Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865
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The Washington abolition bill passed the Senate on April 3, 1862, by a vote of 29 to 14. One week later, Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens introduced the same bill to the House. To speed its passage, Stevens moved its immediate consideration by the entire House meeting as a Committee of the Whole. He skillfully turned back all efforts to amend the bill, at one point moving to limit debate to one hour. Democrats and Border State congressmen failed to stall consideration of the bill and to table it once it came up, but they did win enough Republican votes to extend the debate. Several days of protracted wrangling ensued. Even after Stevens called for a vote on the bill, opponents kept coming up with desperate amendments designed to derail it. In the end, the House approved the Senate version of the bill by another overwhelming vote of 92 to 38. President Lincoln signed it into law on April 16, 1862.
The statute followed the language of the Constitution by referring to slavery as a servile status rather than a right of property. But for the first time Republicans were specific that they were abolishing racial slavery. “All persons held to service or labor within the District of Columbia by reason of African descent are hereby discharged and freed.” Also for the first—and only—time in the war, the bill provided for compensation at an average of three hundred dollars for each emancipated slave, though it restricted payments to “loyal” slaveholders. Owners had ninety days to apply for compensation to a three-man commission charged with examining the owners’ claims. An oath was insufficient as proof of loyalty; there had to be witnesses, and often the only competent witness was a former slave. The commissioners were free to subpoena testimony “without the exclusion of any witness on account of color.” Former slaves were thereby empowered to testify as to the loyalty of their former owners. The law made it a felony for any former owner to remove emancipated slaves from the District in an attempt to sell or re-enslave them, and anyone convicted of the felony could be sentenced to between five and twenty years in prison. Finally, Congress appropriated one hundred thousand dollars “to aid in the colonization and settlement of such free persons of African descent . . . as may desire to emigrate.” Lincoln appointed the three men on the commission, and they set about their work quickly, issuing a notice on April 28 that all masters wishing compensation had ninety days to document their claims. By mid-June the commission published a list of all those claiming compensation and inviting testimony from anyone with knowledge of their loyalty. The commissioners completed their work and submitted a final report on August 16, 1862.27
A few days after the bill was passed, District blacks, many of them newly emancipated, met at an African American Presbyterian church to celebrate. They passed a series of resolutions, praising God for having brought to the District “that dearest of all earthly treasures—Freedom.” They also resolved to “prove ourselves worthy” of freedom and to remain “orderly and law abiding.” Finally, they expressed “heartfelt and enduring thanks to Congress, to President Lincoln and to our friends generally.”28 But as free blacks celebrated, Maryland masters complained that the abolition bill had turned Washington into “free soil,” making it more than ever a refuge for their escaping slaves.
Like the existence of slavery on federal military installations within the southern states, slavery in the District presented Republicans with a legal anomaly. Committed to the proposition that slavery was purely local, they could not agree on the status of slavery in areas where state and local law created it. Wasn’t slavery in the District of Columbia local? Though Republicans were generally loath to compensate masters on the principle that slaves were not “property” under the Constitution, they held their noses and compensated District masters because local law did recognize slave property. A similar anomaly arose over the legal status of slaves of loyal Maryland masters escaping into the District. Republicans generally believed that the fugitive slave clause should be enforced by state and local authorities only, and they were adamant that the Union army should not enforce the clause at all. In Washington, therefore, slaves escaping to Union military camps were generally emancipated, whereas local police and judges continued to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. Republicans were frustrated with the continued capture of fugitive slaves by the District’s city marshal, but by their own legal logic there was not much they could do about it. The contradiction became acute after the District abolition bill all but invited Maryland slaves into the capital to claim their freedom.29
Even before the statute took effect, Washington newspapers reported that slaves were “running away in numbers, the most of them making their way to the City of Washington, having got the idea that they will be free here.” There were reports that between “100 and 200 slaves crossed the Eastern Branch Bridge every week.” Owners watched helplessly, “knowing that they could not stop the stampede.” The Evening Star predicted that once the law was passed, it would “bring hither within the next year a population of between 50,000 and 100,000 negroes liberated by the natural contingencies of the war.”30 This was pretty much what the Republicans had in mind: the destruction of slavery in one area would weaken it elsewhere, thanks to “the natural contingencies”—or, in Lincoln’s phrase, the “friction and abrasion” of war.
