At this same time, the President again besought the loyal slave States to adopt gradual and compensated emancipation, “not rending or wrecking anything.” Against the conservatism of his course, the radicals of Congress fulminated. The President signed the bill prohibiting slavery in the territories; but when he forced the modification of a second confiscation bill, more drastic and explicit than the first, the relations between Mr. Lincoln and his party leaders were strained to the breaking point.
In public speech or writing, the President made no sign. Yet, after a hopeless conference with the representatives of the loyal slave States, his resolve was taken. The reverses on the Peninsula and the fierce political pressure forced him to the precipitate act of military emancipation of the rebels’ slaves. It was designed to weaken the Confederacy by drawing off the Negro laborers who released their men for military service. In July of 1862, Mr. Lincoln had come to believe that this war measure was the alternative to surrendering the Union. He said as much to Mr. Seward and Mr. Welles, as they drove out to the funeral of Stanton’s baby, James. A week later, he discussed the subject with his Cabinet. In September, after Antietam, he issued his preliminary proclamation: on the first day of January, 1863, the slaves of persons in rebellion against the Government were to be proclaimed forever free.
The country, in the main, received the proclamation without enthusiasm. Democrats interpreted their gains in the State elections which soon followed as a protest against the President’s capitulation to the radicals. Abolitionists, on the other hand, were still dissatisfied with Mr. Lincoln’s moderation. His wholehearted support came from the Negroes themselves. From the beginning, his name had been to the race the simple synonym of their deliverance. Colored folk, when crowds gathered at the White House, wildly demonstrated their love for the President, shouting and swinging their hats with abandon. In long columns, the contrabands came toiling over the dusty roads to the city he inhabited. Some were in rags, some wore the rough and sweat-stained garments of the field, some were decked in the antique finery of their masters and mistresses. The pickaninnies who rode their fathers’ backs, the tiny black Abraham Lincolns who nuzzled at the breast were scarcely more helpless than those who carried them.
For these were primitive and childlike people, adrift without a plan from the dependence of slavery. They understood nothing of the political complexities in which their destinies were involved. They took no account of the abolitionists who pressed the President to his reluctant decision. They knew only that Lincoln was a man raised up by God to work the miracle of their deliverance. Their simple imagination had its own power. They and other millions like them, flocking to the Union armies of the West and South, or waiting on the plantations of their masters, impressed their faith on a nation’s mind. The abolitionists of Congress—Wade, Stevens, Chandler, Wilson, Lovejoy, even the lofty Sumner—have been all but forgotten by their countrymen. The Lincoln who lives in the American legend was shaped in the slave’s long dream of a kindly master who should set his people free.
In July, smallpox broke out among the families huddled in the little rooms of Duff Green’s Row. The sick were left there, while the rest were transferred to the camp on North Twelfth Street, formerly occupied by the dragoons of McClellan’s bodyguard. No Maryland fugitives were allowed in this camp, but Lamon’s constables hung around it. In protecting his charges, Wadsworth remained defiantly paternal. He had two county constables arrested as kidnapers. In November, and again in December, there were spectacular jail deliveries of Negroes by the provost guard. The civil and military authorities were as much at odds as ever, when Wadsworth left to take command of a division of the Army of the Potomac, and the post of military governor fell to a less impetuous western New Yorker, General John A. Martindale. Meantime, the windows of Duff Green’s Row had been fitted with iron bars, and the block of houses was transformed into Carroll Prison.
In their crowded and comfortless barracks, the contrabands patiently awaited the coming of the day of jubilee. On New Year’s Eve, they filled the chapel to overflowing. An old man named Thornton arose to testify. “I cried all night. What de matter, Thornton? Tomorrow my child is to be sold, neber more see it till judgment—no more dat! no more dat! no more dat! Can’t sell your wife and children any more!”
Ecstasy mounted with the passing hours, and the silent prayer enjoined by the superintendent at midnight gave place to fervent invocations and hallelujah hymns. Young and old wrung one another’s hands, dancing and shouting in a frenzy of joy. Around the bleak, dark camp, they paraded singing. Many marched until daybreak.
The sun rose on the first day of January, 1863. The air was clear and brilliant. The President opened his tired eyes on a momentous day. Since he had issued his preliminary proclamation, the defeat of his party in the State elections had been followed by the military disaster of Fredericksburg. The radical senators, demanding the removal of the conservative Seward, had nearly wrecked his Cabinet. The thing he was about to do had alienated some of his warmest adherents among moderate men. In Washington, that winter, he seemed to stand alone, almost without friends.
Threading his way through the mob of New Year’s callers about the White House came the slender, amiable man whom the radicals hated, with his slender, amiable son by his side. William and Frederick Seward climbed the stairs to the President’s office. There were less than a dozen persons in the room to witness the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Conscious of a moment of history, the President closed his aching fingers on a pen. His whole right arm was numb from the ordeal of the morning’s receptions. He feared his hand might tremble; but he signed his name firmly.
