The cartoon is captioned: POMPEY. ”What day ob de month id dis, Massa?” MASTER. ”Twenty-sixth December. Why?” POMPEY. ”Oh! cause you knows Massa LINKUM he gib us our Papers on de First January, God bless um; and now I wants to say as how you allus was a good Massa, and so I’ll gib you a Mont’s Notice to git anudder Boy. Niggers is powerful cheap now, Massa!”
As is quite well-known, the Emancipation Proclamation did not cover slaves in the loyal border states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. Abraham Lincoln did not want to risk alienating Unionists slaveholders there by taking their slaves and he did not believe that his power as commander-in-chief, which he had used to free slaves in the rebellious states as a military necessity, extended to states that were ostensibly loyal.
Yet that did not mean that the Emancipation Proclamation did not have a powerful effect in the border states that had stayed in the Union. Some slaves in these states asserted that the proclamation covered them, even if it really did not. The New York Times reported on January 8:
No doubt many slaves in Maryland appreciated that they had not been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, but that recognized that it put slavery in their state on life support and shifted the balance of power between themselves and their owners in their favor. So much so that they could openly challenge the peculiar institution, an act that as the article points outs only a few years before would have put their lives in serious danger.
With the Emancipation Proclamation, except in its border with Delaware, Maryland was now in essence surrounded by free territory or territory that would be come free with a successful conclusion of the war for the Union. Slaves could easily flee out of Maryland, especially with the enforcement mechanisms of slavery in the state gravely weakened by the war, most noticeably by the Union Army, which since the earliest months of the conflict had become a refuge there for many slaves escaping from their masters.
Slaves had demanded wages before (in areas of Northern Virginia under Union occupation) and would later many times demand wages elsewhere. The catalysts were the arrival or prospect of the arrival of the Union Army, and the breakdown of the means to enforce slavery as men who would have joined slave patrols instead went into the Confederate Army and usually were taken far from home. Yet the Emancipation Proclamation too had a corrosive impact on slavery in the border states by undermining its legitimacy, enforceability, and unintentionally giving slaves the sense it had freed them, even if it formally had not. In this respect, as in others, Lincoln’s proclamation was a game changer in terms of expectations even if the President had not intended it to function in that manner.
Some of the best material on emancipation in the Civil War is easily accessible due to the hard work of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project (FSSP) at the University of Maryland, founded by my mentor, Ira Berlin, and headed up for over two decades now by his longtime collaborator, Leslie Rowland. The staff of the project over the years reads like a who’s who of many of the best scholars of African Americans in the 19th century. Collectively, they did a heroic job of sifting federal records at the National Archives for documents relevant to the end of slavery in the United States, many of which have been published and much more remain unpublished in the project files up on the third floor of Francis Scott Key Hall in College Park.
Naturally, the FSSP joined the internet revolution and put some of the best of best documents up on the web, which I have made considerable use in this blog. An especially poignant example from their collection comes from correspondence of the Confederate Army that made it into the federal archives in Record Group 109. It is a letter from Pleas Smith, Adjutant of the 2nd Tennessee Infantry to the Adjutant of the Army of Mississippi and East Louisiana. The letter read:
This account is difficult to accept at face value. The black man in question was captured near Okolona, Mississippi, which is about seventy miles south of Corinth. Corinth, a major railroad hub was, in January 1863, under federal occupation and would remain so until the end of the war. Consequently, it became a magnet for slaves seeking freedom. Yet is seems implausible that federal authorities were handing escaped slaves pistols and sending them back into Confederate territory to encourage other slaves to flee. Neither was this man a black Union soldier. While recruitment of African Americans in the Mississippi Valley under Lorenzo Thomas would get underway in few months, in January 1863, no black soldiers were yet being recruited around Corinth, Mississippi. What seems more likely is that the black man mentioned letter with his own pistol went from Corinth south to spread the news that the city was a sanctuary of freedom. When captured by Confederate forces, he spun a yarn about being part of a group of armed black men spreading the news about freedom among the slaves in Confederate-held territory.
