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

  UPHEAVAL IN THE BORDER STATES

  When the war began, secessionists were a potent political force in three of the four Border States. Supporters of the Confederacy initially dominated the legislatures in Maryland and Missouri. In two states—Kentucky and Missouri—defeated secessionists established rump legislatures, both of which were immediately recognized by the Confederate States of America. Beyond the legislative halls, secessionists often flexed their muscle through their control of local police and militia companies—bulwarks of southern slave society and, in effect, the military arm of the slaveholding class. Pro-Confederate police rioted in the streets of Baltimore and St. Louis. Police and local militias became centers for the recruitment of Confederate regiments from the loyal slave states. Until these secessionists were politically vanquished and militarily suppressed, neither Congress nor the administration could formulate a coherent policy for attacking slavery in these three states and Delaware.

  Brute military force was indispensible to the triumph of unionism in most of the Border States. Delaware alone lacked a viable secessionist faction at the outset of the war, and it remained distinctive because it was never really disrupted by the presence of Union or Confederate troops. In Maryland, by contrast, the Union army was everywhere from the earliest days of the war, and it disrupted slavery wherever it went. Heavy military thumbs also tipped the scales in favor of Maryland unionists. Yankee troops threatened to shut down the legislature, and Union soldiers were stationed at polling places where they intimidated secessionist voters. Kentucky offered still another variation. Having declared its neutrality at the outset, Kentucky had neither Union nor Confederate troops within its borders for the first five months of the war. But an ill-starred Confederate invasion in September led to a series of battles that ended in the expulsion of Confederate forces from Kentucky in early 1862. The military threat persisted, but the threat of secession was over. The most violent struggles between unionists and secessionists took place in Missouri. By midsummer of 1861 political conflict gave way to open warfare that lasted until March of 1862. After their defeat at Pea Ridge, however, Confederate troops did not launch a significant invasion of Missouri until the fall of 1864. The military defeat of the secessionists in the Border States provided ample proof, if such proof were needed, that war was politics by other means.

  Political struggles in turn reflected basic social divisions within each of the Border States. In Maryland a sectional divide, pitting north against south, appeared on that state’s map with nearly as much clarity as it did on the map of the United States. The southern counties hugging the eastern and especially the western shores of Chesapeake Bay were the most rural, the most committed to slavery, and the most deeply engaged in the production of staple crops cultivated from the labor of slaves. The more economically diversified counties with few slaves stretched northward from Baltimore to form a straight edge along the Pennsylvania border, the famous Mason-Dixon Line.2

  When the war began in April of 1861, pro-southern Democrats dominated the Maryland state legislature. Secession sympathizers also controlled the Baltimore police, who sat on a cache of arms and ammunition so large it “resembled a concealed arsenal.” A week after the capture of Fort Sumter, a Baltimore mob attacked Union soldiers on their way to Washington. Anxious to stir up disunion sentiment, the Baltimore police chief wired the state’s attorney that the city streets were running “red with Maryland blood.” He invited “riflemen” from “over the mountains of Maryland and Virginia” to head for Baltimore “without delay” and join the struggle against the invading Yankees. “Fresh hordes will be down on us tomorrow. We will fight them and whip them or die.”3 Frightened by the Baltimore riot, Maryland’s timorous Governor Thomas H. Hicks tried to assuage the secessionist mob by ordering the destruction of bridges and rail lines and the obstruction of waterways, all to prevent the further passage of any Union troops rushing from the North to protect Washington. Hicks pleaded with federal officials to recognize the secession of the southern states and suggested British mediation of the dispute.

  But Hicks was not a secessionist, and neither were most Marylanders. Within days of the Baltimore riot, the state’s unionist majority launched a counterattack. “A great reaction has set in,” Henry Winter Davis wrote to William Seward. “If we act promptly the day is ours and the city is safe.”4 Lincoln did act promptly, suspending the writ of habeas corpus along the rail lines running through the state. Benjamin Butler arrived a few weeks later and made an impressive show of force in Baltimore. By the end of April, the pro-southern legislature was reduced to issuing defiant pronunciamentos, but it didn’t dare pass an ordinance of secession. A potent combination of forces—a unionist governor backed by a unionist electorate backed by a firm federal first—had effectively thwarted Maryland’s secessionists.

