Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 Page 24
Nor would the freed people themselves go back to work without knowing if their freedom was secure. They needed to be certain that they would be “protected against their rebel masters.” Pierce sympathized with their concerns. It would be “wasted toil” to continue the social experiment “without such assurances,” he said. If the North could not promise the freed people that their emancipation was secure, none of the volunteers could honorably continue with their work. Pierce thought re-enslavement was simply inconceivable, if only because the freed people on the plantations were technically employed by the federal government. As at Fortress Monroe, labor for the Union government was considered a guarantor of emancipation. It was not “possible to imagine any rulers now or in the future,” Pierce wrote, “who will ever turn their backs on the laborers who have been received, as these have been, into the service of the United States.”22
If the lengths to which Pierce and others went to insist upon the freedom of the Sea Island blacks seemed a bit too strenuous, it was not because they doubted that the slaves had in fact been emancipated. Rather, the tone of uncertainty in their words suggested a vaguely dawning awareness of a weakness built into military emancipation: the possibility that it was not permanent. What if the masters did come back? What if they reasserted their claims to their property in slaves? What if the rebellion ended and the southern states re-enslaved those freed by the war? Eventually such questions would drive Union policymakers to move beyond emancipation to support a constitutional amendment permanently abolishing slavery everywhere. But in early 1862, no one expressed any doubts about the status of the contrabands at Port Royal. Those people were presumed to be free.
Blacks were treated as free laborers, for example. Adults worked for wages, either on the plantations or in the Union army camps. Pierce’s superintendents were actually frustrated by the mobility of black workers, who presumed the right to move about in search of better or at least steadier wages. Army camps competed with plantations. Mansfield French, sent by Lewis Tappan to head the New York contingent, complained that the “Coffin place”—once one of the largest slave plantations in the islands—was in a “miserable, demoralized condition” because he could not get the young men to stay. There was a Union camp at Bay Point, a few miles away, “so the temptation to leave is very pressing, for smart fellows can get money there.”23 The women likewise preferred housework to laundering, Laura Towne reported, “because the Northerners can’t help giving extra pay for service that is done them.”24 Meanwhile several thousand of the children of the free black laborers were in school, learning to read and write. And their parents were getting married so that their families were at least legally secure.25 Free labor, schools for children, and legally recognized marriages—all were prohibited under slavery, and all ranked among the basic attributes of freedom as Americans understood it in the middle of the nineteenth century.
In March of 1862 the Reverend Richard Fuller, the pastor of Baltimore’s Seventh Baptist Church, called on Treasury Secretary Chase, seeking “advice as to the course he should pursue in regard to his plantations and slaves at Port Royal.” Fuller wanted to know what, if any, rights he still had “in respect to them.” He was a South Carolina slaveholder, but because he was loyal to the Union he believed he was entitled to retain ownership of his slaves on the Sea Islands. Chase told Fuller that “as a loyal man, he was the Proprietor of the land.” That answer did not satisfy Fuller. “How about the negroes?” he asked the Treasury secretary. Chase was straightforward: “They were free, I replied.”26
By the spring of 1862, more than ten thousand former slaves on the Sea Islands had been emancipated under the authority of the First Confiscation Act as it was implemented by the Lincoln administration. Yet by 1896 the memory of slaves freed prior to the Emancipation Proclamation was so thoroughly obliterated that when a compilation of Edward Pierce’s papers was prepared for publication, the editor was at a loss to explain why the reports, which Pierce published as articles in February and June of 1862, were written as though the slaves on the Sea Islands were already emancipated. It “should be observed,” A. W. Stevens wrote, that Pierce’s reports “preceded by several months President Lincoln’s proclamations of emancipation.” Pierce’s articles had appeared at a time when, according to Stevens, “there was as yet no definite policy or public opinion as to the fate of the Southern negroes.” Yet the articles assumed otherwise. What could possibly explain the way Pierce had written them? He must have “deemed it wise,” Stevens guessed, given “the sensitive state of the public mind, to avoid argument on the vexed question of their status, and thought it better to assume their freedom as already established by events.”27 It would be better to assume that Pierce was right to begin with, that the contrabands at Port Royal were already emancipated when he published his reports in 1862.
NORTH CAROLINA AND THE PENINSULA
When the Civil War broke out, Allen Parker was working as a slave in Chowan, in the northeastern part of North Carolina. He was born sometime between 1835 and 1840. “I do not know exactly when I was born,” he recalled, “for slaves keep no family records.” But “in common with all the Negroes” Parker had developed a “very strong yearning for freedom.” That yearning was strengthened by the outbreak of Civil War. The more Parker and his fellow slaves heard about the “Yankees,” the more anxious he became. Some of the slaves on nearby plantations had escaped to Union lines; others had been “refugeed” to Richmond to prevent their escape. In their attempt to keep any more slaves from running away, the slave owners had beefed up the patrols. “[E]very effort was made to keep the slaves on the plantations at night,” Parker remembered, “and it was very hard to get a pass.” But in August of 1862—several months after Union forces had captured Roanoke Island and established bases in eastern North Carolina—Parker and a number of slaves on adjoining plantations began to plan their escape. Union gunboats had appeared on the Chowan River, providing the slaves with an opportunity. One night Parker and three of his friends “stole our way down to the river bank, where we knew there was a boat.” As they approached the Union vessel, they were hailed by a Yankee sailor.28
“Who are you?” the Yankee asked.
