Which was the most important result of the Civil War: preservation of the Union or abolition of slavery? These two results became inextricably linked as the war went on, and by 1864 it became impossible to separate them: slavery could not have been abolished without Union victory, and preservation of the United States as one nation became dependent on the destruction of slavery. Yet in the minds of most Americans today, the abolition of slavery stands out as the most dramatic result of the war, while preservation of the Union is something that we seem to take for granted. But in 1861 it could not be taken for granted. “Union” held profound meaning for many Americans, including even some Southerners (like Jefferson Davis) who embraced secession with heavy hearts and a conviction that it was the Northern people who had betrayed the great promise of 1776.
We rarely speak of the Union today except when referring to a labor organization. But to mid-nineteenth-century Americans “Union” carried powerful meanings, analogous with “nation” and “country.” It “represented the cherished legacy of the founding generation,” writes Gary Gallagher in The Union War, “a democratic republic with a constitution that guaranteed political liberty and afforded individuals a chance to better themselves economically.” In this view of the Union, “slaveholding aristocrats who established the Confederacy … posed a direct threat not only to the long-term success of the American republic but also to the broader version of democracy.”1
The determination to uphold this vision sustained the Northern people and especially their president through four years of bloody war. Gallagher recaptures the meaning of Union to the generation that fought for it. He rescues the “Cause” for which they fought from modern historians who maintain that the abolition of slavery was the only achievement of the Civil War that justified all that death and destruction. In the process, however, he overstates the case against emancipation as an avowed purpose of the war for the Union. The very first sentence of The Union War states his thesis: “The loyal American citizenry fought a war for Union that also killed slavery.”2 “Also” is the key word here; it implies that the death of slavery was a mere by-product of the war. “Intention did not drive the process” by which the presence of Union soldiers in the South liberated slaves, Gallagher maintains. “Troops commanded by officers who cared nothing about black people proved as destructive to slavery as those led by ardent advocates of emancipation. No matter how prejudiced their own attitudes, Union soldiers functioned as cogs in a grand military mechanism that inexorably ground down slavery.”3
Intentionality may have had more to do with the abolition of slavery than Gallagher is willing to grant. The invasion of slave states by the British army in the American Revolution liberated a good many slaves, but it did not end slavery because the British government had no intention of doing so. But from the beginning of the Civil War there were abolitionists and Republicans who believed that this war against a slaveholders’ rebellion must end slavery, and their numbers grew as the war escalated. Congressional legislation confiscating the slave property of “rebels,” the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution expressed a growing determination that slavery and the Union were incompatible. Despite enormous pressure to drop abolition as one of his conditions for peace when the war was going badly for the North in the summer of 1864, Lincoln refused to do so. By that time more than one hundred thousand black soldiers were fighting for the Union. “If they stake their lives for us they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom,” said Lincoln. “And the promise being made, must be kept. … Why should they give their lives for us, with full notice of our purpose to betray them? … I should be damned in time and eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends and enemies, come what will.”4
Gallagher acknowledges that by 1864 the Lincoln administration “added emancipation to Union as a non-negotiable condition of any peace following United States victory.”5 The seeds of that nonnegotiable condition were sown in the first months of the war, according to Adam Goodheart’s rich multi-tiered narrative of the North and its people as war descended on the land. At Fort Monroe, a Union garrison in Virginia at Hampton Roads, where the James River flows into Chesapeake Bay, three slaves sought asylum on May 24, 1861. They had escaped from a Confederate camp across the Roads where they had been building fortifications for the Southern army. Major General Benjamin Butler met with them and heard their story. On Butler’s staff was Theodore Winthrop, who had told his family as he departed from Massachusetts for the front: “I go to put an end to slavery.” When a Confederate officer, Major John Cary, came under a flag of truce to ask General Butler to return the three slaves, the following exchange took place:
cary: What do you mean to do with those negroes?
butler: I intend to hold them.
cary: Do you mean, then, to set aside your constitutional obligation to return them?
butler: I mean to take Virginia at her word, as declared in the ordinance of secession passed yesterday. I am under no constitutional obligations to a foreign country, which Virginia claims to be.
cary: But you say we cannot secede, and so you cannot consistently detain the negroes.
