The Fiery Trial (28 page)

When Lincoln assumed the presidency, four forts in Confederate states remained in Union hands within Confederate territory—Taylor and Jefferson in the Florida Keys and in no danger of attack; Pickens on an island off Pensacola, Florida; and Sumter, in Charleston harbor, very much within range of Confederate shore batteries. Moreover, the
Star of the West
episode in January left little doubt as to how Confederates would respond to an attempt to resupply Sumter. In his letter of February proposing changes in a draft of the inaugural address, Orville H. Browning had observed that no matter what policy Lincoln announced, war would still be possible. Thus, it was “very important that the traitors shall be the aggressors…. The first attempt that is made to furnish supplies or reinforcements to [Fort] Sumter will induce aggression by South Carolina, and then the government will stand justified, before the entire country, in repelling that aggression.”

As early as March 15, the
Chicago Tribune
suggested that Lincoln send a ship “with provisions, but not with reinforcements” to Sumter and make “no secret of its undertaking.” This, it noted, would “place upon Mr. Jefferson Davis the responsibility of firing on a provision-ship going to the relief of American citizens, or suffering it to quickly accomplish the object of its mission.” After a month of indecision, with his cabinet deeply divided as to the best course of action, Lincoln adopted this very course. He announced a humanitarian venture to send food and medicine, but not arms, to the beleaguered troops. Unwilling to acquiesce in this show of federal authority, the Confederate president on April 12 ordered the bombardment of Sumter. Civil War had begun.

With the fort’s surrender, Lincoln declared that an “insurrection” existed in the seceded states. To suppress it, on April 15 he called for the states to supply 75,000 militia volunteers, ordered an expansion of the regular army and navy, proclaimed a blockade of the southern coast, authorized the expenditure of millions of dollars for military purposes, and suspended the writ of habeas corpus along the railroad line from Philadelphia to Washington. He also ordered federal troops stationed in the West to move to the East, thereby alienating Indian tribes whom the soldiers were there to protect from white incursions on their land, and, ironically, abandoning a number of Union forts. Congress had adjourned (Lincoln called it into special session beginning on July 4), and these were among the boldest unilateral exercises of executive authority in American history, doubly remarkable for a man who had entered politics as a member of a party opposed to what it considered abuses of presidential power. By the end of May, four more slave states—Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas—seceded rather than take part in the coercion of their southern brethren.
⁶²

Whether Lincoln craftily maneuvered the South into firing the first shot or simply took a calculated risk of war, creating a situation that placed the onus of striking the first blow on Jefferson Davis rather than himself, the result galvanized public sentiment in the North. The attack on Fort Sumter crystallized in northern minds the direct opposition between free and slave societies that abolitionists and many Republicans had long insisted on. In time, serious divisions would emerge in the North over the conduct of the war. But in the early weeks, contemporaries were struck by the virtual unanimity of opinion. Stephen A. Douglas rushed to the White House to offer his support and then traveled to Illinois, where, only a few weeks before his untimely death, he addressed the legislature, calling for undivided loyalty to the Union. In Quincy, Illinois, a mass meeting of Democrats and Republicans unanimously adopted resolutions drawn up by Browning pledging “ardent support” to the administration in its efforts for “the suppression of rebellion, preservation of the Union, chastisement of treason, etc.” In Philadelphia, Sidney George Fisher recorded in his diary, “the streets are all of a flutter with flags, streaming from windows, hotels, stores…. It is at the risk of any man’s life that he utters publicly a sentiment in favor of secession.” “Ten days ago great differences of opinion existed among our people,” Elias B. Holmes, who had served in the 1840s as a Whig member of Congress, reported from upstate New York. “Today they are a unit…. The latent sparks of patriotism all over the land are being ignited.”
⁶³

