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

by James Oakes

  Lincoln was fascinated by these developments. Chase had been keeping the president fully informed about what Butler was doing. Lincoln even read the enthusiastic reports on emancipation that Denison sent back to Washington. In early November of 1862, Lincoln wrote Butler personally. He had learned from one of Denison’s letters “that some of the planters were making arrangements with their negroes to pay them wages. Please write to me,” Lincoln asked Butler, “to what extent, so far as you know, this is being done.”46 This was more than mere curiosity on the president’s part. He was close to issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, and Louisiana was about to hold elections for a loyal government that would exempt it from the proclamation’s reach. It would be better if slavery were substantially destroyed in Louisiana before then.

  Butler reassured the president. He was “happy to report” that “our experiment in attempting the cultivation of sugar by free labor” was “succeeding admirably.” He claimed that the same workers on the same plantations were proving far more productive as free laborers than they had been as slaves. As evidence, Butler forwarded to the White House a barrel of “the first sugar ever made by free black labor in Louisiana.” To be sure, Butler reported, some of the local planters had refused to endorse the free labor contract he had drawn up “because they would not relinquish the right to use the whip.” In those cases, Butler refused to return black workers to their former plantations and instead employed them in Union army camps, where they were paid wages and where corporal punishment was prohibited. In Lafourche, Butler reported, Union troops had taken over “the richest sugar-planting part of Louisiana” and with it “a very large number of slaves all of whom under the act are free.” They, too, were in the process of making sugar under a free labor system. Of course, there were problems, Butler explained to the president. For the time being, the profits from government-run sugar plantations were helping to defray the cost of a massive relief program to feed and house thirty-two thousand desperate whites and ten thousand blacks, mostly women and children, who otherwise faced starvation. Butler was not sure how much longer he could pay for such provisions without requesting drafts from the Treasury. In addition, Butler was worried that many planters were signing wage contracts for the current season but only with the hope that in the future the “Institution” of slavery “can be spared them.” Such problems were to be expected, Butler observed, and he was doing all he could to manage them. “It cannot be supposed that this great change in a social and political system can be made without shock,” the general explained, adding that the only real surprise was “that it can be made at all.” Butler was optimistic, in part he told Lincoln, because of “the almost universal sentiment and opinion of my Officers that Slavery is doomed.”47

  AS LINCOLN MADE HIS INQUIRIES about the free labor system that Butler was establishing in Louisiana, he also asked about the upcoming elections for a new unionist government slated for early December. Butler and Denison assured the president that, although free elections were possible in only two of the state’s districts, the candidates were sound Union men, some of them firm supporters of emancipation. Before the year was out, Louisiana was able to send two new congressmen to Washington, Benjamin Flanders and Michael Hahn, both of whom pledged to support the policies of the Lincoln administration. With “duly elected” representatives of a unionist government serving in Congress, Louisiana met the standard of “loyalty” that Lincoln had established in the September proclamation. On January 1, 1863, he therefore exempted occupied Louisiana from the Emancipation Proclamation, but only after having made sure that its slaves were already being freed.

  8 “A CORDON OF FREEDOM”

  BACK IN THE LATE 1840S during the heated congressional debate over the Wilmot Proviso—which would have excluded slavery from all the territories acquired from the war with Mexico—Ohio Congressman Columbus Delano warned the South that the North intended to “establish a cordon of free states that shall surround you.” For Delano, containment was not an end in itself. By surrounding the slave states “we will light up the fires of liberty on every side,” he explained, “until they melt your present chains and render all your people free.”1 The federal government could not abolish slavery in the states, but it could restrict slavery to the states where it already existed, surround those states, and squeeze slavery to death. Containment was never the goal of abolitionism; it was a way to achieve the goal. When William Lloyd Garrison said that the North should secede from the Union, for example, it wasn’t merely because he wanted to free the North from the moral taint of association with slavery; he also wanted to surround the South with a “cordon of freedom” that would hem the slave states in and eventually force them to abandon slavery on their own.2 Once surrounded, abolitionists believed, the first to succumb to the pressure of the cordon would be the Border States. Unlike Garrison, most abolitionists believed this could be done within the Union thanks to a Constitution that made freedom national and slavery merely local. Peacetime containment—the cordon of freedom—was designed to bring about the “ultimate extinction” of slavery by the slave states themselves.

  It’s hard to imagine that Republicans could have contained slavery without the Civil War, and it’s even harder to imagine that containment could have ended slavery even if it had been implemented in peacetime. But the secession of eleven slave states gave Republicans the congressional majorities that allowed them to ban slavery from the territories, abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, and withdraw federal protection of slavery on the high seas—long the basic elements of antislavery politics. But war also made it possible for the Republicans to construct a cordon of freedom stronger than anyone had previously imagined, and to construct it much more rapidly than would have been possible in peacetime. As Yankee squadrons moved into the South, generating a flood of runaways, the Congress—with its eyes chiefly on the Border States—prohibited the Union army from participating in the capture and return of fugitive slaves. By early 1862, Republicans decided for the first time to require a state, West Virginia, to abolish slavery as a condition for admission to the Union, setting a precedent that they would later apply to all states that applied for readmission to the Union. By these means, Republican policymakers put pressure on the loyal slave states—states that were beyond the constitutional reach of full-scale military emancipation—to abolish slavery on their own.

