Like most slaves, Frederick Douglass never knew precisely how old he was. “I have no accurate knowledge of my age,” he wrote, “never having seen any authentic record containing it.” He was born as property on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. He never learned the identity of his father, only that he was white. His only memory of his mother was being held by her in the night, adding, “I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light of day.”
There was no reason to believe he would eventually become one of the most important figures of the century.
His name at birth was Frederick Bailey and he lived his young life in a cabin with his grandparents, but he summed up the fate of every slave when he wrote, “I knew the taller I grew the shorter my stay.” He was separated from his family when he was about seven years old and sent to live on a plantation. It was there that the wife of his owner taught him the fundamentals of reading and writing, but his desperation for knowledge continued long after she was compelled to stop. Slave owners knew that educating slaves was dangerous.
By the time this hand-colored photograph of Frederick Douglass, who had been born a slave, was taken in 1866, he was a free man and slavery had been abolished in the United States.
Bailey refused to be easily tamed. His body was owned but not his mind. Frustrated, his masters finally sent him as a teenager to live with a farmer named Edward Covey, who was known as a Negro-breaker. After numerous beatings, food and sleep deprivation, and long days and nights of hard labor, “the snake,” as Frederick referred to him, “succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit … the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!”
After one terrible beating Bailey attempted to escape. In response Covey tried to loop ropes around his legs—but this time, “I was resolved to fight, and, what was better still, I was actually hard at it. The fighting madness had come upon me,” and it never went away. It took extraordinary courage for a slave to stand up to a white man, and a rebellious slave who attacked an overseer would be brutally flogged till near death. Bailey knew the risk but had gone beyond fear. He beat Covey bloody, he hit him again and again, and then again, and harder; the fight lasted two hours and afterward the Negro-breaker Covey never again “laid the weight of his finger upon me.” This was the lesson Frederick would never forget. While still physically enslaved, for the first time he had experienced the scent of freedom.
Bailey’s escape in September 1838 was considerably less dramatic. By that time he was working at a shipyard in Baltimore, living somewhat independently as long as he paid part of his weekly salary to his owner. Carrying the papers of a retired free black sailor that he’d either purchased or borrowed, he dressed in the proper sailor’s uniform and boarded the Negro car of an aboveground railroad headed to freedom in the North. He had no specific destination, like most slaves. “I really did not, at that time, know that there was a state of New York, or a state of Massachusetts. I … was ignorant of the free states, generally.”
While the punishments for attempting to escape varied, it was probable that if Bailey had been caught he would have been sent to work in the Deep South. Early in his journey an armed conductor asked to see his papers proving he was a free man. Instead of those papers he showed him the seaman’s document he had obtained—although he did not at all resemble the man described on it. It was a moment that changed American history. The conductor noted the printed American eagle and barely looked at the description. “Twenty-five cents,” he demanded. Twenty-five cents was the cost of a trip to freedom.
After other close calls Bailey eventually settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and married a free woman he’d met in Baltimore. Still in jeopardy, he changed his name to Frederick Douglass, picking the name of a main character in Sir Walter Scott’s narrative poem “The Lady of the Lake.” And it was as Frederick Douglass that he made his indelible imprint on American history.
Douglass lived such a dramatic life, three autobiographies were required to tell his entire story. This first book, which told the often-brutal story of a slave’s life, was published in 1845 and became an international best-seller—while he was still legally an escaped slave subject to being put into chains.
Frederick Douglass became the century’s most influential black man and a leader in the fight for all individual rights—but especially the battle to abolish slavery in America. He was about twenty-eight years old when his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, was published in 1845, and by that time he already was gaining a reputation as a stirring speaker. When the publication of his best-selling book put his freedom in jeopardy he fled to Europe, where he could travel without fear. He was received in Britain as a celebrity, welcomed to high society, and even dined with the Lord Mayor of Dublin. In Ireland he often appeared with the “Irish Liberator,” Daniel O’Connell, whom he often quoted in his speeches: “I am the foe of the tyrant … wherever slavery rears its head, I am the enemy of the system, or the institution, call it by what you will. I am the friend of liberty.” After he spent two years abroad speaking fiercely against American slavery, English Quakers helped him raise enough money to purchase his freedom, and he returned to America, now legally a free man, to continue his crusade. Several years later, as the British government contemplated recognizing the Confederacy, Douglass’s words still resonated and perhaps added to the British reluctance to support a slave nation.
