

Despite the many obstacles, thousands of blacks in federally occupied towns like Nashville, Memphis, Natchez, New Orleans, Beaufort, Plymouth, and Norfolk made a decent living for themselves. From Helena, Arkansas, an army chaplain wrote of local blacks that “the town contains many, who, by their industry, economy and good judgment, have made and saved money. They are traders, mechanics and laborers, and if let alone, will compete successfully with any people in the same walks of life.”⁸⁰

The truth of that statement had much to do with economic obstacles thrown in the path of former slaves. Whites wanted no competition from blacks, and the Federals wanted no trouble with local whites. Toward that end, except for the issues of Union and, to a lesser extent, chattel slavery, federal policy from top to bottom worked to appease southern whites at the expense of southern blacks. Debt slavery, vagrancy decrees, impressment orders, and “forcible persuasion” all sought to limit any economic gains blacks might achieve.

When former slaves fled farther north to escape such policies, they often ran into similar difficulties. Border state towns used many of the same tactics to suppress blacks. Sometimes they tried to exclude blacks entirely. Sedalia, Missouri, passed an ordinance expelling blacks from the town. In other Missouri communities, bands of “regulators” made nightly visits to “certain Citizens who had free negros hired, and with force and threats drove off the negros.” In St. Louis, there were systematic efforts to expel free black laborers not only from the city but also from the state. “Bushwhackers” in Columbia lynched a black man after giving notice that all blacks were to leave within ten days or be killed.⁸¹

Refugees fleeing through the border states, where slavery was still legal, risked not only violence but also reenslavement. Kentucky passed a law forbidding blacks freed by the Emancipation Proclamation from entering the state under threat of being “arrested, dealt with, and disposed of as runaways.” It was a common thing for Kentucky lawmen to seize free blacks and sell them at auction to the highest bidder. By February 1863, Louisville’s jail was filled to capacity with “runaway slaves.” When it could hold no more, they were turned over to private slavecatchers.⁸²

Lincoln’s administration tried just as hard to keep black refugees from penetrating into the free states. That effort, in large part, lay behind the army’s effort to keep former slaves employed in, or otherwise confined to, the South. Doing so, Secretary of War Stanton assured Lincoln, would avoid “all possibility of competition from negro labor in the North” and the political complications it would bring.⁸³

Stung by public backlash against the Emancipation Proclamation, in his December 1862 message to Congress, Lincoln sought to calm white fears by asking “Why should emancipation south, send the free people north? People, of any color, seldom run, unless there be something to run from. Heretofore, colored people, to some extent, have fled north from bondage; and now, perhaps, from both bondage and destitution.” Urging the border states to end slavery on their own, Lincoln insisted that “if gradual emancipation and deportation be adopted, they will have neither to flee from. Their old masters will give them wages … till new homes can be found for them in congenial climes, and with people of their own blood and race.” But, insisted Lincoln, whether these measures discouraged blacks from trying to migrate north was immaterial. “Cannot the north decide for itself, whether to receive them?”⁸⁴

Lincoln’s comments made clear that colonizing blacks out of the country remained a large part of his plan to maintain postwar peace. Although he cancelled an agreement with swindler Bernard Kock to employ black timber cutters on Ile a Vache near Haiti in January 1863, he approved a contract in April with New York financiers allied with Kock. Five hundred blacks of a projected 5,000 were sent to the island, but the effort proved disastrous. Kock and his associates stole colonists’ money, gave them inadequate housing, and left them in a state of near starvation. After smallpox swept through the settlement and killed nearly a hundred people, Lincoln gave up on the venture. In 1864, he recalled the survivors.⁸⁵

Although Lincoln abandoned the Ile a Vache scheme, he continued to worry about what the presence of blacks would mean for the nation’s future. As late as 1865, shortly before his assassination, Lincoln pressed the issue with General Benjamin Butler. “But what shall we do with the negroes after they are free?” Lincoln worried that a “race war” might break out in the South, or, worse yet, another civil war might occur. “I can hardly believe that the South and North can live in peace,” Lincoln reportedly told Butler, “unless we can get rid of the negroes. … I believe that it would be better to export them all.”⁸⁶

The more immediate concern for most white northerners was keeping blacks out of their communities. Well before the president’s December 1862 congressional message, efforts were under way to establish or strengthen already existing state laws limiting black migration. By the spring of 1862, petitions bearing the names of up to 40,000 citizens flooded the Ohio legislature demanding that blacks be kept out of the state. “Ohio,” declared a Columbus editor, “shall never become the depot for the runaway and freed negroes of the South.” Illinois voters, by a majority of more than 100,000 votes, reaffirmed their support for a ban on black immigration.⁸⁷ The editor of Indiana’s Vincennes Western Sun was sure that

the rest of the States of the North feel on the subject of negro immigration as Illinois does. They are all set like flint against the thing. This fact was brought out very distinctly in the debates of the last session of Congress. Not one of the Northern States will consent to the admittance of Negroes in any considerable number. Not one. The abolitionists themselves will not consent to it. … the Southern negroes as a body must stay where they are.⁸⁸

The next year, when Indiana passed a law barring blacks from entering the state, Sojourner Truth defied the act with a speaking tour. Authorities arrested her several times, but she kept to her mission. After a crowd at Angola threatened to burn down the hall in which she was scheduled to speak, she pointedly responded, “Then I will speak upon the ashes.”⁸⁹

Threats of violence aimed at blacks were hardly uncommon. In Iowa’s Wapello and Johnson Counties, whites declared their intention to “resist the introduction of free negroes into Iowa; first by lawful means, and when that fails, we will drive them, together with such whites as may be engaged in bringing them in, out of the State or afford them ‘hospitable graves.’” Farmers in Page County who had hired “colored girls” as house servants were warned “that they must send those ‘niggers’ back” or see their farms

Figure 4.4. Fear of black immigration led several northern states to erect legal barriers. Illinois amended its constitution to forbid black settlement. Indiana barred blacks from entering the state at all. Ever defiant, Sojourner Truth set out for an Indiana speaking tour. Authorities arrested her several times, but she kept to her mission. After a crowd at Angola threatened to burn down the hall in which she was scheduled to speak, she proclaimed, “Then I will speak upon the ashes.” Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

burned to the ground. In Muscatine County, twenty whites visited a local farmer who had hired a former slave. “By threats of personal violence,” they intended to convince the farmer of his error.⁹⁰

In April 1863, a gang of whites drove at least forty black workers off a farm in Union County, Illinois. A month later, two armed Illinois whites halted three black fugitives from Missouri, shot one, and sent the other two back the way they came. In Ottawa, Illinois, gangs of vigilantes assaulted any blacks they could find. According to one witness, “these ruffians combine in squads, and hit every wooly head that presents itself.” March of 1863 found a white mob in Detroit, Michigan, trying to drive blacks out of the city. Dozens were beaten and about thirty-five had their homes burned before federal troops intervened. An untold number of blacks fled to Canada after the riot. Two months later, white workers and local authorities in St. Paul, Minnesota, tried to expel black refugees.⁹¹

It Is Enough to Free Them

That spring, Republican Representative George Julian visited Lincoln and found him despondent over the violent reactions to emancipation. “My proclamation was to stir the country; but it has done about as much harm as good.” The comment disturbed Julian, a firm emancipation supporter. Julian later wrote with regret that such comments “were characteristic, and showed how reluctant [Lincoln] was to turn away from the conservative counsels he had so long heeded.”⁹²