  THE THEORY OF CONTAINMENT

  In the early 1830s, when abolitionists first proposed a cordon around the slave states, they meant something like a moral quarantine. By persuading more and more people of the evil of slavery, the abolitionists would “lay the slaveholders under an embargo, surround them, as the moral invalids of the universe, with a cordon sanitaire. It will confine the contagion to the spot of its origin, as the pest house of human nature.” At other times abolitionists spoke of the cordon as the slave South’s self-imposed isolation from “the literature and philosophy and religion of all the rest of mankind.” But as abolitionists moved into politics, the cordon became less spiritual and more material, not so much a moral quarantine as a physical one. The federal government would implement a number of policies that would surround the South, cordoning off slavery, forcing the states to abolish slavery on their own. Senator Henry Wilson, the Massachusetts radical, mentioned some of those policies in 1851. “We shall arrest the extension of slavery, and rescue the Government from the grasp of the Slave Power. We shall blot out slavery in the National Capital. We shall surround the slave States with a cordon of free States.” But preventing slavery’s extension into the territories was only one piece of the cordon the opponents of slavery proposed to build.3

  Containing slavery also meant transforming the North into truly “free soil” by the federal government’s refusal to enforce the fugitive slave clause. “What will be accomplished by a dissolution of the Union?” Massachusetts abolitionists asked as early as 1837, already responding to southern threats of secession. “The line of Virginia will be blackene
d with fugitive slaves fleeing into the free States. Gone is your guarantee to restore the fugitives, which now alone restrains them; gone is the whole compact of the Constitution to uphold slavery, for the alleged partial infraction of which the Republic is to be torn asunder. Your slave States will be depopulated, and how will you prevent it? Will you do it with a cordon of soldiers, covering the whole extent of Mason and Dixon’s line?” This argument for why the South would never secede became a standard theme in antislavery circles. As James Gillespie Birney the Ohio abolitionist, explained, one of the reasons “the South will not dissolve [the Union] is, that the slaves would leave their masters and take refuge in the free states. The South would not be able to establish a cordon along her wide frontier sufficiently strong to prevent it.”4

  Most Republicans objected to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 because it transferred enforcement of the fugitive slave clause from the states to the federal government, a violation of the premise that freedom was national and slavery merely local. It soon became difficult, not to say dangerous, for the slaveholders to capture and bring home with any degree of regularity runaways found in the northern states. “We ought not to deceive Southern men,” the veteran antislavery Congressman Joshua Giddings declared as Congress enacted the 1850 statute. “We should say to them, in all frankness and sincerity, that the day for arresting fugitive slaves has gone by forever.”5 Lincoln similarly warned on more than one occasion that if the slave states left the Union, the free states would no longer be under any obligation to return fugitive slaves. When slaves began running to Union lines early in the war, Republicans in both Congress and the administration responded predictably. Beginning with the decision to withhold “contraband” slaves from their owners in the first weeks of the war, Republican policymakers would eventually make it a crime for anyone in the armed forces to participate in the capture and return of fugitive slaves. Congress went a step further when, in the Second Confiscation Act, it restricted enforcement of the fugitive slave clause to local civil and judicial authorities. Under the principle of freedom national, the slave states alone were responsible for enforcement of the fugitive slave clause. The free states would thus become another part of the cordon of freedom surrounding the South.

  Ideally all of the slave states would eventually succumb to the pressure of the cordon and begin to abolish slavery on their own. As Pennsylvania Congressman Thaddeus Stevens explained in 1850, slavery should not be allowed to expand, “because confining it within its present limits will bring the States themselves to its gradual abolition.” Like most northern opponents of slavery, Stevens assumed that slavery was too weak to survive the pressure of a cordon. “Confine it, and like the cancer that is tending to the heart, it must be eradicated, or it will eat out the vitals,” he explained. But it was up to the slave states themselves to reach that conclusion. “The sooner the patient is convinced of this, the sooner he will procure the healing operation. . . . Confine this malady within its present limits. Surround it by a cordon of freedom so that it cannot spread, and in less than twenty-five years every slaveholding State in this Union will have on its statute books a law for the gradual and final extinction of slavery.”6