It was as much his presence and eloquence as his book that gained him international recognition. It was sometimes difficult for people who had little direct contact with slaves to accept the fact that they were human beings with all the potential, the intelligence, and the foibles of anyone else. It was Frederick Douglass who stood tall and spoke passionately to represent the millions of men, women, and children then living in slavery—and made it impossible for many Americans to ignore their plight.
In 1852, the leading citizens of Rochester, New York, where he had settled to publish an abolitionist newspaper, the North Star, invited him to give a Fourth of July speech at Corinthian Hall. By choice, on the fifth of July he spoke to a hall packed with six hundred abolitionists, and rather than celebrating the anniversary of the nation’s freedom he issued a memorable attack on its toleration of slavery. “Why am I called to speak here today?” he asked.
This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.… Do you mean, citizens, to mock me by asking me to speak today? …
What to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is … mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.
Douglass told his audience that what was needed to make this truly a free country was “fire,” not light, and “thunder,” not reason. If this speech was not perceived to be a call to take up arms, it was at least a bitter reminder that the guarantees of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were still limited by the color of a man’s—or woman’s—skin.
Years later, as that war came closer, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass were not allies: Lincoln needed to avoid alienating any potential supporters. Whatever his personal beliefs, he argued vehemently that the war was being fought to hold the Union together. As he wrote to New-York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, in response to Greeley’s 1862 editorial criticizing his lack of direction or resolve, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it.… What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.”
In response, a contemptuous Douglass referred to Lincoln as “an excellent slave hound,” at least in part because he continued to support the Fugitive Slave Act as well as rescinding proclamations by Major General John C. Frémont in Missouri and General David Hunter in Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina freeing the slaves in those states. Consistently, Lincoln refused to take the moral stand on the most divisive issue in the nation’s brief history.
But events were forcing the president to reconsider his position. The Union army had been beaten back to Washington and popular support for the war was waning. It was becoming increasingly more difficult to enlist soldiers to fight for a cause they couldn’t quite understand. Lincoln was being pressured to allow black men to participate in the war. His own generals pointed out that the Confederates were using slave labor to do the work being performed by federal troops. A Union officer complained that throughout McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign, soldiers had been exhausted doing manual labor and building fortifications, entrenchments, and bridges while “the same kind of work in the Southern army was performed by negro labor almost wholly.” There also were some soldiers who claimed to have seen black men actually fighting for the Confederacy. A soldier writing in the Indianapolis Journal argued, “Fighting and marching does not wear the soldiers half so fast as ditching and fatigue duty, and the prevalent opinion in the army is in favor of negroes doing that kind of work,” adding that troops were writing to friends and telling them not to enlist “as long as this state of things exists.” Many Northern newspapers agreed; the Boston Herald editorialized, “We were not beaten by the arms of the enemy, but rather by the picks and spades in the hands of our own soldiers, with which they have wasted their vigor.” No one questioned either the availability or the desire of the growing number of contraband blacks to do this work. Many battalions were trailed by large numbers of men and women who had simply walked off plantations. The army was feeding them whenever possible but it had become a substantial problem with no easy solution.
From other corners came stronger appeals for abolition. After suffering thousands of killed and wounded in the first year of the war, Northerners had little interest in placating the Confederacy in hopes of a negotiated settlement. If the North was going to fight, the abolitionists argued, here was a noble objective to fight for. Susan B. Anthony toured upstate New York gathering support. Henry Ward Beecher wrote impassioned editorials, and Frederick Douglass thundered that it had “never been more palpable … that the only choice left to the nation is abolition or destruction.”
But still, Lincoln resisted. Slavery was a constitutionally protected right in states where it was legal; abolishing it would mean violating the Constitution. He also was deeply concerned about how his officers would react if he emancipated the slaves. An increasingly belligerent McClellan was strongly against it, warning the president—whom he described to his wife in a letter as “an idiot” and “the original gorilla”—that “a declaration of radical views, upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our present Armies.” McClellan made it clear that he was fighting the war to save the Union and that abolishing slavery would be detrimental to the possibility of reconciliation. The general was far from alone and Lincoln weighed the risks of telling white soldiers that they were endangering their lives to free black men and women against the obvious military benefits of allowing black men to support the fight for their own freedom.