In any case, it was not unusual for African Americans that made it to Union controlled territory during the Civil War sometimes to make the risky trip back home to let family and friends know there was a place within reach where they could be free. Hence, the man mentioned in this letter was one of many missionaries of freedom. Their numbers would grow considerably once the recruitment of black soldiers began in earnest later in 1863. African-American troops would spread the news of freedom among the slaves wherever they went. The film Glory (1989) illustrates this well.
It is not known if the missionary slave with a pistol suffered the hangman’s noose, although it is likely he did. Less offensive slaves met worse fates from the Confederates. The New York Times reported on January 5, 1863, that rebel troops in Tennessee had massacred about twenty unarmed African-American teamsters working for the Union Army. The story read:
Yet ruthless cruelty could not stop the missionaries of freedom. Indeed, with the arrival of the Emancipation Proclamation and the mass recruitment of black men as Union soldiers, such violence would only make them more determined and effective. While the lonely missionary of freedom described in the Pleas Smith letter likely died, he would soon be followed by hundreds of thousands more that would over the next two years play a major role in overwhelming the slaveholders’ rebellion.
“Watch Night Meeting”: Slaves await midnight on December 31, 1862; Source: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/odyssey/archive/04/0421001r.jpg
As 1862 drew to a close, as far as emancipation was concerned the nation’s attention was riveted on whether President Abraham Lincoln would finalize the Emancipation Proclamation. They had little to worry about on that score. In the last days of 1862, Lincoln and his cabinet were not debating whether the administration should go ahead with the proclamation, but fussed over its exact wording. While these details certainly were important, it was clear from the discussions that the Emancipation Proclamation was going ahead.
Far from Washington, D.C., however, out in the country other things were happening that make the Lincoln administration putting the final touches on the Emancipation Proclamation seem not quite so important, as titanic a milestone as it was. One such place was Helena, Arkansas, west of the Mississippi River, far from the national capital. Like other parts of the Confederacy that had come under the control of federal forces, slaves in the vicinity fled to Union lines. Yet instead of finding protection, many of the slaves in Helena, Arkansas, instead found mistreatment from the Yankee soldiers and officers.
A committee of chaplains and surgeons reported these injustices to the Union commander of the Army of the Southwest, Maj. Gen. Samuel Curtis, in a letter dated December 29, 1862. They wrote:
Certainly, the Emancipation Proclamation’s finalization ultimately would prove much more important than the ill-treatment of escaped slaves in Arkansas by Union soldiers and officers in late 1862. Still, remembering it should temper the joyful stories of people gathering together on the evening of December 31, what became known as “Watch Night,” waiting for the stroke of midnight when presumably Lincoln’s proclamation would go into effect freeing millions of slaves in the rebel South. (Read this account of one Watch Night service in December 1862 as reported by the New York Times.) It portended the very real problems for freed people that accompanied their liberation from bondage. So while it is proper to remember Lincoln signing the final Emancipation Proclamation, neither should the suffering that accompanied it be forgotten.
By late 1862, the recruitment of African Americans as soldiers in the Union Army was well under way with thousands of black men already under arms and many thousands more that would soon be recruited. Although they would face discrimination–unequal pay, denied officer’s commissions, and countless other indignities large and small–most black troops in the federal army served willingly, glad for the chance to play an active role in their race’s liberation.
The existence of black Union soldiers though caused great consternation in the Confederacy. Although a few white Southerners had and would continue to advocate recruiting African Americans into their own army, most found the idea repellent. And they considered black men in federal uniform to be even more objectionable. Armed African Americans, even under military discipline, raised the bloody specter of Saint-Domingue–in other words, servile insurrection on a mass scale. Hence, since Confederates equated black soldiers in the Union Army as slaves in revolt, they could treat African Americans in federal uniform as rebellious slaves, meaning in any way they saw fit, including summary execution on the battlefield.
In denying black Union soldiers the customary protections accorded enemy troops, it made their military service riskier than for soldiers in white regiments. The film, Glory (1989), put this fact to dramatic use in telling the story of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the first black regiment formed in the North during the Civil War.
