Savannah, Ga., Dec. 22 [1864].
To His Excellency, President Lincoln:
I beg to present you as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.1
When de war ended, I goes back to my mastah and he treated me like his brother. Guess he wuz scared of me ’cause I had so much ammunition on me.2
NOW THE WAR COULD be won: as with previous proclamations by Dunmore and by Sonthonax and Polverel, emancipation meant black soldiers in combat, even as it emboldened the many enslaved who heard about it throughout the South.
Pursuant to the Emancipation Proclamation, 166 black regiments were created. The number of African Americans who fought is officially around 180,000, but it seems likely there were more than that. By war’s end, about 10 percent of the US Army was black. Though they were not commanded by black officers, they were known as dedicated fighters. For them, the war was even more dangerous than it was for white soldiers.
In his previously quoted message, Jefferson Davis announced his post–Emancipation Proclamation intention to treat all captured Union officers as guilty of “exciting servile insurrection,” which was to say, to execute them. The Confederate hierarchy construed all black soldiers to be guilty of that crime and deserving of death.
From the first encounters between black soldiers and Confederates in battle pursuant to the Emancipation Proclamation, the Confederates waged “black flag” or “no quarter” war. Atrocities were routine; taking no prisoners, they slaughtered wounded black soldiers, on occasion bayoneting them repeatedly or beating their brains out with clubs. Confederate soldiers frequently made every effort to kill black soldiers on the battlefield, murdering them in cold blood if they were captured, including, writes Gregory J. W. Unwin, “those who attempted to surrender and wounded men too weak to offer resistance.”3 Captured black soldiers who were not killed were frequently enslaved. Confederates also typically targeted for murder the white commanders of the black regiments; the knowledge that any whites associated with black troops would be flat-out killed was intended to drive a wedge between white and black Union soldiers.
Afraid of the consequences, the Union refrained from calling for no-quarter war in reprisal, thereby leaving their black troops to be sacrificed. There were thus two different war regimes operating, one for white prisoners and the other, even more horrible, for black prisoners. “Confederate war crimes far exceeded those of the Federals by every measure,” writes George S. Burkhardt, who called attention to it in Confederate Rage, Yankee Wrath.4
Confederate violence in battle was genocidal toward black people, reaching a pitch comparable to the final moments of that other major bloody American war of abolition, the Haitian Revolution. The mere fact of a black man in a military uniform with a weapon was cognitive dissonance: in the Confederate worldview, this was not possible. As they saw it, the enemy was less than human, and was their own escaped property. In the words of a South Carolina woman: “Just think how infamous it is that our gentlemen should have to go out and fight niggers, and that every nigger they shoot is a thousand dollars out of their own pockets!”5 The most notorious massacre, though not the largest, was committed by the troops of Nathan Bedford Forrest at Fort Pillow, an army post of no great strategic importance on a Tennessee bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, on April 12–13, 1864. Forrest had enlisted in the Confederate army as a private, but quickly became a lieutenant colonel, then one of the most celebrated Confederate generals. He was a cavalryman, said to be one of the best horsemen in the army, whose principal military technique was the aggressive assault.