Clearly there was not universally strong support for abolition in the North. In Cincinnati, the nation’s third-largest industrial city, Irish dockworkers, fearful that freed black men would take more of the diminishing number of stevedore jobs, rioted for a week in early July 1862, tearing through Bucktown, beating people and destroying property. Race riots ignited in several other cities, among them Brooklyn, New York, and New Albany, Indiana, and tensions simmered in other cities as the debate became increasingly loud and angry.
Among those people who may have been trying to sway Lincoln was a remarkable black woman named Elizabeth Keckley, whose talent as a dressmaker and seamstress enabled her to become a companion, confidante, and traveling partner to Mary Todd Lincoln. Born about 1818, Keckley was the daughter of a house slave and a then-unidentified white man. She was moved to Saint Louis with her owners in the 1840s and there discovered her sewing skills. “With my needle,” she recalled in her autobiography, “I kept bread in the mouths of seventeen persons for two years and five months.” She also was able to save enough money—$1,200—to purchase freedom for herself and her son. Eventually she moved with her husband and child to Washington, DC, where her list of clients eventually included the wives of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. When Varina Davis and her husband left Washington in January 1861, she invited Keckley to come with them, telling her she was fearful that should war occur, Northerners might blame blacks and “in their exasperation … treat you harshly.” Keckley refused politely.
Born into slavery, Elizabeth Keckley, after using her sewing skills to earn sufficient funds to buy her freedom, became a modiste, or custom dressmaker, to the leading ladies of Washington, and eventually Mary Todd Lincoln’s best friend.
For six months in 1864 painter Francis Bicknell Carpenter was permitted to set up a studio in the White House, becoming a very early version of the White House photographer. This painting, The Lincoln Family in 1861, was painted from memory in 1872.
Keckley met Mrs. Lincoln on Inauguration Day and spent the next four years working in the White House, designing and sewing for the president’s wife, whom she also dressed, and caring for Tad Lincoln while becoming, as Mary Lincoln once described their relationship, “my best friend.” During that time thousands of contrabands poured into Washington, “fresh from the bonds of slavery,” Keckley wrote. “Fresh from the benighted regions of the plantation, they came to the Capital looking for liberty, and many of them not knowing it when they found it.” In fact, many of them suffered. To provide relief and educational opportunities for these fugitives, Keckley created the Contraband Relief Association. Among her first contributors were Mrs. Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, each of whom donated $200.
During her time in the White House, Keckley’s son, who easily passed for white, enlisted in the Union army and was killed at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek in August 1861. Their shared grief over the death of their sons brought Mary Lincoln and Elizabeth Keckley even closer. There is no evidence to show that Keckley had any influence over President Lincoln while he was considering his momentous decision about emancipation, but given the nature of her relationship with the First Lady, it certainly is possible to assume that she played a role.
Joining McClellan in his disdain for Lincoln was Frederick Douglass, but obviously for precisely opposite reasons. He had consistently been disappointed by the president’s position, writing that Lincoln’s first inaugural address was “a weak and inappropriate utterance” that presented a policy of “complete loyalty to slavery in the slave States.”
But Lincoln was searching desperately for some compromise on the issue. When he found no support for his suggestion that loyalist slave states agree to a slow, compensated emancipation, meaning that owners would be paid for their property, he seriously embraced the possibility of separating the races by establishing a black colony outside the United States. In August 1862, he invited a delegation of five black clergymen to the White House to try to drum up support for his plan to send emancipated slaves to a region in what is now Panama to work there in coal mines. Douglass was incredulous, writing in his abolitionist newspaper that Lincoln “seems to have an ever increasing passion for making himself appear silly and ridiculous.” But rhetoric, which worked so well for Douglass, would not work for Lincoln. The “Great Emancipator” had to learn how to become the “Great Compromiser.”
While Lincoln was equivocating, the Republican Congress acted, passing bills in July 1862 that freed the slaves of anyone who had joined the rebellion against the United States and permitted the president to utilize those freed slaves in any military capacity—including allowing them to serve in the army. But before these laws could be enacted, Lincoln finally found an acceptable solution. He presented to his cabinet a version of the document that became known as the Emancipation Proclamation. This preliminary version freed the slaves in any state still in rebellion—although not in those slave states that had remained loyal—and those slaves “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons.” In addition, he wrote, “such person of suitable condition will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts.”