  On June 13, unionists scored major victories in Maryland’s special congressional elections. They did even better in the November balloting, when a unionist candidate for governor overwhelmed his pro-southern opponent while unionists won control of the lower House of Delegates by a landslide. Even in the state Senate—grossly malapportioned to favor the most conservative slaveholding districts—a slight unionist majority took control. The state bureaucracy was quickly cleansed of secessionists as loyalty to the Union became the de facto requirement for all patronage appointments. Reinforcing the electoral victory of the unionists was the departure of many of the state’s most ardent secessionists. Thousands went south, offering their services to the Confederacy. The state’s attorney, Bradley T. Johnson, would shortly defect and become a Confederate general. Colonel Isaac R. Trimble, who had come rapidly to the assistance of the Baltimore mob, also defected to the southern cause. By the end of the year Maryland’s secessionists were vanquished.

  AS IN MARYLAND, MISSOURI’S social and political divisions were etched visibly on the state’s map. A potent slaveholding class had colonized the rich bottom lands along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Yet St. Louis was fast becoming an industrial and commercial center, a railroad hub, with a rapidly growing immigrant community—including a large contingent of radical Germans—that helped sustain a politically active working class. Throughout the 1850s the Democratic Party in Missouri was bitterly divided between a proslavery majority and a vocal minority led by Senator Thomas Hart Benton, who, along with Congressman Frank Blair Jr., opposed the expansion of slavery. Both were blackballed by their party for their apostasy, and by 1856 Blair had gone over to the Republicans. In 1860 the proslavery forces controlled the Democratic Party machinery and nominated the secessionist Claiborne F. Jackson for governor on a proslavery platform endorsing the unlimited expansion of slavery. Jackson won.5

  In early January of 1861 the new governor called for a secession convention with the announcement that Missouri could best serve its interests “by a timely declaration of her determination to stand by her sister slave-holding states.” A majority of Missourians, however, opposed secession, and in the delegate elections held on February 18, the unionists triumphed overwhelmingly, 110,000 to 30,000. Some of that unionism was “conditional,” but not a single overt secessionist was chosen. The convention met in St. Louis on March 4, and the proceedings were dominated by the staunch unionist Hamilton R. Gamble; at his urging, the delegates refused to do anything more than recommend a sectional compromise. The convention adjourned without even considering secession as an option. It looked as though the governor and his pro-southern legislature were thwarted.6

  But Governor Jackson was a most determined secessionist. After the firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, Lincoln asked Missouri to supply four thousand troops to suppress the rebellion, and Jackson ostentatiously refused to comply. Acting swiftly, Frank Blair—relying on his powerful family connections in Washington—instead arranged for Union Captain Nathaniel Lyon to muster the St. Louis Home Guards, thereby fulfilling Missouri’s quota. Lyon’s troops took control of the federal arsenal just south of the city, snatching the weapons
from the secessionist militia loyal to the governor. Undeterred by the loss of the arsenal, Governor Jackson requested a shipment of arms from Confederate President Jefferson Davis, who promptly complied. The arms arrived on May 8, at Camp Jackson, recently established and occupied by seven hundred secessionist militiamen. Two days later, Lyon, with thousands of men now at his disposal, took control of the camp and arrested all seven hundred men. But the march back to St. Louis turned into a fiasco as mobs of angry citizens, shouting, “Hurrah for Jeff Davis,” hurled rocks at Lyon’s troops. The troops fired into the crowd and twenty-one people were killed. That night secessionists rioted through the streets of St. Louis, just as their counterparts were doing back in Baltimore.

  In Jefferson City the governor wasted no time using the attack on Camp Jackson to persuade the state legislature to grant him absolute power over the state militia and the funds to organize them. Jackson pressured the state’s mostly pro-Confederate bankers to finance his rebellion. Lyon’s attack also converted many conditional unionists into secessionists, among them former governor Sterling Price. Jackson appointed Price to be major general in charge of the State Guard, and hundreds of volunteers streamed into Jefferson City to join up. Like Jackson, Lyon rejected all efforts at conciliation. Rather than concede the right of any Missouri official “to dictate to my government in any manner,” Lyon declared, he would see “every man, woman, and child in the State, dead and buried. This means war.”7 And so it did. Lyon invaded Jefferson City, but the governor and legislature had fled the state capital and, along with thousands of volunteers, joined up with the State Guard assembling at Boonville under General Price.

