1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [205]
Union officers in all these areas wrote to Washington, asking for instructions. The administration, punting once again, told them that decisions about sheltering runaways should be based on military necessity, but that they were left entirely to their own discretion how to determine this. (Congress endorsed this position in August in the Confiscation Act.) The result was that each commander ended up with his own policy. General George McClellan, entering western Virginia, proclaimed that his troops would interfere with slavery in no way whatsoever. Meanwhile, Colonel Harvey Brown, the new commandant at Fort Pickens, announced flatly, “I shall not send the negroes back as I will never be voluntarily instrumental in returning a poor wretch to slavery.”113
The confusion was compounded by the fact that no matter what the individual commander’s decree, his junior officers and enlisted men, having ideas of their own, might be unwilling to enforce it. In July 1861, a New York soldier wrote from northern Virginia:
A slight case of rebellion occurred in one of our camps a few evenings ago, when a young man on guard was ordered to arrest any slaves who undertook to pass. He promptly answered: “I can obey no such order; it was not to put down [Negro] insurrection that I enlisted but to defend my country’s flag! I am ready to bear the consequences, but never to have a hand in arresting slaves.”
The man’s superior decided to back off; “it was deemed politic not to try the temper of the men too hard.”
Sometimes the refusals were even more peremptory. In Missouri—where, since it was Union territory, all fugitives were supposed to be returned to their masters—a brigadier wrote to his commanding general, who had just ordered him to send back some runaways: “In answer to your note of this day I have this to say that I don’t give a fig about rank.… The institution of slavery must take care of itself.” And he added, even more bitterly: “I had a man cowardly shot in the woods to-day within sight of camp by the very men I have no doubt whose property you are so anxious to protect.”114
In August, Secretary Cameron tried to bring some clarity to the chaos by asking that Butler and other commanders collect detailed information on each fugitive: not just name and physical description but “the name and character, whether loyal or disloyal, of the master,” since, this, of course, was essential to determining whether the particular Negro counted as legitimate contraband. Such a system, Cameron said, would let the federal government assure that slaveholders’ “rights” were protected, and possibly return the slaves to their proper owners once the rebel states had rejoined the Union. But how were officers supposed to tell whether a master whom they had never laid eyes on was loyal or disloyal—even assuming that the slave was telling the truth in identifying him? Besides, didn’t the military have more pressing business at the moment, such as fighting the war?
Butler’s contraband doctrine was utterly impossible almost from the moment it was devised, but it became hugely influential precisely because it was so impossible: it did not open the floodgates in theory, but it did so in practice, and with very little political risk to the Lincoln administration. Indeed, preposterous as the contraband doctrine was as a piece of law, it was also, albeit inadvertently, a political masterstroke; it satisfied nearly every potential theoretical and political objection at the same time as being completely unworkable in real life. “There is often