Freedom national: the destruction of slavery in the United States, 1861–1865

559 Pages·2012·4.53 MB·English

by  James Oakes

Dedication
For
DEBORAH and DANIEL,
without whom, nothing
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
ALSO BY JAMES OAKES
Preface
Maps
1 “ULTIMATE EXTINCTION”
2 “DISUNION IS ABOLITION”
3 “FULFILLMENT OF THE PROPHECIES”
4 AUGUST 8, 1861: EMANCIPATION BEGINS
5 THE BORDER STATES
6 “SELF-EMANCIPATION”
7 “BY THE ACT OF CONGRESS THEY ARE CLEARLY FREE”
8 “A CORDON OF FREEDOM”
9 THE “PRELIMINARY” PROCLAMATION
10 THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION
11 “THE SYSTEM YET LIVES”
12 “OUR FATHERS WERE MISTAKEN”
Epilogue: Was Freedom Enough?
Acknowledgments
Notes
Credits
Index
Illustrations
About the Author
Copyright
ALSO BY JAMES OAKES
The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass,
Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics
Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South
The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders
PREFACE
O
N MARCH 24, 1862, Illinois Republican Isaac Arnold introduced a bill in the
House of Representatives that would “render freedom national, and slavery
sectional.”1 Arnold’s bill would go on to become the law that banned slavery
from all of the western territories, but its title harkened back a decade to the first
speech Charles Sumner delivered in Congress upon being elected senator from
Massachusetts. In that speech, “Freedom National; Slavery Sectional,” Sumner
proposed a number of federal policies that he and most antislavery politicians
believed would lead to the eventual destruction of slavery.2 But the idea that
freedom was national was much older than the policies Sumner specified. Its
lineage could be traced to the famous Somerset decision issued by the Court of
King’s Bench in 1772 in which Lord Mansfield ruled that on English soil the law
did not recognize a right of “property in man.” Somerset was in turn a powerful
reassertion of a venerable European ideal, the “freedom principle,” which held
that freedom was the natural condition of those residing within the realm—
whether in France, Spain, or the Netherlands.3 Isaac Arnold’s bill was the lineal
descendant of that tradition, and in it lay the origins of the Republican Party’s
antislavery policies during the Civil War.
Tracing the historical origins of a policy—or a war, or almost anything—
always risks making it look as though the outcome were preordained. It’s
especially tempting to think of the destruction of slavery as inevitable, maybe
even easy. Abolition in the United States came midway through the Age of
Emancipation. The northern states had long since abolished slavery. The Haitian
revolution had destroyed it from within, and the British Parliament had
destroyed it in Jamaica and Barbados from without, as had the French and the
Dutch in their own Caribbean empires. On the other hand, two of the largest
slave societies in the Americas, Cuba and Brazil, abolished slavery only in the
wake of the American Civil War. A century after the overthrow of New World
slavery began, every plantation system in the hemisphere had done away with
slave labor.4 The trajectory is so clear, so relentless, as to make it seem as if the
abolition of slavery in the United States had been determined by the irresistible
forces of historical progress. Plenty of people talked that way in the middle of
the nineteenth century. “Slavery is a hideous anachronism,” one Republican
congressman declared, “coming to us out of the barbarism and old dead night of
the past.5 The slaveholders were standing fast against the inexorable tide of
human history. Their way of life was doomed, the argument went; the entire
world was turning against slavery.
The assumption of slavery’s inevitable demise shaped the way its opponents
thought about how to end it. In 1787, delegates at the Constitutional Convention
were willing to make compromises with slavery in part because they were
certain the system was dying anyway. From classical political economists like
Adam Smith, the Founders learned that slave economies were backward and
inefficient, that in the long run slavery could never compete with the superior
productivity, the sheer dynamism, of free labor. From moral philosophers they
concluded that the progress of antislavery sentiment was steady and irreversible.
In time everyone would come to see that slavery had to be abolished. Convinced
that slavery was already doomed by the laws of political economy and the
progress of morality, it was easy for the men in Philadelphia to conclude that
nothing significant was sacrificed by compromising with slavery to create a new
nation. How could they have foreseen that the protections for slavery they wrote
into the Constitution would become one of the most formidable obstacles to
abolition in the United States?6
It’s also tempting to think that the only thing abolition required was the will to
make it happen. If the abolitionists could persuade enough people to hate
slavery, the end of slavery would surely follow. By the late eighteenth century,
however, most people in the northern states already disliked slavery, and while
the intensity of their dislike waxed and waned over the decades, the biggest
problem abolitionists faced was not a proslavery public but a Constitution that
protected slavery in the states where it already existed.7 What could the federal
government do to destroy slavery if everybody believed it was strictly a state
matter, that the Constitution put it beyond the reach of federal intervention? How
could there be any national antislavery politics if there was nothing the federal
government could do about it? Answering such questions was the single greatest
challenge for opponents of slavery. That challenge became more rather than less
daunting as the explosive growth of the “Cotton Kingdom” after 1790 cemented