butler: But you say you have seceded, so you cannot consistently claim them. I shall hold these negroes as contraband of war, since they are engaged in the construction of your battery and are claimed as your property.6
Contraband of war! This novel description of escaped slaves was like a shot heard ’round the world. “An epigram abolished slavery in the United States,” wrote Theodore Winthrop shortly before he was killed in action on June 10, 1861. Butler’s epigram turned out to be the thin edge of a wedge driven into the heart of slavery. From that moment, slaves who came within Union lines—and there were soon thousands of them—were known as contrabands. Some abolitionists complained that this word dehumanized Negroes by equating them with property. But “contraband” soon meant “freedman.” The term became acceptable and universal, even among freed slaves themselves. “Never was a word so speedily adopted by so many people in so short a time,” marveled a Union officer.7
The Lincoln administration approved Butler’s policy. The president was hearing from many of his constituents and from Republican leaders that slavery must not survive this war for the Union. Senator James Doolittle of Wisconsin told Lincoln that the war “is to result in the entire abolition of Slavery.” The president’s private secretary, John Hay, who opened Lincoln’s mail, told him on May 7, 1861, that “his daily correspondence was thickly interspersed with such suggestions.”8 The cause of Union and freedom would not be completely fused for another three years, but as Goodheart neatly puts it, when those three slaves showed up at Fort Monroe in May 1861 “they joined the Union”—and the fusion began.9
Of course, Butler would not have had the opportunity to declare these slaves contraband of war if they had not taken the initiative to escape to Fort Monroe. Such proactive deeds by many others who followed raise the question of who was really responsible for the coming of freedom. Perhaps the real story is not what happened in the White House or the halls of Congress, but at thousands of places from Maryland to Texas when slaves ran away from their masters and entered the lines of Union armies, or when those armies occupied Southern cities and plantation districts. In his fascinating book A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation, David Blight enters a debate among historians about who deserves primary credit for freeing the slaves and ending slavery: Abraham Lincoln and his white Republican allies in Congress, or the slaves themselves.
The traditional answer to the question “Who freed the slaves?” was Abraham Lincoln. But many historians have placed greater emphasis on the initiative of the slaves themselves. They saw the Civil War as a potential war for abolition well before Lincoln did. By coming into Union military lines in the South, they forced the issue of emancipation on the administration. “While Lincoln continued to hesitate about the legal, constitutional, moral, and military aspects of the matter,” wrote the historian and theologian Vincent Harding in 1981, “the relentless movement of the self-liberated fugitives into Union lines” soon “approached and surpassed every level of force previously known.” Making themselves “an unavoidable military and political issue … this overwhelming human movement … of self-freed men and women … took their freedom into their own hands.” The Emancipation Proclamation, when it finally came, merely “confirmed and gave ambiguous legal standing to the freedom which black people had already claimed through their own surging, living, proclamations.”10
During the 1980s this self-emancipation thesis became dominant. It won the imprimatur of the foremost scholarly enterprise on the history of emancipation, the Freedmen and Southern Society project at the University of Maryland. By acting “resolutely to place their freedom—and that of their posterity—on the wartime agenda,” wrote the editors of this project, the slaves were “the prime movers in securing their own liberty.”11 One of the historians associated with the Freedmen and Southern Society project, Barbara J. Fields, gave wide currency to this theme in her eloquent statements on camera in the Ken Burns PBS documentary The Civil War (viewed by more than forty million people) and in the book that accompanied the series. “Freedom did not come to the slaves from words on paper, either the words of Congress or those of the President,” said Fields in 1990, but from “the initiative of the slaves” who “taught the nation that it must place the abolition of slavery at the head of its agenda.”12 A decade later Lerone Bennett Jr. declared that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was a hoax. He “did not intend for it to free a single Negro. … Lincoln didn’t make emancipation; emancipation, which he never understood or supported, made Lincoln.”13
Proponents of the traditional interpretation that Lincoln had something to do with freeing the slaves, and that the Emancipation Proclamation was an important step in that process, are quite ready to acknowledge that the actions of slaves who came into Union lines forced the Lincoln administration to decide what to do about them. Some Union generals wanted to return them to their owners. But both Congress and the administration rejected that alternative. Well before the end of the war’s second year, the United States not only welcomed escaped slaves and enforced their freedom but also began arming freedmen to fight for freedom and nation as Union soldiers.
