The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (57 page)

The second broad point I mentioned, that America’s Emancipation Proclamation and especially the
Thirteenth,
Fourteenth, and
Fifteenth Amendments represent the climax and turning point of the Age of Emancipation, is illuminated by
James Oakes’s recent revisionist book on the destruction of slavery in the American Civil War.
²⁴

Oakes shows, contrary to many standard accounts, that
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation did not appear as a sudden, radical action, totally out of the blue. For more than a year, Lincoln’s
Republican administration did remain committed to a supposed constitutional ban on interference with slavery in the
existing
slaveholding states. But they were determined from the first to move toward the ultimate extinction of slavery, first by establishing an antislavery “cordon of freedom” around the South that would contain and undermine the institution; and second, by using the doctrine of “military necessity” to free tens of thousands of slaves—so-called contrabands—who
fled behind Union lines. Republican leaders drew upon the antislavery arguments of John Quincy
Adams as well as leading abolitionists and were convinced that since chattel bondage violated natural and international law and was unrecognized by the
Constitution, which defined slaves as “persons held in service,” not property, it was restricted within the boundaries of specific Southern states. In 1862 they thus banned slavery on the high seas and in all territories “where the national government has exclusive jurisdiction.” And in early 1862, while applying pressure on the four slaveholding
Border States that remained within the Union, they required a new state,
West Virginia, to abolish slavery as a condition for admission to the Union.

Contrary to many conventional accounts, the Republicans’
First and
Second
Confiscation Acts freed enormous numbers of slaves and led directly to Lincoln’s Preliminary
Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862. While the First Confiscation Act was originally intended to apply only to those fugitives “employed in hostility to the United States,” under the
War Department’s instructions of August 8, 1861, “military necessity” meant the freeing of
all
slaves who voluntarily entered Union lines from any Confederate state. Despite some debate over “loyal” and “disloyal” masters, no freed people were to be reenslaved. While Union generals acted in different ways, they were influenced by the fact that runaway slaves often provided Northern troops with important military intelligence regarding the location of rebel forces. Within a year of passage, the law had liberated tens of thousands of slaves, and it is difficult to imagine how emancipation could have begun any sooner.

The Second Confiscation Act, or “The Emancipation Bill” as it was frequently called, was debated for seven months and aimed at completely destroying slavery in the seceded states. Signed by Lincoln on July 17, 1862, it immediately freed thousands of slaves in parts of
Louisiana and the lower
Mississippi Valley occupied by Union troops. Most surprising, a “prospective” clause called upon Lincoln to issue a proclamation freeing all rebel-owned slaves in areas not yet occupied by Union forces. Lincoln acknowledged this by quoting verbatim Section 9 of the Act in his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which he finally felt free to release following the Union victory at
Antietam on September 17, and which promised to call for slave emancipation on January 1, 1863, if the South continued to rebel. One should note that Democratic and Border State congressmen
were outraged by the success of the Second Confiscation Act, and declared that Republican fanatics had destroyed all prospects of restoring the Union.

Unfortunately,
Oakes’s emphasis on the antislavery unity of the Republican Party obscures the crucial importance of Abraham Lincoln as a leader of the Union. Everything would have been different if Lincoln had not possessed the extraordinary “capacity for growth” documented in
Eric Foner’s Pulitzer Prize–winning
The
Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.
Though Lincoln hated slavery from his earliest reflections and stressed in 1858 that the natural rights of the
Declaration of Independence applied to blacks and that Democrats were attempting to “dehumanize the negro,” he had no adequate reply to Steven
Douglas’s persistent repetition of Jefferson’s famous question, “what shall be done with the free negro?”
²⁵
Indeed, despite his impressive growth on other fronts, such as treating Frederick Douglass as a genuine equal, Lincoln advocated colonization and helped plan for voluntary black removal even after his
Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. Yet Lincoln also played a central role in helping to shape public opinion toward the radical goal of emancipation and in helping to pass the
Thirteenth Amendment.

Oakes refutes the myth that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation did not free a single slave as well as the myth that it shifted the purpose of the war from the restoration of the Union to the abolition of slavery—the war to restore the Union had always been a conflict over slavery. He also highlights other aspects of the Proclamation, such as the importance of recruiting 180,000 black troops to join the Union army, which became indispensable for a Union victory. The Proclamation not only converted the Union army into a true army of liberation but helped lift the ban on the “enticement” of slaves, so that countless Union soldiers now coaxed slaves to leave, spread word of the Proclamation, or even delivered talks on plantations, reducing fears of flight and adding to the huge number of blacks who followed invading Union forces. Above all, the Proclamation gradually helped convince a large number of voters that total slave emancipation was a necessary condition for the restoration of the Union, a prerequisite for passage and ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Yet military emancipation could never free most of the slaves in the South, and the Union army could hardly deal with the hundreds of thousands who flocked behind their lines. Of the nearly 4 million
slaves in the South in 1860, no more than 14 percent of those in the eleven Confederate states had been freed by war’s end (approximately 474,000 in the Confederate states and another 50,000 in the
Border States).
Lincoln and the Republican leaders long expressed faith in both military emancipation and the effects of a “
cordon of freedom,” especially for Border States, but the major military victories at
Gettysburg and
Vicksburg in 1863 showed that the war might end without any assurance that even the emancipated blacks would not be reenslaved. How could Lincoln guarantee his proclamation that freed slaves would be “forever free” when Confederate leaders promised they would be reenslaved after the war? In early 1864 Republicans arrived at a consensus that the full and permanent destruction of
slavery would require a
Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

Whereas Northern Democrats were still making a full-scale defense of slavery in June 1864, Republicans drew on a tradition going back to Jefferson’s failed bill of 1784 banning slavery from all the western territories. Like the authors of the
Northwest Ordinance of 1787, banning slavery north of the Ohio River, they used Jefferson’s words in the amendment: “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime” before ending with “shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Since the Republicans dominated the Senate, they easily approved the amendment, 38 to 6. But on June 15, Democrats won the necessary one-third of the votes in the
House of Representatives to block the measure, to the dismay of Lincoln and the Republicans.