It was a very practical document, designed to cripple the Confederacy by stripping it of the slaves who performed the menial tasks that allowed soldiers to fight. Its goal was to win the war by freeing the slaves rather than making the abolition of slavery the objective of the war. Lincoln hoped that by limiting its purview to regions in rebellion, he might satisfy both his supporters and detractors. But legally, he could not include border states like Kentucky or Maryland since the “war powers” granted by Congress applied only to slave states at war with the federal government. Lincoln’s cabinet was divided. Several secretaries felt it was far too radical, while others believed it would make little difference. Secretary of State William Seward, a strong abolitionist, urged him to wait for a Union military victory before issuing it, arguing that releasing it at the present time, after a defeat, would make it appear to be a desperate move. Seward felt strongly that it needed to be “borne on the bayonets of an advancing army, not dragged in the dust behind a retreating one.”
Lincoln’s original draft also contained a reference to support colonization, but Seward suggested a modification that made it voluntary. Eventually that clause was removed completely.
The president agreed with Seward, recognizing that if he issued the proclamation after a military defeat, “it would be considered our last shriek.” He agreed to wait until McClellan gave him a military victory. The presumption was that it would not be too long a wait. McClellan had been handed a copy of Lee’s Special Orders No. 191, the most valuable piece of intelligence of the war, on September 13. He held in his hands Lee’s plans to split his army. After completing their missions, the army was to reassemble behind Antietam Creek, near the village of Sharpsburg, Maryland, where Lee waited with his remaining force.
McClellan moved swiftly, without pressing the fight. On September 14, General Jesse Reno’s troops broke through Turner’s Gap and pushed the dazed rebels back. A key moment in the battle came when greatly outnumbered federal troops allowed the Confederates to get “within fifteen paces,” as John C. Abbott wrote in his 1863 History of the Civil War in America. “When the patriots sprang to their feet and poured in upon the rebel ranks such a staggering storm of lead, that the whole line reeled, as if smitten by thunderbolts, turned and fled. The ground behind them was covered with their slain.”
After the debacle at Second Bull Run, this vitally important victory boosted flagging morale and opened a passage to Antietam. Unfortunately, in the fighting, popular general Jesse Reno was mortally wounded. As he lay on the ground he told his soldiers, “Boys, I can be with you no longer in body; but I am with you in spirit.”
But even with Lee’s campaign orders in hand, McClellan was still cautious. Rather than pressing forward to reinforce the garrison at Harpers Ferry before the rebels got there, he hesitated, and as a result Jackson’s forces captured the strategic town. Meanwhile, McClellan didn’t know that his own battle plan had been compromised: a Confederate sympathizer had learned of his intent and gotten a warning to Lee. General Lee responded by ordering his army to concentrate behind Antietam Creek in western Maryland as rapidly as possible. Had McClellan attacked immediately, his ninety thousand men might have overwhelmed Lee’s fifty thousand troops. But he didn’t, and by the time he launched his offensive, Jackson’s divisions had arrived carrying large supplies of ammunition captured at Harpers Ferry, and additional troops were marching double-quick to support him.
On the morning of the sixteenth, 170,000 men looked across Antietam Creek as they waited anxiously for the fighting to begin. Minor skirmishing broke out that afternoon as McClellan probed Lee’s northern flank, serving mostly to give away his own strategy.
Union captain James Hope’s panoramic painting, A Fateful Turn, depicts the fighting at Antietam moments before the old sunken farm lane became known forever as Bloody Lane. There were five paintings in the series; each one weighed more than two hundred pounds.
The Battle of Antietam, or the Battle of Sharpsburg, as it is also known, commenced at daybreak on the seventeenth when General Joseph Hooker launched an attack on Lee’s left flank. It raged throughout the entire day. As the Charleston Courier described the carnage, “From twenty different standpoints great volumes of smoke were every instant leaping from the muzzles of angry guns.… Men were leaping to and fro, loading, firing, and handling the artillery, and now and then a hearty yell would reach the ear, amid the tumult, that spoke of death or disaster from some well-aimed ball.”