In none of his proclamations did Lincoln mention the word “slavery” or indicate that military efforts had any purpose other than to suppress “insurrectionary combinations” that prevented the execution of the laws. In his call for 75,000 militiamen issued two days after Sumter surrendered, he explicitly stated that the “utmost care” would be taken to avoid any “interference” with property in the seceded states. Two weeks after the war began, Lincoln assured Garrett Davis, a Unionist senator from Kentucky, that he intended to “make no attack, direct or indirect” on the domestic institutions of “any state.” Lincoln believed that making slavery a target of the war effort would drive all the states of the Upper South to secede and shatter northern unanimity. In the immediate aftermath of Sumter, northern Democrats made it abundantly clear that, as one newspaper put it, “we are not fighting for negro freedom or negro abolition.” Even in staunchly antislavery Wayland, Massachusetts, when the abolitionist David Child told a town meeting that slaves should be allowed “to fight on our side,” his audience responded that the war was about national unity, “and they wouldn’t hear a word about the niggers.” As so often, Lincoln sought the lowest common denominator of public sentiment—in this case, a war to preserve the Union.
⁶⁴

War, however, has a way of producing unanticipated consequences. Even in these early weeks, antislavery rhetoric made its appearance in patriotic pronouncements, and not simply among Radicals. “The time is not yet,” his friend Orville H. Browning, one of the more conservative Republicans, advised Lincoln, “but it will come when it will be necessary for you to march an army into the South and proclaim freedom to the slaves.” One Ohio journal that had supported Breckinridge in 1860 and denounced Lincoln’s inaugural address as a “virtual declaration of war upon the institution of slavery,” now called on him to punish the “vile traitors” who “would convert the land of the free into a chattel mart.” “If the people become satisfied,” Senator James R. Doolittle informed Lincoln from Wisconsin, “that either slavery or the union and constitution must perish,” they would readily sacrifice slavery. The Confederacy had adopted a constitution that explicitly protected slave property; its vice president, Alexander H. Stephens, had called slavery and belief in black inferiority the new nation’s “cornerstone.” What was the point, wondered the Washington correspondent of the
New York Times
, in seeking an “end to the present war…which leaves the cause of it in existence?”
⁶⁵

Four decades earlier, at the time of the Missouri debates, John Quincy Adams, with remarkable prescience, had confided in his diary that differences over slavery might lead to civil war, a “calamitous” eventuality that, however, would inevitably result in “the extirpation of slavery from this continent.” He repeated the thought in 1836 and 1842 in the House of Representatives. Were the slaveholding states to become “the theatre of a war, civil, servile, or foreign,” Adams announced, the “war power” would supercede all the barriers “so anxiously erected” in the Constitution for the protection of slavery. In 1836, he assigned the power of emancipation to Congress, but six years later he identified the commander in chief of the army as possessing the authority to “emancipate all the slaves in the invaded territory.” During the secession crisis, John A. Bingham of Ohio read excerpts from Adams’s speeches on the floor of the House.

With the outbreak of war, Radical Republicans and abolitionists hastened to remind Lincoln of Adams’s words. As soon as he heard of the attack on Fort Sumter, Senator Charles Sumner rushed to the White House and told the president “that under the war power the right had come to him to emancipate the slaves.” A few days later, Wendell Phillips spoke in Boston. Like William Lloyd Garrison, Phillips had long advocated disunion in order to free the North from its connection with slavery. To support the war, he told a fellow abolitionist, would be to “renounce my past…start anew with a new set of political principles, and admit that my life has been a mistake.” But that is what he did. “Today,” Phillips proclaimed, “abolitionist is merged in citizen, in American.” The war would sweep away slavery and for the first time create a unified nation with a common nationality based on free-labor ideals. Phillips, too, referred to John Quincy Adams’s prophecy: “When the South cannonaded Fort Sumter, the bones of Adams stirred in his coffin…. That hour has come to us.” He even declared that he had “always believed in the sincerity of Abraham Lincoln,” which must have surprised listeners familiar with his previous orations.
⁶⁶

Frederick Douglass, too, experienced a remarkable change of heart. The course of events in the late 1850s, he had written in August 1860, filled him with “doubt and gloom.” Lincoln’s election failed to dissipate his sense of “hopelessness.” During the secession crisis, Douglass modified his long-standing opposition to black emigration. In January 1861, he accepted an invitation to visit Haiti from James Redpath, the white abolitionist who headed the Haitian Emigration Bureau. But at the last minute, after the firing on Sumter, Douglass postponed the trip. For the first time, his monthly magazine appeared bedecked with an engraving of the American flag and a cap of liberty and alongside them the slogan “Freedom for All, or Chains for All.” The Civil War, Douglass wrote, portended “a tremendous revolution in…the possible future of the colored race of the United States.” “This is no time,” he added, “for us to leave the country.” Instead, he would remain and fight for emancipation: “Fire must be met with water, darkness with light, and war for the destruction of liberty must be met with war for the destruction of slavery.”
⁶⁷