In the November election Republicans gained more than enough seats in the House of Representatives to secure passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in the next Congress. But that would be many months away and Lincoln and his associates feared that an impending Union victory would remove a major justification for the amendment—the wartime need to suppress a slaveholder rebellion. As a result, they saw the need for an intense lobbying campaign in the final lame-duck session of the Thirty-Eighth Congress. After much arm-twisting, bribing, and patronage, Republican leaders succeeded on January 31, 1865, in converting enough Border State and Democratic congressmen (a change of three votes would have reversed the outcome). The House erupted in jubilation; spectators wept and danced. In a speech the next day Lincoln stressed that slavery was the only thing that ever threatened to destroy the Union and praised the Thirteenth Amendment
for freeing all slaves, everywhere, for all future time, “a King’s cure for all the evils” that had not been cured by the
Emancipation Proclamation.

But of course the measure could not become part of the Constitution until three-fourths of the states had ratified it. Despite bitter Democratic opposition, by February 3,
New York,
Illinois,
Rhode Island,
Michigan,
Maryland, and
West Virginia had ratified the amendment, and eleven more state legislatures followed by the end of the month. But after Lincoln’s
assassination on April 14, progress slowed considerably and it was not until December 18 that Secretary of State
Seward officially certified that the requisite twenty-seven states had ratified the amendment—the same day that
Delaware and
Kentucky finally abolished
slavery. This meant that during most of the year 1865, slavery was still legal in most of the Southern states and that more slaves may have been freed in December 1865 than in the four preceding years of war. But, by the year’s end, freedom was truly “national.”

While the implementation of the amendment and the meaning of freedom would long be problematic, this culmination of Anglo-American emancipation had been totally unforeseen and unanticipated at the beginning of the war. Even more astonishing, from a prewar perspective, was the award of citizenship and suffrage by the
Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 and the
Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. And while major attention has long and rightly focused on the failure of
Reconstruction and the emergence of a Southern penal system that was “worse than slavery,”
²⁶
few slave emancipations in history have been followed by anything equivalent to America’s first civil rights legislation and the Constitutional amendments that for a limited time in the Reconstruction Era led a significant number of
African Americans to vote, to serve in state legislatures, and even to serve in the U.S. Senate (two) and House of Representatives (twenty).
²⁷

In 1788, the first French abolitionist society (the Société des
Amis des Noirs) was formed and entered into correspondence with the recently established abolitionist societies in
London,
Philadelphia, and New York. At that time Vermont and Massachusetts, containing very few slaves, were the only places in the New World that had taken effective
steps to outlaw the kind of racial slavery that extended from
Canada to
Chile and
Argentina. A century later, in 1888,
Brazil celebrated the immediate and uncompensated emancipation of the only slaves remaining in the hemisphere, concluding an extraordinary century of emancipation. Since most of this abolition of the Atlantic
slave trade and chattel slavery was contrary to economic self-interest,
²⁸
it probably stands, despite the
U.S. Civil War and other heavy costs, as the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history.

In all three volumes of my
Problem of Slavery
trilogy I have addressed both slavery and its abolition as essentially moral issues while of course recognizing the economic functions of the institution. The very concept of chattel slavery has always embodied a profound moral contradiction, exemplified in this volume by my emphasis on the efforts to dehumanize and animalize fellow human beings. The true slave, as Aristotle put it, could have no will or interests of his own; he was merely a tool or instrument who could only affirm his consciousness by partaking of his master’s consciousness and by becoming one with his master’s desires. Yet, as
Hegel later observed, the master’s identity depends on having a slave who recognizes him as master: the truth of the master’s independent consciousness lies in the dependent and supposedly unessential consciousness of the slave. And while some freed slaves like
David Walker and Frederick Douglass agreed that slaves sometimes
internalized their master’s desires, no masters, whether in ancient
Rome, medieval
Tuscany, or seventeenth-century Brazil, could forget that the obsequious servant might also be a “domestic enemy” bent on theft, poisoning, arson, or rebellion.

My first volume,
The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture,
dealt with this “problem” first by analyzing the ways in which Western culture explained and rationalized slavery as part of a necessarily imperfect social system. The book then explored the cultural heritage that provided the framework for a profound transformation in moral perception in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that led a growing number of Europeans and Americans to see the full horror of a social evil to which mankind had been blind for centuries. This attack on the most extreme form of labor exploitation was related to the “discovery” and celebration of free labor, which was virtually unknown outside of Western Europe during most of history.

The second volume,
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823
, deals with the consequences of this revolution in moral perception,
centered in the
Enlightenment and
evangelical revivals, at a time when any serious attack on slavery carried momentous implications, since the institution was not only thriving economically in this period but had long been interwoven with other widely accepted forms of domination and submission. After reviewing “what the abolitionists were up against,” the book analyzes the early history of antislavery movements in
Britain and America, and ends with a discussion of legal and theological issues, and an imaginary confrontation between
Napoleon and the black Haitian leader
Toussaint Louverture.