Lincoln did little to reassure those who questioned his commitment to slavery’s effective end when, in December 1863, he issued his “Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction.” Under the Constitution’s authority granting him power to issue “reprieves and pardons for offences against the United States,” Lincoln declared that any Confederate state would be allowed to reestablish a federally recognized government when a number of its citizens totaling at least 10 percent of those who had voted in the 1860 presidential election took an oath of loyalty to the United States and promised to abide by congressional acts and presidential edicts regarding slavery. Any newly formed government applying for recognition must have no provision in its constitution “contravening said oath.”⁹³

Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan, as it came to be called, did not quite settle the issue of slavery’s future in the secessionist states once they were readmitted. As Lincoln stated in his amnesty proclamation, all acts and edicts of the federal government in reference to slavery were war measures subject to being “repealed, modified or held void by Congress, or by decision of the Supreme Court.” Nor did Lincoln’s plan ensure any legal protection for blacks. Wendell Phillips, a long time Boston abolitionist, complained that Lincoln’s plan restored “all power into the hands of the unchanged white race.” Phillips pointed to the newly reconstructed government in Louisiana where, with Lincoln’s backing, General Nathaniel Banks was forcing blacks into labor contracts and debt slavery at the point of federal bayonets. “Such reconstruction,” wrote Phillips, “makes freedom of the negro a sham, and perpetuates Slavery under a softer name.”⁹⁴

Blacks in Louisiana had hoped for better. During the constitutional convention of April–July 1864, they held rallies and signed petitions calling for equal rights, including the right to vote. The black newspaper L’Union insisted that they deserved nothing less than “universal equality before the law.” Lincoln wrote a private letter to Governor Michael Hahn suggesting that the franchise might be extended to some few blacks, perhaps the “very intelligent,” a reference to New Orleans Creoles, and those who had “fought gallantly in our ranks.” But that was as far a Lincoln was willing to go. When the convention issued its constitution, with no mention of black voting rights or of any protection for blacks beyond the elimination of chattel slavery, Lincoln pronounced the document “an excellent new constitution.”⁹⁵

Creoles and other African Americans in Louisiana were bitterly disappointed in Lincoln, Banks, and federally appointed officials who followed their lead. The New Orleans Tribune, a public voice for free blacks in Louisiana since before the war, lamented that “deep-rooted prejudice against this people still remains in all its pristine strength and vigor, in the North quite as much as at the South.” The Tribune castigated Banks, whose allies held sway at the convention, for allowing the new constitution to be framed by men motivated by “hatred of their fellows of African descent.” Some New Orleans blacks, including the Tribune editor, were so upset that they advocated a mass migration to Mexico.⁹⁶

Congress had concerns as well, although of a different sort. To require that only 10 percent of any southern state’s voters swear loyalty to the United States might restore secessionists to power. It might even invite future rebellion. Certainly it would provide no fertile field for the Republican Party to develop and flourish. To counter that threat, Congress passed the Wade-Davis Bill, requiring 50 percent of the number voting in 1860 to take a loyalty oath before governments could be reorganized in former Confederate states. Furthermore, any delegates to state constitutional conventions would be required to swear that they had never taken up arms against the United States. Chattel slavery could not be reinstated by state constitutions under Wade-Davis, but there was no reference to black voting rights. Not wanting to repudiate his new Louisiana government reconstructed under the Ten Percent Plan, Lincoln refused to sign the Wade-Davis Bill and let it die by pocket veto.

The bill’s supporters were outraged. They charged Lincoln with endangering the nation by restoring power to the very men who had torn it apart. But there was little Congress could do about it. Lacking enough votes to override Lincoln’s veto, Wade-Davis supporters responded with a “manifesto” printed in newspapers throughout the country criticizing the president for “dictatorial usurpation.”⁹⁷

Black leaders were even more upset with Lincoln. Frederick Douglass blasted the Ten Percent Plan as “an entire contradiction of the constitutional idea of Republican Government.” After promising freedom for blacks and asking them to fight for the Union, Lincoln was now prepared to hand former slaves back to their old owners, with little or no legal power to shield themselves “from the vindictive spirit sure to be roused against the whole colored race.” Douglass called Lincoln’s claim of abolishing slavery a “swindle.” The president was, in fact, “practically re-establishing that hateful system.” James McCune Smith fully agreed. In a letter to the Anglo-African, Smith railed against efforts to appease southern whites at the expense of southern blacks. To Smith, Lincoln’s reconstruction plan preserved “all the wrongs of slavery, without its name.”⁹⁸

Despite his opposition to slavery, Lincoln stressed that the Emancipation Proclamation was a war measure that might end with the war. Once the Union was restored, whatever the courts might rule on emancipation, or however Congress might modify it, the matter was out of his hands. In a letter to General John McClernand, an old acquaintance from Illinois, Lincoln went so far as to suggest that even if emancipation stood, slaveholders “need not be hurt by it. Let them adopt systems of apprenticeship for the colored people.” In exchanging slaves for apprentices, former slaveholders would “be nearly as well off, in this respect, as if the present trouble had not occurred.” Lincoln asked McClernand to keep the letter confidential but assured him that he would stand by his remarks.⁹⁹

Lincoln surely knew that it would be a practical impossibility to reverse chattel slavery’s demise. After all, the Second Confiscation Act and resulting Emancipation Proclamation had done little more than recognize the freedom that blacks had largely taken for themselves. But Lincoln’s efforts to distance himself politically from abolitionists and to highlight the limits of his own Proclamation left blacks, and many of their white allies, worried about the direction of Lincoln’s postwar plans.

That concern drove Frederick Douglass, along with white abolitionists such as Wendell Phillips and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to break with Republicans and support the newly formed Radical Democratic Party. In May 1864, party delegates met in Cleveland and nominated John C. Frémont for president. The convention’s platform called for equality under the law regardless of race, protection of civil liberties, congressional rather than presidential control of reconstruction, abolition of the electoral college and election of the president by direct popular vote, distribution of confiscated southern plantations to former slaves, and a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery.¹⁰⁰

Few party members had any real hope that Frémont could win in November. The more politically astute hoped only that the threat of a radical splinter party might force Republicans either to dump Lincoln at their upcoming convention or at least make their party platform more friendly to blacks. It did neither. To enhance their chances at the polls, Republicans allied themselves with war-supporting Democrats to form the Union Party. It met in convention at Baltimore and nominated Lincoln for president. His vice presidential running mate was former slaveholder Andrew Johnson, a Democrat from Tennessee and the only U. S. senator from a seceded state not to have resigned his seat. As for the Union Party’s platform, the only plank it had in common with the Radical Party was its call for ending slavery by constitutional amendment.¹⁰¹

Republicans had long been moving toward support for such an amendment in any case. Some were surely moved at least in part by altruism, but racism and practical politics were prime motives as well. Large numbers of slaves flooding into Union lines convinced some in Congress that ending slavery was the only way to keep blacks in the South. Constitutional emancipation as one element of a racial containment policy was beginning to sway War Democrats as well. Certainly racial containment was viewed as a palatable way to sell northern voters on the idea of an emancipation amendment. So was the threat of another civil war. If slavery did not end finally and forever, might not the old difficulties of fugitive slaves, slavery’s expansion, and perhaps a future war follow? Still, most congressmen so feared being branded “nigger worshipers” that few were willing to lead a public charge toward abolishing slavery once and for all. The main push would come from below.

