The African Americans

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  38 Quoted in Donald Yacovone, ed., Freedom’s Journey: African American Voices of the Civil War (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2004), 26.

  39 Mark Reinhardt, Who Speaks for Margaret Garner? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 112.

  40 Steven Weisenburger, Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998).

  5

  THE WAR TO END SLAVERY 1859–1865

  SITTING IN A COLD JAILHOUSE IN CHARLESTOWN, VIRGINIA, IN LATE NOVEMBER 1859, JOHN A. COPELAND WROTE HIS PARENTS FOR THE LAST TIME.

  Dear Parents,

  My fate so far as man can seal it, is sealed, but let not this fact occasion you any misery; for remember the cause in which I was engaged; remember it was a holy cause, one in which men in every way better than I am, have suffered & died. Remember that if I must die, I die in trying to liberate a few of my poor & oppressed people from a condition of servitude against which God in his word has hurled his most bitter denunciations…. Good-bye Mother & Father, Goodbye brothers & sisters, & by the assistance of God, meet me in heaven. I remain your most affectionate son,

  —John A. Copeland

  Copeland (1834–1859) had grown up near Raleigh, North Carolina, a free person of color. His parents moved the family to Oberlin, Ohio, in 1843, where he attended Oberlin’s famed preparatory school and worked alongside his father as a carpenter. Before long, he became a trusted member of the local antislavery society and helped rescue fugitive slaves. His uncle and co-conspirator Lewis S. Leary (1836–1859) had recruited Copeland for John Brown’s army and when he crafted this letter to his parents—John Copeland, Sr., and his mother, Delilah—Copeland was awaiting execution for his role in the attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry.1

  Copeland and Leary had combined with Shields Green (1836–1859), Osborn P. Anderson (1830–1872), and Dangerfield Newby (1820–1859) as the five African Americans who joined John Brown’s raiding party of 16 white men intent on striking a blow against the institution of slavery. An audacious plan backed by many prominent African American and New England abolitionists, the venture seems to us today to have had little or no chance of success. The raiding party, few in number, attacked a federal arsenal located in a small, isolated town in a deep gorge, bounded by two boulder-strewn rivers and cut by a rail line. Just before the raid, when Brown revealed his plans to Frederick Douglass—a man not known for timidity—the black abolitionist wished Brown well but wanted no part of what looked like a 19th-century version of a modern terrorist’s suicide attack. Harriet Tubman had agreed to join the raid, but was unable to travel at the last minute.

  But those who agreed to the raid cared more for destroying slavery than saving their own lives; and Dangerfield Newby still had a wife and children in chains and wished to free them. His wife had written three letters telling him of her white master’s financial problems, and of her escalating fears that she and their children would be sold before Newby could rescue them. Those letters were found on Newby’s body after he was killed in the attack. Brown shared this same sense of urgency and grounded his scheme in the idea that the slaves represented a combustible mass just waiting for the right spark to catch fire, to rise up and throw off their chains. Had that not happened before, in Stono, South Carolina, New York City, Richmond, Charleston, New Orleans, Southampton, and Haiti?

  Indeed, by 1859, the entire nation seemed to be awaiting some terrific explosion. Just about everyone could sense the fear, anger, and hate. After passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, followed by the Dred Scott decision in 1857, tensions between North and South only increased with each passing year. Moderates on both sides of the slavery issue evaporated like water on a hot griddle. The vital center of American politics had disappeared, leaving only the extremes. Northerners, even those who were not especially fond of African Americans, increasingly saw the South as dominated by a narrow set of interests determined to control the federal government and compel it to do its bidding to preserve, protect, and extend the institution of slavery. Major American cities witnessed the forced return of fugitive men and women back into slavery, without a shred of due process and backed by federal bayonets. Those who resisted were arrested for assault, murder, or even treason.

  John Brown, by J. W. Dodge, New York, circa 1865. Photograph of original painting, mounted on carte de visite. Library of Congress.

