In the North, the Republican Party won substantial working-class support in 1856. Increasingly, white workers defined slavery and slaveholders as menaces not only to land reform but also to free labor. A Republican labor convention in Pittsburgh made the case at length in an address to the workingmen of Pennsylvania. The heart of the argument was simple:
In another section of our country exists a practical aristocracy owning labor, and made thereby independent of us. With them Labor is servitude and Freedom is compatible only with mastership. . . . These aristocrats desire to extend this system over all the Territories of the nation. To extend it over the Territories is to give them supreme power over the government, and then they will extend it to us.
This was not an unreasonable fear; some prominent defenders of slavery did suggest that in a better world all labor would be enslaved.
In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court gave its seal of approval to slavery and further galvanized the opposition. The case involved a lawsuit by Dred Scott, a Missouri slave who claimed to be legally free because his owner had taken him into Illinois and Wisconsin, where slavery was prohibited. The Court ruled against Scott, finding that he was not entitled to sue in federal court because slaves were not U.S. citizens. According to Chief Justice Roger Taney, free blacks were not citizens either. That question had been settled long ago, he wrote, for the republic’s founders had made clear their conviction that all black people were “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The Supreme Court now affirmed that opinion, and ruled in addition that federal laws to restrict slavery’s spread were unconstitutional because they deprived slaveholders of property without due process.
Across the North, antislavery forces protested the Dred Scott decision; across the South, slave resistance continued. Then, on October 16, 1859, the white abolitionist John Brown—already notorious for the savagery of his guerrilla campaigns in Kansas—led a raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Brown and his band, eighteen men both black and white, were all killed or captured after two days of fighting. Their action attracted national attention, as did the trials of the survivors, convicted of treason and sentenced to death. As John Brown awaited his execution, black communities throughout the North held meetings in honor of the “old man.” A resolution passed in New Bedford, Massachusetts, was typical: “Resolved, that the memory of John Brown shall be indelibly written upon the tablets of our hearts, and when tyrants cease to oppress the enslaved, we will teach our children to revere his name.” More immediately, over the summer of 1860, at least eleven slave plots and insurrections led or abetted by whites were suppressed in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas. At least twenty slaves and a dozen white men were hanged or lynched in Texas alone.
Many Americans continued to hope that slavery’s defenders and enemies could peacefully coexist. Many white workers remained loyal to the Democratic Party, which supported the popular-sovereignty doctrine and the Dred Scott decision. But votes from small farmers and workingmen were enough to elect Republican Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in 1860. The Republican platform called for a ban on the admission of slaveholding states;the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, all U.S. territories, and American ships on the high seas; the end of the interstate slave trade; strict enforcement of the ban on importing slaves from abroad; and the exclusion of slaveowners from federal jobs at all levels, from local post offices to Capitol Hill.
Even before Lincoln took office, the South’s planter elite organized insurrection, and the slave states began to secede from the federal union. By mid-April 1861, the country was at war. On his way to execution, John Brown had left behind a note predicting that slavery “will never be purged away but with blood.” Now that prophecy would be fulfilled.
* The Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations had disintegrated along with the Philadelphia Working Men’s Party in 1831.
* New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Ohio, Georgia, and California
CHAPTER
4
CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION
By the eve of the Civil War, slavery gripped more Americans, ruled more states, and produced more dollars than ever before. The federal government had protected it from the earliest days of the republic but never more vigorously than in the 1850s. When Abraham Lincoln’s election threatened this arrangement, the South’s master class confidently decided to break away from the federal union of states.
South Carolina seceded in late December 1860. The rest of the lower South soon followed: Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. In February 1861, the secessionists founded the Confederate States of America, later joined by Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas. In his inaugural address that March, Lincoln declared secession unlawful and assured the South, “I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.” Confederate states could return to the union without reprisal and with full faith that slavery would stay intact. But things had gone too far for that.
In mid-April, South Carolina answered Lincoln by bombarding the U.S. garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston’s harbor. On April 15, the President called for volunteers to fight the Confederacy;within days, troops were skirmishing along its northern borders. Confederate leaders fully expected to win the war. Since slaves did much of the work, many white men were free to fight, and most had received military training in the large militias southern states maintained. The war had some powerful opponents in the North, whose bankers and merchants generally wanted peace and a resumption of trade with southern planters. Britain, whose giant textile industry depended on American cotton, seemed likely to side with the Confederacy. If the North had more men and factories to equip an army, the South’s prospects still looked bright.
What the Confederates did not anticipate was that slaves would mobilize for the South’s defeat. By running away, by sabotaging production, by working and fighting for the Union Army, slaves doomed the Confederacy. If Southern leaders did not foresee that, Lincoln did when his Emancipation Proclamation declared the Confederacy’s slaves forever free and ordered that freedmen be received into the Union’s forces. Abolitionism surged in the North; by the end of the war, Congress had passed a Constitutional amendment to eradicate slavery and the states were certain to ratify. The Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, one of the Union Army’s black regiments, meanwhile marched into Charleston, followed by columns of black civilians who burned down the city’s slave market.