Organized efforts toward statutory abolition began in the spring of 1863 when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony established the Women’s Loyal National League and led it in a petition drive aimed at pressuring Congress for a universal emancipation act. Aside from their own abolitionist motives, women like Stanton and Anthony hoped that rights for blacks might lead to rights for women as well, perhaps even the right to vote. Relying, ironically, on a vein of white racism, women’s rights supporters reasoned that the nation could hardly count black men as voting citizens while denying that distinction to white women. For their part, black leaders viewed women’s righters as useful allies who might help bridge the gap between themselves and resistant whites.¹⁰²

The Women’s Loyal National League sent out speakers, circulated petitions, and organized League affiliates across the North. The American Anti-Slavery Society soon joined the petition effort, sending speakers of their own far and wide. One of their lecturers was William Andrew Jackson, a former slave once held by Jefferson Davis.¹⁰³

Although abolitionists at first called only for a congressional emancipation act, they shifted their focus after Lincoln announced in December 1863 that his Emancipation Proclamation might end with the war. Even an emancipation act could be overturned by the courts. The only way to head off that possibility was with a Constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. Within a few weeks, Stanton and Anthony were ready to send Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts 100,000 signatures calling for action. It was far short of their original goal of 1 million, but impressive nonetheless.

On February 9, 1864, in a gesture both solemn and symbolic, two black men carried the petitions into the U. S. Senate chamber and laid them on Sumner’s desk. Sumner then addressed the Senate. “This petition is signed by one hundred thousand men and women, who unite in this unparalleled number to support its prayer,” he told his colleagues. “They are from all parts of the country and from every condition of life. … Here they are, a mighty army, one hundred thousand strong, without arms or banners, the advance guard of a yet larger army.”¹⁰⁴

Over the next few weeks, the Senate discussed pros and cons of an emancipation amendment, breaking largely along party lines. Republicans stressed slavery’s danger to the Union; Democrats stressed antislavery’s danger to white supremacy. A turning point came when Reverdy Johnson, a Maryland Democrat who had long defended slaveholding interests, rose to repudiate slavery. “Let the institution be abolished, and the subject is taken from the political controversies of the day on which and in relation to which alone the southern people can be excited to madness by the traitors who may come into existence from time to time.” Johnson called the doctrine of state sovereignty a “political heresy” that would pose little danger to the Union once slavery was dead. Besides, Johnson said, slavery had already been “fatally wounded,” in large part by “those Africans, whom we are now calling around our standard.” It was time to recognize that fact and put the issue to rest.¹⁰⁵

Johnson’s speech was stunning. Such remarks coming from a slave-state senator and member of a party that had opposed emancipation for so long were unheard of. Perhaps most astonishing was the credit Johnson gave blacks for their role in fatally wounding slavery. Wrote the editors of the Chicago Tribune, “We doubt if the rebel cause has got a harder blow since Vicksburg was taken than it got in the Senate when Reverdy Johnson laid his blows.” On April 8, three days after Johnson’s address, the Senate passed what would eventually become the Thirteenth Amendment and sent it to the House of Representatives.¹⁰⁶

Signatures from the “larger army” of which Sumner spoke poured into House offices during the next few months. By July, the list of names totaled nearly 400,000. Clearly, the alliance of long time abolitionists and newly minted emancipationists, who feared continuing conflict over slavery, was becoming stronger by the day. Lincoln himself, expressing Union Party policy, gave the amendment his support. Although conservative on granting the rights of full citizenship to blacks, Lincoln knew that he would need the help of Radicals to win reelection. And he would need the help of blacks to win the war. “Any different policy in regard to the colored man,” Lincoln admitted, “deprives us of his help, and this is more than we can bear. … Keep it and you can save the Union. Throw it away, and the Union goes with it.”¹⁰⁷

Despite backing from Lincoln, his Union Party, and the Radicals, the amendment’s sponsors could not muster the two-thirds majority in the House necessary to get it passed and sent to the states for ratification. There was too much trepidation among House Democrats. Many of them had been elected in 1862 on an anti-abolition platform. Now another election year was upon them, and “abolitionist” was still a dirty word among large segments of the northern electorate – so much so that even some of the amendment’s backers called themselves “emancipationists” as a signal that they supported little more than nominal freedom for former slaves.¹⁰⁸

Such attitudes, held as they were even by antislavery allies, had worried black leaders for years. As much resistance as there was to emancipation among northern whites, there was much more toward social and political equality for blacks. Even among white abolitionists, there was often apathy if not hostility to anything more than ending chattel slavery. That William Lloyd Garrison, feeling that its work was effectively done, sought to disband the American Anti-Slavery Society in the war’s later years showed how wide the gulf was between what abolitionism meant to blacks and what it meant to whites. The attitude of most white abolitionists, wrote the editors of the New Orleans Tribune, seemed to be that “it is enough to free them … let them be free as the beasts in the fields.”¹⁰⁹

A Partial Emancipation Unworthy of the Name

In May 1864, in a speech before a black artillery regiment, John Rock was plain and direct about what blacks wanted. “We … are contending for and shall not be satisfied until we get equal rights for all.” Black soldiers themselves were making the same point. “Give me my rights,” insisted a black soldier in South Carolina, “the rights this Government owes me, the same rights as the white man has.” J. H. Hall of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts agreed. “All we ask is the proper enjoyment of the rights of citizenship.” Foremost among those rights, the one that symbolized citizenship like no other, was the right to vote. As Pennsylvania soldier Zack Burden boldly wrote to President Lincoln, it was the height of hypocrisy to “make A man go and fite and Wont let him vote.”¹¹⁰

As the campaign for an emancipation amendment got under way in 1863, Robert Hamilton, like so many others, pointed out that simply ending slavery would not be enough. In an Anglo-African editorial, he warned that freedom without the franchise would be “a partial emancipation unworthy of the name.” In Michigan, leading blacks demanded equal rights, including the right to vote. They asked legislators to remove the word “white” from Michigan’s racially restrictive constitution and called for the repeal of all laws making reference to skin color. Blacks in Indiana petitioned the legislature to repeal the most onerous of the state’s Black Laws and to appropriate money for “colored” schools. Chicago blacks went even further, demanding repeal of all Illinois’s Black Laws and an end to segregation in public schools.¹¹¹

In October 1864, 150 black leaders from seventeen states, North and South, and the District of Columbia met at Syracuse, New York, for “the most truly national black convention” that had ever assembled. In his speech before the gathering, John Rock summed up the purpose of this National Convention of Colored Men. “All we ask is equal opportunities and equal rights. This is what our brave men are fighting for. They have not gone to the battle-field for the sake of killing and being killed; but they are fighting for liberty and equality. We ask the same for the black man that is asked for the white man; nothing more and nothing less.” In a “Bill of Wrongs and Rights,” the convention denounced colonization, called for immediate and universal emancipation, maintained the former slaves’ right to land, and demanded full citizenship for blacks throughout the country. Before adjourning, delegates set up the National Equal Rights League as an umbrella organization to fight for equality throughout the nation.¹¹²

