11.

The Enslaved People’s Civil War

In the four months between Lincoln’s election and his inauguration as president of the United States, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas formed the southern Confederacy. They elected their own president and began to seize the federal forts and arsenals on their lands.

Enslaved men and women from Virginia to Florida and Texas watched the growing hostility among whites for sparks that could ignite their freedom. One December night, sixty enslaved people marched through New Castle, Kentucky, singing political songs, shouting Republican slogans. Said a Texan: “We sleep upon our arms and the whole country is deeply excited.”

In Natchez, Mississippi, an African American named Mosley and other enslaved people planned a rebellion on March 4, Lincoln’s inauguration day. Mosley was seized and confessed: “I said, ‘Lincoln would set us free.’ Alfred and Monroe Harris proposed a company to be raised. Drago has a pistol to shoot master. I got two pistols from Bill Chamberlain. Bill has a fine shooter pistol. I heard Harvey say Obey would join us. Howard told Margaret he murdered the Dutchman. Harry and Alfred are all for the plan.”

Mosley and his followers proved unduly optimistic about the new president. Lincoln, though he personally hated bondage, stated his aim was to save the Union and not interfere with the South’s “internal institutions.” He reassured all Americans, “If I could save the union without freeing any slave, I would do it.”

But by the end of March 1861, eight enslaved people seeking freedom reached Fort Pickering, Florida, expecting federal officers to recognize the liberty they had seized. They were turned away. That summer, a Bowling Green, Kentucky, enslaver said the people he enslaved “know too much about Lincoln. . . . It is too late now; they know as much as we do, and too much for our safety and peace of mind.”

Following the Confederate firing on Fort Sumter in April, hysteria over unrest among people in bondage swept Arkansas, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee. A Mississippi enslaver spoke of the “possibility of an insurrection,” and attempts “to poison and . . . burn houses.” By May, a white wrote of defiance by enslaved people in New Orleans—“slavery requires armed power to keep it in order,” “very alarming disturbances among the blacks,” and on more than one plantation “open resistance.” When “a dozen ships were burned at anchor in New Orleans early in May,” whites told a reporter “slaves were responsible.”

African Americans in South Carolina and Mississippi exhibited a new mood. Mary Chestnut sensed it among the people in servitude inside her house. A butler, whom she had taught to read, was “inscrutably silent” and “won’t look at me now. He looks over my head, he scents freedom in the air.”

In July, W. B. Williams complained to Mississippi governor Pettus, “I cannot manage my negroes myself and they are bad.” In October, owner Addie Harris insisted it was “dangerous to leave them by themselves.” In December, enslaved people were blamed for a Charleston fire that destroyed six hundred buildings.

When white men left for the Confederate army, southern food crops were neglected. Enslaved people saw that fewer whites were in control. Planters informed Governor Pettus that no more young men could be spared for the front because “now we have to patrol every night.” Whites complained about Black “insolence” and of enslaved people who “won’t work.” Talking of his own and his sister’s plantations, Addie Harris said: “Her negroes as well as mine are very near free and I cannot get my crop gathered.”

The Confederate Congress passed a law that allowed overseers to avoid the draft. The poorer whites who owned no enslaved laborers claimed it was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” At a time when the Confederacy desperately needed unity, this created bitterness between two important groups of whites.

Planters were infuriated by new laws permitting the Confederacy to draft enslaved workers for labor on fortifications. This war work opened a new horizon for enslaved people who had never before left the plantation. They made contacts with free Black people who were also drafted, worked close to Union lines, and learned about roads, rivers, and firearms. Some began to study troop movements.

They watched in amazement as officers shouted at each other and argued with their enslavers. They never witnessed so much white division, and it was growing. War had always made enslaved people an undependable labor force, but this one, they began to feel, was really about their own liberty.

Union rifle fire often missed Confederate targets, but it tore huge holes in the institution of slavery. With armed foes nearby, enslavers no longer enjoyed unlimited power over those in chains. As Union guns spoke in the distance, enslaved workers shirked duties, resisted orders, and scoffed at authority. As they learned the lay of the land, flight became easier. Some conscripts fled home to gather up their families and race to freedom.

What had been the Confederacy’s biggest asset now became its worst problem—an enemy within during wartime. “They deserted at every opportunity,” said both white officers and civilians.

The Union announced it opposed resistance by enslaved people. General George McClellan declared, “We will, with an iron hand, crush any attempt at insurrection,” and General Ben Butler issued a similar order. McClellan expelled the Hutchinson family folksingers from his camp for singing antislavery songs.