More than a decade had passed since Senator Henry Wilson vowed to “blot out slavery in the National Capital” as part of a larger effort to “surround the slave States with a cordon of free States.” Opponents were not wrong to see District abolition as “part of a series of measures already initiated, all looking to the same ultimate result,—the universal abolition of slavery by Congress.” Clement Vallandingham of Ohio pronounced the abolition of slavery in Washington “the beginning of a grand scheme of emancipation; and there is no calculation where that scheme is to end.” Republicans made no attempt to deny the charge, and radicals freely admitted it. The abolition of slavery in Washington was, in Charles Sumner’s words, “the first installment of that great debt which we all owe to an enslaved race. . . . At the national capital, slavery will give way to freedom: but the good work will not stop here; it must proceed.” Debate over slavery “will go on,” one Republican congressman declared, and “should go on, till slavery is extinct.”31
COLONIZATION
In 1860, writing “as an Abolitionist and a Republican,” James Redpath proposed the construction of a colony of former slaves on the Caribbean island-nation of Haiti. Colonization would do two things, Redpath argued. It would demonstrate “the capacity of the race for self-government,” and it would also “carry out the programme of the ablest intellects of the Republican Party,—of surrounding the Southern States with a cordon of free labor, within which, like a scorpion girded by fire, Slavery must inevitably die.”32 Colonies of freed people in Central America and the Caribbean would block the southward expansion of slavery, further tightening the cordon around the slave states and hastening the ultimate extinction of slavery in the South. Redpath had his own reasons for supporting a colony of freed slaves in Haiti, and though they were compatible with the reasons most Republicans would have given, they were not the same.
Colonization—the idea that blacks should be colonized somewhere outside the United States—always meant different things to different people. Cotton planters objected to colonization because it presupposed emancipation. Upper South slaveholders initially embraced it as a means of ridding the country of a despised class of free blacks. Moderate antislavery politicians endorsed colonization as a respectably conservative path to gradual abolition, but radical abolitionists denounced colonization because it delayed emancipation indefinitely and because it assumed that blacks and whites could never live together as equals. In the 1780s Thomas Jefferson argued that while the principles of universal freedom necessarily implied that the slaves should be emancipated, the indelible fact of black racial inferiority also demanded that emancipated slaves be deported to some other country. But abolitionists generally disliked the idea. In their campaigns to abolish slavery in the northern states in the late eighte
enth century, they insisted that through diligence and education emancipated slaves and their descendants would overcome the degradation of slavery and eventually take their place as equal citizens. Not surprisingly, abolitionists were shocked by the emergence of the American Colonization Society (ACS) after the War of 1812, precisely because it seemed to deny the possibility of eventual racial equality.33 To be sure, many sincere abolitionists were initially attracted to the society when it was first formed in 1817, but most of them departed within a few years as the organization put more and more emphasis on racial exclusion. By the late 1820s a new, more militant abolitionism defined itself in opposition to colonization.
The colonization movement waxed with the buildup of the Missouri crisis in 1821 and then quickly waned with the departure of the abolitionists. By the 1830s and 1840s the American Colonization Society was essentially moribund. Abolitionists had repudiated it, and meanwhile the Whigs and Democrats had excluded all forms of antislavery from national politics. Colonization revived alongside antislavery politics during the 1850s. In 1859 and 1860 the ACS sponsored more emigrants to Liberia—some four thousand—than at any period in its history. The war itself brought forth a new wave of colonization schemes and proposals, peaking in the same year—1862—that Republicans adopted a policy of universal military emancipation in the seceded states and put unprecedented pressure on the loyal slave states to abolish slavery on their own. But once the Republicans committed themselves to the complete destruction of slavery—which they had by the end of 1862—the colonization movement sputtered and for all practical purposes died. The Civil War brought colonization back to life, and then killed it. It’s easy to see why. Among Republicans, support for colonization served two purposes: it would make it easier for northern racists to accept the emerging policy of universal emancipation, and it was part of a broader package of incentives designed to encourage the Border States to abolish slavery on their own. By the end of 1863, colonization no longer served those purposes, and though individual Republicans continued to endorse it, it all but disappeared as a serious policy. But which policy?
Historians generally use a single word—colonization—to describe two very different proposals. The first was deportation, the forced expulsion of free and emancipated blacks from the United States. During the war this was a policy advocated primarily by northern Democrats, and it went nowhere. Not a single freed slave was deported from the United States during or after the war. Only a few of the most conservative Republicans—Orville Browning in the Senate and Edward Bates, the attorney general—even hinted that they would support deportation. Most Republicans who supported colonization—and a substantial minority did not—endorsed a very different policy: federal subsidies for the voluntary emigration of blacks who chose to leave the United States. Though both policies are referred to as “colonization,” the advocates of each were sharply critical of the other, and both were at some level disingenuous. Democrats insisted that they would support emancipation only if it was accompanied by deportation, when in truth they opposed emancipation under almost any circumstances. Republicans appropriated funds for voluntary emigration, knowing full well that hardly any blacks were likely to accept the offer. These rather sharp divisions became clear in the congressional debate over the colonization provision of the District emancipation bill.