  When the Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas introduced a bill to organize the territories of Kansas and Nebraska in 1854, the national political system snapped under the controversy surrounding the status of slavery in the western lands. The contention not only snuffed out the old two-party system—and the moderate Whig Party of Henry Clay—but gave birth to what is known as the third-party system and the Republican Party, and eventually led to civil war. The controversy also set off an avalanche of violent events: urban and rural riots over fugitive slaves; the assault by South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks on Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner while he sat at his desk in the Capitol; open warfare in Kansas and Missouri between free state and slave state militias; and the infamous Dred Scott decision by the United States Supreme Court that not only opened the way for the expansion of slavery, but concluded that all African Americans had “no rights that white men were bound to respect.”

  Harpers Ferry Firehouse, by George Stacy, circa 1860. Stereocard photograph. Library of Congress.

  Ironically, although it was crushed, John Brown’s raid gave African Americans new hope. Especially after the Dred Scott decision, many African Americans began giving up on their future in America. While Dred Scott did not alter the daily treatment that most African Americans were experiencing in the second half of the decade—anti-black racism had only strengthened since the Fugitive Slave Act—to many, it appeared to place a stamp of finality on their lack of civil rights, now defined as the law of the land by the Supreme Court itself. John C. Bowers, a Philadelphia activist, summed up black sentiment when he lamented that “our friends have even turned against us” and when “Gabriel blows his last trumpet, the negroes will still be in slavery, unless they emigrate.”2

  Emigrationist plans returned to the debate within black abolitionist circles, and even the North’s leading black paper, the Weekly Anglo-African, early in 1861 closed its doors (temporarily) and sold out to the Haitian Emigration Bureau. Staunch black leaders, seeing little future for the race in the U.S., went to Canada or became seduced by the Haitian appeal. Leaders such as Henry Highland Garnet, William Wells Brown, James T. Holly, William J. Watkins, and—just before the opening of the Civil War—even Frederick Douglass flirted with the idea of black resettlement in Haiti. As James T. Holly wrote in 1859, “to despise the claims of Hayti is to despise the cause of God, by which her promises to bring deliverance to the captives and to those who are bound….”3

  John Brown helped change that. While before the raid few blacks fully trusted the promises of white allies like Brown, afterward Brown’s loyalty to the holy cause of abolitionism and black freedom was undeniable. “I believe in insurrections,” the black Boston lawyer and doctor John S. Rock proclaimed.4 Even the great American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed that Brown had sanctified the gallows as Christ had sanctified the cross. As later generations of African Americans would hang pictures of Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., in their parlors, 19th-century black Americans saw in John Brown a sainted, Christlike hero who gave up his life so that black men and women might live—in freedom.

  For many black people, it now appeared that a clash between North and South was inescapable, and as Frederick Douglass predicted, such a battle would inevitably lead to the emancipation of the slaves. Even if it went against the collective better judgment of Northern whites, Douglass understood from the outset—in ways most Northerners did not—that the Union could not survive a civil war without destroying its root cause: slavery.

  Lincoln’s election in 1860 convinced most Souther
ners that their “peculiar institution” was not secure since the government was controlled by those determined to halt the spread of slavery. Although Lincoln and the Republican Party pledged to defend slavery where it existed, to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, and even adopt a constitutional amendment to guarantee slavery in the South, secessionists brushed such promises aside. From their perspective, all of the North was infected with abolitionist fever and none could be trusted. With the hotspurs of South Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama leading the way, the other Southern states one after another left the Union after Lincoln’s election, setting the stage for a cataclysm.5

  The very assurances that Lincoln and the Republican Party had given to Southerners throughout the 1860 campaign to convince them that slavery would be secure under a Lincoln administration had precisely the same impact on most African Americans: destroying trust. In hindsight, we readily understand how Lincoln could become a secular saint to African Americans. But looking at history as it unfolded from the perspective of the 1850s, Lincoln only offered more of the same: the preservation of slavery, permanently. While individual Republicans like Charles Sumner or Pennsylvania’s great antislavery congressman Thaddeus Stevens proved immensely popular with blacks, in 1860 Lincoln and his party had pledged to suppress black rights and preserve slavery. What in the Lincoln of 1860 could draw black support, or encourage them that change would ever come?