New York African American editor Thomas Hamilton predicted: “The forlorn hope of insurrection among the slaves may as well be abandoned. They are too well informed and too wise to court destruction at the hands of the combined Northern and Southern armies.”

In May 1861, as enslaved laborers continued to flee the Confederates and seek refuge in Union lines, a change of policy began. General Butler at Fort Monroe, Virginia, declared enslaved people “contraband of war” and refused to return any to rebel enslavers. With this terse military phrase the process of emancipation began. In two months Fort Monroe had nine hundred enslaved people seeking refuge, three thousand by Christmas.

Now thousands of African Americans made their way to Union lines. The enslavers’ claims that their laborers were a docile, happy people faded with each batch of arrivals. For their escape some had stolen horses or buggies, boats, rafts, or canoes.

But freedom was not official US policy, and people not only had to escape the Confederacy, eluding soldiers and whites hunting them, but they had to reach Union officers who would not return them. For example, in February 1862, US General Buell ordered enslaved people returned, but his junior officers quietly promised protection to any carrying military information. They declared people in bondage “our only friends.”

In the face of a confused Union policy, many enslaved people seeking freedom preferred to remain in no-man’s-land between the lines. Entire families or colonies of freedom seekers lived between a foe they hated and an ally they could not trust.

Enslaved people begin to leave Hampton, Virginia, plantations for freedom as “contrabands” at Fort Monroe.

Enslaved people entering Fort Monroe.

But still they fled. General Burnside reported in March 1862 from New Bern, North Carolina: “They find their way to us through woods and swamp from every side,” and once within federal lines, were “wild with excitement and delight.”

The Union forces gained valuable information from those fleeing Confederate fortifications and war work. In April, Confederate Commander Thomas Jones reported from Pensacola that “the greatest trouble” was fugitives racing to the enemy with valuable information about his troop strength.

In North Carolina, a Confederate officer estimated that by August 1862, a million dollars in enslaved people fled the Confederacy each week. As the South lost laborers, bluecoats gained willing volunteers. Over campfires, after battle, young white soldiers taught Black refugees the magic of reading and writing.

In Florida, where the biracial Seminoles had battled slave-hunters for decades, Black guerrilla units roamed. In April 1862, Confederate Brigadier General Floyd asked Florida governor Milton “as a measure of absolute necessity” to declare martial law in six counties in the war against “traitors and lawless negroes.”

A South Carolina paper reported “from five to six hundred negroes” in two counties were “roving the country.” “Guerrilla warfare,” it said, was threatening southern meat supplies. Edmund Ruffin, the enslaver who fired the first cannon at Fort Sumter, became worried about insurrections. He wrote in his diary about something “I never did before . . . keeping loaded guns by my bedside.” He described a Virginia conspiracy, hatched at “night meetings for pretended religious worship,” and concluded “we ought to be always vigilant,” ready to repel attacks from “northern invaders or negro insurgents.”

In November 1861, a Union fleet captured Port Royal in the Georgia and South Carolina Sea Islands. US General Rufus Saxton reported thousands of formerly enslaved people were ready to work for the Union. They had fought their enslavers to stay and to welcome the invaders:

They tried to take their negroes with them [deeper into Confederate territory], but they would not go. They shot down their negroes in many instances because they would not go with them. They tied them behind their wagons and tried to drag them off; but the negroes would not go. The great majority of negroes [80 percent] remained behind and came into our lines.

The southern countryside was filled with people in bondage fleeing or hiding supplies of arms, gunpowder, and knives. A Confederate officer wrote to Governor Pettus of widespread resistance by and flight of enslaved people, adding: “Within the last 12 months we have had to hang some 40 for plotting an insurrection, and there has been about that number put in irons.”

In April 1862, the Union fleet and army captured New Orleans. General Butler met with officers of the Louisiana Native Guards, Black people whom Confederates had enlisted. They had been trained, not with guns but with broomsticks, and never sent into battle. The officers told Butler their soldiers would like to exchange broomsticks for rifles and would be happy to fight for the Union. Butler at first refused, but agreed to arm them when a Confederate army appeared in the neighborhood.

Black troops, formerly enslaved, guard a Sea Islands mansion in 1862.

An enslaved family who rode into Union lines appears in a Mathew Brady photograph.

By September, Louisiana enslavers close to Union lines were complaining that some field hands “would not work at all, and others wanted wages.” On the Magnolia plantation, the owner cried, “We have a terrible state of affairs here . . . negroes refusing to work.” His laborers built a gallows and said they “will be free” only after they drive off or “hang their master.”

