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

by James Oakes

  Dedication

  For

  DEBORAH and DANIEL,

  without whom, nothing

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  ALSO BY JAMES OAKES

  Preface

  Maps

  1 “ULTIMATE EXTINCTION”

  2 “DISUNION IS ABOLITION”

  3 “FULFILLMENT OF THE PROPHECIES”

  4 AUGUST 8, 1861: EMANCIPATION BEGINS

  5 THE BORDER STATES

  6 “SELF-EMANCIPATION”

  7 “BY THE ACT OF CONGRESS THEY ARE CLEARLY FREE”

  8 “A CORDON OF FREEDOM”

  9 THE “PRELIMINARY” PROCLAMATION

  10 THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION

  11 “THE SYSTEM YET LIVES”

  12 “OUR FATHERS WERE MISTAKEN”

  Epilogue: Was Freedom Enough?

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Credits

  Index

  Illustrations

  About the Author

  Copyright

  ALSO BY JAMES OAKES

  The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass,

  Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics

  Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South

  The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders

  PREFACE

  ON MARCH 24, 1862, Illinois Republican Isaac Arnold introduced a bill in the House of Representatives that would “render freedom national, and slavery sectional.”1 Arnold’s bill would go on to become the law that banned slavery from all of the western territories, but its title harkened back a decade to the first speech Charles Sumner delivered in Congress upon being elected senator from Massachusetts. In that speech, “Freedom National; Slavery Sectional,” Sumner proposed a number of federal policies that he and most antislavery politicians believed would lead to the eventual destruction of slavery.2 But the idea that freedom was national was much older than the policies Sumner specified. Its lineage could be traced to the famous Somerset decision issued by the Court of King’s Bench in 1772 in which Lord Mansfield ruled that on English soil the law did not recognize a right of “property in man.” Somerset was in turn a powerful reassertion of a venerable European ideal, the “freedom principle,” which held that freedom was the natural condition of those residing within the realm—whether in France, Spain, or the Netherlands.3 Isaac Arnold’s bill was the lineal descendant of that tradition, and in it lay the origins of the Republican Party’s antislavery policies during the Civil War.

  Tracing the historical origins of a policy—or a war, or almost anything—always risks making it look as though the outcome were preordained. It’s especially tempting to think of the destruction of slavery as inevitable, maybe even easy. Abolition in the United States came midway through the Age of Emancipation. The northern states had long since abolished slavery. The Haitian revolution had destroyed it from within, and the British Parliament had destroyed it in Jamaica and Barbados from without, as had the French and the Dutch in their own Caribbean empires. On the other hand, two of the largest slave societies in the Americas, Cuba and Brazil, abolished slavery only in the wake of the American Civil War. A century after the overthrow of New World slavery began, every plantation system in the hemisphere had done away with slave labor.4 The trajectory is so clear, so relentless, as to make it seem as if the abolition of slavery in the United States had been determined by the irresistible forces of historical progress. Plenty of people talked that way in the middle of the nineteenth century. “Slavery is a hideous anachronism,” one Republican congressman declared, “coming to us out of the barbarism and old dead night of the past.5 The slaveholders were standing fast against the inexorable tide of human history. Their way of life was doomed, the argument went; the entire world was turning against slavery.

  The assumption of slavery’s inevitable demise shaped the way its opponents thought about how to end it. In 1787, delegates at the Constitutional Convention were willing to make compromises with slavery in part because they were certain the system was dying anyway. From classical political economists like Adam Smith, the Founders learned that slave economies were backward and inefficient, that in the long run slavery could never compete with the superior productivity, the sheer dynamism, of free labor. From moral philosophers they concluded that the progress of antislavery sentiment was steady and irreversible. In time everyone would come to see that slavery had to be abolished. Convinced that slavery was already doomed by the laws of political economy and the progress of morality, it was easy for the men in Philadelphia to conclude that nothing significant was sacrificed by compromising with slavery to create a new nation. How could they have foreseen that the protections for slavery they wrote into the Constitution would become one of the most formidable obstacles to abolition in the United States?6

  It’s also tempting to think that the only thing abolition required was the will to make it happen. If the abolitionists could persuade enough people to hate slavery, the end of slavery would surely follow. By the late eighteenth century, however, most people in the northern states already disliked slavery, and while the intensity of their dislike waxed and waned over the decades, the biggest problem abolitionists faced was not a proslavery public but a Constitution that protected slavery in the states where it already existed.7 What could the federal government do to destroy slavery if everybody believed it was strictly a state matter, that the Constitution put it beyond the reach of federal intervention? How could there be any national antislavery politics if there was nothing the federal government could do about it? Answering such questions was the single greatest challenge for opponents of slavery. That challenge became more rather than less daunting as the explosive growth of the “Cotton Kingdom” after 1790 cemented the political power of the slaveholders and transformed the South into one of the largest slave societies in the history of the world.