After charging into Fort Pillow, the troops under Forrest’s command killed in cold blood perhaps as many as five hundred Union soldiers who had surrendered (there is no definitive count) over a period of two days.6 Most of them were black. The New York Tribune reported that five soldiers were buried alive.7 Forrest’s New York Times obituary in 1877 recalled the massacre:
Without discrimination of age or sex, men, women, and children, the sick and wounded in the hospitals, were butchered without mercy. The bloody work went on until night put a temporary stop to it; but it was renewed at early dawn, when the inhuman captors searched the vicinity of the fort, dragging out wounded fugitives and killing them where they lay. The whole history of the affair was brought out by a Congressional inquiry, and the testimony presents a long series of sickening, cold-blooded atrocities … The news of the massacre aroused the whole country to a paroxysm of horror and fury.8
An 1865 interview with Forrest, conducted by a reporter for the New Orleans True Delta and reprinted in other newspapers, asked him if the investigators’ (the “Yankees’”) report of Fort Pillow was accurate. He answered, “Yes, if we are to believe anything a nigger says.” Then he added, “When I went into the war I meant to fight. Fighting means killing. I have lost twenty-nine horses in the war, and have killed a man each time.”9
There were many witnesses to the Fort Pillow massacre, which contributed to its visibility as a media event, but Fort Pillow was not an anomaly; the level of hatred displayed toward black soldiers was consistent wherever Confederates fought. A Virginia colonel described the wholesale slaughter of prisoners at the disastrous Battle of the Crater outside Petersburg, Virginia, in July 1864: “Our men, who were always made wild by having negroes sent against them … were utterly frenzied with rage. Nothing in the war could have exceeded the horrors that followed. No quarter was given, and for what seemed a long time, fearful butchery was carried on.”10
Black troops made “Remember Fort Pillow!” into a battle cry and became increasingly disposed to give no quarter. Burkhardt quotes a New Jersey officer: “The Rebel prisoners are very fearful of being left to … colored troops as they fear their own acts of inhumanity will be repaid.”11 Forrest’s troops continued their homicidal career in June, a little north of Tupelo, Mississippi, at Brice’s Cross Roads, where Forrest scored his greatest victory of the war against an enemy superior in numbers. After routing a Union force of eight thousand under the incompetent direction of Brigadier General Samuel Sturgis, Forrest’s men hunted down and killed members of Colonel Edward Bouton’s Colored Brigade who had survived the battle. In April 1865, Forrest directed a massacre of Union troops near Selma while they were sleeping.12
The month after the Fort Pillow massacre, General William Tecumseh Sherman, who liked neither black people nor abolitionists, began his Atlanta campaign. Entering Georgia from Chattanooga on the north, he burned the strategic rail depot in Atlanta, a small town whose population had multiplied under the pressure of war. Some of Atlanta was torched by Sherman’s troops, and some by the Confederate general John Bell Hood; about half the city went up in flames. It was tremendous news in the North.
Sherman followed up Atlanta on November 15 with his sixty-mile-wide, three-hundred-mile long March to the Sea without supply lines, forcing his sixty-two thousand troops to eat their way through the country as they tore up railroad tracks and burned industrial, governmental, and military facilities and cotton crops along the way. Sherman’s march, tactically aimed at destroying what remained of the Southern railroad system and strategically aimed at stopping the war once and for all, has been traditionally portrayed in the South as an orgy of cruelty, acquiring a mythical reputation as Exhibit A of Northern aggression. Sherman’s troops certainly caused suffering, in part because they destroyed food supplies as well as cotton, but they concentrated primarily on strategic targets rather than residences.13 Some homes were burned, especially those of the planters; Sherman took special care to make sure that Howell Cobb’s plantation was burned to the ground.
But the property that Sherman’s troops fired was the least of the wealth they destroyed.
They burned slavery to the ground.
Whatever else Sherman’s march symbolized, for the enslaved it was a march of liberation, as one of the war’s best-known songs, composed by Henry Clay Work, recalls:
Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the jubilee!
Hurrah! Hurrah! The flag that makes us free!
And so we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea
While we were marching through Georgia.
“Marching Through Georgia” took its place alongside the most popular anthem played by Northern military bands: the stirring “John Brown’s Body,” for which Julia Ward Howe had written new lyrics, still familiar today, as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Noah Andre Trudeau quotes a letter written during the campaign by General William P. Carlin of the First Division that described what happened on one occasion when the band played that song:
About a dozen young African-American girls came out of nearby houses, “formed into a ring around the band at the head of the column, and with a weird, plaintive wail, danced in a circle in a most solemn, dignified, and impressive manner,” wrote Carlin years afterward. “What their meaning was I did not know then, nor do I now, but I, of course, interpreted it as expressive of goodwill to our cause.”14
Carlin was hearing a ring shout, a collective song of spiritual power sung and danced in a moving counterclockwise circle. One of the oldest known forms of African American music, heavily Kongo in influence, the ring shout is known in the Sea Islands and points west, all the way to the Louisiana / Mississippi delta region, where it became part of the Baptist tradition of “rocks.”*
Meanwhile, Jacob Thompson was plotting the mass murder of Northern civilians on behalf of the Confederacy. Funded with a million dollars in gold and sent by Judah P. Benjamin to be head of Confederate Secret Service operations in Canada, Thompson dispatched incendiary attacks on New York and Chicago. These terrorist attacks were to be coordinated with occupation by the former Knights of the Golden Circle, as of 1864 called the Sons of Liberty, whose membership was said, perhaps hyperbolically, to number in the hundreds of thousands.15 That never happened; but had Confederate colonel Robert Martin been less inept in scouting locations and in using his “Greek fire” phosphorus firebombs, the plot for eight infiltrated Confederate officers to burn down New York City in a massive conflagration on November 25, 1864, might well have succeeded, in which case the Confederacy would have exacted a civilian death toll of possibly historic proportions.16 The fires were set, but in closed spaces, where they burned out for lack of oxygen.