“Friends,” the slaves answered.
“Advance, friends, and come alongside.”
When the escaping slaves reached the boat, a Union officer “inquired if our owners were Union people or not, and we replied that they were not.” The slaves asked to be taken on board immediately; otherwise they would have to get back home by morning before their escape was discovered. The officer excused himself and returned a few minutes later with “orders from the captain” to let the slaves come aboard. At daybreak a party of armed men and dogs appeared on the riverbank searching for the runaway slaves. “The captain watched them for a while,” Parker recalled some years later, “then ordered a gun loaded with a shell fired in that direction.” That night the Union sailors went ashore and, with one of the fugitives as their guide, made their way to the plantation, where they “got quite a lot of chickens, ducks, and geese.” A few days later, on one of the foraging expeditions, the Yankees arrested the slave’s owner and took him to New Bern as a prisoner. Allen Parker joined the U.S. Navy and served for one year on the Knockum, an ammunition boat captured from the Confederates.29
Parker’s experience demonstrates how federal emancipation policy was implemented in coastal North Carolina, despite the fact that the Union commanders in charge of the expedition objected to the policy. In early 1862, George McClellan, then general in chief of the army and a vocal opponent of a war against slavery, gave extremely conservative instructions regarding military emancipation to General Ambrose Burnside as he was about to embark on another joint army-navy operation aimed at capturing Roanoke Island. “I would urge great caution in regard to proclamation,” McClellan wrote. “[S]ay as little as possible about politics or the negro. Merely state that the true issue for which we are fighting is the preservation of the Union and upho
lding the laws of the General Government, and stating that all who conduct themselves properly will as far as possible be protected in their persons and property.” Upon capturing Roanoke Island in early February, Burnside issued a proclamation that was more guarded than the one General Sherman had issued on the Sea Islands a few months earlier: We have not come “to liberate your slaves,” Burnside declared, and would “inflict no injury unless forced to do so by your own acts.”30 McClellan’s instructions, like Burnside’s proclamation, were technically correct: the “purpose” of the Union invasion was the restoration of the Union, not the liberation of the slaves. The policy of the federal government, however, was to emancipate all slaves coming within Union lines. In North Carolina, as elsewhere along the southern Atlantic coast, Union occupation forces would not actively interfere with the peaceful operation of slavery among loyal farmers and planters, they would not entice slaves away from their owners, but slaves escaping to Union lines were emancipated and employed as wage laborers.
McClellan and Burnside could no more overrule federal policy than could John C. Frémont. On March 12, a few weeks after Burnside vowed to leave slavery untouched, his headquarters on Roanoke Island issued instructions for the payment of wages—ten dollars per month plus rations for men; four dollars per month plus rations for women—for the “contrabands at this post.” On March 27, Burnside reported to Edwin Stanton, who had recently replaced Simon Cameron as secretary of war, that the “negroes continue to come in, and I am employing them to the best possible advantage.”31 Slavery deteriorated rapidly in the occupied parts of North Carolina thanks to the policy instructing Union forces to employ fugitives entering their lines, coupled with the prohibition against military enforcement of the fugitive slave clause.
On March 13, 1862, just as Burnside’s troops were about to capture New Bern, Lincoln signed the articles of war making it a crime for Union soldiers to participate in any way in the capture or return of fugitive slaves. L. R. Ferebee, for example, was still only thirteen years old when he ran to Burnside’s army a few months later. “I reached Yankee lines about (30) minutes before my master overtook me on the road,” Ferebee recalled. Eventually the Union troops evacuated the area and moved to New Bern, “carrying as many colored people with them as wanted to go.” There Ferebee attended his first school, set up by northern missionaries. Burnside occupied New Bern on March 14. Two months later, W. H. Doherty, the principal of the Newbern Academy, wrote somewhat ruefully that the Union invasion has “overthrown the whole fabric of society, founded as it was, on the Institution of negro Slavery.” It was “perfectly futile to hope,” Doherty added, “that the slaves now practically emancipated, will ever return to their former condition.” Union troops were “prohibited from assisting, or aiding in the restoration of fugitive slaves,” not only by the recent act of Congress but also “by the prevailing sentiment of the North.” In what he believed was a spirit of fairness, Doherty wrote to President Lincoln suggesting that the burden of emancipation be borne equally by each of the three parties concerned—the owners, the former slaves, and the federal government. He wanted the federal government to compensate North Carolina masters for one-third of the value of their slaves, and the freed people to pay off another third by working for their former owners for five more years. Lincoln ignored the request.32
But the generals could not ignore Lincoln and the Republican lawmakers. The clearest example was McClellan. No Union commander was more strongly committed to separating the war for the Union from a war against slavery. Early on McClellan announced to the people of western Virginia that his Union troops would protect civilian property and suppress servile insurrection. Yet on March 17, 1862, when the Army of the Potomac embarked from Alexandria, Virginia, to begin the Peninsula Campaign, McClellan was constrained by the law Congress had passed a few days before as well as the War Department’s instructions of the previous August. By then it was illegal under the March 13 statute for anyone in the Union army to turn away slaves coming into its lines. Once they were within Union lines, neither McClellan nor any other military officer had any legal authority to determine the status of the contrabands. That was a political decision, made by civilian rather than military officials, and both Congress and the Lincoln administration had already determined that slaves coming into Union lines in the seceded states were free.