  This is undoubtedly what Lincoln meant when he said that confining slavery within its existing limits would lead to its “natural death.” The genius of this approach, as antislavery politicians saw it, was that it did not violate the constitutional ban on direct federal interference with slavery in the states. “The North has no desire to oppress the South,” one New York congressman insisted. “They will leave it untouched by any national legislation in those States, but will surround it by a cordon of free States.” A popular metaphor likened slavery, trapped within the cordon, to a scorpion that kills itself once it realizes that it is surrounded. “The Republican Party does not wish to interfere in the internal government or social institutions of the slave States, but merely to place around them a cordon of free States,” Republican Congressman Anson Burlingame explained in 1856. “Then this horrible system will die of inanition; or, like the scorpion, seeing no means of escape, sting itself to death.” In principle, containment did not merely isolate slavery; it destroyed it.7

  Free territories and free states would go a long way toward making freedom national within the United States, but keeping slavery local also had implications for foreign policy. Freedom was not merely national, it was also international. Because slavery was a purely state institution, it had no “extraterritorial” reach whatsoever. On the high seas, where the law of nations ruled, the natural right of freedom prevailed. The destruction of slavery would require free oceans along with free soil.

  FREE OCEANS

  When in 1860 opponents of slavery looked back over the course of American diplomatic history, they saw an unbroken record of support for slavery. The very treaty recognizing America’s independence included a provision, demanded by the Americans, requiring British compensation for the slaves England had freed during the War of Independence. The Americans demanded a similar provision in the Treaty of Ghent, which concluded the War of 1812. And in the treaty that transferred French Louisiana to the United States, the Jefferson administration made explicit promises to protect slavery. Jefferson and his successors squashed all moves to grant diplomatic recognition to the independent black republics of Haiti and Liberia. In a series of incidents during the 1820s and 1830s, the federal government repeatedly protested when British officials in the Bahamas enforced their own nation’s law by emancipating slaves on U.S. ships that made their way into British ports. When slaves rebelled on the high seas, the U.S. government consistently supported slaveholders in their attempts to return the rebels to slavery. With the annexation of Texas and the war with Mexico in the 1840s, the United States dramatically extended the territorial reach of slavery and increased the number of slave states in the Union. And during the 1850s the federal government sent bellicose proslavery southerners on diplomatic missions to Europe, where they issued not-so-veiled threats to take Cuba by force if the Spanish government refused to sell the island to the United States. To abolitionists this was a sordid record that tarnished America’s image in the world.8

  Nothing so clearly exposed the slaveholders’ sway in foreign affairs, abolitionists believed, as the refusal of the United States to join with Great Britain in its attempts to suppress the Atlantic slave trade. The issue was not the illegal importation of African slaves into the United States. The federal government had made slave trading a crime in 1790, banned the importation of slaves in 1808, and went further in 1820 when it branded the slave trade a form of piracy. Thereafter very few slaves were smuggled into the country. The real problem was the participation of American ships and captains in the business of purchasing slaves in Africa and selling them in Cuba and Brazil. Americans became active in the Cuban slave trade in the 1830s, but in the 1840s the focus of their business shifted to Brazil. After 1850, when Brazilian authorities began suppressing the slave trade, American slavers turned their attention once again to Cuba. All of this commercial activity was illegal under U.S. law, but it was impossible to suppress so long as the American government refused to allow British patrols to search American ships. With the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842, the United States committed itself to the deployment of a squadron that would patrol the African coast in cooperation with British ships, but it was not until the very end of the 1850s that the Buchanan administration finally commissioned enough ships to make the slave-trade patrols effective.9

  In the spring of 1861, within weeks of taking office, Secretary of State William Seward approached Britain’s foreign ministry indicating that at long last the United States was willing to sign a slave-trade treaty. The British were initially suspicious of American intentions. Seward had come into office making provocative proposals to stave off secession by uniting the country in a war against England. Anglo-American relations were further hampered by mutual misunderstandings. The British never understood that the Constitution did n
ot allow the federal government to prosecute a war whose “purpose” was to abolish slavery in the southern states. The Lincoln administration, on the other hand, never understood that Britain’s formal declaration of neutrality benefited the North because it meant that English ships would respect the Union blockade of the Confederacy. In late 1861, relations between Britain and the United States reached a low point when an impetuous American naval commander illegally boarded a British ship, the Trent, near Havana and removed two Confederate diplomats on their way to Europe. The peaceful resolution of the Trent affair, however, opened the way to renewed negotiations for a slave-trade treaty in early 1862.10

  For once, Seward’s penchant for intrigue proved advantageous. Anxious to disarm any anti-British sentiment that might undermine ratification, Seward suggested a diplomatic shuffle between himself and the British ambassador in Washington. The Americans would insist on a meaningless sunset provision in the treaty; the British would publicly protest but then back down, making it seem as if they had succumbed to the demands of the United States. The ruse worked.11 The Senate approved the slave-trade treaty by a unanimous vote on April 24, 1862. After decades of reluctance the Americans finally signed a slave-trade treaty that would allow the British to search American ships suspected of engaging in the illegal transatlantic slave trade. The number of African slaves sold to Cuba dropped from fourteen thousand in 1861 to ten thousand in 1862 to under four thousand in 1863. Within another few years, four centuries of Atlantic slave trading came to an end.