by James Oakes
The emancipation of soldiers and their families was part of a broader Republican effort to undermine slavery in the Border States. In 1863 the War Department opened recruiting offices for blacks in Maryland, Tennessee, and Missouri. The results were dramatic. Of the 146,000 black men recruited from the slave states, nearly 60 percent—as many as 85,000—enlisted from areas exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation. This was partly the inevitable consequence of the fact that the Union army occupied the loyal areas more or less undisturbed from January 1, 1863, until the end of the war. Four exempted slave states—Kentucky, Maryland, Tennessee, and Missouri—had fewer than 20 percent of the slaves yet provided 40 percent of the black soldiers from the South. With the exception of Mississippi—parts of which were continuously occupied by the Union army from the moment the proclamation was issued—the disloyal states of the Deep South generated relatively few black recruits for the Union army. Some of this may have been due to General Sherman’s persistent reluctance to enlist black men during his marches through the cotton states. Some of it may have been caused by the active recruitment of blacks by agents from northern states trying to fill their draft quotas with slaves from the nearby Border States. But for whatever reason, the disparity was stark. Some 5,000 Alabama slaves enlisted, compared to more than 20,000 from neighboring Tennessee. Fewer than 3,500 black Georgians enlisted; more than 23,000 Kentucky blacks did. An astonishing 57 percent (23,703) of Kentucky’s eligible black men served in the Union army, compared with a mere 8 percent (5,462) of blacks from South Carolina who were eligible for military service. More astonishing still were the Delaware numbers. The state had fewer than 1,800 slaves in 1860, yet by the end of the war more than 900 blacks from Delaware served in the Union army. Approximately 44,000 black soldiers, comprising nearly one-third of the recruits from the South, came from just two exempted states—Tennessee and Kentucky. For enslaved men in loyal parts of the South, military service provided the clearest path to emancipation for themselves and their families.65
Black soldiers in exempted areas became especially aggressive liberators of their fellow slaves. Early in the war, for example, Peter Bruner had tried to escape from his Kentucky master, but when he reached Union lines and told the Union soldiers he wanted to join the army, “they said they did not want any darkies, that this was a white man’s war.” Bruner tried again in July of 1864, by which time Union policy had changed. He rose early one morning and headed for Camp Nelson, Kentucky, a major center for the Union army’s recruitment of black troops. It took him nearly twenty-four hours to make the forty-mile trek, but along the way he met up with sixteen other blacks who, like Bruner, “were on their way to Camp Nelson.” When he arrived the Union officers asked him what he wanted. “I told them that I came here to fight the rebels and that I wanted a gun.” When enough recruits had come into camp a new regiment was formed and on July 25, 1864, Bruner was mustered into service in the Twelfth U.S. Heavy Artillery. Bruner saw little combat, but if emancipation was part of the broader effort to suppress the southern rebellion, he and his unit performed an essential service by “recruiting” slaves off the plantations near his own home. As they moved onto their old farms and plantations some of the slaves resisted, telling Bruner that “they had no time for war.” Bruner’s unit conscripted them anyway, and when their masters came after them Bruner’s unit refused to return the conscripts, declaring the slaves “prisoners of war.” Other slaves, often in large numbers, ran to Bruner’s unit “for protection.” “At one time,” Bruner recalled, “we sent away five hundred men, women and children to Camp Nelson.66
Henry Clay Bruce, himself a former slave, recalled that in Missouri—another state exempted from the proclamation—“any slave man who desired to be a soldier and fight for freedom, had an opportunity to do so.” By late 1863 “recruiting officers” from Iowa were pouring into Missouri looking for black men who might serve as replacements for white men trying to avoid the draft back home. But Bruce had “trouble” with the black Missourians once they were enlisted, because “they thought it no more than right to press in every young man they could find.” Urged on, bribed even, by the Iowa recruiters, the black troops “scoured the county in search of young men for soldiers.”67
In most cases, however, black soldiers did not have to be pressured or bribed into recruiting other blacks into the army. In Tennessee, for example, as soon as Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Samuel Hall decided he would be “permanently safe with the union army and he went to it.” William Wallace, who had recently paid over eleven hundred dollars for Hall, had already been warned that the slave “knowed too much.” Fearing the worst, Wallace tried to “refugee” his slaves—including Hall’s wife and children—southward into Alabama beyond the reach of Union forces. Before the slaves were moved, Sam Hall escaped, joined the army, and quickly returned along with several other soldiers to his old plantation, where they exacted “revenge.” The soldiers ordered the “ex-master” to “hitch up his mules, load up his wagon with hams and bacon and include in the load Sam’s wife and five children and haul them all over into the union lines.” Within a few days Hall’s family and several other blacks were on a boat heading northward to freedom as the “old master stood by the side of the river watching tearfully at the disappearance of his $1,125.00.”68 The experience of slaves like Peter Bruner, Henry Clay Bruce, and Samuel Hall suggests that, exemptions notwithstanding, the Emancipation Proclamation made slavery more vulnerable than ever in the loyal slave states that were technically beyond its reach.
IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN TEMPTING to read the text of the Emancipation Proclamation and draw inferences from words about what it did or did not do—that it freed all the slaves, or that it freed no slaves at all. But the proclamation did not explain itself. Lincoln issued it at a specific moment in the long history of the struggle against slavery. Read in the context of decades of abolitionist efforts to legitimate “military emancipation,” for example, Lincoln’s legalistic tone was a culmination, not a rejection, of the antislavery movement. Read on their own terms the proclamation’s exemptions can seem like restrictions on the scope of emancipation; read in light of the antislavery policies in place prior to January 1, 1863, the proclamation dramatically expanded military emancipation into the areas that were previously beyond emancipation’s reach. It is impossible to tell, from the text alone, how heavily the Emancipation Proclamation rested on the attorney general’s earlier declaration that under the Constitution blacks were full citizens of the United States. Even the most careful reading of the proclamation will not fully explain how federal antislavery policy changed after January 1, 1863.
What, then, did the Emancipation Proclamation do? It lifted the ban on the enticement of slaves from their farms and plantations. Beginning in early 1863, Union soldiers systematically invited unprecedented numbers of slaves to claim their freedom by coming into Union lines. It opened the Union army to the enlistment of black soldiers who, for obvious reasons, were among the most enthusiastic liberators. By these means the Emancipation Proclamation transformed Union soldiers, especially black Union soldiers, into an army of liberation. The proclamation greatly intensified the pressure on the Border States. Because the Militia Act of 1862 had eliminated the word free from the conditions for enlistment, the Emancipation Proclamation empowered federal recruiters to enlist slaves in the Border States, which they proceeded to do with an aggressiveness that outraged loyal slaveholders.
Yet the Emancipation Proclamation did not transform the “purpose” of the war. Like most Republicans, Lincoln had long insisted that the only constitutional justification for the war was the restoration of the Union, and he continued to say the same thing even after he issued the proclamation. Barely a week into 1863, Lincoln told John McClernand—a political general and a Democrat—that his purpose was unchanged: he would restore the states to their proper place under the Constitution. “For this alone have I felt authorized to struggle; and I seek neither more nor less n
ow.” Ten days later Lincoln formally thanked the working men of Manchester, England, for their expression of support, telling them that his “paramount” duty was “to maintain at once the Constitution and the integrity of the federal republic.”69 Lincoln never stopped saying this. In saying it, however, neither he nor his fellow Republicans had ever meant to suggest that the war was caused by anything other than slavery or that slavery was in any way shielded from the war’s destructive force. It was always a war for the Union and always a war over slavery.