The Union presence in Louisiana offered the enslaved population new choices. The US flags at Fort Parapet four miles north of New Orleans, or at Fort Jackson and Fort Philip at the mouth of the Mississippi, became more than banners of liberty. Enslaved workers south of the city stayed on plantations and won concessions of ten dollars a month in wages and no use of whips. Others, who left their enslavers but were unable to reach federal lines, chose a new life in maroon colonies in swamps and bayou underbrush. When planters abandoned land, many enslaved people waited to see which white side offered them better choices.

One of the most unusual wartime escapes was planned by Robert Smalls, the enslaved pilot of the Confederate battleship Planter, and his Black crew. On the evening of May 13, 1862, after the white captain and officers left the ship, Smalls and his African American crew picked up their families and loved ones on the shore. Smalls blinked the correct signal at Confederate-held Fort Sumter, sailed out of Charleston harbor at 4 a.m., and surrendered to the Union navy. “I thought the Planter might be of some use to Uncle Abe,” he said with a smile. Smalls was the first man to steal a battleship, and living proof that enslaved people only waited for the opportunity to help the Union. For the rest of the war, Smalls served the US Navy as captain of the Planter.

Other African Americans fled with guts, faith, and little else. One said, “We thought freedom better than clothes, so we left them.” An eighty-eight-year-old who ran said, “Never too old for leave de land o’ bondage.” An elderly couple, Si and his ill wife, ran off, but she died in the woods. When his enslaver asked Si why they tried so hazardous a trip, he answered, “I couldn’t help it, marster, but then, you see, she died free.” Two Louisiana families with children on their backs spent two days and nights wading in mud and water to reach Union lines. A Georgia woman placed her twenty-two children and grandchildren on a raft and floated to the Yankees.

Men and women enslavers were shocked to find both loyal and hostile enslaved workers had abandoned them. Emily Douglass of Natchez always boasted of the undying loyalty of those she enslaved, but now: “They left without even a good-bye.”

“One life they show their masters and another life they don’t show,” Robert Smalls had said.

Emma Holmes refused to believe Black people had become so unruly and blamed Yankees for exciting “the foulest demoniac passions of the negro, hitherto so peaceful and happy.”

Some whites tried not only to accept painful truths, but to act on their new knowledge. Alexander Jones, a Hendersonville, North Carolina, spokesman for poor whites, now realized the wealthy planters had ruled by dividing “negroes and poor helpless whites.” His “Heroes of America” with ten thousand members sided with the North. When some were arrested and forced into the Wilmington salt mines alongside enslaved laborers, they helped many African American fellow prisoners reach Union lines.

Because the war did not end in ninety days as both sides had predicted, President Lincoln faced trouble on the political warfront. Drafting whites into the Union army led to so much violence in New York City, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin that federal troops were rushed to these states. Federal marshals arrested and jailed without trial five newspaper editors, three judges, antiwar politicians, and hundreds of anti-draft rioters.

On the battlefield, both sides continued to suffer staggering casualties, and there was no sign of victory. By the end of 1862, one hundred thousand Union soldiers had deserted their posts.

Abolitionists and northern newspapers constantly pointed out that as whites bled and died for the Union, southerners whipped Black people into bringing in their crops and building their forts. In February 1862, a New York Times reporter in liberated Port Royal wrote that everywhere “blacks hurry in droves to our lines; they crowd in small boats around our ships; they swarm upon our decks; they hurry to our officers from the cotton houses of their masters, an hour or two after the guns are fired.”

African American men and women in US lines represented an enormous potential as laborers, spies, and soldiers. For freedom, they would eagerly wield shovels or rifles. Parents of Union soldiers and northern papers no longer ignored these facts.

Under such pressure, antislavery views gained in the North. In the winter and spring of 1862, fiery abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips was suddenly flooded with lecture invitations. In a Washington, D.C., he had dared not enter a year before, he was invited to address large assemblies that included President Lincoln and members of Congress. Vice President Hamlin personally introduced his booming, radical voice to the US Senate.

The president feared that freeing people from bondage would cost him the support of the four loyal border proslavery states and lose him many votes in the 1864 election. He was right. But Congress believed that unless radical action was taken, the North could lose the war. Congressmen were determined to draw off the South’s enslaved people one way or another and arm them. It rejected as impractical Lincoln’s plans to pay enslavers who freed people from bondage and to have the government resettle liberated people in another country. Congress rushed past Lincoln toward immediate emancipation, without either compensation to enslavers or deportation of Black people.