Not until Sherman’s arrival in Savannah did the town’s slave trade stop. Some traders escaped the city with captives, while others were less successful, and at least two traders, E. M. Blount and W. C. Dawson, fell victim to revolt, as the horrified trader Henry Bogardus wrote his sister: “Blount’s Negroes killed him and Dawson is not much better.”17
For the whites of Savannah, Sherman’s occupation was defeat. But among black Savannahans, as the Reverend James Simms recalled, “The cry went around the city from house to house among our race of people, ‘Glory be to God, we are free!’”18 Almost immediately, the black community of Savannah organized the Savannah Education Association. The Montmollin building, previously a Savannah slave trader’s headquarters, was occupied by a school. It still had bars on the windows, and all they had to use for paper was the blank back sides of a stack of bills of sale for slaves, which were thus lost to history, but at least some children learned how to read and write.19
Sherman continued on to Charleston, which fell in February 1865 after a siege of 545 days.20 Charleston had already suffered a devastating fire in December 1861; now, as most of the city’s white population fled, Confederate troops set fire to the cotton in the warehouses and the ships in the harbor, and blew up their explosives, generating a great blaze that killed at least 150 civilians before Union troops put it out.21 In the chaos, two Northern journalists broke into the hastily abandoned slave mart on Chalmers Street. Charles Carleton Coffin, who reported for the Boston Journal, took the gilt letters that read MART as a souvenir. James Redpath of the New York Tribune, who had previously announced that he was not only an abolitionist but a reparationist, scooped up 652 letters to slave trader Ziba B. Oakes from his regional purchasing agents, which he donated to William Lloyd Garrison and which since 1891 have been in the Boston Public Library.
The people of Richmond had become accustomed to the sound of artillery fire, but now they too had to flee Grant’s army. “My line is broken in three places and Richmond must be evacuated,” wrote Robert E. Lee to Confederate president Jefferson Davis, who ordered the evacuation of the Confederate capital on April 2, 1865. As Davis ran with the members of his government to board the Danville train, Robert Lumpkin hurried amid the chaos to evacuate the captives from his slave jail, setting out with one final coffle.
The classic account of the fall of Richmond is Coffin’s report:
Mrs. Davis had left the city several days previous…. There was no evening service. Ministers and congregations were otherwise employed. Rev. Mr. Hoge, a fierce advocate for slavery as a beneficent institution, packed his carpet-bag. Rev. Mr. Duncan was moved to do likewise. Mr. Lumpkin, who for many years had kept a slave-trader’s jail had a work of necessity on this Lord’s day,—the temporal salvation of fifty men, women, and children! He made up his coffle in the jail-yard, within pistol-shot of Jeff Davis’s parlor window, and a stone’s throw from the Monumental Church. The poor creatures were hurried to the Danville depot. This sad and weeping fifty, in handcuffs and chains, was the last coffle that shall tread the soil of America.*
Slavery being the corner-stone of the Confederacy, it was fitting that this gang, keeping step to the music of their clanking chains, should accompany Jeff Davis, his secretaries Benjamin and Trenhold, and the Reverend Messrs. Hoge and Duncan, in their flight. The whole Rebel government was on the move, and all Richmond desired to be. No thoughts now of taking Washington, or of the flag of the Confederacy flaunting in the breeze from the dome of the national Capitol!
Hundreds of officials were at the depot, waiting to get away from the doomed city. Public documents, the archives of the Confederacy, were hastily gathered up, tumbled into boxes and barrels, and taken to the trains, or carried into the streets and set on fire. Coaches, carriages, wagons, carts, wheelbarrows, everything in the shape of a vehicle, was pressed into use. There was a jumble of boxes, chests, trunks, valises, carpetbags,—a crowd of excited men sweating as never before: women with dishevelled hair, unmindful of their wardrobes, wringing their hands, children crying in the crowd, sentinels guarding each entrance to the train, pushing back at the point of the bayonet the panic-stricken multitude, giving precedence to Davis and the high officials, and informing Mr. Lumpkin that his niggers could not be taken.