All day, while an artificial conviviality surrounded the bowls of eggnog in the Washington parlors, the wastes of North Twelfth Street rang with the choruses of the contrabands. “I’m a Free Man Now,” they sang, “Jesus Christ has made me Free.” At last, the beautiful word was spoken, as potent and as incomprehensible as a magician’s spell. At seven in the evening, a bellman made the rounds of the quarters, to summon them to the chapel for a reading of the President’s proclamation. In droves, they came from the cabins which surrounded the muddy quadrangle of the camp. A grizzled old Negro in a military overcoat, known to all as John the Baptist, led them in prayer. Twin lamps suspended from the low chapel roof and a candle or two set on a rafter cast a dim light on their dark, expectant faces. The superintendent, Dr. Nichols, entered, bringing the white man’s quibbling precision to their unclouded jubilance. He explained that the proclamation did not free all slaves, but only those in the States and parts of States which were in rebellion. In Virginia, where this audience had many loved ones, he enumerated, county by county, the sections in which freedom was declared. Joyful cries arose. “Dat’s me!” “Dar’s where I’se come from!” Some sat in hurt and puzzled silence.
In the city, the Negroes who had been emancipated the preceding April, and the vastly larger group of freedmen received the news without disorderly excitement and with few outbursts of rejoicing. It was a great day for their race. But the intelligent among them were skeptical and disillusioned. The white man’s oppression had taught them that freedom might be an empty privilege. That spring, the Reverend James Reed arose in the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church to say that he had purchased his liberty years before, but could not say that he had ever felt himself free.
Above all, it was fear that kept the Washington Negroes quiet. Since the emancipation in the District, there had been demonstrations of hostility to them. The Washington guttersnipes had been ready with insults and even with stones. The President’s proclamation increased the antagonism of the white rowdies. Apprehensively, uneasy over rumors of a projected disturbance, the colored people gathered in January at the Israel Church near the Capitol, to make plans for a mass meeting in recognition of the proclamation. Stones thumped against the sides of the building. Panic spread, as panes of glass were shattered. The women, clutching shawls and cloaks and furs, hurried to the d
oor. Some of the men huddled close to the wall between the windows. Others stood defiantly brandishing their canes. Even after the arrival of the police, some time passed before order was restored. The Star reporter was of the opinion that they would have defended themselves desperately. The proposed mass meeting was not held.
On a Sunday evening in February, the minister of McKendree Chapel announced for his sermon a text which inadvertently contained the word, Ethiopia. Part of his congregation walked in protest from the church. Even this Biblical allusion was interpreted as an alliance with abolitionism. A number of soldiers who had attended the service behaved in a disorderly manner.
Congress, in the preceding summer, had given the President authority to employ Negroes as army laborers or for any other military or naval service, fixing their pay at six dollars a month less than that of the soldiers, and providing that, if they had been slaves of rebel masters, they and their families should win freedom by their service. On the strength of this, Union officers had begun recruiting and drilling blacks in South Carolina and New Orleans. The Emancipation Proclamation explicitly stated that the slaves of rebels would be received into the armed service of the United States; and Stanton in January authorized the governor of Massachusetts to raise two colored regiments. There was widespread antipathy to this new policy of the Government. In the army, the officers warmly shared the men’s repugnance to colored troops. This prejudice did not exist in the navy, where Negroes were freely enlisted, with the same pay and allowance as white sailors. In the country at large, save for a minority of extremists, the sentiment was bitterly adverse to arming colored men. It was well known that Negroes had fought bravely in the Revolution and the War of 1812; yet it was repeatedly stated and earnestly believed that they would neither enlist nor fight. Even Lincoln shared this opinion in some measure. In September of 1862, he had told a group of anti-slavery ministers from Chicago that he was not sure that much could be done with the blacks; if they were to be armed, he feared that, in a few weeks, the arms would be in the hands of the rebels.
In February of 1863, the troops in Washington were flagrant in their hostility to Negroes, chasing and stoning them in the streets. Convalescents, returning to duty, beat up the contrabands employed at the Soldiers’ Rest. A few days later, convalescents on their way to camp in Virginia attacked every colored person they met along Maryland Avenue. No provocation was necessary. The sight of a dark face was enough; and in Washington dark faces seemed to be everywhere, as, drawn by the Emancipation Proclamation, the contrabands streamed to the capital and to freedom. The camp on North Twelfth Street was so crowded that tents had to be erected outside the enclosure. Its smallpox hospital was crowded, too, and complaints began to be heard about the careless burial of the dead in the graveyard on Boundary Street. The camp held only a fraction of the invading blacks. In April, 1863 it had a thousand occupants, while the contrabands in Washington were estimated at ten thousand, in addition to three thousand at Alexandria. The following month, a new and healthful camp was established at Arlington, and, under the supervision of the Quartermaster’s Department, the men were employed in cultivating the abandoned rebel farms between Fort Corcoran and the Long Bridge. Later, workshops were organized, where the contrabands became skilled blacksmiths, wheelwrights, carpenters, tailors and shoemakers. The Arlington camp developed into a model miniature city, the Freedman’s Village, with houses, shops, a church, a school, a hospital and a home for the aged, laid out around a little park. The colony became self-supporting, with several thousand dollars to its credit in the Treasury. The vast majority of the incoming refugees, however, continued to take their chances in the city, which, as its inhabitants had fearfully foreseen, became littered with poverty-stricken settlements of Negroes.
