by James Oakes
35 OR, ser. 1, vol. 14, p. 333; Susie King Taylor, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops Late 1st S.C. Volunteers (Boston, 1902), pp. 8–9; William Lilley Memorandum, Apr. 16, 1862 ALP-LC. Lilley had been court-martialed for, among other things, treating “poor defenceless blacks” in such a manner as “to outrage all the common feelings of humanity, characterized by the most cowardly and brutal treatment, and apparently in one or two instances by criminal indecency.” Rufus Saxton to Montgomery Meigs, Apr. 19, 1862, ALP-LC.
36 OR, ser. 1, vol. 14, p. 333.
37 Ibid., p. 341.
38 CW, vol. 5, p. 219; Salmon P. Chase to Abraham Lincoln, May 16, 1862, ALP-LC; Carl Schurz to Lincoln, May 16, 1862, ALP-LC. Chase’s point was that emancipation proclamations could be effective only on the ground where they could actually be enforced.
39 CW, vol. 5, pp. 222–224.
40 Carl Schurz to Abraham Lincoln, May 19, 1862, ALP-LC. For letters endorsing Lincoln’s revocation of Hunter’s order, see Alexander T. Stewart to Lincoln, May 21, 1862; Andrew Johnson to Lincoln, May 22, 1862; Carlton Chase to Lincoln, May 22, 1862; Joseph M. Wightman to Lincoln, May 23, 1862, ALP-LC.
41 Butler’s “proclamation” is in Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler (Norwood, MA: Plimpton Press, 1917), vol. 1, pp. 433–436. The reference to the “sullen and dangerous” residents is in a letter from Butler’s wife, p. 438.
42 FSSP, ser. 1, vol. 1, pp. 208–217, quotation on pp. 210–211.
43 Ibid, p. 218.
44 Ibid., p. 213.
45 W. Mitthoff to Benjamin Butler, May 29, 1862, in Private and Official Correspondence of Butler, vol. 1, p. 526.
46 Benjamin Butler to Edwin M. Stanton, June 29, 1862, in ibid., vol. 2, p. 14.
47 The Phelps proclamation, the exchange between General John W. Phelps and Butler, and Butler’s letter to Edwin M. Stanton, are reprinted in FSSP, ser. 1, vol. 1, pp. 199–208.
48 Private and Official Correspondence of Butler, vol. 1, pp. 614ff.
CHAPTER 7: “BY THE ACT OF CONGRESS THEY ARE CLEARLY FREE”
1 Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 2d Sess., p. 19.
2 The best study of the Second Confiscation Act is Silvana R. Siddali, From Property to Person: Slavery and the Confiscation Acts, 1861–1862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005). Daniel W. Hamilton’s Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), is more concerned with confiscation than emancipation, but is also worthwhile.
3 Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 2d Sess., pp. 49–50; Henry Wilson, History of Anti-Slavery Measures of the Thirty-Seventh and Thirty-Eighth Congresses, 1861–1865 (Boston: Walker, Wise, 1865), p. 112.
4 Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 2d Sess., p. 1953 (emphasis added).
5 Ibid., p. 1921.
6 Ibid., p. 2163.
7 Ibid., p. 1955.
8 Ibid., p. 5.
9 Ibid., p. 7.
10 Ibid., p. 1303.
11 Ibid., pp. 1886, 2233. Under Thomas Eliot’s bill “any person within any State or Territory of the United States shall, after the passage of this act, willfully engage in armed rebellion against the Government of the United States, or shall willfully aid or abet such rebellion, or adhere to those engaged in such rebellion, giving them aid or comfort, every such person shall thereby forfeit all claim to the service or labor of any persons, commonly known as slaves; and all such slaves are hereby declared free and forever discharged from such servitude.”
12 Ibid., p. 2274.
13 Ibid., pp. 2792–2793.
14 Wilson, History of Antislavery Measures, p. 173.
15 Ibid., pp. 1801, 1916ff. In a testy exchange, Benjamin Wade said that if Senators Orville Browning and Edgar Cowan were right, the Constitution made the president a “despot.”
16 Ibid., pp. 18, 2171, 2190; CW, vol. 5, p. 331.
17 Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 2d Sess., p. 18; CW, vol. 5, pp. 328–331. For similar concerns about the property confiscation provisions of the statute by a Republican congressman who strongly favored military emancipation, see Luther C. Carter to Salmon P. Chase, July 5, 1862, ALP-LC. Like Lincoln, Carter believed the federal government could permanently emancipate slaves but could not permanently confiscate real property. Chase showed Carter’s letter to Lincoln.