  Nevertheless, by 1860 antislavery lawyers and politicians had formulated two distinct scenarios for a national assault on slavery. One was federal pressure on states to abolish slavery themselves. Though nearly everyone agreed that the federal government could not directly abolish slavery in the states, Republicans endorsed a number of policies they believed would eventually force the southern states to destroy slavery on their own. The federal government would surround the South with free states, free territories, and free waters, building what they called a “cordon of freedom” around slavery, hemming it in until the system’s own internal weaknesses forced the slave states one by one to abandon slavery. To these external pressures the Republicans would add a number of federal incentives—a gradual timetable, monetary compensation, and subsidies for the voluntary colonization of the freed slaves—all of them designed to speed up the process of state abolition, beginning in the slave states bordering on the North (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri). This was a peacetime policy designed to put slavery on what Abraham Lincoln called a course of “ultimate extinction.” But if there was a war or a rebellion, the Constitution empowered the federal government to implement a second policy, military emancipation, until peace and order were restored. Any educated person would have been familiar with the historical precedents, stretching back to antiquity, for emancipating enemy slaves in wartime. But the precedents had not produced a theory of military emancipation. The founding treatises on the laws of war had almost nothing to say about slavery. By 1863, however, when called on to defend the legality of the Emancipation Pr
oclamation, antislavery lawyers deployed what amounted to an abolitionist theory of military emancipation. These two policies—state abolition and military emancipation—were widely proclaimed by Republicans throughout the secession crisis.

  It was this unabashed Republican threat to slavery that provoked the South to secede from the Union in the immediate aftermath of Abraham Lincoln’s election in November of 1860. Historians commonly dismiss secession as an outbreak of hysteria, irrationality, and paranoia. But events soon demonstrated that the Republican threat to slavery was far from imaginary. Before the first year of the war was out, both antislavery policies had been initiated. Based on the authority granted to it by the First Confiscation Act, the Lincoln administration began freeing slaves as a “military necessity” on August 8, 1861. Lincoln drafted his first proposals for state abolition a few months later.

  It’s important to bear in mind that military emancipation and state abolition were two different policies pursued by Republicans along parallel lines throughout the war. Military emancipation was always immediate; slaveholders were never compensated; it applied initially to the disloyal states; and it was implemented first, beginning in the summer of 1861. Gradual abolition applied to loyal slave states, which were beyond the reach of full-scale military emancipation. Lincoln first suggested gradual abolition for Delaware in late 1861, and it remained an option for loyal states as late as 1864. Yet all along, his administration was implementing immediate and uncompensated military emancipation in the seceded states. There was no shift from gradual abolition to immediate emancipation. On the contrary, immediate emancipation began in the rebel states months before Lincoln first proposed gradual abolition in the Border States.

  Once initiated, the two policies were implemented more and more aggressively. As firm believers in the superior vitality and strength of free labor, Republicans originally assumed that slavery would crumble quickly under the pressure of war. But prescient observers like Frederick Douglass warned from the start that slavery was the “stomach” of the rebellion, and soon enough Republicans grasped the point. By early 1862 their confident predictions of slavery’s swift demise gave way to the widespread recognition that slavery was actually a source of the rebellion’s strength in the South. By July virtually all Republicans reached the conclusion that they would have to free all the slaves of all the rebels in the seceded states. With the Emancipation Proclamation, military emancipation reached its climax as the Lincoln administration for the first time ordered Union soldiers to entice slaves from their owners in the rebel states and to enlist blacks for “armed” service in the Union army. The proclamation also increased the pressure for state abolition because it led directly to the systematic recruitment of black soldiers from the loyal slave states, an escalation of the policy of forcing those states to abolish slavery on their own. Over the next few years both policies proved, in their own ways, successful. By 1865 military emancipation had freed hundreds of thousands of slaves, and six states had abolished slavery, ostensibly of their own accord but in fact under intense pressure from the federal government.

  But it wasn’t enough. There were four million slaves in 1860, and when the war ended no more than 15 percent of them had been emancipated. Slavery was still legal in nine of the fifteen slave states, including nearly all of the most densely populated plantation regions of the Deep South. An increasingly aggressive military emancipation, even when coupled with a more coercive approach to state abolition, could not fully destroy slavery. More disturbing still to Republicans was the distinct possibility that when the Union was restored, the southern states would reverse the results of the war and re-enslave those who had already been freed.

  Once they realized that neither military emancipation nor state abolition would be sufficient, Lincoln and the Republicans turned to a third policy—a thirteenth amendment to the Constitution—as the only sure way to abolish slavery forever throughout the United States. Lincoln ran for reelection in 1864 on a platform pledged to rewriting the Constitution, but not until after he won could the Republicans muster the strength to push the amendment through Congress. And not until it was ratified in December of 1865 was slavery finally and irreversibly destroyed. In the end it took four years of brutal war, 750,000 deaths, and three different policies to bring slavery down.8 Freedom National is in part an attempt to demonstrate how much harder it was to destroy slavery than anyone first imagined.