Auxiliaries of the National Equal Rights League formed all across the country. In Tennessee, which sent several delegates to the Syracuse meeting, Memphis and Nashville became focal points of demands for equality. January 1865 found sixty-two “colored citizens of Nashville” petitioning the state’s white Unionist constitutional convention “to abolish the last vestige of slavery” by reinstating the right of “free colored men” to vote, a right that had existed in Tennessee until 1835. Blacks in New Orleans called for the formation of a local Equal Rights League to combat the injustices that “are daily practiced on our people.”¹¹³

Blacks had some success in gaining admission to schools, churches, streetcars, and other facilities from which they had long been barred. Segregation on New York City streetcars was lifted by court order after Ellen Anderson, a war widow, refused to leave a streetcar reserved for whites. Such successes were limited and local, and they did not include voting rights beyond those few that already existed. Indeed, it would have been political suicide for any politician to support extending the franchise to blacks. Lincoln himself mentioned the idea of limited black voting rights only twice – once in a private letter to Louisiana’s governor, the other during his last speech on April 11, 1865, to a crowd outside the White House.¹¹⁴

Although Lincoln hinted at supporting the right to vote for at least some blacks, it was never a priority. His only commitment regarding blacks was to emancipation, and even that seemed precarious at times. Adding to the confusion was a widely published speech by Secretary of State William Seward. Echoing Lincoln’s own earlier statements, in the summer of 1864, Seward publicly pronounced that “when the insurgents shall have disbanded their armies … all the war measures then existing, including those which affect slavery, will cease also.” Despite black hopes that he might do so, Lincoln refused to contradict Seward. It was an election year, and many northerners already viewed Lincoln as too “soft” on the “negro question.”¹¹⁵

With Lincoln ever waffling on slavery, many blacks and some sympathetic whites threw their support to John C. Frémont for president. His platform, with its call for “absolute equality,” was a far cry from that of Lincoln. A black soldier signing himself “Africano” wrote to the Anglo-African:

Mr. Lincoln’s policy … has always been one of a fickle-minded man – one who, holding anti-slavery principles in one hand and colonization in the other, always gave concessions to slavery when the Union could be preserved without touching the peculiar institution. Such a man is not again worthy [of] the votes of the voting portion of the colored race, when the intrepid Frémont … the well-known freedom-cherishing, negro-equalizing patriot, is the competitor.¹¹⁶

But Frémont was not the only other candidate in the race. Uncertain as blacks were on Lincoln’s position, there was no question about the Democrats’ policy. At their August 1864 convention, Democrats refused to support the emancipation amendment, which had already been blocked twice by Democrats in the House of Representatives. Even their support for maintaining the Union was considerably vague. They adopted a platform promising to halt the fighting, call a convention of all the states, and restore the Union. But the question of whether any Confederate state would send delegates to such a convention was left entirely aside. So was the question of slavery, although the Democratic nominee, George McClellan, did say that any state returning to the Union would receive a full guarantee of its constitutional rights. McClellan’s message to slaveholders was clear. Under his administration, their claim on slaves would be upheld.¹¹⁷

It was too much for many of the Radicals. Some began encouraging Frémont to drop out of the race. Even “Africano” wrote of Lincoln that “though we abhor him when we consider the many injustices he has allowed to be practiced on colored men, we cannot but think him a better object than George B. McClellan.”¹¹⁸ As weak as Lincoln was on anything but nominal freedom for blacks, his platform was at least committed on that point. McClellan, on the other hand, seemed determined to preserve slavery as a constitutional right. That was the last thing Frémont and the Radicals wanted.

Lincoln’s reelection chances improved with the fall of Atlanta on September 2, 1864. But fear remained that Frémont might draw enough Radical votes to give McClellan the presidency. After meeting twice in mid-September with a delegation from the White House asking him to withdraw, Frémont suspended his bid for the presidency and threw his support to Lincoln. “It became evident,” Frémont later explained, “that Mr. Lincoln could not be elected if I remained in the field.” And he may have been right. After one of the most racist campaigns in U. S. history – with Democrats charging that Lincoln wanted equality for blacks, and Republicans denying the accusation at every turn – Lincoln won the popular vote in November by no more than a questionable 10 percent margin.¹¹⁹

Although they had succeeded in keeping McClellan out of the White House, Radicals were hardly enthusiastic about giving Lincoln a second term. “When there was any shadow of a hope,” wrote Frederick Douglass in October 1864, “that a man of a more decided anti-slavery conviction and policy could be elected, I was not for Mr. Lincoln.” Still, Lincoln did stand by the party platform, pushing the House to approve the Senate’s antislavery amendment. Taking the election’s outcome as a referendum, House members finally passed the measure in a lame duck session on January 31,

Figure 4.5. Lincoln’s apparent willingness to backtrack on emancipation and his refusal to support equal rights led Frederick Douglass and other “radicals” to endorse John C. Frémont’s third-party presidential run in 1864. By September, when it appeared that his candidacy might throw the election to proslavery Democrat George McClellan, Frémont dropped out of the race. “When there was any shadow of a hope,” Douglass wrote in October, “that a man of a more decided anti-slavery conviction and policy could be elected, I was not for Mr. Lincoln.” Photo courtesy of the National Archives.

1865. With fifteen Democrats voting yea, resulting in two votes more than the two-thirds needed, the proposed Thirteenth Amendment went out to the states for ratification with Lincoln’s blessing. But that was as far as he was willing to go. He feared the consequences of publicly pressing any further. So he held to a lenient Reconstruction policy, including his Ten Percent Plan, and left the political and economic fate of southern blacks in the hands of their former owners.¹²⁰

Lincoln’s ambiguous attitude toward blacks mirrored that of most northern whites. How former slaves, and blacks generally, might fare in the war’s aftermath was not an overriding concern for them. Whatever liberties black folk might carve out for themselves in the postwar period would be, for the most part, of their own making.

¹ Selma (Ala.) Morning Reporter, August 29, 1863; Milledgeville (Ga.) Southern Recorder, November 25, 1862; Early County (Ga.) News, March 16, 1864; B. W. Clark to Gov. Joseph E. Brown, January 30, 1864, Governor’s Incoming Correspondence, Georgia Department of Archives and History, Morrow.

² John F. Andrews to Mrs. Clement Claiborne Clay [Virginia Tunstall Clay], July 10, 1863, Clay Papers, Duke University.

³ Eubanks to Brown, July 18, 1864, Governor’s Incoming Correspondence, Georgia Department of Archives and History; Edwards to Brown, January 8, 1864, ibid.; Petition from Ladies of the County of Schley to Brown, August [?] 1864, ibid.; Brooks to Brown, June 22, 1864, ibid.

⁴ Mrs. John Green to Gov. Joseph E. Brown, December 11, 1863, Governor’s Incoming Correspondence, Georgia Department of Archives and History; Bryan, Confederate Georgia, 126; Hadden, Slave Patrols, 186, 182.

⁵ W. B. Allen, in Rawick et al., American Slave, supplement, series 1, vol. 3, Georgia Narratives, part 1, 7–8.

⁶ Lizzie S. Neblett to William H. Neblett, August 13, 1863, in Murr, Diary and Letters of Elizabeth Scott Neblett, 135; Greensboro (Miss.) Southern Motive in Richmond Sentinel, June 2, 1864; Ida Henry, Oklahoma Narratives, 135; Bell Irvin Wiley, Plain People of the Confederacy (1943; reprint, with new introduction by Paul D. Escott, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000), 82; Charlie Moses, Mississippi Narratives, 115–16.