“The faith of the Confederate States is pledged to provide and establish sufficient revenues for the regular payment of the interest, and for the redemption of the principal,” read the bonds; but there was a sudden eclipse of faith; a collapse of confidence, a shrivelling up like a parched scroll of the entire Confederacy, which was a base counterfeit of the American Union it sought to overturn and supplant, now an exploded concern, and wound up by Grant’s orders, its bonds, notes, and certificates of indebtedness worth less than the paper on which they were printed.22
Jefferson Davis was trying to get to Texas, to continue the war from there. Did Lumpkin think he was taking his coffle to Texas too? There was nowhere to take a coffle. Those fifty people weren’t going to be anyone’s property now.
In a dramatic show of defiance, the Confederate general Richard S. Ewell torched a large area of Richmond, definitively ruining many of the city’s businessmen. It was done with the acquiescence of his superior, Confederate secretary of war John C. Breckinridge, who was present in the city. The Richmond Whig’s report of April 4, 1865 seemed to suggest that the city had been ridded of an occupier with the departure of the Confederate government of which it had been the capital—an occupier that destroyed much of Richmond as it fled:
By noon the flames had transformed into a desert waste that portion of the city bounded between 7th and 15th streets, from Main street to the river, comprising the main business portion. We can form no estimate at this moment of the number of houses destroyed, but public and private they will certainly number 600 to 800.
At present we cannot do more than enumerate some of the most prominent buildings destroyed.—These include the Bank of Richmond; Traders Bank; Bank of the Commonwealth; Bank of Virginia; Farmers’ Bank, all the banking houses, the American Hotel, the Columbian Hotel, the Enquirer Building on 12th street, the Dispatch office and job rooms, corner of 13th and Main streets; all that block of buildings known as Belvin’s Block, the Examiner office, engine and machinery rooms; the Confederate Post Office department building, the State Court House, a fine old building situated on Capitol Square, at its Franklin street entrance; the Mechanic’s Institute, vacated by the Confederate States War Department, and all the buildings on that Square up to 8th street, and back to Main street; the Confederate Arsenal and Laboratory, 7th street.
At sunrise on Monday morning, Richmond presented a spectacle that we hope never to witness again. The last of the Confederate officials had gone; the air was lurid with the smoke and flame of hundreds of houses sweltering in a sea of fire.
Coffin reported that:
To prevent the United States from obtaining possession of a few thousand hogsheads of tobacco, a thousand houses were destroyed by fire, the heart of the city burnt out, —all of the business portion, all the banks and insurance-offices, half of the newspapers, with mills, depots, bridges, foundries, workshops, dwellings, churches,—thirty squares in all, swept clean by the devouring flames. It was the final work of the Confederate government.23
Richmond’s slave trade had continued full tilt, with a large population in the traders’ jails when the Union entered the city. Chaplain Garland White, an African American soldier who entered Richmond with Indiana’s Twenty-Eighth Regiment, described his experience in a letter written shortly after leaving the city: “a vast multitude assembled on Broad Street, and I was aroused amid the shouts of ten thousand voices, and proclaimed for the first time in that city freedom to all mankind. After which the doors of all the slave pens were thrown open, and thousands came out shouting and praising God, and Father, or Master Abe, as they termed him.”24
On April 4, Elizabeth Keckley visited Richmond, as she accompanied Mary Todd Lincoln on the steamer River Queen up the James, “the river that so long had been impassable, even to our gunboats,” to join the presidential party, with Lincoln at the head, to examine the city’s condition.
The Presidential party were all curiosity on entering Richmond. They drove about the streets of the city, and examined every object of interest. The Capitol presented a desolate appearance—desks broken, and papers scattered promiscuously in the hurried flight of the Confederate Congress.
After a delightful visit we returned to City Point.25 (paragraphing added)
Five days after Lee’s surrender to Grant, on Good Friday, April 14, Lincoln became the first president in US history to be assassinated. John Wilkes Booth’s conspiracy also gravely wounded Secretary of State William Seward and members of his family, and unsuccessfully targeted Vice President Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, who had been drunk at his swearing-in as vice president not six weeks previously on March 4, 1865.26
Booth was killed during capture, before he could be questioned. Eight people were convicted and executed for participating in his conspiracy; Jacob Thompson spent the rest of his life trying to clear his name of a rumored involvement in it. Was there a conspiracy involving Thompson’s terrorist organization or other elements in the Confederate hierarchy? None has been proved, and Booth has often been portrayed as a fanatic in popular historiography, but that’s too simple. Writing of the monk who assassinated the French king Henri III, the historian Geoffrey Treasure called him “not mad, but exalté [exalted]: a recognisable type, not an isolated individual but representative, doing what many wished to see done.”27
If Calhoun, Rhett, Davis, Stephens, Cobb, Forrest, and their many colleagues were not “madmen,” neither was Booth. If they were madmen, at what point did madness set in? At Forrest’s wholesale butchery? At Rhett’s bizarre paean to martyrdom? At Calhoun’s insistence that slavery was a positive good for humanity? At Jackson’s genocide and ethnic cleansing? At Jefferson’s scheme to deport all black people?