Glory gets some things wrong here. For instance, the proclamation announcing the harsh treatment of black Union soldiers came not from the Confederate Congress, but from Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy’s president just before Christmas 1862. Another interesting thing about the proclamation is that most of it was not devoted to the subject of black soldiers in the Union army. Instead, the bulk of the document was a screed and bill of attainder against northern general Benjamin Butler. The Confederate president declared:
The controversial Butler certainly had done much to earn the ire of President Davis and the Confederacy. Butler, of course, had devised the clever justification not to return slaves to their rebel owners by declaring them “contraband of war.” But most of Davis’ indictment focused on Ben Butler’s time as overseer of Union-occupied New Orleans and the various indignities, real and imagined, to which the Confederates held him responsible. They can be read by <clicking here>.
After unloading on Benjamin Butler, Jefferson Davis finally turned to the more general policy part of the document. With the recruitment of African Americans into the Union Army under way in earnest, Davis felt it necessary to make an official statement about a step by the Lincoln administration that he and other Confederate leaders considered beyond the pale. The declaration read:
Jefferson Davis’ idea of “just retribution” was to treat black Union soldiers and their white officers not as legitimate combatants, but as perpetrators of a slave revolt. The relevant section of his declaration read:
So, in other words, Jefferson Davis proposed handing over black Union soldiers and their white soldiers to state authorities as had been the case with slave revolts in the antebellum South. The clear implication, of course, was they would be put to death much as Nat Turner (a black rebel) and John Brown (a white abettor to slave revolt).
Still, intentionally or not, Davis left some uncertainty in how captured soldiers and commissioned officers in black Union regiments would be treated. And by delegating this matter to the states he also was, in effect, washing the hands of the Confederate central government in the handling of African-American prisoners-of-war. Jefferson Davis sounded tough by promising death to Benjamin Butler and his subordinate officers if they ever fell into Confederate hands. But the proclamation was not as definite as the movie Glory would make it seem, where the comparable proclamation promised summary execution to any black soldier and their white officers taken prisoner.
In any case, black Union prisoners’ actual treatment by Confederate forces proved ad hoc. In some case, such as the infamous Fort Pillow incident in March 1864, African American troops were massacred as they attempted to surrender. In other cases, they were treated much as white Union soldiers and shipped off to stockades like Andersonville. In still other cases, black POWs were used as forced labor by the Confederates or even siphoned off by rebel soldiers or officers as personal servants or even as laborers on their plantations and farms back home. However, as uncertain as was the fate of African-American prisoners, the Confederacy refused to exchange them for their own POWs in federal custody until late in the war when the southern army was desperate for men to add to its dwindling ranks.
Nonetheless, Jefferson Davis’ declaration just before Christmas 1862, for all its bluster and buck passing, remains an infamous document. Especially, in how it sought to equate the honorable military service of uniformed soldiers of a sovereign government with servile insurrection. By doing so, it legitimated the worst impulses of white Southerners and the massacres of black Union POWs that were to come. Still, Glory had one thing right. If a purpose of Davis’ declaration was to intimidate black men in federal service during the Civil War and discourage their enlistment in the Union Army, it had the opposite effect. Rather than driving them out of uniform it merely served to make African-American troops even more determined. So, while infamous, ironically, Jefferson Davis’ proclamation of December 23, 1862, likely actually advanced rather than hindered the cause of emancipation in the American Civil War.
From: Harper’s Weekly, December 20, 1862. Source: http://www.sonofthesouth.net/leefoundation/civil-war/1862/december/emancipation-proclamation-cartoon.htm
As December 1862 progressed the date approached (January 1, 1863) for President Abraham Lincoln to make good on his promise in the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation to free the slaves in the portions of the rebellious states not under control under federal control if those states did not return to the Union by the end of 1862. Not surprisingly, there was disagreement in the press over whether Lincoln would actually do it. As mentioned in the last edition of Civil War Emancipation, the President had generated some of the uncertainty in his annual message to Congress, dated December 1, 1862, by making a last attempt to convince the slave states to accept gradual compensated emancipation, followed by the emigration of freed slaves out of the United States. So the artist of the cartoon above from Harper’s Weekly certainly can be forgiven for doubting Lincoln’s resolve on this issue.