the political power of the slaveholders and transformed the South into one of the
largest slave societies in the history of the world.
Nevertheless, by 1860 antislavery lawyers and politicians had formulated two
distinct scenarios for a national assault on slavery. One was federal pressure on
states to abolish slavery themselves. Though nearly everyone agreed that the
federal government could not directly abolish slavery in the states, Republicans
endorsed a number of policies they believed would eventually force the southern
states to destroy slavery on their own. The federal government would surround
the South with free states, free territories, and free waters, building what they
called a “cordon of freedom” around slavery, hemming it in until the system’s
own internal weaknesses forced the slave states one by one to abandon slavery.
To these external pressures the Republicans would add a number of federal
incentives—a gradual timetable, monetary compensation, and subsidies for the
voluntary colonization of the freed slaves—all of them designed to speed up the
process of state abolition, beginning in the slave states bordering on the North
(Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri). This was a peacetime policy
designed to put slavery on what Abraham Lincoln called a course of “ultimate
extinction.” But if there was a war or a rebellion, the Constitution empowered
the federal government to implement a second policy, military emancipation,
until peace and order were restored. Any educated person would have been
familiar with the historical precedents, stretching back to antiquity, for
emancipating enemy slaves in wartime. But the precedents had not produced a
theory of military emancipation. The founding treatises on the laws of war had
almost nothing to say about slavery. By 1863, however, when called on to defend
the legality of the Emancipation Proclamation, antislavery lawyers deployed
what amounted to an abolitionist theory of military emancipation. These two
policies—state abolition and military emancipation—were widely proclaimed by
Republicans throughout the secession crisis.
It was this unabashed Republican threat to slavery that provoked the South to
secede from the Union in the immediate aftermath of Abraham Lincoln’s
election in November of 1860. Historians commonly dismiss secession as an
outbreak of hysteria, irrationality, and paranoia. But events soon demonstrated
that the Republican threat to slavery was far from imaginary. Before the first
year of the war was out, both antislavery policies had been initiated. Based on
the authority granted to it by the First Confiscation Act, the Lincoln
administration began freeing slaves as a “military necessity” on August 8, 1861.
Lincoln drafted his first proposals for state abolition a few months later.
It’s important to bear in mind that military emancipation and state abolition
were two different policies pursued by Republicans along parallel lines
throughout the war. Military emancipation was always immediate; slaveholders
were never compensated; it applied initially to the disloyal states; and it was
implemented first, beginning in the summer of 1861. Gradual abolition applied
to loyal slave states, which were beyond the reach of full-scale military
emancipation. Lincoln first suggested gradual abolition for Delaware in late
1861, and it remained an option for loyal states as late as 1864. Yet all along, his
administration was implementing immediate and uncompensated military
emancipation in the seceded states. There was no shift from gradual abolition to
immediate emancipation. On the contrary, immediate emancipation began in the
rebel states months before Lincoln first proposed gradual abolition in the Border
States.
Once initiated, the two policies were implemented more and more
aggressively. As firm believers in the superior vitality and strength of free labor,
Republicans originally assumed that slavery would crumble quickly under the
pressure of war. But prescient observers like Frederick Douglass warned from
the start that slavery was the “stomach” of the rebellion, and soon enough
Republicans grasped the point. By early 1862 their confident predictions of
slavery’s swift demise gave way to the widespread recognition that slavery was
actually a source of the rebellion’s strength in the South. By July virtually all
Republicans reached the conclusion that they would have to free all the slaves of
all the rebels in the seceded states. With the Emancipation Proclamation, military
emancipation reached its climax as the Lincoln administration for the first time
ordered Union soldiers to entice slaves from their owners in the rebel states and
to enlist blacks for “armed” service in the Union army. The proclamation also
increased the pressure for state abolition because it led directly to the systematic
recruitment of black soldiers from the loyal slave states, an escalation of the
policy of forcing those states to abolish slavery on their own. Over the next few
years both policies proved, in their own ways, successful. By 1865 military
emancipation had freed hundreds of thousands of slaves, and six states had
abolished slavery, ostensibly of their own accord but in fact under intense
pressure from the federal government.
But it wasn’t enough. There were four million slaves in 1860, and when the
war ended no more than 15 percent of them had been emancipated. Slavery was
still legal in nine of the fifteen slave states, including nearly all of the most
densely populated plantation regions of the Deep South. An increasingly
aggressive military emancipation, even when coupled with a more coercive
approach to state abolition, could not fully destroy slavery. More disturbing still
to Republicans was the distinct possibility that when the Union was restored, the
southern states would reverse the results of the war and re-enslave those who