The Emancipation Proclamation officially made Union soldiers into an army of liberation. Northern troops carried copies of the Proclamation and distributed thousands of them as they penetrated into the heartland of the Confederacy. By the war’s last year, more than 10 percent of these soldiers of freedom were black, most of them former slaves. That army was chiefly responsible for the freedom of slaves who came within its purview. By the end of the war, David Blight estimates, “some 600,000 to 700,000 out of the nearly four million African American slaves had reached some form of emancipation” by this process.14 But most of them had done so by the Union army coming to them rather than by escaping to the Union army. The remaining 3.3 million slaves achieved freedom by the Thirteenth Amendment, whose adoption was possible only through Union military victory. And no one deserved more credit for that victory than Abraham Lincoln, commander in chief of an army of liberation.15
David Blight’s A Slave No More publishes for the first time two autobiographies of former slaves that offer case studies of the process of emancipation during the Civil War. “Slave narratives” had long been a well-established literary genre. Before 1865 approximately sixty-five autobiographies of slaves who escaped or otherwise achieved freedom were published. Most of them were circulated (and some were ghostwritten) by abolitionists as part of their antislavery crusade. After the Civil War some fifty or more former slaves wrote autobiographies, of which Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery is by far the most widely read. The purpose of these postwar narratives, writes Blight, “was no longer to catalog the horrors of slavery, but to use memoir as a marker of racial uplift and respectability in the age of Jim Crow.”16
The two narratives published in A Slave No More do not quite fit into either category. They do touch on some of the corrosive effects of slavery, and they also reveal, at least implicitly, the authors’ striving for respectability. But in two important respects they are almost unique: They focus primarily on the authors’ actions and experiences during the Civil War, and they were not written for publication, so they are unmediated by white editors or by the conventions of writing for a public audience. They were apparently written for the authors’ children, to tell the next generation what their fathers had gone through to bring them into a world where they were free to achieve at least a modicum of mobility within a segregated society.
John Washington (1838–1918) and Wallace Turnage (1846–1916) were born slaves, respectively in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and on a farm near Snow Hill, North Carolina. Both had white fathers—which at the outset offers an insight into one of slavery’s dirtiest secrets, the sexual exploitation of slave women by white men. Washington’s mother taught him to read, while it is not clear how Turnage gained that precious knowledge. Both were exceptional in the degree of literacy they possessed when they emerged from slavery. They also shared the shock of separation from their mothers at a young age, another of the baneful features of enslavement. When Washington was twelve years old, his mother was hired out to a master in Staunton, Virginia, one hundred miles from Fredericksburg. Taking her other four children with her, she left John behind to work as a servant and errand boy for their owner. “Bitter pangs filled my heart” at this separation, wrote Washington more than twenty years later. “Then and there my hatred was kindled secretly against my oppressors, and I promised myself if I ever got an opportunity I would run away from these devilish slave holders.”17 Turnage endured even more bitter anguish when at the age of fourteen he was sold apart from his mother and taken seven hundred miles to a plantation in Alabama, where a burning desire to escape fueled every moment of his existence.
From this point on, the experiences of the two young slaves diverged. Living in the cosmopolitan town of Fredericksburg, Washington interacted with free blacks and fell in love with a light-skinned free woman whom he married in January 1862. His job as a steward at a hotel, whose proprietor rented him from his owner, and his literacy and access to books and newspapers kept him informed on national politics and the course of the war, which brought the Union army to Falmouth across the Rappahannock River from Fredericksburg in the spring of 1862.
Washington’s desire for real freedom had only grown stronger during the years of quasi-freedom he had known as a hired slave doing the job of a free man. On April 18, 1862, he shouted across the river to Union troops that he wanted to come over. They sent a boat and rowed him to freedom. For several months he served as a cook and steward at a Union general’s headquarters, until he could bring his wife and even his mother and siblings to Washington, where they joined a large and growing free black community liberated by the war.