The madness was there all along. It was the madness of slavery.
In the Civil War’s final battle east of the Mississippi, for Columbus, Georgia, on April 16, 1865, the forces of Union general James H. Wilson, who had not received word of Lincoln’s assassination two nights before, defeated those of former US secretary of the treasury, now Confederate major general, Howell Cobb.
On May 2, President Johnson signed a proclamation offering $100,000 for Jefferson Davis’s arrest in connection with Lincoln’s assassination, and a manhunt for Davis ensued.28 Whatever the conspiratorial mechanism, Lincoln’s assassination was a coup d’etat that carried a number of benefits for former Confederates who might reasonably have expected to hang for treason. Johnson was a pro-Union white supremacist who was uninterested in prosecuting Confederate leaders or in helping freedmen. He issued presidential amnesties and pardons for former Confederates, and restored confiscated lands—thus ensuring that there would be no “forty acres,” as Rufus Saxton of the Freedmen’s Bureau had promised, to compensate the destitute, largely illiterate mass of formerly enslaved for their multigenerational legacy of confiscated labor. There were no war crimes trials for the mass murder of black troops under cover of battle.
But the fundamental change had been made. The Southern economy had suffered its final, fatal collapse, the one long feared by slaveowners: their property had ceased to be their property. They were not compensated by the taxpayers for its loss, as the Jamaican slaveowners had been.
No more counting children as interest. No more multigenerational wealth accumulating from reproduction of enslaved humans to be passed on as legacies to slaveowners’ children. No more paying debts in a bad year by cashing out and selling adolescents: the liquidity of the financial system vanished when ownership of the human capital was transferred from landowners to the laborers themselves.
No more forced mating. No more fancy girls. No more sex slaves.
The Ponzi scheme of the slave-breeding industry had crashed. Since laborers were no longer property, they were no longer mortgageable. Without enslaved women producing ever-increasing numbers of slave children to borrow against, the South suffered a massive credit implosion, whiplashing from a credit economy to a cash-poor cash economy, floating on a sea of bad debt.
Many proud families never forgot the humiliation of losing their slaves, and some were downright hateful about it. Some former masters found it demeaning to have to share a sidewalk with black people who did not jump out of the way. Others were surprised to find that they could no longer slap black workers with impunity. There were still black laborers, of course, but they would no longer work sunup to sundown to make an ever-increasing, whip-enforced quota for bacon and corn mush in return. Some planters decamped for Brazil, which had slavery and plenty of land, and others for Mexico; a Confederate diaspora fanned northward up to Canada and out to the far West.
The poor whites of the South had a miserable time of it in the economically devastated postwar years. As the Southern states rejoined the country they had repudiated, many formerly wealthy Southerners occupied themselves by suing each other over old debts for which the collateral had vanished. But others had found ways to keep their money, or even made money during the war. They could no longer live off human capital as rentiers, but the elite were still the elite, and elite families have remarkable staying power over multiple generations, in every society. Since the planters’ estates weren’t broken up and distributed to the freedmen, they still had their land, which would be the basis of new fortunes. They still had their education, their family webs, their control of local institutions, their business and political contacts—and they still had cheap black labor, which they kept as abject as possible by terrorizing them with a new racist regime that would come to be known as Jim Crow, enforced all over the former slave nation.
Many of the formerly enslaved, whose dispossession was so complete that they had not even family names, got little more out of Reconstruction than an assigned surname, which was the bare minimum necessary for the creation a civil identity. Their new Anglo-Saxon names were in many cases assigned to them: Williams, Johnson, Smith, Jones, Brown, Jackson, Jefferson, Washington.
Some of the elite who had the resources relocated with style—the so-called “Confederate carpetbaggers”—to New York, Chicago, and other urban centers.29 Some renewed Northern commercial contacts or business partnerships that had been active before or even during the war and found that little stigma was attached to their former treasonous activities, which were now recast as Southern patriotism.