By early afternoon almost two hundred artillery pieces were firing at close range. An eyewitness reported that “every hilltop, ridge and woods along the whole line was crested and veiled with white clouds of smoke.… Four miles of battle, its glory all visible, its horrors all hidden, the fate of the Republic hanging on the hour.” Throughout the day both sides launched attacks that were repulsed, then countered. The casualties were horrendous; in less than an hour General John Bell Hood’s division lost fourteen hundred men in Miller’s Cornfield. When Hood was asked later, “Where is your division?” he replied, “Dead on the field.” One of his regiments, the 1st Texas, lost 186 of its 226 men.
The Union forces gained ground in the morning but lost much of it in the afternoon. The fighting became so confusing that at one moment a future Supreme Court justice, Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes, saw one of his men firing backward, into what appeared to be his own lines. Holmes smacked him with the side of his sword—until he realized the rebels had managed to get around behind him. By late afternoon Lee had committed all of his troops to the battle and had none left in reserve; Union troops broke through the center of the rebel line but McClellan refused to commit his twenty thousand fresh troops, believing that Lee still held thousands more men waiting to counterattack—and then during those few desperate hours General A. P. Hill arrived with about three thousand fresh troops to reinforce Lee.
For decades following the war an untold number of illustrations were produced to fill the demand from patriotic veterans and families. The Battle of Antietam is one of the thirty-six chromolithographs published by Kurz and Allison. Supposedly depicting the fighting at Burnside Bridge, like most fanciful prints, it is highly melodramatic.
Late in the afternoon Lee made one last attempt to push back the federal army. Hill’s fresh troops attacked General Ambrose Burnside, whose men had fought their way over a narrow stone bridge and onto the Sharpsburg Road. Burnside’s lines wavered under the relentless assault and were driven back. When Burnside requested reinforcements, McClellan sent him a message. “I can do nothing more.… Tell him if he cannot hold his ground, then the bridge, to the last man!—always the bridge! If the bridge is lost, all is lost.” But as the sun set, Lee halted his attack.
There was no clear victor. The Union held control of the battlefield but neither side had gained anything substantial while suffering tremendous losses. More Americans were killed, wounded, or missing in battle on that day, September 17, 1862, than on any single day in our history. McClellan had suffered 12,410 casualties, including 2,108 dead, while Lee had lost 10,316 men, including 1,546 killed. As many as 5,000 men were killed or wounded in repeated attacks on a sunken farm road that became known as Bloody Lane. In the next few days, an additional 2,000 federal troops and 1,500 rebels would die of their wounds.
Among the heroes that day was Clara Barton, who had spent more than a year lobbying the army for permission to bring her medical supplies onto the battlefield. She arrived at Sharpsburg around noon with a wagon filled with supplies she had collected and spent the next few days treating the dying and wounded, binding their wounds, bringing them food and water, assisting surgeons as they amputated limbs, and in at least one instance actually cutting a ball out of a wounded soldier’s face. During the fighting she was holding a wounded soldier when she felt a stir in the sleeve of her dress—and discovered a bullet had ripped through it and killed the man she was treating. As army surgeon Dr. James Dunn later wrote of her service at Antietam, “In my feeble estimation, General McClellan, with all his laurels, sinks into insignificance beside the true heroine of the age, the angel of the battlefield.”
Among the first women to gain recognition in the war was Clara Barton, an educator and US Patent Office clerk, who became known as “The American Nightingale” and “The Angel of the Battlefield” for her efforts to bring medical care to wounded soldiers.
Lee had gambled his entire army in the fight, while McClellan held almost a quarter of his men in reserve. Although there were numerous skirmishes the next morning, neither side could sustain a battle and Lee withdrew his army, retreating into Virginia. Generals Burnside and Franklin pleaded with McClellan to attack. As Abbott wrote four years later, McClellan “had the opportunity either of driving the rebels into the Potomac and of capturing a large portion of their army, or of pushing them, in a demoralized state, farther into hostile country, where their communications with Virginia could easily be severed.” Instead, the always cautious commander allowed Lee to save his army, reporting, “I felt that my duty to the army and country forbade the risks involved in a hasty movement.”