McClellan conceded the point. “Slaves contraband under the Act of Congress, seeking military protection, should receive it,” he wrote. The Union army could not exclude slaves from its lines. “The right of the Government to appropriate permanently to its own service claims to slave labor should be asserted.” Civilian authorities had the right to emancipate contraband slaves. Indeed, it could go further. The confiscation of slaves “might be extended upon grounds of military necessity and security to all slaves within a particular state; thus working manumission in such a state.” Following the War Department’s August 8 instructions, McClellan held out the possibility that loyal owners might eventually be compensated for their freed slaves. This policy might even apply to the loyal slave states of Missouri, western Virginia, and even Maryland, where “the expediency of such a military measure is only a question of time.” McClellan was a reluctant emancipator, but he wasn’t a criminal. He was not going to break the law.33
McClellan’s armies had no choice but to implement Union emancipation policy during the Peninsula Campaign. When his troops arrived, slaves on nearby farms and plantations predictably flocked to Union lines, and they were not turned away. The “negroes all running helter skelter,” Hill Carter complained on June 30, 1862, “owing to the Yankee army occupying the plantation.” Two weeks later Carter’s plantation diary noted the first of the many escapes that would frustrate the master for the next several years: “15 negro men & boys ran off at different times.” Unlike what occurred in the Border States in 1861, Union commanders in Virginia in the spring of 1862 issued no orders to exclude slaves from Union lines. In the Official Records there are no requests from Union commanders asking for clarification of Union policy regarding slaves and no complaints from soldiers objecting to their orders. Instead, the evidence indicates that McClellan was emancipating slaves in accordance with the policies laid down by Congress and the Lincoln administration. The most conspicuous records left behind document the numerous instances in which escaping slaves provided McClellan and his commanders with valuable military intelligence. Meanwhile contrabands were being ferried in large numbers from the peninsula to Fortress Monroe and elsewhere. Plantation letters and diaries reveal that slaves were running in large numbers to Union lines all along the peninsula as McClellan’s troops approached, and they were not coming back. And when McClellan spelled out his own views to Lincoln, the general made it clear that he was adhering to the emancipation policy established by Congress and the War Department. Against everything he believed the war should be about, George McClellan oversaw the emancipation of more slaves than any other Union commander in the first year of fighting.34
GENERAL HUNTER’S TWO PROCLAMATIONS
Slaves were also being emancipated farther down the Atlantic coast. On April 13, 1862, two weeks after he was given command of the Department of the South, General David Hunter issued an emancipation edict covering Fort Pulaski and Cockspur Island, Georgia, the coastal areas most recently occupied by the Union forces under his command. “All persons of color lately held to involuntary service by enemies of the United States,” Hunter’s proclamation read, “are hereby confiscated and declared free.” At the approach of the Yankees, Susie King Taylor, a slave living in Savannah, was rushed into the countryside by her mother. “Two days after the taking of Fort Pulaski,” King recalled, “my uncle took his family of seven and myself to St. Catherine Island. We landed under the protection of the Union fleet.” They stayed for two weeks before being transferred to St. Simons Island. Because King could read and write, she was quickly enlisted as a teacher at one of the recently established schools for the freed people
on the Sea Islands. All of these educational activities provoked the ire of a Union soldier named William Lilley, who complained on April 16 that “the abolition feeling” was too widespread in the Sea Islands. “Is it right,” Lilley asked, “to detail the soldiers to perform laboring work while the blacks go to school?”35 Apparently it was, for by mid-April of 1862, tens of thousands slaves had been emancipated along the southern Atlantic coast. Because Hunter’s order was, as the general himself put it, “in conformity with law,” not to mention prevailing practice, it did not cause so much as a ripple.36
The same was not true of the proclamation that Hunter issued less than a month later, on May 9. In this second proclamation, Hunter declared the abolition of slavery in three entire states—South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida—only small portions of which were actually under Union control. “Slavery and martial law in a free country are altogether incompatible,” Hunter declared—though it is not entirely clear what he meant by this. Martial law is the suspension of civil and judicial authority in times of emergency. If Hunter was assuming the Somerset principle, he may have reasoned that slavery could be sustained only by the local civil and judicial authorities that had been suspended by martial law. The Union military authorities that replaced them operated under the Constitution, which did not recognize slavery wherever it was sovereign. By that reasoning, slavery and martial law were incompatible.37