  While some accepted Abraham Lincoln as the best that could be hoped for, other blacks refused to compromise on principle. How could an African American support a man who admitted his prejudices against black people, wished that free blacks would leave the country, and pledged himself most vigorously to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act? His first inaugural address, designed to assure the South that he posed no threat, profoundly disappointed black people, who turned from it, as one of them would put it, “with a more dead despair of our future here” than at any other time. To George E. Stephens, a reporter for the New York Weekly Anglo-African and later a sergeant in the famed 54th Massachusetts Regiment, Lincoln’s election seemed like merely “the fag end of a series of pro-slavery administrations,” embodying the “Godless will of a criminal nation.”6

  According to legend, the fire-eating secessionist from Virginia Edmund Ruffin fired the first and last shots of the Civil War. An ardent defender of slavery, on April 12, 1861, Ruffin pulled the lanyard of one of the many rebel cannons pointing at Fort Sumter isolated out in Charleston Harbor. The last shot he fired came on June 17, 1865, from his silver-barreled musket, which he placed in his mouth, despondent over the destruction of his rebellion. In a sense, both shots marked the beginning of the end of slavery as an American institution. The beginning of the war gave African Americans hope, for the first time, that the government could at long last crush slavery along with the rebellion. The excitement was palpable. Black newspapers cried out: “We want Nat Turner—not speeches; Denmark Vesey—not resolutions; John Brown—not meetings.” Black communities across the North began drilling men to ready them for battle. Some Bostonians claimed that a force of 50,000 black men could be quickly assembled to put down the rebellion. In Philadelphia, black leaders instructed their brethren to forget past grievances and help defend the Union.7

  But that was not to be. From pulpit and press, from state governments and from Congress, blacks were told to “keep out of this; this is a white man’s war.” The repudiation, perhaps, should have been anticipated. After all, the previous March, John S. Rock had reminded his brethren that the “position of the colored man today is a trying one; trying, because the whole country had entered into a conspiracy to crush him.”8 White men—and their very definition of masculinity—were caught up in racial and nationalist pride. To their mind, no “inferior being” incapable of citizenship could be considered for armed service. The idea was as ludicrous as it was insulting. The Ohio congressman Chilton A. White best summed up the Northern response to black patriotism: “This is a government of white men, made by white men for white men, to be administered, protected, defended and maintained by white men.” Stung by such responses, some black leaders counseled patience and advised their brethren to stand ready for the time when “the slave calls.” Others, such as A.M.E. Church leaders, advised their parishion-ers that they simply had no business fighting for a country that oppressed them.9

  Stampede among the Negroes in Virginia. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, June 8, 1861. Wood engraving. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Surrounding the crush of “contraband” attempting to enter Fortress Monroe are depictions of Union General Benjamin F. Butler meeting with Confederate Major John B. Cary, fugitive slaves, and employment of contraband by Union forces.

  However, almost as soon as the guns thundered across Maryland and eastern Virginia, “the slave” began to call. On May 23, 1861, three slaves belonging to Colonel Charles Mallory of Hampton escaped in the middle of the night by boat to Fortress Monroe. The fort, completed in 1834 and named for President James Monroe, sat on the tip of the Virginia Peninsula at Old Point Comfort near Hampton, at the confluence of the Elizabeth, Nansemond, and James Rivers. It covered 63 acres of land with its walls stretching more than a mile around, and as with the White House and most other federal buildings, the fort had been erected with slave labor.

  The three slaves met the fort’s commander, General Benjamin F. Butler, a controversial and mercurial Massachusetts lawyer and politician. Butler learned that two of the escaped slaves had wives and families in nearby Hampton and wondered what he should do with the men; indeed, what could he do? The next day, Confederate Major John B. Cary, who had known Butler before the war, approached the fort under a flag of truce and on behalf of Mallory asked for the return of the man’s property under the Fugitive Slave Act. Butler reminded Cary that as Virginia claimed to have left the Union, the colonel could not claim any protection under the Constitution he had repudiated. Butler then declared the men “contraband” of war and put them to work.