The true horror of that day was soon brought into American homes through photographs published in magazines or displayed in galleries. For the first time Americans could see the bodies piled up for themselves rather than through illustrations. Pictures of the bodies of their sons and neighbors and friends, of boys not yet ready to shave, mesmerized the public. Scottish immigrant Alexander Gardner, who ran Mathew Brady’s Washington photo gallery, became a staff photographer under McClellan and his images from Antietam shocked Northerners, putting even more pressure on Lincoln to bring the war to an end.
While Antietam was not the glorious victory needed to fulfill Seward’s vision, Union troops had acquitted themselves well, and at the end of the fighting McClellan controlled the battlefield while Lee had been forced to retreat for the first time in the war. His attempted invasion of the North had been repulsed. The president could no longer wait. After telling his cabinet, “I made a solemn vow before God, that if General Lee was driven back from Pennsylvania, I would crown the result by the declaration of freedom to the slaves,” on September 22, he issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. He warned the Confederacy that if it did not end the rebellion by January 1, 1863, he would sign this document, legally freeing more than three million enslaved men, women, and children.
As expected, the preliminary document caused great controversy. Many Northerners railed against it, believing this issue had been settled in the Constitution. Copperhead Democrats, for instance, who were against the war and favored ending it by permitting slavery to continue, denounced it as an unconstitutional abuse of presidential power. They warned, as Frederick Douglass said in ridiculing them, “The only effect of the Proclamation is to make the slaves cut their masters’ throats and stir up insurrections all over the South.—The same men tell you that the Negroes are lazy and good for nothing, and in the next breath they tell you that they will all come North and take the labor away from the laboring white men here.” McClellan made his disgust public, criticizing Lincoln for “inaugurating servile war.” Enlistments in the army declined significantly as many men refused to put their own lives at risk to free blacks, while most of those already enlisted were ambivalent. Others believed it was far too drastic and favored a slower, more reasoned approach. Secretary of State William Seward complained that it applied only to those states in which Lincoln had no real power, noting, “Where he could, he didn’t; Where he did, he couldn’t.”
The photographs of Mathew Brady brought the horrors of the Civil War to civilians. For the first time, unburied corpses and smashed field equipment could be seen as they lay, within hours of the battle. Using the equipment seen in this 1864 photograph, Brady’s photo outfit at Petersburg captured images of all aspects of the war—except the fighting, as cameras could not yet capture moving images.
The proclamation was one of several contentious issues in the midterm elections of 1862. In addition to being dissatisfied about the conduct of the war, Northern Democrats were also unhappy with rising taxes and Lincoln’s suspension of the constitutionally guaranteed right of habeas corpus and were fearful that newly freed slaves would flood the labor market. The Democrats gained 28 seats in the 185-member House of Representatives, although Republicans managed to retain control. Senators at that time were elected by state legislatures rather than by popular vote, so Republicans managed to slightly increase their majority. The elections demonstrated that there existed no great reservoir of support for Lincoln’s proclamation. People accepted it, but clearly they did not like the fact that a war they had believed was being fought for union now was being waged to free the slaves.
While Lincoln claimed the right to issue this order as one of the executive’s undefined “war powers,” he still appealed to legislators for support. In his annual message to Congress in December he renewed his request for voluntary colonization of freed slaves and “compensated emancipation,” the plan to pay slave owners for releasing their property. He went so far as to suggest that slavery should be eliminated by January 1, 1900, to spare “both races from the evils of sudden derangement.” But he also made an impassioned plea for congressional backing for his proclamation, writing:
We can succeed only by concert.… The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise—with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. …
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history.… We know how to save the Union.… We—even we here—hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.
Carpenter’s 1864 oil painting First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln, which depicts the president and his cabinet, was re-created from sketches and photo portraits of each man. Lincoln worked with the artist to put each man in his proper position.
Precisely one hundred days after issuing the preliminary document, on January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, liberating the slaves in the Confederate states. “I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right,” he said, “than I do in signing this paper.” It was done without celebration. As his private secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, later described the low-key event that changed America forever, “Vast as were its consequences, the act itself was only the simplest and briefest formality. It could in no wise be made sensational or dramatic.… Those who were in the house came to the executive office merely from the personal impulse of curiosity joined to momentary convenience. His signature was attached to one of the greatest and most beneficent military decrees of history in the presence of less than a dozen persons.”