In its issue after the war began, the black-owned
Weekly Anglo-African
also carried an image of the American flag on its editorial page, with the words “Emancipation or Extermination” superimposed on it. “Out of this strife,” it predicted, “will come freedom, although the methods are not yet clearly apparent.” Moreover, it added prophetically, “the millions ‘bowed and bound’ in slavery” should not be viewed as “impassive observers” of the strife. The administration might deem it “a white man’s war,” but the slaves “have a clear and decided idea of what they want—Liberty.” They, too, the paper predicted, would play a role in the outcome of the Civil War.
⁶⁸

As for Lincoln, he believed that because secession was illegal, the states remained in the Union with all their constitutional rights intact. “Some of our northerners,” he remarked after receiving the letters from Browning and Doolittle, “seem bewildered and dazzled by the excitement of the hour. Doolittle seems inclined to think that the war is to result in the entire abolition of slavery.” Such an idea did seem far-fetched in the spring of 1861. Yet, Lincoln’s refusal to compromise his core antislavery commitment had helped to produce the war in the first place. Not long after the conflict began, the
National Anti-Slavery Standard
predicted that as Union armies advanced into the South, the question of slavery “will rapidly turn from abstract into the concrete.”
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Far sooner than he anticipated, Lincoln would have to make policy decisions about the South’s peculiar institution, and how to place it on the road to ultimate extinction.

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11, 1861, a week after Lincoln’s inauguration and a month before the Civil War began, a canoe arrived at Fort Sumter carrying a “negro boy” who had heard that the new president intended to free the slaves. The commanding officer ordered him immediately turned over to the authorities in Charleston. The following day, four slaves appeared at Fort Pickens in Florida, “entertaining the idea,” according to Lieutenant Adam Slemmer, “that we were placed here to protect them and grant them their freedom.” Determined to “teach them the contrary,” Slemmer ordered the men delivered to the marshal at Pensacola (like Charleston, part of the Confederate States of America).
¹

The outbreak of the Civil War in April did nothing to change the army’s policy. “The Fugitive Slave Act,”
Harper’s Weekly
pointed out, “is not to be found in the Army Regulations.” Nonetheless, by the end of the month some thirty Florida slaves who had escaped to Fort Pickens suffered the same fate as the initial four. In April and May, as Union forces made their way through Maryland to protect Washington, hundreds of slaves flocked to their lines or took the occasion to escape to Pennsylvania. Seeking to ensure the loyalty of local whites, Union commanders in the border states, and in enclaves of Confederate territory where the army ventured, issued strict orders to their troops to respect private property and return runaway slaves, and assured residents that they harbored no “animosity” toward them or their institutions. Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act continued. A week after the war began, the U.S. marshal appointed by Lincoln arrested several fugitives in Chicago. Three months into the conflict, a Maryland newspaper pointed out that more escaped slaves had been returned to their owners under Lincoln “than during the whole of Mr. Buchanan’s presidential term.”
²

The flight of slaves should not have come as a surprise. Thousands had sought refuge with British forces during the struggle for independence and the War of 1812. Whatever the announced policies of the Lincoln administration, slaves, as a Kansas newspaper put it, viewed the Civil War as their “hour of opportunity,” the dawn of freedom. Acting on this belief, they took actions that placed the issue of slavery on the national agenda and helped to propel America down the road to emancipation.
³