⁷ Watson, Winds of Sorrow, 13–14.

⁸ Mansfield to Joseph E. Brown, May 26, 1864, Governor’s Incoming Correspondence, Georgia Department of Archives and History; Richmond Examiner, June 13, 1864; Milledgeville (Ga.) Southern Recorder, October 6, 1863; Richmond Sentinel, June 2, 1864; Wadesboro (N.C.) Argus in Milledgeville (Ga.) Southern Recorder, December 27, 1864.

⁹ Columbus (Ga.) Daily Sun, July 15, 1861.

¹⁰ L. R. Ramsaur to Gov. Joseph E. Brown, December 14, 1861, Governor’s Incoming Correspondence, Georgia Department of Archives and History.

¹¹ Early County (Ga.) News in Augusta (Ga.) Constitutionalist, June 24, 1862.

¹² Sarah Jones to Gov. Joseph E. Brown, August 22, 1864, Governor’s Incoming Correspondence, Georgia Department of Archives and History; Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle and Sentinel, August 26, 1864; Columbus (Ga.) Daily Sun, August 27, 1864; Augusta (Ga.) Constitutionalist, August 26, 1864; Macon (Ga.) Daily Telegraph, August 26, 1864; Capt. Jos. John Williams to Gen. Howell Cobb [commanding, Middle District of Florida], January 11, 1863,Official Records, series 1, vol. 14, 752; Augusta (Ga.) Constitutionalist, August 24 and 31, 1864. See also Meyers, “‘The Wretch Vickery’ and the Brooks County Civil War Slave Conspiracy,” 27–38; Williams et al., Plain Folk in a Rich Man’s War, 144–50. In 2010, the Georgia Historical Society and the city of Quitman erected a marker in front of city hall commemorating the conspiracy.

¹³ Atlanta Southern Confederacy, December 19, 1862; Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers, 4; Aptheker, Slave Revolts, 363–64, 365–66.

¹⁴ J. B. Clements, History of Irwin County (1932; reprint, Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Co., 1997), 134–35; Clay County (Ga.) Superior Court, Minute Book, December Term, 1863; Lee County (Ga.) Superior Court, Minute Book C, September Term, 1863; William S. Kinsland, “The Civil War Comes to Lumpkin County,” North Georgia Journal 1 (1984): 24; Spruill Memorandum, November 17, 1862, Pettigrew Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in Durrill, War of Another Kind, 132–33; John M. Hough to William S. Pettigrew, August 12, 1864, Pettigrew Papers, in ibid., 132–33; Early County (Ga.) News, April 6, 1864; Criminal Action Papers, Granville County, North Carolina Department of Archives and History, in Victoria E. Bynum, Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 123.

¹⁵ Jane Lee, North Carolina Narratives, part 2, 52; Atlanta Southern Confederacy, October 4, 1862; Gov. John Gill Shorter of Alabama to Confederate Sec. of War James A. Seddon, January 14, 1863, Official Records, series 1, vol. 15, 947.

¹⁶ Brig. Gen. John P. Hatch to Maj. Gen. J. G. Foster [commanding, Department of the South], August 4, 1864, Official Records, series 1, vol. 35, part 2, 215; Brig. Gen. John K. Jackson [Military District of Florida] to Gen. S. Cooper, August 12, 1864, ibid., 607.

¹⁷ Philadelphia Inquirer, August 18, 1862; Berlin et al., Remembering Slavery, 227–28, 264–65; Jacob Branch, Texas Narratives, 141.

¹⁸ National Anti-Slavery Standard, December 27, 1862; Margaret Espey to Joseph S. Espey, March 21 and April 3, 1864, Joseph Espey Papers, Southern Historical Collection, in Clarence L. Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 87–88.

¹⁹ Massey to Gov. Joseph E. Brown, March 9, 1865, Governor’s Incoming Correspondence, Georgia Department of Archives and History; Early County (Ga.) News, April 6, 1864.

²⁰ Richmond Daily Examiner, January 14, 1864; Christopher Flinn et al. [South Carolina slaveholders] to Confederate Sec. of War James A. Seddon, March [?] 1864, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 806–807.

²¹ Capt. Samuel E. Hope [Confederate officer] to Capt. W. Call [Headquarters, Confederate District of Florida], September 8, 1863, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 805–806; Statement of Washington Somerroy [Florida fugitive], November 26, 1864, in ibid., 142–43.

²² Victoria E. Bynum, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 109–10.

²³ Margaret M. Storey, Loyalty and Loss: Alabama’s Unionists in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), 80.

²⁴ Augusta (Ga.) Constitutionalist, May 5, 1864; Testimony of Nancy Johnson, Southern Claims Commission, March 22, 1873, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 151.

²⁵ Richardson, The Secret Service, 445.

²⁶ Taylor, Reminiscences, 68.

²⁷ Thomas G. Dyer, Secret Yankees: The Union Circle in Confederate Atlanta (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 88–89; Testimony of Nancy Johnson, Southern Claims Commission, March 22, 1873, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 151.

²⁸ John Azor Kellogg, Capture and Escape: A Narrative of Army and Prison Life (n.p.: Wisconsin Historical Commission, 1908), 146–47, 149; Larke and Day to provost marshal general, Department of the South, December 7, 1864, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 809–10.

²⁹ John W. Ennis, Adventures in Rebeldom; or, Ten Months Experience of Prison Life (New York: Business Mirror, 1863), 32–33; Henry L. Estabrooks, Adrift in Dixie; or, A Yankee Officer Among the Rebels (New York: Carleton, 1866), 74–78.

³⁰ Estabrooks, Adrift in Dixie, 11–12.

³¹ Junius Henri Browne, Four Years in Secessia: Adventures within and beyond the Union Lines (Hartford, Conn.: O. D. Case and Co., 1865), 368.

³² Testimony of Alonzo Jackson, Southern Claims Commission, March 17, 1873, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 813–18.

³³ Col. Charles H. Abbott [commanding an Iowa regiment] to Col. Jno. A. Rawlins [Headquarters, Department of Tennessee], March 26, 1863, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 302–303; Affidavit of Jack [Mississippi fugitive], September 13, 1864, in ibid., 325; Col. Jno. C. Kelton [Headquarters, Second Brigade, Second Division, Army of the West] to assistant adjutant-general [Headquarters, Army of the West], October 6, 1861, Official Records, series 2, vol. 1, 772.

³⁴ Capt. Thomas H. Francis [Fourth Tennessee Infantry] to Brig. Gen. F. A. Shoup [chief of staff, Army of Tennessee], September 15, 1864, Official Records, series 1, vol. 38, part 3, 973–74; William Douglas Hamilton, Recollections of a Cavalryman of the Civil War (Columbus, Ohio: F. J. Heer Printing, 1915), 137; Celestia Avery, Georgia Narratives, part 1, 26.

³⁵ P. H. Aylett [Confederate district attorney] to Brig. Gen. John Winder, March 15, 1865, Official Records, series 2, vol. 6, 1053; Harper’s Weekly (New York), March 28, 1863.

³⁶ Vincent Colyer, A Brief Report of Services Rendered by the Freed People to the United States Army in North Carolina in the Spring of 1862 after the Battle of Newbern (New York: V. Colyer, 1864), 25.

³⁷ Crabtree and Patton, Diary of Catherine Anne Devereaux Edmondston, 463.

