1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [207]
A telling fact: the price of slaves was already dropping precipitously. Numerous reports attest that by mid-1861 it had fallen to half or even a third of what it had been the year before. The “property” that slaveholders were fighting for was now not only less reliable (you never knew when it might run off in the night) but less valuable—perhaps, in a sense, less worth fighting for.121
Just as important was what did not happen: the long-expected and long-feared Negro uprising—the apocalypse when slaves would rise up, rape their mistresses, and slaughter their masters—never occurred. Indeed, even now it is remarkable to consider, given what the slaves had suffered and the turmoil in the South over the next four years, that they ended up committing so little violence against their masters. It soon became apparent from the behavior of the contrabands that the vast majority of blacks did not want vengeance; they simply wanted to be free, and to enjoy the same rights and opportunities as other Americans. Many were even ready to share in the hardships and dangers of the war.
This realization had enormous repercussions, not just in the South but in the North. For decades, abolitionist “agitators” had been vilified as traitors to their race for trying to bring about “another St. Domingo.” As the Democrats had sung in the 1860 presidential campaign: They love the nigger better than the red, white, and blue. Even as stalwart a Unionist as Jessie Frémont sometimes felt torn between her loyalty to her country and her loyalty to her race and her sex. A few weeks after the attack on Sumter, she wrote to a friend, “When I think of the hideous [danger] the Southern states hold in themselves, I don’t know to which women the most sympathy belongs. Our side is great & noble & to die for it … is a great duty. But they have no such comfort & at their hearths is the black slave Sepoy element.”122 When it turned out that the South’s Negroes were not like St. Domingo’s revolutionaries or India’s Sepoy mutineers, Jessie Frémont’s dilemma vanished. She and millions of other white Americans realized they did not actually have to fear a bloodbath if the slaves were suddenly set free. This awareness in itself was a revolution in Northern politics.
Most important, though, was the revolution in the minds of the enslaved Negroes themselves. Though they may not have known about the production at the Winter Garden, they knew that they had become actors on the stage of American history in a way that they had never been before. The bolder the blacks grew, the more fearful the whites grew—and when the whites grew more fearful, the blacks grew bolder yet. At first this typically took the form of blacks simply refusing to work as hard as they had before—easy enough with so many masters and overseers away in the rebel armies. But in time this would amount to a significant act of sabotage against the Confederate cause, especially after Southern troops began experiencing shortages of food, which happened as early as the autumn of 1861. And soon more and more Negroes were taking the boldest step of all, from slavery into freedom. Even before Lincoln finally unveiled the Emancipation Proclamation, in the fall of 1862, the stream of a few hundred contrabands at Fortress Monroe had become a river of many thousands. “The Negroes,” a Union chaplain wrote, “flocked in vast numbers—an army in themselves—to the camps of the Yankees.… The arrival among us of these hordes was like the oncoming of cities.”123*
On the September day of Lincoln’s proclamation, a Union colonel ran into William Seward on the street in Washington and took the opportunity to congratulate him on the administration’s epochal act.
Seward snorted. “Yes,” he said, “we have let