Southern gynecologist Marion Sims, who had developed his surgical innovations by practicing on enslaved women, went to Europe during the war, where he operated on women of social importance for high fees. Returning to America, he established a private practice on Fifth Avenue and presented himself as a popular vision of a fabulously wealthy doctor-celebrity. He was “instrumental” in founding the nation’s first cancer hospital, Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, though he died the year before the project came to fruition in 1884.30
Isidor Straus spent much of the war in Europe, returning to America at war’s end with about $10,000 in gold he had made in London trading Confederate bonds.31 His father Lazarus Straus relocated the family’s retailing firm from Columbus, Georgia, to New York, where they became the owners of R. H. Macy’s department store, then bought an interest in the store that became Abraham & Straus. Isidor Straus died in the 1912 sinking of the Titanic, together with his wife Ida.
Emanuel Lehman, already based in New York, also made money during the war selling Confederate bonds in England, at one point uncomfortably encountering his New York neighbor Joseph Seligman, who was selling Union bonds. After the war, Lehman Brothers put up $100,000 for Alabama’s constitutional convention. Mayer Lehman moved up to New York, where he organized the first futures market in cotton; two of his former slaves came to New York to work for him as servants. The brothers parlayed their warehouses full of cotton into a business that continued through many transformations until the Panic of 2008, when Lehman Brothers filed for the largest bankruptcy in American history, intensifying a worldwide economic crisis.33
Widely suspected of being a planner of the Lincoln assassination, Judah P. Benjamin fled to London and became a barrister there. He wrote the standard legal work* on the sale of personal property, became legal counsel to Queen Victoria, and died, quite wealthy, in Paris in 1884.
Adelicia Hayes Franklin Acklen Cheatham, one of the wealthiest women in the United States, died at the age of seventy, in 1887, in New York’s Fifth Avenue Hotel, of pneumonia contracted while on a shopping trip.34
J. D. B. De Bow, who in the South had been the most influential proslavery business publisher, started his DeBow’s Review right back up in New York in 1866, but died the following year.
Howell Cobb’s plantation was up and running again soon after the war. According to Cobb, the problem was that the formerly enslaved laborers were ungrateful, as per a December 1866 letter: “The truth is I am thoroughly disgusted with free negro labor, and am determined that the next year shall close my planting operations with them. There is no feeling of gratitude in their nature.”35 Cobb, who was as guilty of treason as anyone in the Confederate project, received a presidential pardon and died of a heart attack in New York City in 1868; his son continued the plantation.
Pierce Mease Butler’s Georgia plantation survived the war intact. The places that had been occupied by the Union earliest—Louisiana, the Sea Islands, Alexandria, etc.—suffered less destruction, and the Union had occupied Butler’s land from early in 1862, which likely saved it. Since the plantation was not broken up and distributed to the former slaves, Butler remained the owner. Though there was no longer slave labor, many of his former slaves returned to the plantation—presumably less because they loved the Butlers than because the plantation was their home, and was the ancestral home of their close-knit community, or perhaps, as in other cases involving slaves who returned to the plantations they knew, because they were starving. Without a doubt, they would have preferred a small plot of land of their own in what sociologist Jean Casimir, speaking of Haiti, has called a “counter-plantation” system: “a refusal … of the plantation system itself, [involving] the creation of a very different way of living, one focused on production for oneself and for surplus within a local market.”36 But that was not on offer.
Frances Kemble finally published her Journal of life on Butler’s plantation as a book in 1863, in post–Emancipation Proclamation wartime. It became popular reading for abolitionists and caused a sharp rift with her pro-Confederate younger daughter Fan. After Pierce Mease Butler died of the archetypal Low-country disease, malaria, in 1867, Fan took the plantation over and tried to make it produce. But she couldn’t make a go of it, blaming the labor force’s disinclination to work as hard as necessary.