These were the opening scenes of a second American revolution in which the victory over slavery sparked other insurgencies. Southern freed-people struggled to claim their rights as workers and citizens. Northern workers revived the labor movement and organized on the political front. The women’s rights movement launched its first campaign for female suffrage. Like the first revolution, however, this one was incomplete. Women would not win the vote for another fifty years, and most of the gains made by freedpeople and northern workers were soon wiped out.
THE CIVIL WAR
The war defied the expectations of political and social leaders on both sides. Confederate and Union officials alike thought the war would be over in short order and involve minimal casualties. The fighting began in a festive atmosphere, with high-society Charleston toasting the bombardment of Fort Sumter and upper-class residents of Washington, D.C., driving their carriages out to northern Virginia to watch and cheer the early battles. Moreover, neither side at first identified the war as a conflict over slavery. The Confederacy claimed to fight for states’ rights to independence; the Lincoln administration’s only declared aim was to “Save the Union.” Contrary to expectations on both sides, the war dragged on for four long years and the casualties were enormous. Against this backdrop, slavery’s abolition became a central Union cause.
The Civil War was the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history. It claimed the lives of 618,000 troops and uncounted numbers of civil
ians, and maimed hundreds of thousands more. New military technology—the Winchester repeating rifle and the Gatling revolving machine gun—produced some of this carnage. Military tactics—long-term bombardment, mass charges against defensive formations and fortifications—produced even more. Most died of the complications of mass warfare: two-thirds of the casualties came from disease, hunger, or sheer exhaustion. Military camps were rife with mumps, measles, malaria and typhoid; prisoners of war were packed into stockades with little food and less care, and died of starvation or disease by the thousands. Yet out of this carnage came one of the most glorious chapters in U.S. history—the eradication of chattel slavery.
African Americans argued from the start that the Union’s war against the Confederate secession could not be won unless it became a war against slavery as well. “Never wound a snake, but kill it,” declared Underground Railroad activist Harriet Tubman. Since the Confederacy’s wealth and power rested on slavery, the Union would ultimately be compelled, in the words of Tubman’s comrade John Rock, “to take slavery by the throat, and sooner or later . . . choke her to death.” With that idea in mind, free black men were among the first to form volunteer companies when Lincoln called for troops to fight the Confederacy. In the spring of 1862, Tubman herself went to the Sea Islands of South Carolina to work with the 10,000 former slaves who had stayed behind after their masters fled the previous December.
The federal government dragged its feet. Fearful of alienating the “loyal” slaveholding states, it not only hesitated to “take slavery by the throat” but also refused to enlist black regiments during the opening years of the war. A handful of white regiments admitted black men, and a few light-skinned blacks enlisted by “passing” as white. For the most part, however, African Americans were turned away. As Union casualties mounted and Confederate victories multiplied, however, the Lincoln administration had no choice but to change its stand toward slavery and the enlistment of black troops. Only then did the Union start to win the war.
This shift in Union fortunes on the battlefield galvanized abolitionists on the home front. Their movement swelled, as did their political clout. By the time the war ended in April 1865, Lincoln had issued his famous Emancipation Proclamation declaring that the Confederacy’s slaves were “forever free”; abolition had triumphed in Missouri, Maryland, and West Virginia, and Congress had approved and northern states had begun to ratify a Constitutional amendment that would erase the last vestiges of slavery from U.S. soil.
Working people had a major hand in transforming the Union’s war from a fight against secession into a fight against slavery. Slaves played the leading role. As soon as the war started, they seized every opportunity to flee their masters and make their way to Union Army camps. These refugees from bondage numbered about half a million by the end of 1862. The U.S. government called them “contrabands of war.” The historian W.E.B. Du Bois has more aptly described them as participants in a “general strike” against the Confederacy—a strike waged not only by those who escaped bondage but also by the legions of slaves who were unable to flee but weakened the Confederacy from within by engaging in slowdowns, arson, and other forms of sabotage.
Though some of the refugees soon left military camps for northern cities, large numbers stayed on to work for the Union Army as scouts, spies, construction laborers, stevedores, mariners, laundresses, nurses—and, in some cases, as soldiers, even though federal policy barred them from formal enlistment. In recognition of this assistance, several Union generals declared the refugees free by military order, and in summer 1862 Congress proclaimed that all slaves who escaped from Confederate masters would be “forever free.”