It was the nature, not the purpose, of the Civil War that changed after January 1, 1863. When the fighting started Republicans defended emancipation as a legitimate means of suppressing the southern insurrection. By 1863 they were saying something slightly but significantly different: emancipation—not of some slaves, but of all of the slaves—had become the necessary condition for the restoration of the Union. As this conviction spread it accustomed both the Union army and the majority of northern voters to the idea that Union victory could be accomplished only by means of the complete destruction of slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation thereby created the political will that would become indispensible to the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment—indispensible because by the end of 1863, a year after Lincoln issued it, Republicans realized that the Emancipation Proclamation would not be enough to destroy slavery forever.
11 “THE SYSTEM YET LIVES”
FOR MORE THAN A YEAR, from the spring of 1862 into the summer of 1863, the progress of federal antislavery policy was substantially shaped by the misfortunes of the Union army in the South. After Grant’s capture of Forts Henry and Donelson and Farragut’s capture of New Orleans in early 1862, there was not much good news for the Union armed forces. The northern victory at Shiloh was widely viewed as a near disaster caused by Grant’s presumed incompetence. McClellan’s failure to defeat the Confederates during the Peninsula Campaign had propelled the North’s shift to a harder war and with it a harder emancipation policy. That same failure led Lincoln to delay issuing the Emancipation Proclamation for several months, during which the Union forces were defeated for a second time at Bull Run. The “victory” at Antietam that finally prompted Lincoln’s announcement was bloody, disappointing, and soon followed by disastrous Union defeats at Fredericksburg in late 1862 and Chancellorsville in early 1863. Yet amid these cascading military disappointments, and in part because of them, the federal government abolished slavery in the nation’s capital, excluded it from the western territories, adopted universal emancipation in the seceded states, lifted the ban on enticement, and opened enlistment in the Union army to African American men. Federal antislavery policy seemed to progress most rapidly when Union armies fared most poorly.
The irony reversed itself in the summer of 1863, when spectacular Union victories turned the tide of war in the Union’s favor. In the West, after a long and brilliant campaign that ended in a prolonged siege, Grant succeeded in capturing the strategically important city of Vicksburg, Mississippi. As long as the Confederates controlled Vicksburg, they held a choke on the Mississippi River, and Grant had been struggling for months to wrench the southern stranglehold from what Lincoln called the “Father of Waters.” Union forces pounded Vicksburg’s well-fortified defenses, but to no avail. Grant tried to dig a new channel for the river that would allow his army to slip down past the guns aimed at it, but that failed. Instead, a daring series of nighttime flotillas enabled Grant to move his army downriver past the city and then over to the east bank, where he broke loose from his own supply lines to chase one Confederate army all the way to Jackson and beyond, feeding his soldiers by foraging off the land. When a second Confederate force retreated to the security of the Vicksburg defenses Grant promptly closed off their escape and settled in for the siege. Within weeks the Confederate soldiers, desperate and starving, demanded that their officers surrender and in early July the victorious Yankees entered the city. Shortly thereafter the remaining Confederate strongholds along the river, unable to sustain themselves, likewise surrendered. The Mississippi River was now under the more or less complete control of the Union. Never again would Confederate armies west of the Appalachians regain the momentum. It was one of the most spectacular Union triumphs of the war, yet it was nearly eclipsed by an equally dramatic Union victory in the East.1
After his stunning triumph at Chancellorsville Confederate General Robert E. Lee came to believe that his remarkable army could do anything he asked of it, so he asked it to do the impossible. In late June of 1863, as Grant was closing in on Vicksburg a thousand miles away, Lee moved his Army of Northern Virginia across the Potomac into Maryland, launching his second invasion of the North. Cut off from his own supply lines and for a time from his own cavalry, Lee pushed into Pennsylvania and bumped into the Union army, led by the newly appointed General George Gordon Meade, at the small crossroads town of Gettysburg. And there, for three successive days, Union and Confederate troops fought the climactic battle of the Civil War. On July 1 Lee instructed his men to get control of the heights just south of the town, but they failed. On