³⁸ Colyer, Brief Report of the Services Rendered by the Freed People, 9.

³⁹ Poole, South Carolina’s Civil War, 104; Ervin L. Jordan Jr., Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 284; Elizabeth R. Varon, Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 165–68; William Gilmore Beymer, “Miss Van Lew,” Harper’s Monthly (June 1911), 90. See also Lois Leveen, “A Black Spy in the Confederate White House,” New York Times, June 21, 2012.

⁴⁰ John Truesdale, The Blue Coats and How They Lived, Fought, and Died for the Union (Philadelphia: Jones Brothers and Co., 1867), 132–34.

⁴¹ Montgomery Weekly Mail, September 2, 1863, in Robert F. Durden, The Gray and the Black: The Confederate Debate on Emancipation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), 32–34.

⁴² Cleburne et al. to Gen. Joseph E. Johnston [commanding, Army of Tennessee], January 2, 1864, Official Records, series 1, vol. 52, part 2, 586–92. Quote found on page 590.

⁴³ Cobb to Confederate Sec. of War James A. Seddon, January 8, 1865, Official Records, series 4, vol. 3, 1009–10; George H. Hepworth, The Whip, Hoe, and Sword: or, The Gulf-Department in ‘63 (Boston: Walker, Wise, and Co., 1864), 187.

⁴⁴ Lee to Hon. Andrew Hunter [Virginia state senator], January 11, 1865, Official Records, series 4, vol. 3, 1012–13.

⁴⁵ Joseph F. Maides to mother, February 18, 1865, Maides Papers, Duke University, in McPherson, What They Fought For, 55.

⁴⁶ Resolutions of the Eighteenth Virginia Infantry, February 20, 1865, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 297–98; Resolutions of Thomas’s Brigade, February 10, 1865, Telamon Cuyler Collection, University of Georgia, Athens, in Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom, 278; Maj. Gen. John B. Gordon to Col. W. H. Taylor [assistant adjutant-general, Army of Northern Virginia], February 18, 1865, Official Records, series 1, vol. 51, part 2, 1063; Edward Porter Alexander to wife, February 21, 1865, Edward Porter Alexander Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom, 278.

⁴⁷ Ann K. Blomquist and Robert A. Taylor, eds., This Cruel War: The Civil War Letters of Grant and Malinda Taylor, 1861–1865 (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2000), 322–23.

⁴⁸ General Orders No. 14, Adjutant and Inspector General’s Office, Richmond, March 23, 1865, Official Records, series 4, vol. 3, 1161–62; Columbus (Ga.) Daily Sun, March 22, 1865. For the most recent and complete treatment of the subject see Bruce Levine, Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

⁴⁹ Christian Recorder, May 28, 1864.

⁵⁰ North American Review (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865), 101: 4; Weekly Vincennes (Ind.) Western Sun, January 3, 1863; Liberator, July 25, 1862.

⁵¹ Liberator, December 12, 1862; Shaw to mother, July 4, 1863, in Duncan, Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune, 373. For a treatment of what the first few years of freedom meant to the former slaves at Port Royal see Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (New York: Vintage Books, 1964).

⁵² Wilson A. Norman to Josiah Collins, June 28, 1863, George Spruill to Collins, May 16, 1863, Girard W. Phelps to Collins, March 14, 1863, Joseph W. Murphy to Collins, May 30, 1863, Josiah Collins Papers, North Carolina Division of Archives and History, in Durrill, War of Another Kind, 141; 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.

⁵³ Capt. Chas. B. Wilder [superintendent of Negro Affairs, First District of the Department of Virginia and North Carolina] to Maj. George J. Carney [general superintendent of Negro Affairs in the department], December 30, 1864, in Berlin et al., Upper South, 217; Cimprich, Slavery’s End in Tennessee, 71.

⁵⁴ Eaton [general superintendent of freedmen, Department of Mississippi and State of Arkansas] to Sec. of the Treasury W. P. Fessenden, January 31, 1865, in Berlin et al., Lower South, 871–72; George F. Weston to sir, February 2, 1863, New Bern Occupation Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in Durrill, War of Another Kind, 144.

⁵⁵ Statutes at Large, 13: 737–39; Statutes at Large, 12: 422–26; Syrett, Confiscation Acts, 123–24, 137.

⁵⁶ A Freedman’s Speech (Philadelphia: Friends Association, n.d. [1866?]), Printed Ephemera Collection, Portfolio 159, Folder 14b, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress.

⁵⁷ Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 52–53; Berlin et al., Lower South, 103. The best treatment of northern speculation in southern plantations is Lawrence N. Powell, New Masters: Northern Planters during the Civil War and Reconstruction (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980).

⁵⁸ M. French to Hon. Mr. Lewis [commissioner of internal revenue], February 23, 1864, in Berlin et al., Lower South, 291–92; Saxton to Edwin M. Stanton, December 7, 1862, in ibid., 220; Gen. John P. Hawkins [commanding, District of Northeastern Louisiana] to Hon. Gerritt Smith, October 21, 1863, in ibid., 743; Testimony of Hon. F. W. Bird, American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, December 24, 1863, in Berlin et al., Upper South, 180–81.

⁵⁹ Wm. Henry Brisbane [direct tax commissioner] to Joseph J. Lewis [commissioner of internal revenue], December 12, 1863, in Berlin et al., Lower South, 276; Lt. Col. Ed. W. Smith [Headquarters, Department of the South] to Messrs. Brisbane, Wording, and Smith [direct-tax commissioners for South Carolina], February 25, 1864, in ibid., 293–94; E. P. Hutchinson [northern businessman] to Hon J. B. Alley [Massachusetts congressman], March 2, 1864, in ibid., 307.

⁶⁰ A. A. [acting assistant] Surgeon L. D. Seymour to Lt. Col. J. B. Kinsman, May 18, 1864, in Berlin et al., Upper South, 105–106.

⁶¹ George S. Denison [collector of internal revenue] to Sec. of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, October 23, 1863, in Berlin et al., Lower South, 471–73; General Orders No. 12, Department of the South, December 20, 1862, in ibid., 223; Testimony of Capt. E. W. Hooper, American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, June 1863, in ibid., 239; Richard Soule Jr. to Edward L. Pierce, March 29, 1862, in ibid., 179.

⁶² Henry Norvall et al. [Louisiana freedmen] to Brig. Gen. James Bowen [provost marshal general, Department of the Gulf], April 5, 1863, in Berlin et al., Lower South, 438–39.

⁶³ Berlin et al., Upper South, 96; Berlin et al., Lower South, 645; Adm. David D. Porter [commanding, Mississippi Squadron] to Gen. Lorenzo Thomas, October 21, 1863, in ibid., 747; William Burnet to W. P. Mellen, January [?] 1864, in ibid., 639.

⁶⁴ Hepworth, Whip, Hoe, and Sword, 30; Berlin et al., Upper South, 560; Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 412; Berlin et al., Lower South, 105, 623.

⁶⁵ Berlin et al., Lower South, 369; A. A. Surgeon John F. Tallon to Hon. B. Flanders [supervising agent of the Treasury Department, Fifth Agency], January 9, 1864, in ibid., 511; Capt. Jas. White to Capt. Sterns, August 24, 1864, in ibid., 544; Gen. John P. Hawkins to Hon. Gerritt Smith, October 21, 1863, in ibid., 742–43; Powell, New Masters, 90–91.

