Littlefield History of the Civil War Era

The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery

Joseph P. Reidy

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781469648378
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la guerre de Sécession

As students of the Civil War have long known, emancipation was not merely a product of Lincoln's proclamation or of Confederate defeat in April 1865. It was a process that required more than legal or military action. With enslaved people fully engaged as actors, emancipation necessitated a fundamental reordering of a way of life whose implications stretched well beyond the former slave states. Slavery did not die quietly or quickly, nor did freedom fulfill every dream of the enslaved or their allies. The process unfolded unevenly. In this sweeping reappraisal of slavery's end during the Civil War era, Joseph P. Reidy employs the lenses of time, space, and individuals' sense of personal and social belonging to understand how participants and witnesses coped with drastic change, its erratic pace, and its unforeseeable consequences. Emancipation disrupted everyday habits, causing sensations of disorientation that sometimes intensified the experience of reality and sometimes muddled it. While these illusions of emancipation often mixed disappointment with hope, through periods of even intense frustration they sustained the promise that the struggle for freedom would result in victory.

PART I

Time

At first glance, time appears as a natural framework for understanding emancipation. Like the other significant milestones of the Civil War era—Abraham Lincoln’s election, the firing on Fort Sumter, Robert E. Lee’s surrender—key events in the history of slavery’s demise, such as the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, may be usefully depicted along a chronological time line. Time lines display events in linear relationship with each other along a continuum that extends from the past through the present and into the future. They contain discrete units (hours, days, months, years) of agreed-on lengths, which follow each other methodically. The time-keeping conventions that are taken for granted today are the product of several thousands of years of development, during which societies found the need to track time ever more carefully for liturgical and dynastic purposes. Such conventions also served to record the births, the deaths, and other such milestones in the lives of individuals. In the context of Civil War emancipation, the personal narratives whereby enslaved people recalled their deliverance from slavery to freedom often employed conventions of linear time.

The ability to reckon time accurately and to situate events in temporal relationship to each other gained value during the Age of Revolutions that began in the late eighteenth century. Understanding time and carefully measuring its passage, like other advances in knowledge that characterized the period, enabled the politically marginalized middle class (whose members included scientists as well as businessmen) to challenge the monopoly of knowledge that the clergy and the nobility had possessed for centuries. The full flowering of these scientific advances late in the eighteenth century helped usher in the era of industrial capitalism. During the twentieth century, harnessing the minute movements at the level of individual atoms enabled accuracy far beyond what mechanical or electric timepieces were capable of achieving. The search for ever greater precision continues.1 Yet clocks and watches are not the only way to observe and record the passage of time.2

The apparent linearity of time undergoes cyclical or seasonal variations, which early humans learned from observation long before subsequent generations developed scientific explanations. Most of North America, including the areas of the southern latitudes that witnessed most of the clashes between the armed forces of the United States and the Confederate States, experiences seasonal differences in ambient temperatures and hours of sunlight as the earth rotates around the sun. Over the four seasons of spring, summer, autumn, and winter, these changes affect the circadian rhythms of all living things. Whether in cities or on farms or amid the open plains and mountains, the continent’s flora and fauna no less than its human inhabitants respond to these seasonal changes. Measuring and recording the passage of time by the meteorological seasons antedated both calendars and clocks, and the practice continued even as the practitioners carried watches on their persons and tacked mass-produced calendars onto walls.