Jefferson Davis never surrendered. As long as Robert E. Lee continued, the war went on, but even after Lee surrendered on April 9, Davis did not; he was captured on May 10 in Virginia while trying to escape to Texas and was imprisoned for two years. He never asked for a pardon, never apologized, never swore allegiance, failed at his business initiatives, and spent much time being a traveling guest of honor until he died in a mansion in New Orleans’s Garden District in 1889. In 1881 he published the stultifying 1,515-page The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, in which he insisted that “to whatever extent the question of slavery may have served as an occasion, it was far from being the cause of the conflict.” The cause, he explained, was “sectional rivalry” and “political ambition” that “happened” to have “coincided” along the “line of demarkation” of slavery versus free labor. He also maintained that “African servitude among us [was] … the mildest and most humane of all institutions to which the name ‘slavery’ has ever been applied.”37
Robert Lumpkin barely outlived the war. He died in 1866 at the age of sixty, his livelihood of slave trading destroyed. Shortly before he died, he named his former slave Mary executor of his estate and granted her the right to use the name “Lumpkin.” Provided she did not remarry, she became the sole proprietor of his properties in Richmond and Philadelphia.38
Mary Lumpkin thus became the owner of the property she had lived on since she was twelve. Formerly known as Lumpkin’s Slave Jail, it had been famous to every trader in Virginia, and notorious to the thousands of African Americans who had passed through it. It was nearly worthless. Desperate like everyone else for income in the charred ruin of Richmond, she rented it for $1,000 a year to the Rev. Nathaniel Colver, a Boston minister, to be used as the School for Former Slaves, subsequently Virginia Union University.39 White landlords wouldn’t rent their property for such a purpose, so the newly freed students had to go down the muddy embankment at Shockoe Bottom. Unfortunately, Mary also inherited Lumpkin’s debts, and she died poor.40
Lumpkin’s competitor, Silas Omohundro, whose slave jail adjoined his, had done something very similar before he died in 1864, leaving the use of his properties in Richmond and Pennsylvania to his formerly enslaved common-law wife, Corinna, with whom he had six children. Corinna fared better than Mary Lumpkin; she came to own her own confectionery.41
Louis Hughes did not escape from slavery in Mississippi until 1865; he went behind Union lines, and from there managed to rescue his wife and children. After moving around, the family settled in Milwaukee, where he worked as a nurse, and where, in 1897, he published his autobiography, Thirty Years a Slave.
Frederick Douglass’s house in Rochester, New York, was burned down in 1872, apparently an arson. From late 1889 to mid-1891 he served as the US minister to Haiti; he died of heart failure in 1895, at the approximate age of eighty-seven. Though he was the leading African American literary and political figure of the nineteenth century, his writing was largely forgotten until a rediscovery that began in 1945, when historian Philip Foner edited a multivolume anthology of his work.
William Wells Brown largely devoted his post-emancipation years to activism on behalf of the temperance cause, and practiced medicine in Boston, specializing in homeopathy. On the occasion of his return to his birth state of Kentucky, he was kidnapped by the Ku Klux Klan, but escaped. He died at the age of seventy in Massachusetts.
After Harriet Jacobs escaped from Edenton, North Carolina, to Philadelphia with the help of a boat captain in 1842, she lived in fear of being captured, especially after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. She became well known in abolitionist circles with her self-publication in 1861 of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which came back from the printer shortly after the first wave of Southern states seceded. A vocal advocate of an emancipation proclamation, with great dignity she organized relief for the “contrabands”—the homeless, impoverished refugees from slavery who poured into Washington and other cities in the early days of the war. With the post–Emancipation Proclamation entry of black soldiers into the war, Jacobs was active in aiding convalescent soldiers in Washington, and together with her daughter founded a free school after the war. She was largely forgotten after her death, and had to be rediscovered; Jean Fagan Yellin’s biography of her, from which we extract the above information, was published in 2004.42 Indeed, Jacob’s memoir was considered by many critics to be fiction until Yellin authenticated it in 1987.
Elizabeth Keckley founded the Contraband Relief Organization in 1862, attempted to raise money for Mary Todd Lincoln, and published her book in 1868. She died in poverty in 1907, a resident of the National Home for Destitute Colored Women and Children in Washington, for which she had helped raise founding funds.43
General Sherman went on to supervise the building of the transcontinental railroad during the Grant administration, which meant completing the killing of the buffalo herds and what Sherman referred to in an 1872 letter as “the final solution to the Indian problem,” in which the West’s Native Americans were slaughtered or moved onto “reservations.”44
If anyone in the Confederate ranks might have seemed a candidate for hanging, it would have been Nathan Bedford Forrest. By the time he was pardoned by Andrew Johnson instead of being tried as a war criminal, he had already returned to violence. Not two years after the Fort Pillow Massacre, in the fall of 1866, he was sworn in at Maxwell House in Nashville as the Grand Wizard of the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan. Beginning as a posse of malicious night-riding pranksters, complete with a fanciful, carnivalesque pedigree that cast them as Scottish knights, the Klan quickly expanded into other states to become the nation’s most notorious, though not the only, white supremacist paramilitary organization as Forrest prosecuted a race war. In what was arguably the largest terrorist campaign in US history, the Klan and similar organizations murdered thousands of people, black and white, as part of a successful effort to suppress Reconstruction and black self-determination.