⁶⁶ George C. Strong [assistant adjutant-general and chief of staff, Department of the Gulf] to Gen. G. Weitzel [commanding, District of the Teche], November 2, 1862, Official Records, series 1, vol. 15, 162–63; Berlin et al., Lower South, 355; Gen. James Bowen to Capt. Kilburn [provost marshal of Orleans Parish, Louisiana], March 5, 14, and 18, 1863, in ibid., 431; Maj. Julian E. Bryant [inspecting officer, District of Northeastern Louisiana] to [Headquarters, District of Northeastern Louisiana], October 10, 1863, in ibid., 729; Hepworth, Whip, Hoe, and Sword, 27; James H. Ingraham and Dr. A. W. Lewis et al. to Gen. S. A. Hurlbut [commanding, Department of the Gulf], March 21, 1865, in ibid., 595.

⁶⁷ Capt. John W. Ela [provost marshal, Jefferson Parish, Louisiana] to Gen. James Bowen [provost marshal general, Department of the Gulf], June 11, 1863, in Berlin et al., Lower South, 455–56; Testimony of Col. George H. Hanks, American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, February 6, 1864, in ibid., 518; Unsigned, undated to Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks [February 1863?], in Louis S. Gerteis, From Contraband to Freedman: Federal Policy toward Southern Blacks, 1861–1865 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973), 90; Hepworth, Whip, Hoe, and Sword, 29–30.

⁶⁸ General Orders No. 46, Headquarters, Department of Virginia and North Carolina, December 5, 1863, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 135–36; Chaplain Samuel Sawyer [superintendent of contrabands, District of Eastern Arkansas] to Gen. Samuel R. Curtis [commanding, Department of the Missouri], January 26, 1863, enclosing Samuel Sawyer et al. [committee of chaplains and surgeons] to Gen. Curtis, December 29, 1862, in Berlin et al., Lower South, 675; Cannaday to [Sec. of State William Seward], May 3, 1865, in Berlin et al., Upper South, 239.

⁶⁹ Lt. Charles L. Stevens [guard commander, Kenner, Louisiana] to Lt. J. H. Metcalf [Headquarters, Third Brigade, Second Division, Department of the Gulf], January 27, 1863, enclosed in Col. F. S. Nickerson [commanding a brigade] to Capt. A. Badeau [Headquarters, Defenses of New Orleans], January 28, 1863, in Berlin et al., Lower South, 410–14.

⁷⁰ Testimony of Lewis Johnson, January [?], 1864, in Berlin et al., Upper South, 295–96; Freedmen of Roanoke Island, N.C., to Mr. President, March 9, 1865, and Freedmen of Roanoke Island to [Edwin M. Stanton], March 9, 1865, in ibid., 231–35; Testimony of Mrs. Louisa Jane Barker [Union chaplain’s wife], January [?], 1864, in ibid., 312.

⁷¹ General Orders No. 6, Headquarters, Department of the Cumberland, January 27, 1863, in Berlin et al., Upper South, 390–91; Circular, Headquarters, Department of the Gulf, February 6, 1863, in Berlin et al., Lower South, 419.

⁷² Capt. Chas. B. Wagner [aide of the chief quartermaster] to Brig. Gen. Rufus Ingalls [chief quartermaster], June 15, 1863, in Berlin et al., Upper South, 154–55; General Orders No. 75, Headquarters, District of Memphis, July 17, 1863, in Berlin et al., Lower South, 714–15; Testimony of Maj. George L. Stearns, American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, November 23, 1863, in Berlin et al., Upper South, 416; Order, Health Office, March 19, 1864, in Berlin et al., Lower South, 814–15.

⁷³ Bowen to Capt. C. W. Killborn [provost marshal, Orleans Parish], March 5, 1863, in Berlin et al., Lower South, 431; S. W. Ringgold et al. [Louisiana free blacks] to the generals commanding the District and Department of the Gulf, December 1864, in ibid., 570–71; Rev. Asa Prescott [northern minister] to Edwin M. Stanton, July 11, 1863, in Berlin et al., Upper South, 157.

⁷⁴ Rev. Asa Prescott to Edwin M. Stanton, July 11, 1863, in Berlin et al., Upper South, 157; Ned Baxter et al. [North Carolina freedmen] to Maj. Gen. Butler, September 1864, in ibid., 202–203; Roanoke Island [freedmen] to Mr. President, March 9, 1865, in ibid., 231–32.

⁷⁵ Rev. Lewis C. Lockwood [northern minister] to U. S. Senator Henry Wilson of Mass., January 29, 1862, in Berlin et al., Upper South, 112–13; Affidavit of Suthey Parker, September 2, 1865, in ibid., 110–11.

⁷⁶ Berlin et al., Upper South, 275; Col. Wm. Treudail [chief of police, Nashville] to Maj. Gen. Rosecrans [commanding, Department of the Cumberland], March 7, 1863, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 301; Rosecrans endorsement of Gen. J. St. C. Morton to Maj. J. D. Kurtz, April 29, 1863, Official Records, series 1, vol. 23, part 2, 290–91.

⁷⁷ Berlin et al., Upper South, 255–56.

⁷⁸ A. A. Surgeon W. J. Randolph to Hon. Austin Smith, April 28, 1864, enclosed in Austin Smith to Hon. S. P. Chase, May 14, 1864, in Berlin et al., Lower South, 312–13; W. P. Fessenden to Albert G. Browne, Esq., October 19, 1864, in ibid., 313.

⁷⁹ Testimony of Samuel Larkin, Southern Claims Commission, February 9, 1872, in Berlin et al., Upper South, 403–404.

⁸⁰ Chaplain J. I. Herrick to Brig. Gen. N. B. Buford [commanding, District of Eastern Arkansas], November 30, 1864, in Berlin et al., Lower South, 861–63.

⁸¹ G. R. Smith [civil official, Sedalia, Missouri] to Gen. E. B. Brown [commanding, District of Central Missouri], March 16, 1864, in Berlin et al., Upper South, 590–91; Col. Samuel M. Wirt [Missouri militia officer] to Brig. Gen. Clinton B. Fisk [commanding, District of North Missouri], April 20, 1864, in ibid., 604; Samuel Sawyer [superintendent of contrabands at St. Louis] to Maj. Gen. Curtis, April 18, 1863, in ibid., 568–69; F. T. Russell [resident of Columbia, Missouri] to [commanding general, District of North Missouri], February 21, 1865, in ibid., 616.

⁸² An Act to prevent certain negroes and mulattoes from migrating to or remaining in this State, March 2, 1863, Acts of Kentucky, 1861–1863, in Berlin et al., Destruction of Slavery, 504; An Act concerning runaway slaves, March 2, 1863, Acts of Kentucky, 1861–1863, in ibid., 504–505; Mittimus by a Jefferson County justice of the peace, February 17, 1863, and excerpt from Bullitt County Court records of sale of slaves, April 13 and May 18, 1863, in ibid., 568–70.

⁸³ Congressional Globe, Thirty-Seventh Congress, Third Session (1862), Appendix, 32.

⁸⁴ Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862, in Basler et al., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 5: 535–36.

