The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [113]
For all its limitations, however, the Confiscation Act represented an early turning point in the relations of the federal government to slavery. It treated slaves as persons “held to labor,” rather than chattel property. The confiscation of other property required a court proceeding, but the termination of the master-slave relationship did not—that was meant to be self-executing. The law, moreover, applied not only in the seceded states but also in the loyal border if owners allowed the Confederacy to utilize their slaves. Fearing it would alienate the border states (and possibly violate the Constitution’s prohibitions against the seizure of property without due process of law and confiscation beyond the lifetime of the owner), Lincoln signed it “with great reluctance,” according to the New York Times. But given that virtually every Republican member of Congress had voted for the bill, he felt he had no alternative.20
When Congress adjourned in early August, the administration still lacked a consistent policy regarding slavery, as Lincoln no doubt preferred. Immediately after the passage of the Confiscation Act, Secretary of War Cameron, claiming to speak for the president, advised Butler that while the army could not receive fugitives from states that remained in the Union, the rights of slaveholders in the Confederacy must be “subordinated to the military exigencies created by the insurrection.” Butler himself had already decided to treat arriving slaves as “free,…never to be reclaimed.” All this went well beyond the letter of the Confiscation Act. But early in August, Lincoln suddenly appointed General John E. Wool commander at Fortress Monroe, dispatching Butler to New England to raise troops. Butler assumed that this insulting demotion arose from “my views on the negro question.” In fact, it resulted from a debacle in which he had sent untrained troops to try to capture a Confederate outpost.
Wool continued Butler’s contraband policy, paying wages to both male and female fugitives employed by his forces. Military commanders elsewhere, however, still barred runaways from entering their lines and returned them to their owners. In the nation’s capital, Ward Hill Lamon, an old friend from Illinois whom Lincoln had appointed U.S. marshal, enforced the Fugitive Slave Act, jailing blacks who sought refuge from nearby Virginia and Maryland. “Thus far,” complained Francis E. Spinner, the treasurer of the United States, “our army has been but an armed police, whose duty has seemed to be to arrest and return runaway slaves to their rebel masters.” Spinner consoled himself with the reflection that “this will work itself out. There can be but one result to this contest, and it is only a question of time, and the manner of its being done.”21
II
ALLOWING INDIVIDUAL military commanders to make policy about dealing with slaves had the advantage of enabling the administration in Washington to avoid the issue. But since every such decision unavoidably made a political statement, it could lead to unanticipated problems. The disadvantages became strikingly evident at the end of August 1861, when John C. Frémont, commanding Union forces in Missouri, issued an order declaring martial law in the state, providing for the summary execution of rebels, and confiscating the property and emancipating the slaves owned by Confederates. Frémont had been dispatched in May to bring Missouri firmly under Union control. He found the state, he reported to Lincoln, “in disorder, nearly every county in an insurrectionary condition.” Frémont believed the administration had given local commanders a free hand. But his order went well beyond both Butler’s contraband policy, which applied only to fugitives,