  With Missouri’s capital abandoned, the secession convention reconvened, deposed both the governor and the secessionist legislature, and became the de facto Provisional Government with Hamilton Gamble as acting governor. Widely respected, even by pro-southern conservatives, Gamble also had influence with the Lincoln administration through his brother-in-law and former law partner, Attorney General Edward Bates. Lincoln immediately recognized the Provisional Government, but five days before Gamble assumed his duties as acting governor, Lincoln’s newly appointed commander of the Department of the West, John C. Frémont, arrived in Missouri to assume his duties as well. Missouri now had three competing systems of authority: an insurgent governor and legislature on the loose but backed by a pro-Confederate army, a rickety civilian government headed by Governor Gamble, and a military department commanded by General Frémont. The situation required nothing if not cooperation among unionists.

  FRÉMONT AND CIVILIAN RULE

  Frémont had never been the cooperative type. A rebellious streak already evident in his youth—he was expelled from the College of Charleston for “continued disregard of discipline”—was magnified by later success.8 That success was nonetheless splendid for having originated in nepotism. In 1841 Senator Benton had arranged for Frémont, Benton’s son-in-law, to lead a government-sponsored expedition to survey and map the Oregon Trail. Two years later Frémont and his wife, the indomitable Jessie Benton Frémont, published a report of their explorations, an account so engaging and popular that Frémont immediately set out on another military expedition—this time through the Southwest, across the Sierra Nevada into California, and back—a thrilling fourteen-month voyage capped by another report that sealed Frémont’s heroic reputation as “The Pathfinder.”

  He was not one to wear his fame with humility. The reckless youth had grown into an irresponsible man with an imperious disposition and penchant for insubordination. During his second western expedition, Frémont had headed for the Southwest, disregarding explicit orders not to do so. Contempt for authority was one thing in a civilian, but Frémont was still an officer in the U.S. Army, and when, on his third expedition, he went up against Stephen Watts Kearny, his commanding general in California, Kearny had Frémont court-martialed. Despite powerful political support and his own immense popularity with the public, Frémont was found guilty and expelled from the army. Two more privately financed expeditions ensued, both disastrous. In 1848 one-third of his party died trapped in the snowy mountains of southern Colorado. Frémont blamed his guide, but many of the survivors blamed Frémont. Five years later the calamity nearly repeated itself. A brilliant topographical engineer with a flair for self-promotion and a gift for dramatic storytelling, Frémont was nevertheless undone by an inflated opinion of his own greatness and a dictatorial style that made him incompetent as a leader of men.

  He went into politics. As California’s first senator—he took his seat during the tumultuous debates over slavery that led to the Compromise of 1850—Frémont voted for the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia and against stiff penalties for harboring fugitive slaves. Nevertheless by 1856 his political profile was still so obscure that both Democrats and Republicans wooed him as their presidential candidate, chiefly because of his reputation as an explorer. Because his instincts were antislavery, however, Frémont accepted the Republican nomination. Though he gave no speeches and did not campaign, his views on slavery were squarely within the Republican mainstream. He agreed that the Constitution did not allow the federal government to abolish slavery in any state, but he decried the disproportionate power of slaveholders in national politics and argued that the federal government should “avoid giving countenance to the extension of slavery.” It was an increasingly popular view among northern voters, and Frémont’s immense personal reputation fired up a constituency to support the new Republican Party. Alas, the traits that would prove so disastrous for Missouri during the Civil War were already on full display during the 1856 campaign. Frémont was an inept candidate, secretive, suspicious, and overly sensitive to the slightest criticism. Nevertheless, although he lost his bid for the presidency in 1856, his impressive showing helped establish the legitimacy of the new antislavery party and paved the way for Abraham Lincoln’s victory four years later.9

  Frémont was in France when the war broke out. He quickly returned to the United States and accepted President Lincoln’s appointment as the commanding general of the newly created Department of the West. Lincoln made the appointment on July 1, 1861, but despite the chaos into which Missouri was rapidly descending, Frémont dawdled in New York and did not arrive in St. Louis until the end of the month. His orders were vague, though he was expected to clear the rebels from the state.