That first day of 1863 had been cautiously anticipated by both black and white abolitionists. Despite great efforts by Southern whites, news of the preliminary proclamation had spread throughout the Confederacy. Months before it was to go into effect, escaping slaves had been citing it to claim their freedom. Abolitionists declared January 1 a day of jubilee and scheduled prayer meetings, concerts, and gatherings of all types. An estimated five thousand slaves, some of them walking off plantations, gathered in Norfolk, Virginia, to await news of the signing. But no one waited for official word that Lincoln had emancipated the slaves more anxiously than Frederick Douglass, who spent the day listening to lectures in Boston’s Tremont Temple ready “to receive and celebrate the first utterance of the long-hoped-for proclamation.” The day stretched into the early evening, but still there was no word from Washington. Douglass wrote later, “It was by no means certain. The occasion, therefore, was one of both hope and fear.… Every moment of waiting chilled our hopes, strengthened our fears.… We were watching, as it were, by the dim light of the stars for the dawn of a new day.” It was after ten p.m. before the news arrived by telegraph. “The effect of this announcement was startling beyond description, and the scene was wild and grand. Joy and gladness exhausted all forms of expression from shouts of praise, to joys and tears.”
While legally the Emancipation Proclamation did not immediately liberate any slaves, unless they were already in Union hands, its effect was enormous.
In addition to its impact on the military outcome of the war—eventually more than two hundred thousand black men would join the fight for their freedom—it also had vitally important international political implications. In Europe, many politicians had framed the war as an attempt by courageous Southerners to gain their freedom from the oppressive North. In late 1862, British leaders had proposed a peace agreement in which the North would recognize Southern rights—and warned that if this proposal was rejected they would support the Confederacy. But there was a strong antislavery sentiment in England, and the Confederacy was now cast as fighting to protect slavery while the North was viewed as fighting for human rights. That made it difficult for European nations, where slavery had been eliminated, to offer any assistance to the South. This was a major blow to President Jefferson Davis, who had been courting those governments for several years. The Emancipation Proclamation’s real purpose, Davis said, was to provide European nations “justification in withholding our just claims to formal recognition.”
Abolitionists rejoiced. The headline of Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune was simply, “GOD BLESS PRESIDENT LINCOLN.” Speaking in the great hall at the Cooper Union in New York, where only a few years earlier Lincoln had spoken, Frederick Douglass praised his sometimes foe, calling the signing of the proclamation “the greatest event of our nation’s history, if not the greatest event of the century.” Describing it as a revolution as great as if the pope had suddenly become Protestant, he added, “Color is no longer a crime or a badge of bondage.” Douglass was not upset that the document extended only to the Confederacy, pointing out that “slavery must stand or fall together. Strike it at either extreme—either on the head or at the heel, and it dies. A brick knocked down at either end of the row brings every brick in it to the ground.” And he finished his speech by predicting a glorious future, “when we have blotted out this system of wrong, and made this United States in fact and in truth what it is in theory—The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.”
To celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation, the vignettes on the left of this popular lithograph, published in 1864 in Madison, Wisconsin, by Martin and Judson, show scenes related to slavery, while those on the right illustrate the benefits of freedom.
As Douglass predicted, the slaveholding Northern and border states, while not directly affected by the proclamation, moved steadily to eliminate slavery. Delaware sent an abolitionist to Congress although many of its slaves were already running away to join the Union army; Maryland called a state constitutional convention to abolish slavery and its 1864 constitution prohibited the practice. The constitution of the new state of West Virginia provided for the eventual emancipation of its slaves. In Tennessee, a state with greatly divided loyalties, military governor Andrew Johnson called for immediate emancipation, although it did not come until voters approved a new constitution in 1865. Even the newly elected governor of Louisiana, Michael Hahn, called for the “universal and immediate extinction of slavery,” which was abolished by a state constitutional convention.
Not surprisingly, the reaction throughout the Confederacy was quite different. President Davis proclaimed that the “restoration of the Union has been rendered forever impossible by issuing this document,” as it “affords our people the complete and crowning proof of the true nature of the designs of the party … which sought to conceal its purpose by every variety of artful grace.” Far worse, he predicted that slaves would arise and attack their masters. Union officers should bear responsibility for this violence, he wrote, and if captured be handed over to state governors “to be regarded as persons inciting servile insurrection under President Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation.” The penalty for inciting insurrection was death.
