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

by James Oakes

  At Fortress Monroe in July of 1861, General Benjamin Butler linked emancipation to the willingness of freed men and women to work for the Union army in return for wages. Wouldn’t it be better to emancipate the fugitives and pay them to work for the U.S. military, Butler wondered, than to return them to an enemy who would put them back to work as slaves? Over the ensuing months the connection between emancipation and labor for the army was reinforced as more and more northerners—especially Republican policymakers—interpreted the readiness of blacks to work for the Union as evidence that the slaves were the most reliably “loyal” people in the South. This made the transition from work for the army to work in the army relatively smooth. Black men who had escaped to Union lines often earned their wages by digging trenches and building fortifications. The first moves to enlist black men into the Union army built on that record. In July of 1862, Congress authorized the president to enlist black men “for the purpose of constructing intrenchments, or performing camp service, or any other labor, or military or naval service, for which they may be competent.”53

  The first authorized black regiments were organized shortly after Congress lifted the ban on blacks in the army. On August 22, General Butler ordered the enlistment of a regiment of free black soldiers known as the Louisiana “Native Guards” only months after he had repudiated a similar effort by General John Phelps. The same thing happened in South Carolina. In May, General David Hunter had tried to organize a unit of black troops in the Sea Islands, but his heavy-handed approach alienated blacks and abolitionists alike, and with no support from the War Department, Hunter was forced to disband the unit. In July, Congress lifted the ban on black enlistment, and by late October, Hunter’s successor, General Rufus Saxton, was explicitly authorized by the War Department to begin enlisting freed men into what became the First South Carolina Volunteers. In early November, Saxton invited a prominent northern abolitionist, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, to assume command of the troops. There were similar moves in Kansas during the latter half of 1862. These early initiatives, however, were local and uncoordinated until Lincoln formally authorized the general enlistment and arming of black men on January 1, 1863.54

  The Emancipation Proclamation went a step beyond the Militia Act of the previous July. The statute mentioned only physical labor—“constructing intrenchments, or performing camp service”—whereas Lincoln authorized the enlistment of black men into the “armed service” of the United States “to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.” Once the president had authorized the enlistment of blacks into the “armed service” it was but one last step to the deployment of black soldiers in combat. At the end of March, General in Chief Henry Halleck instructed General Grant to use black soldiers “for the defence of forts, depts.,&c,” as indicated in the president’s proclamation, but then added that “they can also be used as a military force.” Within months black troops were proving themselves in battles at Port Hudson and then Milliken’s Bend on the Mississippi River and, heroically but catastrophically, at Battery Wagner in South Carolina.55

  Once authorized by the proclamation, black enlistment began swiftly, accelerated steadily, and became increasingly organized. On January 13, 1863, Secretary of War Stanton authorized General Daniel Ullman “to raise a brigade (of four regiments) of Louisiana volunteer infantry.” They would serve three-year enlistments or the duration of the war. Exactly the same order went out, on exactly the same day, to Colonel James Montgomery, instructing him to raise “a regiment of South Carolina volunteer infantry.” Two days later the adjutant general authorized the governor of Rhode Island to raise “an infantry regiment of volunteers of African descent.” On January 26, Stanton himself authorized Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts to do the same. These last instructions to northern governors would eventually produce a regiment of free blacks from several northern states that became famous as the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth. By the end of January, General Saxton was reporting the successful organization of the First Regiment of South Carolina Volunteers and urging his superiors in Washington to let the men prove themselves in battle, thus “giving them a chance to strike a blow for the country and their own liberty.”56

  Yet despite the alacrity with which blacks were recruited, the Union army never treated them as the equal of white soldiers. Black regiments were strictly segregated and nearly always commanded by whites. At the outset, black soldiers were paid—when they were paid at all—at a lower rate than white soldiers. Not until June of 1864 did Congress abolish the distinction in pay for black and white soldiers. Even after that, most black soldiers found the traditional avenues to promotion blocked. Long after they had proved themselves in combat, black regiments were often relegated to garrison duty or manual labor. Meanwhile Confederate captors refused to treat black soldiers as legitimate prisoners of war. Former slaves captured in uniform were to be re-enslaved, their officers were to be executed, and though the Confederate government did not officially sanction mass executions it did almost nothing to punish the southern troops who massacred black prisoners.