  Back in Missouri, General Lyon and Governor Gamble were trying to do the same thing. By mid-July Lyon had chased the secessionist army down to Springfield, in the southwest corner of the state. The rebels, however, would soon be joined by Confederate troops invading from Arkansas, and Lyon was desperately short of the men and material he needed to face his enemies in battle. He appealed for help, but Frémont was still back in New York spinning dreams of military glory—dreams that did not include repelling the impending Confederate invasion. Instead, Frémont wanted to send Union troops down the Mississippi River, splitting the Confederacy in two and wrecking its hopes for independence. It wasn’t a bad idea, but it occupied Frémont’s mind to the exclusion of everything else. Focused completely on eastern Missouri, Frémont scarcely noticed that the western half of the state was being overrun by Confederates and rapidly collapsing into guerilla warfare.

  Once installed in the St. Louis mansion that he made his headquarters, Frémont surrounded himself with a protective coterie of sycophants sporting elaborate costumes and bearing pompous titles like “adletus to the chief of staff”—affectations that won few friends among down-to-earth westerners. Lyon’s increasingly desperate cries for help rarely got through Frémont’s phalanx, and even when they did, the general ignored them. Frémont was more attentive, one Missourian complained, to the California speculators “who surround him like summer pigs.”10 Gamble tried to intercede to get Lyon the men and supplies he needed, but Frémont ignored the governor as well.

  Finally on August 9, Frémont wrote Lyon that no reinforcements were available, and urged him to
retreat from Springfield to the railhead at Rolla if Lyon felt he could not hold his position. Lyon—as impulsive as Frémont was oblivious—decided instead to launch an attack. The next day, August 10, Lyon and Franz Sigel advanced on Wilson’s Creek, where Confederate General Ben McCulloch, moving up from Arkansas, combined his forces with Missouri troops under Sterling Price to turn back Lyon’s reckless assault. Lyon was fatally shot while riding around the battlefield on his horse trying to rally his outnumbered men. His death instantly demoralized the already overwhelmed Union troops, and they promptly fled the field in panic. Lyon may have been reckless, but he had undoubtedly been courageous, and for that he was widely proclaimed a hero in the North. Frémont, meanwhile, was criticized for not having given Lyon the support he needed.

  Frémont didn’t do much to help Missouri’s governor either. Hamilton Gamble was struggling to organize and arm a state militia made up of Missouri men who could subdue pro-secession guerillas more effectively than the hostile Union troops from out of state. (Yankee regiments had a tendency to encourage slaves to run away, which Missouri masters found obnoxious.) But rather than sustain the governor’s efforts, Frémont went out of his way to undermine them. Indeed, he was so contemptuous of civilian authorities that by early August, reports were already filtering back to Washington detailing Frémont’s political ineptitude, military incompetence, high-handed behavior, and reclusiveness. “Save us,” John Howe begged Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, “and remove Frémont.”11 The Pathfinder was turning out to be a disaster.

  In what looked like a desperate bid to save his collapsing command from the rising chorus of criticism—even from antislavery politicians who had recently been his strongest supporters—Frémont issued a proclamation on August 30 overturning civilian authority, declaring martial law, confiscating the property of disloyal owners, and emancipating their slaves. To Gamble and his allies who were scrambling to construct a legitimate government in Missouri, Frémont’s order amounted to a calculated assault on the principle of civilian rule. The general would “assume the administrative powers of the State.” The “object” of his proclamation, Frémont admitted, was “to place in the hands of the military authorities the power to give instantaneous effect to existing laws.” In the parts of Missouri occupied by secessionist forces—a line extending from Cape Girardeau on the Mississippi River all the way to Leavenworth—Frémont declared that anyone “taken with arms” would be tried by court-martial “and if found guilty will be shot.” This was martial law, and though there were few who doubted that it was legal or that the crisis in Missouri justified the imposition of a firm federal hand, there were many—not least the president—who thought it imprudent to go around executing Confederate prisoners.12