The war, the
New York Times
would observe a year and a half into the conflict, shattered many myths. Despite southern propaganda, slaves turned out to be “earnestly desirous of liberty,” possessed a keen understanding of “the questions at issue in this war,” and had “far more rapid and secret” ways of disseminating news among themselves “than ever was dreamed of at the North.” As the war progressed and Union armies occupied larger and larger portions of the South, the trickle of runaways became a flood. “Slave labor is disappearing so rapidly,” a member of Maryland’s legislature complained early in 1862, “that our lands must go untilled.” As the navy patrolled the southern coast to enforce the blockade, slaves came to the shore hoping to escape to their ships. Some succeeded in doing so. When a small Union flotilla sailed up the Stono River in South Carolina in May 1862, the crew observed cavalry pursuing a “stampede of slaves” fleeing to avoid relocation inland. After opening fire on the Confederate forces and dispersing them, the naval commander took more than seventy slaves on board. He settled them in a safe location near the coast. That same month, in one of the war’s most celebrated acts of individual daring, Robert Smalls, the slave pilot of the Confederate naval vessel
Planter
, brought on board his wife, child, and a dozen other slaves, guided the ship out of Charleston harbor, and surrendered it to the Union navy.
⁴

By 1864, nearly 400,000 slaves had made their way to Union lines. Long before then, the escape of slaves powerfully affected both sides in the Civil War. Most slaves did not have the opportunity to flee, but the escape of those who did made those who remained “restless and discontented.” Fear of escape caused owners to remove slaves to the southern interior, far from the battle lines, and prompted the Confederate government to reinforce plantation discipline by exempting one adult male from military service for every twenty slaves. These measures disrupted the institution of slavery and caused serious dissension in southern white society. The situation also undermined discipline within the Union army, as some soldiers defied orders by encouraging fugitives and refusing to assist in “returning a poor wretch to slavery,” in the words of Colonel Harvey Brown, the commander at Fort Pickens.
⁵

As the
New York Herald
explained at the end of 1861, the slavery question had been “forced upon the administration by these…negroes in our army camps.” The strategic importance of the four border slave states that remained in the Union, where most runaways originated in 1861, heightened the urgency of dealing with the issue. When Lincoln began to make policy about slavery, he drew on ideas he had long embraced, advancing a plan for gradual, compensated emancipation in these states, coupled with the colonization of the freed slaves outside the country. For Lincoln, as for most Republicans, the road to emancipation still ran through the border states.
⁶

In retrospect, Congressman Isaac N. Arnold of Illinois commented in 1866, it seemed difficult to understand the administration’s initial reluctance to endanger slavery. But, he noted, for the nation’s entire history “the claim of the master to his slave had been protected by extraordinary guarantees,” embedded in the Constitution and recognized as lawful by almost every American. Most northerners, including Lincoln, desired to conduct the war, at least at the beginning, in a constitutional manner. Lincoln’s initial definition of the conflict, moreover, seemed to rule out action against slavery. Convinced that secession was a rebellion of individuals, not states, he insisted that the Union remained intact, with the states retaining all their constitutional rights. To be sure, the proclamation of a blockade and the decision to treat captured southerners as prisoners of war rather than criminals seemed to recognize the Confederacy as a belligerent power. And under the laws of war, many northerners argued from the outset, slavery in the Confederacy no longer enjoyed constitutional protection.
⁷

Whatever the legal status of the seceded states, Lincoln appreciated the crucial importance to the Union war effort of securing the loyalty of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, where the Constitution undoubtedly still applied. These states had a white population of 2.6 million—a little less than half that of the Confederacy—and about 420,000 slaves. Maryland and Kentucky, with their diverse economies and key strategic positions, were especially crucial to Union prospects. “I hope to have God on my side,” Lincoln is said to have quipped, “but I must have Kentucky.” Lincoln took many steps early in the war to bolster Union control of the border states. He appointed opponents of secession to patronage posts without regard to their party affiliation. With the army occupying much of Maryland, he moved swiftly and forcefully to suppress disunion sentiment, allowing soldiers to arrest Confederate sympathizers and administer loyalty oaths to voters, steps that helped to produce a Unionist victory in the state’s June 1861 elections. He adopted a quite different approach in Kentucky, tacitly accepting its declaration of “armed neutrality” and keeping Union soldiers out of the state. His forbearance paid dividends when Confederate forces invaded Kentucky at the beginning of September 1861 and the legislature threw its support to the Union. Making emancipation a war aim, Lincoln believed, would drive the border to secession.
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Nonetheless, the status of escaping slaves could not be ignored, especially as the Confederacy set slaves to work for its armies. On May 23, 1861, three black men made their way to Fortress Monroe, where General Benjamin F. Butler had assumed command the previous day. Situated in Virginia at the mouth of the James River, Monroe was one of the largest forts in the United States. It stood near the spot where twenty slaves had been landed from a Dutch ship in 1619, marking the beginning of slavery in England’s North American colonies. Until the outbreak of war, nearby Norfolk was a fashionable resort and “gay promenaders” had crowded the fort’s parapets every evening.