  Hoping to thwart the mistreatment of black prisoners, Lincoln issued an order of retaliation in July of 1863, and subsequently halted all prisoner exchanges until the Confederates agreed to treat black Union soldiers as legitimate prisoners of war. Halleck urged Grant to use his influence and prestige to combat racial “prejudice” within the Union army, and in speech after speech, Lorenzo Thomas warned white soldiers that they would be punished for racial intolerance. Racial prejudice within the ranks did seem to diminish. White soldiers who were initially hostile to black troops often came to admire them.57

  IN THE LAST CABINET MEETINGS to put the finishing touches on the final proclamation, Treasury Secretary Chase had urged Lincoln to remove the paragraph lifting the ban on enlistment in the Union army. Chase supported black enlistment but didn’t think it belonged in the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln, however, was already beginning to grasp the connection between emancipation and black troops. He understood that to destroy slavery, the Union had to win the war, and he came to believe that black troops would help make that happen. Indeed, by late 1863 both Lincoln and Grant were convinced that black troops were indispensable to northern victory. Black soldiers were a double blessing to the Union cause, Lincoln said, because every slave recruited added as much strength to the northern armies as he subtracted from the South’s productive capacity. Grant told Lincoln that emancipation and black troops had definitively shifted the tide of the war against the Confederacy. Historians generally concur. Approximately 180,000 black men eventually served in the Union army. By the last year of the war there were as many as 100,000 blacks in uniform at one time, accounting for nearly 20 percent of the military’s fighting force. To have deprived the Union war effort of that many troops, in 1864, would have been devastating. Indispensable to northern victory, black troops were thus indispensable to slavery’s destruction.58

  AN ARMY OF LIBERATION

  On May, 7, 1864, a Union army recruiter named James Ayers rode onto a plantation ten miles outside of Huntsville, Alabama, and into a field where twenty-seven slaves were gathering corn. “Whose farm is this?” Ayers asked.

  “Master Eldridges, sir.”

  “Is that his house yonder?”

  “Yes, massa.”

  “Is he good to you?”

  “Not mighty good massa?”

  “Is he A union man or secessionist?”

  After telling Ayers that their master “swares and cusses the yanks terribly,” the slaves hurried back to their work lest their master “flog us [if] he see us idle” and “whip us for talking with you.” Ayers reassured them. “I have come to tell you good news,” he said. “Father Abraham has declared you all free[;] you have no master now. You are free and I have come to tell you.” Getting down from his horse, Ayers began to distribute leaflets depicting on one side Union soldiers freeing slaves and, on the other, announcing tha
t “[a]ll Slaves were made Freemen by Abraham Lincoln” and urging “able-bodied colored men” to come to the nearest Union camp and “fight for the Stars and Stripes!” Ayers made his pitch. The army would pay ten dollars a month, plus food and clothing, “and make you free if you will inlist and be soaldiers. How many of you boys will Turn out?” Ayers asked.

  “When do you want us?”

  “Want you Rite now.”

  “Oh massa wont let us go.”

  “Never mind your master,” Ayers protested, “you have none.” Ayers then rode up to the house where he understood there were more potential recruits, and there he met the Eldridge family, “Master, Missus and galls.”

  “How do you do,” Ayers said, “fine day this is.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Eldridge answered, “what’s all this mean? My niggers say you Come into the field and set them all free, is that so?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Well I would like to know how you got the authority to do so, Sir.”

  “By the War Department, sir, I get my Autherity, the verry best of Autherity aint it.”

  “What do you want with my niggers?” Eldridge demanded.

  “Your niggers,” Ayers replied, “you’ve got no niggers my dear sir. These are all free men as you or I am and thease women here that have been your Slaves are all free now as much so as this Lady.”