Many Confederates had always believed that the Union’s true purpose in fighting this war was to free the slaves and were pleased it finally had been admitted publicly. They felt it would give the rebels a new and resounding cause around which they might rally. But perhaps its most significant immediate impact was to open the military to black soldiers. As Douglass lamented, “It was a measure apparently inspired by the low motive of military necessity.” Enlisting black men had long been a controversial issue that Lincoln had artfully avoided, mostly by doing nothing to change existing laws. But the pressure on him had been growing as the number of casualties the Union army had suffered grew larger and larger. There was no doubt that black Americans were ready to enlist. Three years before the war a secret organization called the Loyal League had been established to prepare for that eventuality. John Rock, an African American doctor, lawyer, and teacher, had predicted accurately, “Sooner or later the clashing of arms will be heard in this country, and the black man’s services will be needed: 150,000 freemen capable of bearing arms, and not all cowards and fools, and three quarter of a million slaves, wild with the enthusiasm caused by the dawn of the glorious opportunity of being able to strike a genuine blow for freedom, will be a power which the white man will be ‘bound to respect.’ Will the blacks fight? Of course they will.”
A month after Lincoln had signed the proclamation, Massachusetts governor John A. Andrew formed the first black unit in the North, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. More than one thousand men from Northern states, Canada, some slave states, and the Caribbean responded to the call to arms, and among the first volunteers to join this unit were Frederick Douglass’s sons, Lewis and Charles. Andrew picked twenty-five-year-old Robert Gould Shaw, the son of wealthy abolitionists, to command the unit. Shaw had survived the bloodbath at Cedar Mountain, where a quarter of the men in his 2nd Massachusetts Regiment were killed, and Antietam. Having enjoyed a privileged upbringing, including European travel and a Harvard education, Shaw had found a purpose to his life when he enlisted in the army in 1861 and had served courageously. He wrote of watching in awe at Cedar Mountain as other wealthy young Bostonians stood tall and walked “straight up into the shower of bullets, as if it were so much rain; men, who until this year, had lived lives of perfect ease and luxury.” And after they had died in the battle he dutifully collected locks of their hair to return to their families.
Troops of the Massachusetts 54th Volunteer Infantry, the “Swamp Angels,” as they became known, were one of the first official African American units. This photo was probably taken at their training camp just outside Boston.
Initially people wondered if African Americans would volunteer to fight. While at first there was some reluctance because blacks mistrusted whites in both the North and South, by the time the war ended it is estimated that African American soldiers comprised about 10 percent of the Union army.
Initially he turned down the offer to lead the unit. His reason had nothing to do with the race of the troops. Rather, he did not want to abandon the surviving troops of the 2nd Massachusetts to accept command of what he assumed would be mostly a support unit. He was a combat soldier and it seemed improbable to him that the army would actually allow black soldiers into battle. His parents, primarily his mother, prevailed on him to accept Andrew’s request to form the 54th. Finally, reluctantly, he agreed.
Although initially he harbored doubts about the quality of his men, he quickly gained respect for them. In fact, when the army announced that black soldiers would receive less pay than white troops, Shaw led a several-months-long boycott of all payments until the army finally agreed to pay all soldiers equally at the white rate—and pay back wages. He also began lobbying commanders to give his men the opportunity to prove their mettle in battle. News that the Confederate Congress had resolved that all captured black soldiers would be sold into slavery and their white officers would be summarily executed did not temper his resolve. This unit was fighting to free their race; threats could not shake their determination. On May 28, 1863, four months after forming his unit, Shaw proudly paraded his 54th Massachusetts (Colored) Volunteer Infantry Regiment through the streets of Boston, from the Boston Common to the docks, where they boarded a transport to take them into the fight.
Frederick Douglass must have watched with both great pride and parental fear as his sons marched off to war with a thousand other black soldiers.
This war was no longer being fought simply to tie together the old Union; perhaps reluctantly, and certainly out of necessity, it now had a much more noble purpose: the end of slavery in the United States.
And to guarantee that all the Union had to do was win the Civil War.