By July 1862, Congress prohibited Union officers from returning anyone to Confederate enslavers. It authorized the president to enlist “persons of African descent” for “any war service.” Confiscation of enslaved people as property, it said, was just punishment for traitors. African Americans who entered Union lines, it voted, “shall be deemed captives of war and shall be forever free.”

Congress was trying to catch up with the reality hundreds of thousands of Black feet had already created. Their daring flights to Union lines and offers to help defeat the Confederacy put emancipation on the national agenda. The refusal by US officers in the field to return them, and finally Congress’s dry legalities, ratified what the enslaved people had accomplished. Emancipation needed only the president’s signature.

As enslaved people poured into Union lines, the president cautiously stepped forward to catch up with them, Congress, and events. On July 13, 1862, Lincoln told navy secretary Gideon Welles he was going to issue an emancipation proclamation. He believed that slavery was “at the heart of the rebellion” and freedom had “occupied his mind and thoughts day and night.” Emancipation, he decided, was “a military necessity, absolutely essential to the preservation of the Union. We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued. The slaves were undeniably an element of strength to those who had their service, and we must decide whether that element should be with us or against us.”

On July 22, Lincoln told his cabinet of the decision and won their approval. After the Union victory at Antietam in September, he announced his preliminary proclamation. If the Confederacy did not surrender by the first day of 1863, the president would issue a final proclamation freeing all those enslaved by rebels.

In stiff, official language, the Emancipation Proclamation freed only enslaved people in regions still in rebellion—where enslavers held power. It did not liberate the four hundred fifty thousand in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri, or the two hundred seventy-five thousand in occupied Tennessee, and the tens of thousands in the Union-ruled portions of Louisiana and Virginia. It short, it liberated people in areas controlled by the Confederacy.

But the proclamation also was a declaration that every Confederate-enslaved African American who reached Union lines was free. Lincoln also invited these “freedmen” (as they were called) to enlist in the Union armed forces. The president again was catching up with history, for African Americans had been quietly enrolled in and fighting for the US Army in Louisiana, Kansas, and along the coastline in Georgia and South Carolina.

By May 1863, thousands of African Americans were pouring into Union lines.

African American communities celebrated emancipation on January 1, 1863. At Boston’s Tremont Temple at midnight a Black minister led the singing of “Jehovah has triumphed, his people are free.” In a camp for enslaved people seeking refuge near the White House, a man whose daughter had been sold said, “Now, no more dat! . . . Dey can’t sell my wife and child anymore, bless de Lord!”

“Brothers! The hour strikes for us,” wrote a Black New Orleans paper in French and English. Frederick Douglass said: “The day dawns—the morning star is bright upon the horizon.”

On the Sea Islands, men who had already carried the war to their former enslavers gathered for emancipation ceremonies. Charlotte Forten, a Black New England schoolteacher, was present: “I wish it were possible to describe fitly the scene which met our eyes as we sat upon the stand and looked down on the crowd before us. There were black soldiers in their blue coats, and scarlet pantaloons, the officers of this and other regiments in their handsome uniforms, and crowds of lookers-on—men, women and children of every complexion, grouped in various attitudes under the moss-hung trees.”

Colonel Thomas W. Higginson, who had helped rescue captured freedom seekers in Boston, was their commander. As the colors were presented to the troops, there was an unplanned climax. Higginson wrote:

The very moment the speaker had ceased, and just as I took and waved the flag, which now for the first time meant anything to these poor people, there suddenly arose, close beside the platform, a strong male voice (but rather cracked and elderly), into which two women’s voices instantly blended, singing, as if by an impulse that could not more be repressed than the morning note of the song-sparrow—

My country, ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,

Of thee I sing!

People looked at each other, and then at us on the platform, to see whence came this interruption, not set down on the bills. Firmly and irrepressibly, the quavering voices sang on, verse after verse; others of the colored people joined in; some whites on the platform began, but I motioned them to silence. I never saw anything so electric; it made all other words cheap; it seemed the choked voice of a race at last unloosed. . . . Just think of it!—the first day they had ever had a country, the first flag they had ever seen which promised anything to their people, and here, while mere spectators stood in silence, waiting for my stupid words, these simple souls burst out in their lay, as if they were by their own hearths at home!

Colonel Thomas W. Higginson (center) and Sergeant Prince Rivers (left).