  Eldridge then invited Ayers to leave, but the Union recruiter was hardly finished. “Leave,” Ayers said, “why sir I will leave when I get Ready. But I am going to take your men or thease men when I go. You may bet you Eyes on that.” Ayers then drew his revolver and continued the lecture. “I shall not hurt a hair of your head, sir, if you be quiet, but I have Come for your Darkeys and your Darkeys I’ll have.”

  “Mister,” one of Eldridge’s daughters asked, “are you going to take dads niggers Away from him wether they are willing or no?”

  “Well no mam I aint,” Ayers replied. “But I’ll tell you what I am going to do.” In his experience, Ayers explained, he had found it best to walk off with the young black men a half mile or so and “have a big talk with them” to see if he could persuade them to enlist in the Union army. Those he “cant coax” would be sent back. Eldridge’s daughter next suggested that Ayers allow her father to speak with the men before they walk off, but the recruiting agent thought that was a bad idea. Ayers had his solitary chat with the men, and when he left, he had six black recruits with him. Shortly thereafter they enlisted in the Fifteenth Tennessee Colored Regiment, based in Nashville.59

  Before he joined the army, James Ayers had been an antislavery preacher in Illinois. The new Union policy of black enlistment offered him an opportunity to put both his preaching skills and his convictions to good use. On May, 22, 1863, the War Department issued General Orders Nos. 143 and 144 establishing a Bureau of Colored Troops and spelling out the guidelines for the appointment of “specially authorized” agents to recruit blacks into the Union army. Lorenzo Thomas was the most well known and arguably the most indefatigable of these recruiting agents, but James Ayers—appointed the following February—was no less committed to the task. From his base of operations in Tennessee, Ayers fanned out across the towns and villages of northern Alabama, tacking recruiting posters to trees and buildings and giving speeches to the groups of slaves he gathered to listen. He had two messages. He told all the slaves that they had been freed under the Emancipation Proclamation, and he told black men that it was their special obligation to serve in the Union army, that they had a powerful interest in fighting not simply for the restoration of the Union but for their own freedom. Eventually nearly 250 agents like Ayers were commissioned to spread word of the Emancipation Proclamation into Union-occupied areas of the South and recruit black men to join the army. By the time their work was done, approximately 146,000 blacks enlisted in the Union army from the slave states.60

  The private chat that garnered Ayers’s six recruits reflected official Union policy: blacks were encouraged but not forced to enlist. Not all Union recruiters, however, were as deferential as Ayers was to the preferences of the potential recruits. As the policy of black enlistment was becoming organized in the spring of 1863, there were increasing complaints against Union soldiers who coerced slaves into the army against their will. For some recruiters this was a straightforward application of the conscription policy that was initiated at the same time in the North, but not everyone saw it that way. In April, Captain Alfred Sears complained of the tactics used by Union troops in Florida who were “enlisting and drafting soldiers for the African Regiments.” My men, Sears complained, “have not been drafted. They have been kidnapped by the night.” In the area around Norfolk, Virginia, one northern missionary complained, Union soldiers were “making arrests of Colored Citizens . . . for the purpose of compelling them to volunteer in the U.S. Service.” In June a Louisiana master denounced the “pressgang” of black soldiers who came onto his plantation “and FORCIBLY removed nearly all the male negroes therefrom.” The blacks had already been freed and were working for wages, but that may have made them even more vulnerable to conscription. On the streets of New Orleans, free blacks were “being seized and enlisted in the Army.”61