18 Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 2d Sess., pp. 3373–3374.
19 Ibid., p. 3382. The clause authorizing the enlistment of black troops is discussed in chapter 10.
20 U.S. Statutes at Large, 37th Cong., 2d Sess., pp. 589–592.
21 Ibid.; CW, vol. 5, pp. 336–337.
22 U.S. Statutes at Large, 37th Cong., 2d Sess., pp. 589–592.
23 Ibid., pp. 591–592.
24 Boston Daily Advertiser, Aug. 7, 1862; Springfield Republican, Aug. 30, 1862.
25 Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 2d Sess., pp. 81, 150–153, 262, and Appendix, pp. 68–71, 271.
26 George B. McClellan to Abraham Lincoln, July 7, 1862, in Stephen W. Sears, ed., The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan: Selected Correspondence, 1860–1865 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), pp. 344–345.
27 Anna Ella Carroll to Abraham Lincoln, July 14, 1862, ALP-LC. For an elaboration of these views, see Anna Ella Carroll, The Relation of the National Government to Revolted Citizens Defines . . . (Washington, DC, 1862), reprinted in Frank Freidel, ed., Union Pamphlets of the Civil War, 1861–1865 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), vol. 1, pp. 357–380.
28 Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 2d Sess., pp. 19, 1797, 2301.
29 Ibid., p. 2327, and Appendix, pp. 207, 227.
30 Farmer’s Cabinet (Amherst, NH), July 31, 1862; Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 2d Sess., p. 1562.
31 Salmon P. Chase to Alexander Sankey Latty, [Sept. 17, 1862?], in John Niven, ed., The Salmon P. Chase Papers, vol. 3: Correspondence, 1858–March 1863 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1996), p. 273; Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 2d Sess., pp. 2323 (emphasis added), 2246.
32 OR, ser. 1, vol. 15, pp. 485–490. Quote on p. 486.
33 Benjamin Butler to Captain Haggerty, May 27, 1862, in ibid., p. 522.
34 John W. DeForest, quoted in Peyton McCrary, Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 84; OR, ser. 1, vol. 15, p. 516.
35 Salmon P. Chase to Benjamin Butler, June 24, 1862, in Niven, ed., Chase Papers, vol. 3, pp. 218–219.
36 Edwin M. Stanton to Benjamin Butler, July 3, 1862, in Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler (Norwood, MA: Plimpton Press, 1917), vol. 2, pp. 41–42.
37 Benjamin Butler to Mrs. Butler, July 25 and July 28, 1862, in Private and Official Correspondence of Butler, vol. 2, pp. 109, 115–117.
38 The secretary of war wrote Butler informing him of Johnson’s assignment. E. M. Stanton to Benjamin Butler, June 10, 1862, in ibid., vol. 1, pp. 577–578. Johnson’s appointment was controversial. Montgomery Blair, the postmaster general, objected on the grounds that Johnson had spread lies about Butler, claiming he had been drunk while on duty in Baltimore a year earlier.
39 Reverdy Johnson to Abraham Lincoln, July 16, 1862, ALP-LC: Lincoln to Reverdy Johnson, July 26, 1862, in CW, vol. 5, pp. 342–344.
40 Abraham Lincoln to Cuthbert Bullitt, July 28, 1862, in CW, vol. 5, pp. 344–347.
41 Salmon P. Chase to Benjamin Butler, July 31, 1862, in Private and Official Correspondence of Butler, vol. 2, pp. 132–134.
42 “Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation,” Sept. 22, 1862, in CW, vol. 5, p. 435; Salmon P. Chase to Benjamin Butler, Sept. 23, 1862, in Private and Official Correspondence of Butler, vol. 2, p. 324.
43 Private and Official Correspondence of Butler, pp. 328–329, 331–332, 379, 430, 437–438, 439.
44 George Denison to Salmon P. Chase, Nov. 14, 1862, in ibid., pp. 426–427. For more sober assessments of the transition to free labor in Louisiana, see C. Peter Ripley, Slaves and Freedmen in Civil War Louisiana
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976); John C. Rodrigue, Reconstruction in the Cane Fields: From Slavery to Free Labor in Louisiana’s Sugar Parishes, 1862–1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001); Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).
45 Benjamin Butler to General Weitzel, Nov. 2, 1862; Butler to Edwin M. Stanton, Nov. 14, 1862, in Private and Official Correspondence of Butler, pp. 439, 474–475.
46 Abraham Lincoln to Benjamin Butler, Nov. 6, 1862, in CW, vol. 5, pp. 487–488.
47 Benjamin Butler to Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 28, 1862, in Private and Official Correspondence of Butler, vol. 2, pp. 447–450.