Emancipation in the context of war generated revolutionary changes that made mincemeat of both linear and cyclical concepts of time. The mobilization for war and its prosecution created personal and social dislocations that the breakdown of slavery often magnified. This produced a widespread sensation that time behaved erratically, alternately speeding up, slowing down, even stopping, amid unprecedented events that seared themselves into participants’ and observers’ memories forever. Seeing through the distortions requires looking not just backward in time but also sideways into time—in laboratory terminology, cutting cross sections into it. These views reveal that time did not conform to the expected pattern of uniform units following one another in linear fashion even though time often displayed such characteristics. In short, time may be irregular, messy, and unpredictable as well as straightforward and evenly paced. No wonder that the concept of time lends itself to so many idiomatic and metaphorical uses. One of the most common examples, tempus fugit, a staple of Latin-influenced languages and cultures for more than two millennia, suggests time’s apparent ability to fly.3 At once precise and vague, linear and circular, fast and slow moving, the passage of time also bore the influence of such powers as secular spirits of the age and of Divine Providence. Over the course of the war, participants and observers alike increasingly viewed human events in the context of providential time described in the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible. Present-day studies have begun to reveal that not only in metaphorical terms did time appear to behave erratically: biochemical processes, particularly those related to the circulation of hormones in times of stress, create real sensations of time behaving erratically. What many observers then and since have seen in simplistic terms as a series of events that played out in sequential, chronological time misses how time awareness affects human actions, how human beings account for the passage of time, and how they record into memory events that occur during extraordinary periods such as disasters, wars, and social revolutions.4

Understanding emancipation requires more than abandoning the still-popular belief that it consisted of a single event, such as Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, or even a process that involved a series of related events that occurred in a linear sequence between Lincoln’s inauguration in March 1861 and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865. The three chapters of this section explore the collapse of slavery through the lenses of chronological or linear time, seasonal or recurring time, and erratic or revolutionary time.

Chapter 1

Linear Chronology

Slavery came to an end during the Civil War not in a specific event at a single moment but in a tumultuous process that began before the shooting started and continued long after the Confederate surrender. Yet the main markers along the imagined road to freedom occurred in four years between 1861 and 1865—which contemporaries viewed as either a remarkably short or an agonizingly long span of time. They include Fort Sumter; the congressional Confiscation Acts; the Emancipation Proclamation; the organization of the U.S. Colored Troops; the Union’s victories at Vicksburg, Gettysburg, and Atlanta; General Robert E. Lee’s surrender; and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. For all their explanatory usefulness, such chronologies of events are inherently prone to mislead, creating a false impression that emancipation unfolded in stepwise fashion, even if unevenly, over the course of the war. To be sure, understanding the past requires the use of appropriate analytical frameworks, not the least of which is the chronological sequencing of events. Linear time—which is marked by clocks and calendars and measured in minutes, hours, days, months, and years—provides a good and, to all appearances, a natural starting point.1

The chronology of slavery’s collapse between 1860 and 1865 fits into a national and an international context of emancipation that spanned more than a hundred years from the mid-eighteenth century into the late nineteenth. Official actions of government bodies, such as the court orders, laws, and constitutions of the various states of the fledgling United States during the American Revolution and in the years after, offer key markers in this history. In the British West Indies, to illustrate the point further, Parliament accelerated the process that was begun in 1833, declaring a final end to slavery in 1838 in no small measure owing to fears of unrest among the prime beneficiaries of emancipation—sugar plantation workers. When the African-descended population in the French colony of Saint-Domingue took up the revolutionary fervor of the colonial metropole in 1791, few could have predicted that by 1804 the armies of France and Britain would have failed to suppress the rebels and restore slavery and that Haiti would take its place among the independent nations of the world. During the 1870s and 1880s, the tidal wave of emancipation rolled over the last bastions of African slavery in the Americas: Cuba and Brazil.2

Observers of a secular mind-set in all the nations of Europe and the Americas described this trend as the progressive spirit of the age. Guided by reason, they posited, human civilization’s long struggle to rise above barbarism succeeded in weakening, if not overturning, two institutions with deep historical roots. The first, hereditary monarchy, had been thrown on the defensive during the American and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century and then assaulted anew in the revolutions and uprisings across Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century that crested in 1848. The second was slavery, the ancient practice that had won a new lease on life during the age of merchant capitalism, which began during the fifteenth century when European nations spread their influence around the world. By the late eighteenth century, a combination of economic and moral critiques of the system placed its adherents on the defensive, but the advent of industrial capitalism enabled the architects of slave-grown commodity production to thrive as never before. Over the next hundred years, abolitionist movements mounted successful campaigns against, first, the Atlantic trade in captured Africans and then race-based slavery throughout the Americas. Meanwhile, the planter classes of the American South, Cuba, and Brazil gained political sophistication commensurate with their economic clout, even as republican movements in Europe alternately flared and fizzled.3 The path to this outcome was neither direct nor smooth, as those who pursued the goals of power and profits through slavery well understood. To be sure, the liberal economic and political philosophy that underpinned capitalist expansion held firmly to the belief in the superiority of liberty over restraint across a wide spectrum of human behavior, including the social relations whereby owners of capital retained laborers to produce valued commodities and thereby generate wealth. But neither the narrative arc of “The Age of Emancipation” nor the chronology of events in any one of the polities where slavery came to an end during the nineteenth century supports the notion of a steady march to extinction.