The fact that the so-called contrabands had proved a crucial military asset—and could be even more valuable if allowed to enlist as soldiers—was clearly on Abraham Lincoln’s mind when he penned the Emancipation Proclamation, issued January 1, 1863. This document, which proclaimed the freedom of all slaves under Confederate rule, did not immediately change anyone’s actual status, for it applied only to slaves in areas that the U.S. government did not control. The proclamation did have immense repercussions, however. It foreclosed the possibility that Confederate states would be brought back into the Union as slaveholding states—an arrangement the Lincoln administration had repeatedly offered in the early days of the war. The Emancipation Proclamation also turned the Union Army into an army of liberation that dismantled slavery as it advanced into Confederate territory. And, most important for the Union’s military fortunes, the Emancipation Proclamation announced that the U.S. armed forces would henceforth welcome black men. They had previously fought in very small numbers, under the banners of white regiments; now they would form all-black regiments and fight en masse.
Following the Emancipation Proclamation, about 186,000 black men entered the U.S. armed forces; they made up nearly 35 percent of all troops enlisted by the Union during the final two years of the war. Of the black troops, about 134,000 (72 percent) had been slaves when the war began. African American regiments served in the war’s most vicious battles and distinguished themselves for bravery under fire. Harriet Tubman again was exceptional. After a stint in Florida nursing Union soldiers sick with dysentery, she returned to South Carolina and from 1863 through 1864 she headed a corps of pilots and scouts supporting guerrilla raids deep into rebel parts. Dressed as a soldier, wearing pants, carrying a rifle, Tubman personally led many of these raids. A notice in the Boston Commonwealth dated July 10, 1863, reported a foray up the Combahee River:
HARRIET TUBMAN
Colonel Montgomery and his gallant band of 300 black soldiers, under the guidance of a black woman, dashed into the enemy’s country, struck a bold and effective blow, destroying millions of dollars worth of commissary stores, cotton and lordly dwellings, and striking terror into the heart of rebeldom, brought off near 800 slaves, and thousands of dollars worth of property, without losing a man or receiving a scratch.
The actual numbers were 150 soldiers and 756 slaves. After she reconnoitered the area, Tubman insisted that the colonel lead the raid—he had fought in Kansas with John Brown. She herself mustered the fugitives on the three gunboats used in the raid.
Conditions of service were much harsher for black soldiers than for whites. The Confederates executed black prisoners as armed rebels—the most notorious incident was the April 1864 massacre at Fort Pillow in western Tennessee. The federal government itself did not make service easy. Recruiters promised black soldiers the regular pay—$13.00 a month plus $3.50 for clothing—but Congress authorized the same pay for black troops as for black workers—$10.00 a month less $3.00 deducted for clothing. The Christian Recorder printed a communication from Sergeant Gabriel Iverson of the Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts:
Resolved, that even as the founders of our Republic resisted the British tax on tea on the ground of principle, so did we claim equal pay with other volunteers, because we believed our military and civil equality at issue—and independently of the fact that such pay was actually promised; and not because we regulated our patriotism and love of race by any given sum of money.
In protest, many black soldiers refused to take any pay at all. Some did more: Sergeant William Walker of the Third South Carolina Volunteers was executed for leading a group that stacked arms to protest unequal pay. Congress finally granted retroactive equal pay to free black recruits in June 1864, to ex-slaves in March 1865.
The Emancipation Proclamation and the arming of black troops electrified African Americans still enslaved. They fled bondage and made for Union Army camps in ever greater numbers, and those unable to flee stepped up their sabotage against the Confederacy.
Free labor also played an important role in the Union’s war against slavery. From the start, the Union Army was mainly composed of laboring men—small farmers and wage workers. They made up the vast bulk of all adult males in Northern society and an even larger proportion of those who signed up to fight the Confederacy when Lincoln called for voluntee
rs. In some cases, the members of local labor unions signed up as a group. The federal government estimated at the end of the war that up to 750,000 men had left industrial jobs for the Union Army. Wage earners—both industrial workers and farm hands—served in higher proportions than any other sector of Northern society and composed more than ninety percent of a great many Union regiments.
White workers in the North were by no means unanimous in opposition to the Confederacy. That was quite clear in the federal elections of fall 1862; the Democratic Party, which advocated peace with the Confederacy, gained Congressional seats as pro-war Republicans lost ground. During the months preceding the election, white working men in a number of Northern cities had struck or rioted to protest the hiring of black men. The Democratic Party fanned these flames by declaring that Republicans planned to “turn the slaves of the Southern states loose to overrun the North and enter into competition with the white laboring masses.”
In the minds of many white workers, the Emancipation Proclamation proved such predictions correct. This fueled old resentments against African Americans and the Republican Party, both of which came to a head after the federal government instituted a military draft in March 1863. Draftees could avoid service by paying a $300 fee or hiring others to take their places, and many rich men exercised these options. When poor men were drafted, however, they had no choice but to serve. In July 1863, anger at this inequity combined with racial hostility to spark a bloody four-day riot in New York City, where white mobs terrorized black communities with arson, assaults, and lynchings, and attacked the property of wealthy white Republicans. Estimates of the number of people killed in the riots range from 400 to a thousand.
From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend Page 12