July 2 he ordered simultaneous assaults on the Union right and left, and both assaults failed. Undeterred, Lee ordered General George Pickett to launch a direct attack on the Union center the next day, July 3, and “Pickett’s Charge” instantly became synonymous with military disaster. If everything went wrong for the hardened Confederate veterans, the Union soldiers and officers did everything right—seizing control of the heights, taking good advantage of interior lines of communication, fighting ferociously to close any gaps that opened in their own lines, bravely and ingeniously holding off one Confederate advance after another. On July 4 Lee and his devastated army retreated back across the Potomac into Virginia. “Peace,” Lincoln said, “does not appear so distant as it did.”2
The prospect of peace, however, raised a disturbing possibility for Lincoln and the Republicans: the war might end without slavery having been destroyed. They believed that slaves actually freed by the war—that is, slaves who had come within Union lines one way or another and been “practically” emancipated—were free forever. But most slaves never left their farms and plantations, and in that sense most were never actually freed. There were a dozen reasons why military emancipation could never reach the majority of slaves, but a few stand out. For one thing, as the Union began freeing slaves the Confederacy took countermeasures that successfully prevented thousands from reaching Union lines and inhibited countless others from making the attempt. Then, too, the Union army was overwhelmed by military emancipation and was never able to care adequately for the huge numbers of freed men and women who ended up within its lines. The slaves themselves had reasons to be cautious about attempting to escape. Beyond the threat of severe Confederate retaliation and the inability of the Union army to provide adequately for the contrabands, escape was often difficult—even lethal—especially for parents with children or the elderly. Many chose to stay, but most never got to choose because the Union army never came close enough to them to make successful escape possible. Here was the last and arguably the most important reason why military emancipation could not free most slaves: slavery itself was simply too big. There were too many slaves on too many farms spread out over too many square miles.
With four million slaves in 1860, the South was by far the largest slave society in the world, possibly the largest in the history of the world. At the height of its strength, ancient Rome never counted more than two million slaves on the Italian peninsula. After the southern United States, the largest slave society in the Americas was Brazil, with fewer than half as many slaves. Cuba was next, with under a million slaves. Not only did the South’s slave population dwarf all others, its sheer expanse all but defied military conquest. Spread across two-thirds of the continent, slavery reached all the way from Wilmington, Delaware, to Brownsville, Texas. It took a vast and powerful Union army four years of brutal war to defeat the Confederates—but not even the victorious Yankees could field enough men to physical
ly reach and emancipate more than a fraction of the slaves in the immense southern empire.
At the end of the Civil War fewer than 15 percent of the slaves in the rebellious states had actually been freed. These were military emancipations. What would happen to the others once the fighting stopped? Indeed, could Lincoln or anyone else really be sure that slaves freed by the war would never be re-enslaved? The spectacular successes of the Union armies in the summer of 1863 forced Lincoln and the Republicans to realize the shortcomings of military emancipation. It was brutal. It would not free all the slaves. And it might not free any of them forever.
THE CONFEDERATE COUNTERATTACK
Slavery has been tolerated in all manner of societies throughout human history, Lincoln observed, but the Confederacy was the first nation whose “primary, and fundamental object [is] to maintain, enlarge, and perpetuate human slavery.” The slaveholders had sound reasons for creating their own nation. A very real threat to slavery—a revolutionary threat—had emerged when abolitionists built a successful political movement on the proposition that there was no such thing as a constitutional right of property in slaves. When the slaveholders seceded in defense of their rights, the “counter-revolution of property” began. Protecting slavery was the raison d’etre of the Confederate States of America. Even the treaties regulating the relations between the Confederate government and the Indian nations within its borders had to be renegotiated to reflect proslavery ideals: each new treaty declared, in nearly identical language, that “the institution of slavery in the said nation is legal and has existed from time immemorial.” The Confederate nation was conceived in slavery and dedicated to the proposition that it would last forever.3