Democrats and Border State congressmen belittled the very idea of voluntary emigration. You “will never find one slave in a hundred that will consent to be colonized, when liberated,” Senator Davis of Kentucky insisted.34 Indeed, widespread black reluctance to emigrate was one of the reasons Democrats gave for demanding involuntary deportation as a condition of emancipation. If blacks were allowed to remain in the United States after they were freed, Democrats predicted, either the states would re-enslave blacks as soon as they could, or else a race war would erupt across the South, ending in the complete extermination of all blacks. Border State representatives took a very different position. Delaware Democrat Willard Saulsbury opposed the appropriation of any funds for colonization on the grounds that Congress had no business offering states incentives to abolish slavery—at the taxpayers’ expense, no less.
Despite such criticism, voluntary emigration was the only policy Republicans were willing to pursue. President Lincoln endorsed this type of colonization in his first annual message to Congress in December of 1861. By then his administration, led by Postmaster General Montgomery Blair—an avid colonizationist—was energetically pursing the possibility of building a colony for African American emigrants at Chiriquí, in Central America. Meanwhile Congress, having already included an appropriation for voluntary emigration in the District abolition statute, attached another appropriation to the Second Confiscation Act and authorized Lincoln to implement the colonization clause. By late 1862 the Chiriquí scheme fell apart, but the administration instead turned its attention to a different colony, at Île à Vache, a Caribbean island off the coast of Haiti. In December of 1862, Lincoln once again endorsed voluntary colonization in his second annual message to Congress.35
But by then much of the Republican support for voluntary emigration had already dissipated. Lincoln never mentioned it publicly again. In 1863 the colony at Île à Vache collapsed. Only about five hundred blacks, mostly former slaves from Virginia, had volunteered to go, yet within months they were dying from exposure and malnutrition. Less than a year after it was initiated, the only experiment in colonization came to an end when Lincoln, hearing of the disaster, sent a ship to the island to return the remaining colonists to the United States. Here and there a Republican could be heard to utter words in support of colonization, but as a policy it was finished.
It is not hard to understand the flurry of support for colonization during the Civil War. Notwithstanding the opposition of radical abolitionists, colonization presupposed emancipation, and whenever talk of emancipation rose, so too did talk of colonization. The more difficult question to answer is why it came to so little. In the modern world, wars of national unification, especially civil wars inflamed by ethnic nationalism, commonly lead to forced population transfers and sometimes genocide. The Civil War in the United States was certainly a war of national unification, and the Republicans exhibited more than their fair share of ethnic nationalism. Nor was the idea of forced expulsion unheard of in the United States. Most Republican policymakers were old enough to remember the brutal “removal” of the southeastern Indians during Andrew Jackson’s administration. And during the Civil War itself the Union army forcibly expelled some ten thousand whites from their homes in Missouri. The same army systematically uprooted tens of thousands of slaves from their plantations to relocate them in areas safe from the reach of their former masters. And yet not a single emancipated slave was involuntarily “removed” from the United States in the wake of emancipation. Why was there so much talk of colonization and so little of it?
The most likely explanation is that colonization interfered with Republican efforts to get the former slaves back to work as free laborers. However much Republicans supported voluntary emigration, it paled beside their overwhelming desire to demonstrate the superiority of free labor on the farms and plantations of the post-emancipation South. If Republican emancipation policy is to be faulted, it is not for the relatively inconsequential efforts to colonize the former slaves, but for the far more substantial efforts to keep them in place, to put them back to work as soon as possible—often on their old farms and often for their former masters. Union officers in the South filled their reports with news of their efforts to get former slaves back to work, often boasting of their allegedly successful experiments in free labor. When they began moving large numbers of freed people, Union officials transplanted blacks not to Central America or Liberia, but to Memphis and Cincinnati, or to new plantations on Island No. 10 in the Mississippi River. Colonization was incompatible with the central thrust of Union policy—which was to retain black laborers, not to remove them.36
Colonization prop
osals flourished from late 1861 to late 1862 as Republicans were developing and coordinating their various programs of military emancipation and state abolition. Subsidies for voluntary emigration might appease the racists, particularly in the northwestern states, who were reluctant to accept emancipation on any other terms. More important, voluntary colonization proposals were offered to the loyal slave states as part of the Republican effort to encourage those states to abolish slavery on their own. But the racists were not appeased, and the Border States were not impressed. By the end of 1862, most Republicans gave up on the idea of colonization altogether, and once Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, he stopped advocating it as well. Colonization had served whatever purpose it ever had. Frustrated Republicans instead put their faith in the “friction and abrasion” of war, which, they concluded, was far more likely than colonization to push the Border States into abolishing slavery on their own.