Senator Wilson’s bill to reorganize the District judiciary came before Congress early in 1863. Although forty-eight local lawyers petitioned against it, the bill was passed. A supreme court of four judges was created in place of the old circuit, District and criminal courts. The chief justice was David K. Cartter of Ohio—“a coarse, vulgar, strong-minded man,” Gideon Welles said. His face was disfigured by smallpox, and he had an impediment in his speech, but his mind was vigorous, and he was in good standing as a Republican having nominated Mr. Chase for Presidential candidate at the Republican convention of 1860. However, the complacency of the radicals was rudely jarred when the question of the application of the Fugitive Slave Law to the District came before the new court in May. To the serious embarrassment of its members, they were unable to agree; and Andrew Hall, the young fugitive from labor who had occasioned their variance, stood before a hopelessly divided bench. He was released by the court, but a division of opinion pursued Andrew, as his Maryland master seized him by the collar, while Judge Dean of Brooklyn tried to pull him away. In the crowded courtroom, there was so much excitement that the police were called, and Andrew, for safekeeping, was taken to the Fourth Ward station house. The provost guard presently removed him to the contraband camp. Meantime, the court had disentangled itself from the slavery question by restoring to office one of the former commissioners of the circuit court. Andrew’s status remained precarious, and, as Congress had promised freedom to all who should render military service, he settled the problem by enlisting.
The reappointed commissioner handled the cases of the fugitives precisely as had been done under the circuit court. In the autumn of 1863, runaways from Maryland dwindled with the opening of recruiting stations and the payment to loyal masters of three hundred dollars for every slave permitted to win his freedom by enlisting. In June, 1864, the problem was finally settled by the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law by Congress.
In spite of antagonism and doubt, in spite of Confederate threats of retaliation, the Government carried out its policy of organizing Negro regiments. In the spring of 1863 Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas was sent to the Mississippi Valley to promote enlistments from the multitude of slaves, advancing, “like the oncoming of cities,” to the Union lines. For service to their country Negroes were not offered the same inducements as white men. They received no bounty. Although the fact was widely misunderstood by the first colored recruits, they were paid less than white soldiers—ten dollars a month without clothing, instead of the customary thirteen dollars in addition to clothing. As a protest against this discrimination, the Negroes of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment refused for more than a year to accept pay. In 1864, Congress after much discussion and dispute passed a bill providing white man’s pay and bounty for all Negro soldiers who had been free on April 19, 1861. This was, however, construed by the Attorney General to the advantage of all the colored troops.
By the time that the wounded began to come up from Chancellorsville, recruiting for the first colored regiment in the District was under way in Washington. It made slow progress. The available number of able-bodied contrabands was reduced by the fact that many were already employed, as laborers and teamsters, by the Government. The city Negroes, mistrustful, hung back. At meeting after meeting in the colored churches, white speakers and black worked to whip up enthusiasm. At the first of these meetings, Massachusetts soldiers stood on guard at the church doors and in the aisles. In the capital, a Negro recruit not only feared the vengeance of the Confederates if he should be taken prisoner; he was in immediate danger at the hands of his white comrades and the secessionist bullies who loitered in the streets. An army officer told one gathering of blacks that anyone who would insult a colored soldier in his presence had better have his life insured. He also mentioned a report that one of the city police had declared he would put as many bullets through a nigger recruit as he would through a mad dog. This speech caused a great sensation in the audience; but it was scarcely conducive to the military enlistment of a long-oppressed race.
Even among those who braved the community’s hostility and signed the rolls, there were many who lingered on the fringes of subsequent meetings, hesitant to come forward and commit themselves. Forty or
fifty of them were presently marched along, with red, white and blue badges on their breasts. They seemed to bear their honors well, in spite of the jeers from the sidewalk—some of which, the Star remarked, came from persons of their own color. No officers had as yet been assigned them. They had no quarters, no uniforms, no arms. In spite of Mr. Stanton’s known enthusiasm for colored troops, there was a dispiriting tardiness at the War Department.
The third week in May, the rolls of the first two companies, mainly composed of contrabands, were made up at a desk set outside the Israel Church on Capitol Hill. Splendid among the shabby field hands, moved Dr. A. T. Augusta, a colored physician of Washington, whom Mr. Stanton had made an army surgeon. The sight of his uniform stirred the faintest heart to faith in the new destiny of the race, for Dr. Augusta wore the oak leaves of a major on his shoulders. The next winter, he would create a hubbub by refusing to ride in the rain on the platform of a streetcar, as he was ordered by the conductor to do. Offended by the disrespect shown to his rank, Dr. Augusta walked. He was very late in arriving at a court-martial, where he was an important witness, and his explanation echoed to the Senate Chamber, already inflamed at the streetcar discrimination.
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