⁸⁵ National Anti-Slavery Standard, March 19, 1864; A. Lincoln to William H. Seward, January 6, 1863, in Basler et al., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 6: 41–42. See also Warren A. Beck, “Lincoln and Negro Colonization in Central America,” Abraham Lincoln Quarterly 6 (September 1950): 162–83; Paul J. Scheips, “Lincoln and the Chirqui Colonization Project,” Journal of Negro History 36 (1952): 418–53.

⁸⁶ Benjamin F. Butler, Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences (Boston: A. M. Thayer and Co., 1892), 903. Some scholars have expressed doubt that these were Lincoln’s words. Nevertheless, the passage certainly reflects fears that he had previously voiced. The most insightful analysis of Lincoln’s probable thoughts on colonization at the time of his meeting with Butler is found in Magness and Page, Colonization after Emancipation, 109–16.

⁸⁷ Columbus (Ohio) Crisis, April 30 and October 29, 1862; Springfield Illinois Daily State Journal, August 16, 1862.

⁸⁸ Weekly Vincennes (Ind.) Western Sun, October 25, 1862.

⁸⁹ Narrative of Sojourner Truth; A Bondswoman of Olden Time (1878; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 139–40. Truth’s most complete biography is Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).

⁹⁰ Leslie A. Schwalm, “‘Overrun with Free Negroes’: Emancipation and Wartime Migration in the Upper Midwest,” Civil War History 50 (2004): 166.

⁹¹ Brig. Gen. N. B. Buford to Edwin M. Stanton, April 25, 1863, Official Records, series 2, vol. 5, 521; Voegeli, Free But Not Equal, 89–90.

⁹² George W. Julian, Political Recollections, 1840 to 1872 (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, and Co., 1884), 230.

⁹³ Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, December 8, 1863, in Basler et al., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 7: 53–56.

⁹⁴ Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, December 8, 1863, in Basler et al., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 7: 54; McPherson, Political History of the United States of America, during the Great Rebellion, 412.

⁹⁵ New Orleans L’Union, April 9, 1864; A. Lincoln to Michael Hahn, March 13, 1864, in Basler et al., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 7: 243; A. Lincoln to Stephen A. Hurlbut, November 14, 1864, in ibid., 8: 107.

⁹⁶ New Orleans Tribune, August 11 and 13, 1864; P. M. Tourne to John F. Collins, August 12, 1864, and Thomas W. Conway to Dr. J. B. Foudenez, August 19, 1864, Nathaniel P. Banks Papers, Library of Congress, in Ripley, Slaves and Freedmen in Civil War Louisiana, 175.

⁹⁷ Foner, Reconstruction, 60–61. See also Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 143–44, 150–51.

⁹⁸ Liberator, September 16, 1864; Anglo-African, August 20, 1864. Smith simply signed the initial “S” in his letters to the Anglo-African.

⁹⁹ Lincoln to McClernand, January 8, 1863, in Basler et al., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 6: 48–49. For an early reference by Lincoln to apprenticeship see “Drafts of a Bill for Compensated Emancipation in Delaware,” November [26?], 1861, in ibid., 5: 29–31.

¹⁰⁰ New York Tribune, June 1, 1864.

¹⁰¹ T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and the Radicals (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1941), 315–16. As early as the mid-term elections of 1862, many Republicans and War Democrats, especially in the Midwest and Border states, ran as Unionists. See Adam I. P. Smith, No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 57–63, 90–92, 101–23, 135–53.

¹⁰² For involvement of white women in the wartime abolitionist movement see Wendy Hamand Venet, Neither Ballots nor Bullets: Women Abolitionists and the Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991).

¹⁰³ McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 125–26; Vorenberg, Final Freedom, 80–81. There were some abolitionists, blacks among them, who thought that pushing for an emancipation amendment might be wasted effort. Some feared reviving old arguments about whether the Constitution was a proslavery document. Others felt that slavery was already dead in any case and that efforts should be focused on obtaining black equality. See Speeches and Letters of Gerrit Smith (New York: American News Co., 1865), 2: 5; Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 5: 268–71.

¹⁰⁴ Congressional Globe, Thirty-Eighth Congress, First Session (1864), 536.

¹⁰⁵ Congressional Globe, Thirty-Eighth Congress, First Session (1864), 1422, 1424.

¹⁰⁶ Chicago Tribune, April 10, 1864; Congressional Globe, Thirty-Eighth Congress, First Session (1864), 1490.

¹⁰⁷ A. Lincoln to Isaac M. Schermerhorn, September 12, 1864, in Basler et al., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 8: 1–2.

¹⁰⁸ Congressional Globe, Thirty-Eighth Congress, First Session (1864), 2977–95.

¹⁰⁹ Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 5: 321; Jean-Charles Houzeau, My Passage at the New Orleans Tribune: A Memoir of the Civil War Era, ed. David C. Rankin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 92.

¹¹⁰ Rock to the Soldiers of the Fifth Regiment, United States Colored Heavy Artillery, May 30, 1864, George Ruffin Papers, Howard University, Washington, D.C., in Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers, 5: 274; Christian Recorder, June 11 and August 27, 1864; Burden to Abraham Lincoln, February 2, 1865, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 647–48. Like so many blacks who had the nerve to do such a thing, Burden wrote his letter to Lincoln with some trepidation. Near his conclusion, he asked Lincoln not to “get mad with what I say for I Don’t mene any harme.” Still, as a soldier with his life on the line, he felt he deserved an answer. Burden asked the president to “rite soon if you pleze and let me know how you feel.” There was no reply.

¹¹¹ Anglo-African, September 26 and March 7, 1863; Voegeli, Free But Not Equal, 165.

¹¹² Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men, Held in the City of Syracuse, N.Y., October 4, 5, 6, and 7, 1864; with the Bill of Wrongs and Rights, and the Address to the American People (Boston: George C. Rand and Avery, 1864). John Rock’s speech appears on pages 23–25.

¹¹³ “Petition of the Colored Citizens of Nashville,” January 9, 1865, in Berlin et al., Black Military Experience, 811–16; New Orleans Tribune, January 3, 1865.

¹¹⁴ Iver Bernstein, “Securing Freedom: The Challenges of Black Life in Civil War New York,” in Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris, eds., Slavery in New York (New York: New Press, 2005), 319–20; Basler et al., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 8: 403.

¹¹⁵ Escott, What Shall We Do with the Negro?, 131–32; A. Lincoln to Charles D. Robinson, August 17, 1864, in Basler et al., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 7: 499–501. Basler suggests that Lincoln’s letter may not have been sent.

¹¹⁶ Anglo-African, August 6, 1864.

¹¹⁷ Smith, No Party Now, 117–20; Stephen W. Sears, George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon (New York: Da Capo Press, 1999), 376.

¹¹⁸ Anglo-African, September 24, 1864.

¹¹⁹ Allan Nevins, War for the Union, vol. 4, The Organized War to Victory (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), 105–106; Shankman, Pennsylvania Antiwar Movement, 201–202; Adam I. P. Smith, “Beyond Politics: Patriotism and Partisanship on the Northern Home Front,” in Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, eds., An Uncommon Time: The Civil War and the Northern Home Front (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 151–52; William B. Hesseltine, Lincoln’s Plan of Reconstruction (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), 30.

¹²⁰ Douglass to Theodore Tilton, October 15, 1864, in Foner, Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, 3: 424; Annual Message to Congress, December 6, 1864, in Basler et al., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 149; Congressional Globe, Thirty-Eighth Congress, Second Session (1865), 523–31.