CHAPTER 8: “A CORDON OF FREEDOM”
1 Quoted in David Goldfield, America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2011), p. 50. Goldfield’s endnote on p. 542 refers readers to David Potter, The Impending Crisis: 1848–1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), pp. 67–68. Potter’s citation for the same Columbus Delano quotation refers to several different pages in the Congressional Globe, none of which contain Delano’s remarks. Potter also cites Avery Craven, The Development of Southern Sectionalism: 1848–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1953), p. 40, which contains the same Delano quotation and refers readers to the Congressional Globe, 29th Cong., 2d Sess., Appendix, p. 281, one of the pages Potter cited, and similarly incorrect. A search of surrounding pages of the Congressional Globe as well as every citation by Potter and Craven failed to locate the Delano quotation, as did all the index entries for “Columbus Delano” in the Globe for the Twenty-Ninth Congress. As a result, I’m not sure when Delano made his remark, assuming he is the person who said it. I nevertheless cite Delano’s words because, as I hope to demonstrate, they reflect a popular and important strain of antislavery politics.
2 W. Caleb McDaniel, “Repealing Unions: American Abolitionists, Irish Repeal, and the Origins of Garrisonian Disunionism,” Journal of the Early Republic 28, no. 2 (Summer 2008), pp. 243–269, esp. pp. 251–252. The specific catalyst for William Lloyd Garrison’s disunionism, McDaniel argues, was an 1842 speech by Kentucky Representative Joseph Underwood warning that disunion would turn the Mason-Dixon Line into an international border, freeing the northern states from any obligation to protect slavery. With that “slavery was done in Kentucky, Maryland, and a large portion of Virginia.” The “dissolution of the Union,” Underwood declared, “was the dissolution of slavery.”
3 Third Annual Report of the American Antislavery Society (New York: William S. Dorr, 1836), p. 87; Fifth Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society . . . (Boston: I. Knapp, 1837), p. 88; quoted in Henry C. Wright, The Natick Resolution; or, Resistance to Slaveholders: The Right and Duty of Southern Slaves and Northern Freemen (Boston, 1859), p. 36.
4 Proceedings of the Fourth New England Antislavery Convention . . . (Boston: I. Knapp, 1837), p. 104; Correspondence, between the Hon. F. H. Elmore, One of the South Carolina Delegation in Congress, and James G. Birney, One of the Secretaries of the American Anti-Slavery Society (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1838), p. 36.
5 Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), p. 112 and passim.
6 Speech of Hon. Thaddeus Stevens, of Pennsylvania: In the U.S. House of Representatives, Wednesday, Feb. 20, 1850, in the Committee of the Whole on the State of the Union, on the Reference of the President’s Annual message [pamphlet], p. 7.
7 President’s Plan: Speech of Hon. E. G. Spaulding, of N. York, in Favor of Gen. Taylor’s Plan for Admitting California and New Mexico, and Contrasting the Chicago Convention with the Proposed Nashville Convention: Delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, April 4, 1850 [pamphlet], p. 13; Andrew Dickson White, The Doctrines and Policy of the Republican Party: As Given by Its Recognized Leaders, Orators, Presses, and Platforms (Washington, DC, 1860), p. 3. White’s pamphlet was published by the National Democratic Executive Committee.
8 The actual history of slavery and American foreign policy was more complicated than the abolitionists suggested, primarily because territorial expansion was popular in the North as well as in the South. Nevertheless, there was an indisputably proslavery bias to American diplomacy. See Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery, completed and edited by Ward M. McAfee (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 89–134.
9 Ibid., pp. 135–204.
10 Howard Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
11 The story is told most recently in Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War (New York: Random House, 2010), pp. 277–280.
12 Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 2d Sess. Appendix, pp. 252–253, quotation on p. 253. It is possible that Lincoln had colonization in mind when he endorsed diplomatic recognition of Haiti, though he never said so. Thomas Eliot barely mentioned colonization, devoting two sentences to it in a speech that took up ten full columns of small print in the Congressional Globe.
13 From the Salem, Ala., Reporter, reprinted in Lewis Cass and Zachary Taylor, Cass and Taylor: Is Either Worthy of a Freeman’s Suffrage? [pamphlet, 1848?], p. 4.