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Perhaps no example illustrates the surface simplicity and the underlying complexity—in short, the strengths and the flaws—of a strictly chronological account of emancipation better than the iconic event that generations of Americans have associated with it: President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. Although contemporary critics faulted its limited immediate impact on slavery in Confederate-held areas, it nonetheless established a new commitment on the part of the federal government to abolish slavery, and Lincoln’s words traveled far beyond the reach of federal armed forces.4 The one hundred days between September 22, 1862, when Lincoln publicly announced the government’s new policy of emancipation, and January 1, 1863, when the policy became official, were filled with anticipation and not just on the part of African Americans. Northern Democrats and not a few moderate Republicans questioned the constitutionality and the propriety of emancipation, even under the pretext of military necessity. Conservatives feared that Lincoln’s assault on human property posed a threat to property rights of every kind, everywhere. For others, emancipation raised the specter of a mass uprising of the enslaved that might overspill the Confederate States and inundate the North. Soldiers and sailors might abandon the service rather than risk their lives on behalf of the slaves. Fears of the proclamation’s possible impact on Unionism in the Border States—to include not just Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, where slavery was still legal, but also the tier of states just north of the Mason and Dixon Line and the Ohio River—was not misplaced.5

The proclamation unmasked hidden fears about the future of its intended beneficiaries: roughly 3.5 million enslaved persons in the Confederate States. If large numbers of refugees, many of whom were destitute and ill as a result of slavery and the war, decided to move to the North to enjoy the fruits of freedom, a political uproar would certainly result. In a spring 1862 speech denouncing the proposed revised Confiscation Act, Ohio congressman Samuel S. Cox asked rhetorically: “What will be the condition of the people of Ohio when the free jubilee shall have come in its ripe and rotten maturity?” “If slavery is bad,” he concluded, “the condition of the State of Ohio, with an unrestrained black population … partly subservient, partly slothful, partly criminal, and all disadvantageous and ruinous, will be far worse.”6

In light of such prospects, many Northerners wondered if Lincoln would shy away from delivering what he had promised. Among the doubters was George Templeton Strong, the New York socialite and diarist. “Will Uncle Abe Lincoln stand firm and issue his promised proclamation on the first of January, 1863?” he asked himself during the final days of December. “It is generally supposed that he intends to redeem his pledge,” Strong mused, “but nobody knows, and I am not sanguine on the subject.”7 Frederick Douglass had similar misgivings. In Boston on New Year’s Day, he joined hundreds who had gathered “to receive and celebrate the first utterance of the long-hoped-for proclamation.” “In view of the past,” Douglass worried, “it was by no means certain that it would come.”8

Anticipating the release, African American church congregations in all the free states (and some slave states as well) organized “watch parties” to keep vigil through the night of December 31, 1862. They planned to gather and pray all night long for the cause of freedom, for the security of the Union, for family members and strangers alike who had been afflicted by the evils of slavery and color prejudice, and perhaps most fervently for President Lincoln. The Massachusetts artist William Tolman Carlton imagined a similar scene in which enslaved people had gathered in a barn to await the stroke of midnight (see figure 1.1). Residents of the refu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction. Phantoms of Freedom
• Part I: Time
• Part II: Space
• Part III: Home
• Epilogue. Illusions of Emancipation
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index