  Butler’s brilliant and seemingly improvised decision resolved the situation with alacrity. But word soon spread that a slave could get free by running to the boys in blue. Within days, other slaves flooded into Fortress Monroe, as recorded in a two-page spread in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, on June 8, 1861. That November, a reporter for the Atlantic Monthly explained that if one slave on the Potomac heard something about emancipation, “in a few days it will be known by his brethren on the Gulf….” As we have seen, and as John Adams had noted as early as 1775, the slaves appeared to have a mysteriously effective “grapevine” that carried messages far and wide. Fugitives began collecting at Fortress Monroe, and by July, about 1,000 former slaves had sought protection there. As the number of runaway slaves would only mount, Butler sought policy clarification from the War Department.

  The Lincoln administration had no ready answers and avoided anything that might unsettle the border states, where slavery remained legal even though these states supported the Union. In fact, when General John C. Frémont issued a total emancipation order in Missouri in August 1861, President Lincoln repudiated it as a dangerous policy that violated the constitutional rights of loyal property (slave) owners. Butler’s earlier decision to proclaim the slaves that came into his lines “contraband,” however, had given Congress the opportunity to aid the war effort and move more strongly against slavery. While it could not arbitrarily seize slaves, the government could seize the property of anyone who had committed treason. Thus, on August 6, 1861, it passed the first of two Confiscation Acts allowing military commanders to declare “all such property … to be lawful subject of prize and capture wherever found.”10

  But such an order did not require federal troops to accept all runaways that came into their lines, nor to free any slave they encountered. In fact, early in the war, some Union troops made sport of harassing or killing fugitive slaves, while others participated in an illegal trade in slaves with the enemy. More often, Union soldiers simply ignored the plea
s of slaves to protect them from their masters. John V. Givens, an enterprising New York black abolitionist, accompanied the Ninth New York Regiment to Virginia, either as a teamster or servant to an officer, to keep an eye on how the soldiers treated fugitive slaves. In October 1861, he reported that when his regiment neared Charlestown, Virginia—where John Brown had been executed—slaves rushed to greet the troops. Hundreds of black men and women filled the streets, some women carrying their babies, “shouting and thanking God that we had come at last to free them…. But what pen can describe the revulsion of their feelings when they were told that we came ‘not to free the slaves, but to preserve the Union as it was, with its millions of suffering slaves!’” Not until two years later did the Emancipation Proclamation put an end to most similar instances.11

  Robert Smalls and the Planter. Harper’s Weekly, June 14, 1862. Wood engraving. Library of Congress.

  Some slaves, however, took matters into their own hands. Just before dawn on May 13, 1862, some African Americans quietly set about unmooring the Planter, a steam-powered coastal vessel, from its berth in the Charleston, South Carolina, harbor. At the helm was Robert Smalls (1839–1915), a slave just like the rest of the crew. Smalls, a mulatto and the son of his master, relied on the intimate knowledge of local waterways and Confederate defenses he and the crew had accumulated over a year sailing aboard the Planter, working for his owners and the rebel navy. But now he would pilot the vessel for himself in a daring break for freedom.

  The Planter had ferried cotton in and out of Charleston Harbor before the war, and a harbor pilot like Smalls had to know every rock and eddy to perform his job safely. Almost 150 feet in length and about 30 feet wide, the Planter could haul 1,400 bales of cotton, the fruit of slave labor, but had been refitted with four cannons, some taken from nearby Fort Sumter. Designed to ply shallow water, the ship could easily navigate the harbor and the many inland waterways of the Carolina coast. After the start of the war, the Planter’s owner leased the vessel and its slave crew to the Confederate navy. For more than a year, Smalls piloted the vessel under the command of Captain C. J. Relyea.