  Impressment was controversial for a number of reasons. The most common complaint was that conscripting able-bodied black men interfered with the various “experiments” in free labor that were a centerpiece of federal antislavery policy. As black enlistment opened another avenue to emancipation, the two policies sometimes collided with one another. The one sought to validate emancipation by demonstrating that blacks would work more efficiently as free laborers than as slaves; the other, by demonstrating that black men would make good soldiers if only because they were fighting for their own freedom. Conflicts of this sort tended to pit antislavery men against one another. That’s what happened on the Sea Islands off South Carolina in May of 1862. Abolitionist General David Hunter began forcibly conscripting blacks from the very plantations where another abolitionist, Edward Pierce, was conducting his “social experiment” in free labor. Such conflicts multiplied a year later after black enlistment began in earnest. In Louisiana, General Ullman complained that “the contract system has been a serious impediment” to his efforts to recruit black troops. Benjamin Flanders replied that if the army impressed blacks into service, “we lose the confidence of the negro” and “we shall labor in vain to secure his services in a profitable working of the plantations.” Ullman denounced the contract system as “a virtual rendition of the negro to slavery,” but Flanders hurled the same accusation back at Union recruiting agents. “If the negroes are to be impressed,” Flanders wrote, “they have lost, not gained,” by the Emancipation Proclamation. “They are, nominally, free, but in reality, the most unprotected of serfs.” Both were exploiting what was by then a widespread fear of re-enslavement. Major George Stearns, who had been one of the first black recruiting agents in Kentucky and Tennessee, was worried about something else. He urged that “the impressments of Colored men be discontinued” because it interfered with the goal of enticing slaves away from their masters. Impressment, Stearns warned, will “prevent the slaves from running to our lines.” Some Union officers disputed the claim that black men should be spared conscription because their labor was needed on the plantations. J. G. Foster, the commander of the Department of the South, insisted that he be allowed to “collect all the men that are capable of carrying arms to fill the ranks,” because women and children were perfectly capable of cultivating the fields. In Louisiana, Colonel H. N. Frisbie defended the “peremptory draft” of black men. “The same reasons why these men should not be taken from the plantations here,” Frisbie argue, “are equally applicable to Northern farms.”62

  Black enlistment also implied a departure from the policy of emancipating men and women alike, so long as they were employed by the Union army. Black men were initially enlisted into the army to do the same work they had been doing as civilian employees, but in opening the enlistment o
ption to men the new policy also opened a distinction between the way black men and women were emancipated—for the simple reason that black women who worked as cooks and laundresses for Union soldiers could never enlist. As compensation of sorts Republican lawmakers introduced a patriarchal criterion for emancipation. The Militia Act of July 1862 explicitly freed any slave who enlisted in the Union army and at the same time freed “his mother and his wife and children.”63 For the first time the freedom of women and children depended on the freedom of their husbands and fathers. Yet like the exemptions in the Emancipation Proclamation, the patriarchal qualification for freedom was part of a broader Republican effort to expand rather than limit the scope of emancipation. It would have been easier if the Constitution had simply allowed Republicans to pass a law directly abolishing slavery in the southern states. Persuaded that such a law would have been unconstitutional, Republican congressmen resorted instead to a series of legislative flanking maneuvers, attacking slavery in a variety of indirect ways. As the number of roundabout assaults piled up, however, they began to interfere with one another.

  In the Border States the different approaches to emancipation tended to merge rather than collide. The enlistment of blacks into the Union army, for example, was an especially potent means of undermining slavery in the loyal slave states. By removing the word free from the qualifications for enlistment, the Militia Act of 1862 allowed slaves from loyal slave states to be conscripted. Once the army began recruiting slaves from the Border States shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, Republicans all but abandoned their offers of compensation to states that abolished slavery on their own. Never again would Lincoln publicly mention federal subsidies for voluntary colonization. Instead, beginning in 1863 the War Department pushed military emancipation directly into the Border States by openly encouraging slaves in loyal areas to enlist and promising them freedom in return. On March 26, 1863, Lincoln wrote to Andrew Johnson, the military governor of Tennessee, urging him to help recruit blacks into the Union army. “The colored population is the great available and yet unavailed of, force for restoring the Union,” Lincoln wrote. “The bare sight of fifty-thousand armed, and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi, would end the rebellion at once.”64 This letter is generally cited as evidence of how fully Lincoln had changed his mind about black enlistment over the previous year—and it certainly does show that—but it is scarcely noticed that Johnson was the governor of Tennessee, a state Lincoln had exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation three months earlier. In urging the recruitment of Tennessee slaves, all of whom would be freed by virtue of their enlistment, Lincoln was directly undermining slavery in a loyal slave state. Not only would slaves recruited from the loyal states be emancipated, so would their wives, mothers, and children.