Emancipation

When the war began, antislavery Republicans demanded that abolition be a goal of the war. The fighting should continue, said a Massachusetts abolitionist, “until the Slave power is completely subjugated, and emancipation made certain.” Because slave-grown crops sustained the Confederacy, activists justified black emancipation on military grounds. As Frederick Douglass put it, “Arrest that hoe in the hands of the Negro, and you smite the rebellion in the very seat of its life.”

“Contrabands” As abolitionists pressed their case, African Americans exploited wartime chaos to seize freedom for themselves. When three slaves reached the camp of Union general Benjamin Butler in Virginia in May 1861, he labeled them “contraband of war” (enemy property that can be legitimately seized, according to international law) and refused to return them. Butler’s term stuck, and soon thousands of “contrabands” were camping with Union armies. Near Fredericksburg, Virginia, an average of 200 blacks appeared every day, “with their packs on their backs and handkerchiefs tied over their heads — men, women, little children, and babies.” This influx created a humanitarian crisis; abolitionist Harriet Jacobs reported that hundreds of refugees were “[p]acked together in the most miserable quarters,” where many died from smallpox and dysentery. To provide legal status to the refugees — some 400,000 by the war’s end — in August 1861 Congress passed the Confiscation Act, which authorized the seizure of all property, including slave property, used to support the rebellion.

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Eastman Johnson, A Ride for Freedom — The Fugitive Slaves, c. 1862
At the second battle of Manassas in September 1862, American genre painter Eastman Johnson (1824–1906) witnessed this “veritable incident” of an African American family fleeing slavery — and then painted it. A powerful, split-second image of the riders’ silhouettes, Johnson’s painting captures the father looking forward toward freedom, while the mother cradles a young child and looks back apprehensively for possible pursuers. By “freeing themselves,” this family and thousands of blacks set the stage for Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, USA/The Bridgeman Art Library.

With the Confiscation Act, Radical Republicans — the members of the party who had been bitterly opposed to the “Slave Power” since the mid-1850s — began to use wartime legislation to destroy slavery. Their leaders were treasury secretary Salmon Chase, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, and Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania. A longtime member of Congress, Stevens was a masterful politician, skilled at fashioning legislation that could win majority support. In April 1862, Stevens and the Radicals persuaded Congress to end slavery in the District of Columbia by providing compensation for owners; in June, Congress outlawed slavery in the federal territories (finally enacting the Wilmot Proviso of 1846); and in July, it passed a second Confiscation Act, which declared “forever free” the thousands of refugee slaves and all slaves captured by the Union army. Emancipation had become an instrument of war.

The Emancipation Proclamation Initially, Lincoln rejected emancipation as a war aim, but faced with thousands of refugees and Radical Republican pressure, he moved cautiously toward that goal. The president drafted a general proclamation of emancipation in July 1862, and he publicly linked black freedom with the preservation of the Union in August. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it,” Lincoln told Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, “and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it.”

Now he waited for a Union victory. Considering the Battle of Antietam “an indication of the Divine Will,” Lincoln issued a preliminary proclamation of emancipation on September 22, 1862, basing its legal authority on his duty as commander in chief to suppress the rebellion. The proclamation legally abolished slavery in all states that remained out of the Union on January 1, 1863. The rebel states could preserve slavery by renouncing secession. None chose to do so.

The proclamation was politically astute. Lincoln conciliated slave owners in the Union-controlled border states, such as Maryland and Missouri, by leaving slavery intact in those states. It also permitted slavery to continue in areas occupied by Union armies: western and central Tennessee, western Virginia, and southern Louisiana. In Indian Territory, also under Union control, most mixed-blood Cherokee slave owners remained committed to the Confederacy and to bondage. They did not formally free their 4,000 slaves until July 1866, when a treaty with the U.S. government specified that their ex-slaves “shall have all the rights of native Cherokee.”

Consequently, the Emancipation Proclamation did not immediately free a single slave. Yet, as abolitionist Wendell Phillips understood, Lincoln’s proclamation had moved slavery to “the edge of Niagara,” and would soon sweep it over the brink. Advancing Union troops became the agents of slavery’s destruction. “I became free in 1863, in the summer, when the yankees come by and said I could go work for myself,” recalled Jackson Daniel of Maysville, Alabama. As Lincoln now saw it, “the old South is to be destroyed and replaced by new propositions and ideas” — a system of free labor.

Hailed by reformers in Europe, emancipation was extraordinarily controversial in America. In the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis labeled it the “most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man”; in the North, white voters unleashed a racist backlash. During the elections of 1862, the Democrats denounced emancipation as unconstitutional, warned of slave uprisings, and predicted that freed blacks would take white jobs. Every freed slave, suggested a nativist-minded New Yorker, should “shoulder an Irishman and leave the Continent.” Such sentiments propelled Democrat Horatio Seymour into the governor’s office in New York; if abolition was a war goal, Seymour argued, the South should not be conquered. In the November election, Democrats swept to victory in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois and gained thirty-four seats in Congress. However, Republicans still held a twenty-five-seat majority in the House and gained five seats in the Senate. Lincoln refused to retreat. Calling emancipation an “act of justice,” he signed the final proclamation on New Year’s Day 1863. “If my name ever goes into history,” he said, “it was for this act.”

To see a longer excerpt of the Jefferson Davis document, along with other primary sources from this period, see Sources for America’s History.

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