President Ulysses S. Grant, inaugurated in 1869, believed that the sacrifice of so much blood in the war had to be redeemed by fully enfranchising the formerly enslaved. That was precisely the proposition the Ku Klux Klan was determined to reverse, but after Grant made clear his determination to prosecute the Klan, Forrest officially disbanded it in February 1869. By then much of their work had already been done.45 In subsequent testimony before Congress, Forrest added perjury to his list of crimes by denying his involvement with the Klan.
With no more slave trading business to do, Forrest ventured his net worth on a proposed Memphis & Selma Railroad, which was never built.46 As his railroad plan deflated, Forrest, thinking there might be war with Spain and that it might take place in Cuba (where slavery still existed, though it was fading), offered his services to—of all people—General Sherman, as reported in the New York Times of December 3, 1873: “I hereby tender you my services as a volunteer. I think I could enlist from 1,000 to 5,000 men who served in the Southern army during the late war, and at short notice, and who could rendezvous at New-Orleans, Mobile, Pensacola, and Key West, either as cavalry or infantry.” Sherman politely explained that he did not believe there would be a war with Spain in Cuba; ultimately, there was one, but it happened twenty-five years later.
Forrest spent the rest of his life trying to live down Fort Pillow, for which his name was popularly held in contempt, though in the South there was no lack of apologists for him. In the perhaps sarcastic words of his New York Times obituary on October 30, 1877:
His last notable public appearance was on the Fourth of July in Memphis, when he appeared before the colored people at their celebration, was publicly presented with a bouquet by them as a mark of peace and reconciliation, and made a friendly speech in reply. In this he once more took occasion to defend himself and his war record, and to declare that he was a hearty friend of the colored race.
Slave trader, war criminal, the KKK’s top terrorist: if Nathan Bedford Forrest’s reputation could be sanitized, anyone’s could be. A high school named for Forrest exists in his hometown of Chapel Hill, Tennessee; another, in Jacksonville, changed its name in 2014.
Forrest’s final business venture was a plantation that used captive labor, under the postbellum name of “convict leasing.” He contracted in 1875 with the Shelby County jail to put 117 prisoners (39 of them white) to work for a term of five years (though he died in 1877), paying the jail ten cents a day for their otherwise uncompensated labor, employing seven guards to watch over them.47
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. (emphasis added)
It has been argued that the framers of the Thirteenth Amendment did not intend to tolerate slavery, and that the phrase “except as a punishment for a crime” should be parsed as only modifying “involuntary servitude” and not “slavery.” A clearer version had been proposed: “Slavery being incompatible with a free government is forever prohibited in the United States, and involuntary servitude shall be permitted only as a punishment for a crime.”48 But it was Thomas Jefferson’s phrasing and vision that prevailed: the amendment’s framers copied the more ambiguous language of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which in turn had taken it from Jefferson’s draft of the Land Ordinance of 1784: “after the year 1800 of the christian era, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said states, otherwise than in punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been convicted to have been duly personally guilty.”49
From Jefferson’s ambiguity forward, convict labor has been part of American commerce, and, as twenty-first-century readers are well aware, it continues.
*We don’t know exactly what Carlin heard, but we can get an idea from hearing latter-day ring shout groups, which were recorded as early as 1934 by Alan Lomax. An annual ring shout, known as Easter Rock, is still performed in Winnsboro, Louisiana. See Jackson.
*It was not; there were still coffles wherever the Union had not entered, notably Texas.
*Still being updated today, it’s known as Benjamin’s Sale of Goods.
The entrance to Angola, the former Louisiana plantation of the nation’s largest slave trader, Isaac Franklin. Located at the dead end of a twenty-two-mile road that goes only there, it is now the penitentiary of the number-one incarcerator state of the number-one incarcerator nation of the world, with Death Row situated on the part of the property adjoining the Mississippi border. On its grounds, imprisoned people are forced to perform unmechanized field labor; it is understood by many, including the prisoners, as a re-creation of the slavery experience. March 2014.