Turnage’s passage to freedom was much more tortuous than Washington’s. The overseer on the cotton plantation in Alabama where he ended up liked to use the whip. Three times from 1860 to 1862 the teenage slave ran away in response to a whipping or to avoid one. Each time Turnage was caught and brought back—to face a whipping for running away. As Blight points out, “Wallace Turnage fought a war within a war well before he ever saw a Yankee soldier.”18
By the time of Turnage’s fourth attempt to escape in the fall of 1862, he was aware of the war and of the presence of Union troops in northern Mississippi 120 miles from his plantation. This time he almost made it, experiencing hardships, sleepless nights, and near-starvation along the way, which he described with untutored eloquence in his narrative. But Confederate cavalry caught him and returned him to his master, who decided that he no longer wanted this chronic runaway and sold him down the Tombigbee River to Mobile.
Having failed to reach the Yankees in 1862, Turnage ran away from his new owner when the Yankees came close to him in August 1864. Farragut’s fleet and army troops captured the forts guarding the entrance to Mobile Bay. In his fifth escape attempt, Turnage journeyed thirty miles through swamps and across treacherous rivers dodging Confederate pickets and fending off poisonous snakes to reach Union lines. Within sight of his goal at Fort Powell on Dauphin Island he found a leaky dinghy and rowed out into the bay. A sudden storm almost capsized him before eight Union soldiers who had seen him coming rowed out in a skiff to rescue him.
Turnage remembered with vivid clarity his first day of freedom with the Yankees at Fort Powell. “The next morning I was up early,” he wrote many years later, “and took a look at the rebels country with a thankful heart to think I had made my escape with safety after such a long struggle; and had obtained the freedom which I desired so long.” Turnage offered a fervent expression of what freedom meant to him. “I now dreaded the gun, and handcuffs and pistols no more,” he wrote. “Nor the blewing of horns and the running of hounds; nor the threats of death from the rebel’s authority. I could now speak my opinion to men of all grades and colors, and no one question my right to speak.”19
The welcome that Turnage and Washington received from Union soldiers challenges—or at least qualifies—the accounts by many historians that emphasize the racism and antiblack hostility of most soldiers. Both men have nothing but good words to say about their experiences after they reached Union lines. If they had been writing for a public (and predominantly white) readership, of course, we would be properly skeptical of such statements. But they were writing for themselves and their families, and we may infer that they were writing what they actually felt. There were many racist Union soldiers, to be sure. And the light color of both Washington and Turnage probably worked in their favor. Washington was so light that the Union soldiers he first encountered thought he was a white man and were astonished to learn that he had been a slave. His reception, and Turnage’s, might have been less friendly if they had been really black.
Like Washington, Turnage became a cook for a Union officer (from Maryland) and served with him for the rest of the war. After their discharge they returned together to Baltimore, where Turnage lived for several years and eventually made contact with his mother and siblings. He married and moved to New York City, and several years later to Jersey City, where he lived the rest of his life and raised seven children, four of whom died young. Active in the Baptist church and a fraternal lodge, Turnage struggled to make a living for his family in various occupations: waiter, janitor, and watchman. Two of his children who grew to adulthood passed for white and disappeared into mainstream white society.
Also active in his Baptist church, John Washington lived most of his long life in the city of Washington, where he worked as a sign painter, waiter, and barkeeper. His four sons were educated in the capital’s segregated public schools and found their ways into respectable middle-class and lower-middle-class occupations. Blight speculates that both men wrote their narratives of the journey from slavery to freedom to provide themselves and their families with a sense of identity and pride in an era of increasing segregation and racism. “In their own personal ways, Washington and Turnage are saying: Here is who I am; here is how I achieved freedom; and here is what it means to me.”20
By editing and elaborating upon these striking autobiographies, David Blight has done an inestimable service to historians. He has also presented a way to resolve disagreements about the question of “who freed the slaves, Lincoln or blacks themselves?” The “Turnage and Washington stories answer conclusively that it was both,” writes Blight. “Without the Union armies and navies, neither man would have achieved freedom when he did. But they never would have gained their freedom without their own courageous initiative, either.”21
One might quibble about the “never” in that last sentence. Like the 3.3 million slaves who remained in bondage through the war, Washington and Turnage would have been freed by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 even if they had not demonstrated courageous initiative or come into contact with the Union army. But like many other bondsmen, Washington and Turnage did exhibit “the initiative of the slaves,” in the words of Barbara Fields quoted earlier, “who taught the nation that it must place the abolition of slavery at the head of its agenda.”