The pro-administration newspaper in Washington, D.C., the National Republican, sought to reassure its readers as Christmas approached that President Lincoln was standing fast. It stated in its December 23 issue:
Two days later, on Christmas Day, the National Republican mocked Republican conservatives and others for whom the impending finalization of the Emancipation Proclamation stirred the old fear that once freed the slaves would embark on a violent orgy of vengeance aimed at their former owners and other whites. The paper opined:
On December 27, the National Republican mocked a specific slave insurrection scare that had broken out in Missouri, which as a loyal slave state was, of course, exempt from the provisions of the Emancipation Proclamation. It reported:
While correct about the newly liberated not rising in vengeance the National Republican misunderstood something fundamental about American slaves in the Civil War. This article, quite openly racist, assumed the slaves were passive waiting for the moment of their liberation. If the scholarship of recent decades on emancipation has proven anything, the slaves were anything but passive in their own emancipation. While there was no large-scale organized resistance by slaves during the Civil War, through countless acts of self-interest they chipped away little by little at the foundation of slavery in the American South, whether it be by fleeing to federal lines, joining the Union Army, or insisting they would no longer work without being paid. So while the suspense in December 1862 over whether Abraham Lincoln would made good on his pledge to free the slaves was certainly justified, to an extent it was merely confirming a social revolution already in progress in the slave states that had been unleashed by the Civil War.
In early December 1862, the future of emancipation in the Civil War was again in flux. By that time, the initial furor over the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation had died away replaced by uncertainty over whether President Lincoln would make good on his threat in that document to free the slaves in the parts of the Confederacy not under federal control if the rebellious states did not restore their allegiance to the Union.
Abraham Lincoln fed that uncertainty with his annual message to Congress dated December 1, 1862, when he made one last effort to convince the slave states to accept gradual compensated emancipation, along with emigration of freed slaves to some place outside the United States. Clearly, Lincoln as 1862 ended still preferred a gradual end of slavery, which he no doubt saw as more orderly and peaceful, than the sudden and potentially tumultuous end to slavery inherent in the Emancipation Proclamation.
Yet it was also manifest by late 1862 that Lincoln was dedicated firmly to ending slavery. It was merely a question of how, not if. While the President dedicated much of his annual message to thinking aloud over the details of gradual compensated emancipation and emigration schemes, as if musing might somehow sell the nation’s citizenry on these ideas, at the end he left no uncertainty toward his ultimate purpose. In oft quoted words that have echoed down since, Abraham Lincoln wrote:
By December 1862 then, Abraham Lincoln had concluded that ending slavery was the only way to save the Union, his paramount goal in the Civil War.
Yet it was not just Lincoln who was in a position to influence the future course of emancipation. The Americans, of course, with the greatest interest in Lincoln’s true intentions were the slaves. Like the rest of the population they were uncertain about whether Abraham Lincoln would in the new year make final the Emancipation Proclamation. And the uncertainty made some slaves understandably restless. The New York Times‘ correspondent in Washington, D.C., reported on December 4 that slaves in Maryland’s southern counties, where slavery was most entrenched in that state were exhibiting this restlessness, despite the fact that Maryland was exempt from the Emancipation Proclamation because it had remained loyal. The correspondent wrote:
This newspaper article yet again demonstrates the influence the slaves had over their own liberation. While they could not by themselves bring about their own freedom, collectively their restlessness made whites in Maryland fearful to the point it would come to the attention of a Washington, D.C. reporter.
Yet December 1862 also was a time of discovery related to emancipation. One such discover was Thomas Wentworth Higginson, then freshly installed as the Colonel of the 1st South Carolina Infantry. Higginson, long a radical abolitionist, was predisposed to think well of the men of his command, all of them recently liberated slaves from the Sea Islands region of coastal South Carolina, George, and Florida. Yet it was one thing to sympathize in the abstract with the plight of the slaves, quite another to get to know them as people, especially those from the Sea Islands, many of whom spoke the Gullah dialect as their first language, largely unintelligible to a white New Englander like Higginson.
Still, despite the linguistic and cultural gap, Thomas Wentworth Higginson quickly grew to admire the men of his new regiment, especially how their behavior quickly dispelled many myths about the slaves that even white abolitionists had accepted as fact. For example, the belief that slaves were naturally lazy and would only work under the threat of the lash. On the same day Abraham Lincoln reported to Congress, December 1, 1862, Higginson wrote in his journal:
Hence, while there was uncertainty and fear about emancipation in early December 1862, there was also discovery and hope. It remained to be seen which would prevail in a future all Americans had some influence over, but that none could control on their own.