The three fugitives told Butler that they were about to be sent “to Carolina” to labor for the Confederate army. Other slaves, Butler ascertained, were building Confederate fortifications in Virginia. Having “great need” for manpower himself, Butler decided not to return the men; instead, he put them to work. Shortly thereafter, an agent of Colonel Charles K. Mallory, their owner and the Confederate commander in the area, arrived under a flag of truce asking for the return of his human property. Butler replied that the Fugitive Slave Act “did not affect a foreign country, which Virginia claimed to be.” But if Mallory took an oath of allegiance to the United States, Butler would return the men. This offer Mallory declined.
⁹

Butler called the escaped slaves “contrabands of war.” He claimed to be drawing on international law, even though the term “contraband” means goods used for military purposes that a neutral country ships to one side in a conflict, and which the other combatant may lawfully seize. Butler’s legal reasoning broke down further as escaping slaves who had not labored for the Confederate military, including women and children, joined male fugitives. Nonetheless, Butler had introduced a new word into the political lexicon. Soon, there would be contraband camps, contraband schools, and extended debate about the status and future of “the contrabands.” His policy won wide support in the North, including, wrote the Boston Radical Edward L. Pierce, among those who “would be repelled by formulas of broader and nobler import.” Butler’s actions did not imply a broad attack on slavery. He recognized the fugitives as property but used that very status to release them from service to their owners. Since it deprived the Confederacy of manpower, the strongly anti-abolitionist
New York Herald
approved of Butler’s order. But, the
Chicago Tribune
predicted, “if the war continues one year or more, ‘what shall we do with the slaves?’ will…become the question of the day.”
¹⁰

Butler was an unlikely initiator of a new policy regarding slavery. A well-to-do Massachusetts lawyer and staunch Democrat, he had run unsuccessfully for governor in 1859 and the following year voted for John C. Breckinridge, the most pro-southern of the four candidates for president. When he marched into Maryland in April, Butler assured the state’s governor that his troops would help to suppress any slave insurrection. Nonetheless, word of his action at Fortress Monroe spread quickly among local slaves. On May 27, forty-seven more, including a three-month-old infant, arrived at what blacks now called the “freedom fort.” Butler set as many to work as servants or laborers as he could and requested instructions from Washington. “As a political question and a question of humanity,” he asked, could he continue to receive runaway slaves? “Of the humanitarian aspect I have no doubt. Of the political one, I have no right to judge.” Thus, less than two months into the war, the actions of runaway slaves had created a “political question” for the Lincoln administration.
¹¹

Postmaster General Montgomery Blair reported to Butler that Winfield Scott, the Union’s southern-born general in chief, wanted to overturn his contraband policy. Blair himself felt it should apply only to able-bodied fugitives, leaving nonworking slaves as a financial burden on Confederate owners. But Lincoln approved of what Butler had done. He laughingly called the order “Butler’s fugitive slave law,” adding, however, that the question required further consideration because of the large numbers the Union army would soon “have on hand in virtue of this new doctrine.” On May 30, 1861, in a convoluted letter that reflected the complexities of the situation, Secretary of War Simon Cameron informed Butler that his policy “is approved” (he did not say precisely by whom). Butler could employ slaves as workers, but he should keep a record of the value of their labor and the expense of their maintenance. Their “final disposition,” Cameron wrote, would be left for future determination. The letter said nothing about Butler’s offering refuge to women and children. And no public announcement followed, in order, Blair explained, to “escape responsibility from acting at all at this time.” (Predictably, reports of the cabinet discussion appeared immediately in the press anyway.) Lincoln, according to the
New York Herald
’s Washington correspondent, preferred to leave the issue to local commanders. As a result, some officers continued to return fugitives, while others refused to do so.