14 Remarks of Mr. Yulee, of Florida, in the Senate of the United States, February 14, 15, and 17, 1848: On the Rights of the People of the United States in Acquired Territory [pamphlet], p. 2; Cong. Globe, 31st Cong., 1st Sess., Appendix, p. 157; James Ashley Mitchell, The Rebellion: Its Causes and Consequences: A Speech Delivered by Hon. J.M. Ashley at College Hall in the City of Toledo, Tuesday Evening, November 26, 1861 [pamphlet], p. 14.
15 Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 2d Sess., p. 1340.
16 Fehrenbacher, Slaveholding Republic, pp. 253–294.
17 Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 2d Sess., p. 2042.
18 Ibid., pp. 2049, 2051, 2042.
19 Ibid., pp. 2043, 2050.
20 Ibid., p. 2068. The “Chicago platform” refers to the 1860 Republican Party platform, on which Lincoln ran.
21 U.S. Statutes at Large, 37th Cong., 2d Sess., p. 432.
22 Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 2d Sess., p. 1446.
23 Ibid., pp. 1191–1192.
24 Ibid., p. 1472.
25 Ibid., Appendix, p. 101.
26 Ibid., p. 1629.
27 U.S. Statutes at Large, 37th Cong., 2d Sess., pp. 376–378; Final Report of the Board of Commissioners, House of Representatives, 38th Cong., 1st Sess., Jan. 14, 1863, Ex. Doc. No. 42.
28 Page Milburn, “The Emancipation of the Slaves in the District of Columbia,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society (Washington, DC: The Society, 1913), vol. 16, pp. 116–117.
29 Margaret Leech, Reveille in Washington, 1860–1865 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941), pp. 239–241; Benjamin Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 78ff.
30 Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro, pp. 103–105.
31 Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 2d Sess., pp. 1300, 1647, 1446, and Appendix, p. 105.
32 James Redpath, A Guide to Hayti (Boston: Haytian Bureau of Emigration, 1861), p. 10.
33 Paul J. Polgar, “ ‘To Raise Them to an Equal Participation’: Early National Abolitionism, Gradual Emancipation, and the Promise of African American Citizenship,” Journal of the Early Republic 31, no. 2 (Summer 2011), pp. 229–258.
34 Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 2d Sess., p. 1191.
35 Eric Foner, “Lincoln and Colonization,” in Eric Foner, ed., Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), pp. 135–166; Foner, “Abraham Lincoln, Colonization, and the Rights of Black Americans,” in Richard Follet, et al., Slavery’s Ghost: The Problem of Freedom in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), pp. 31–49.
36 On the w
artime free labor systems, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), pp. 55–56, 165–167.
37 Irving H. Bartlett, ed., Wendell & Ann Phillips: The Community of Reform, 1840–1880 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), p. 52; Moncure Daniel Conway, Autobiography: Memories and Experiences of Moncure Daniel Conway (London: Casell, 1904), vol. 1, pp. 346–347.
38 CW, vol. 5, pp. 29–31.
39 Carl Schurz to Abraham Lincoln, May 19, 1862, ALP-LC.
40 Patience Essah, A House Divided: Slavery and Emancipation in Delaware, 1638–1865 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), pp. 152–185.
41 CW, vol. 5, pp. 144–146. On the background and reaction to the March 6 address, see Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), vol. 2, pp. 333–347.
42 Ibid.
43 Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 2d Sess., pp. 1149–1150, 1173, Springfield Republican, Mar. 15, 1862.
44 Cong. Globe, 37th Cong., 2d Sess., pp. 1170, 1154, 1177, 1179.
45 CW, vol. 5, pp. 152–153, 169; Springfield Republican, Mar. 15, 1862.
46 CW, vol. 5, pp. 49, 145–146. In the weeks following the March 6, 1862, message, Lincoln answered skeptics who doubted that his proposal would be cheaper than war. See, for example, his letter of March 9 to Henry J. Raymond, editor of the New York Times, in ibid., pp. 152–153. Lincoln’s fullest elaboration of the fiscal benefits of compensated emancipation was in a letter to Senator James McDougal, on March 14, in ibid., pp. 160–161.
47 Liberator, Mar. 14 and 21, 1862; Henry Wilson, History of Antislavery Measures of the Thirty-Seventh and Thirty-Eighth Congresses, 1861–1865 (Boston: Walker, Wise, 1865), 89.
48 CW, vol. 5, pp. 222–224.
49 Ibid., pp. 317–318.
50 Cecil D. Eby Jr., ed., The Diaries of David Hunter Strother: A Virginia Yankee in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), entry for July 19, 1862, p. 69.
51 Eva Sheppard Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006). On the sectional divide within Virginia, see also Alison Goodyear Freehling, Drift toward Dissolution: The Virginia Slavery Debate of 1831–1832 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982).