  IN TELLING THE STORY of how slavery was destroyed, I pay a good deal of attention to the broad antislavery movement, in particular the Republican Party that set out to abolish the institution. A generation ago few historians would have found this controversial. Between the late 1930s and the mid-1970s a number of scholars worked to reconstruct what the historian Dwight Lowell Dumond once called “the antislavery origins of the Civil War.” They traced the emergence of political abolitionism in the 1830s and emphasized the continuities between the Liberty and Free Soil Parties of the 1840s and the Republican Party of the 1850s.9 Since then a number of intellectual shifts have obscured those origins and continuities to the point where the claim that the Republicans intended to destroy slavery is more likely to be greeted with disbelief than assent.

  As the antislavery origins of the Civil War receded from our intellectual horizons, there followed a revival of interpretations long associated with the so-called revisionists of the 1930s and 1940s. The Civil War is once again treated by some historians as an accident, by others as a tragic and unnecessary waste of life. It was brought on not by principled opponents who fundamentally disagreed about slavery, but by religious fanatics and moral terrorists who preferred demagogy to peace. If there was a principle at stake in the northern crusade, it was not antislavery but an ethically dubious nationalism aimed at the mere restoration of the Union. Abolitionism is once more consigned to a tiny, beleagured minority, while the broad appeal of principled antislavery politics goes unexplained.10 Persuaded that Republicans had no serious antislavery intentions, some historians have denounced the war as morally unjustified. These days most scholars agree that the South seceded to protect slavery, but neo-revisionists commonly deny that the North was animated by any impulse to destroy it.

  It would indeed be difficult to excuse so much bloodshed if it served no purpose other than the restoration of the Union, since that could have been accomplished easily had there been no fundamental disagreement over slavery. The real moral dilemma of the Civil War, however, arises from the fact that it was about slavery; the tragedy of the war lies not in its pointlessness, but in its necessity. There were plenty of hotheads who thought a war would be quick and clean. Nevertheless, by early 1861 most of the sober statesmen staring at one another across the Mason-Dixon Line understood that they had pretty much run out of options and were heading for a long and devastating war. As the struggle grew ever more deadly, Lincoln was tormented by the dilemma. He hated slavery and he hated the war. There was no easy way for him to balance the competing moral imperatives of ending the war quickly and destroying slavery completely. Sometimes he tried by suggesting a more gradual abolition in return for a more rapid end to the slaughter. I can’t say whether I would have struck the same balance, but I am not inclined to judge Lincoln harshly for having done so. He was always less concerned with how slavery was abolished than with ensuring that it was abolished. By contrast, to deny that the war was about slavery—on the shaky ground that Republicans supposedly denied it, or the even shakier ground that slavery would have died out anyway—strikes me as an evasion of the moral dilemma of the Civil War, not a serious engagement with it.

  Firmly convinced that slavery was the source of the rebellion, Republicans began attacking it almost as soon as the war began. Not having expected to find this, I did what comes naturally to any historian: I went back in time to find out where Republican antislavery policies came from. In my search for the antebellum origins of abolition I rediscovered the antislavery origins of the Civil War. Yet Freedom National should not be read as a
full accounting of the war’s origins. Such a book would require a much broader canvas than I attempt here—not least an account of the political economy of slavery, the development of a free labor society in the North, the evolution of party politics, the schisms within Protestant churches, and more attention to the international context within which both slavery and antislavery developed. Freedom National barely touches on these important matters. But it does, I hope, establish the critical role that political abolitionism played in the formulation of Republican antislavery policies and the coming of the Civil War.

  Lincoln and the Republicans expected that slaves would run for their freedom if given the chance, and they constructed their antislavery policies on that expectation. They realized that they could not destroy slavery if they did not win the war, and they eventually concluded that they could not win the war unless they reversed decades of federal policy and enlisted tens of thousands of African Americans in the Union army. Freedom National therefore specifies in some detail precisely how federal policymakers came to rely on the “loyalty” of the slaves and with that, how important the legacy of slave resistance was to the destruction of slavery.

  Nevertheless, I avoid the question of who freed the slaves because, framed that way, it tempts scholars to specify a single agent in a process that had many agents. I sometimes think that people in the 1860s understood this better than we do. Even before the war began, the slaves knew that Lincoln’s election was of vital importance to their prospects for freedom, just as Republicans warned that the outbreak of civil war would provoke a wave of runaway slaves—maybe even a full-scale slave rebellion—that would ultimately destroy slavery. Everyone knew that an invading Union army posed a direct threat to slavery’s survival. To rest the destruction of slavery on the shoulders of any single agent, or to deny the significance of any one of them, is to oversimplify the history of abolition. If Republicans stand out in Freedom National, it is not because “Republicans freed the slaves” but because this is a study of antislavery policy and Republicans were the policymakers