The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [129]
Lincoln soon appointed a three-man commission, headed by Daniel R. Goodloe, to allocate federal compensation payments. Their proceedings were rife with irony. Unsure how to assess the market value of slaves, the commission hired a slave trader from Baltimore to advise them. To ascertain slaveholders’ loyalty or lack thereof, the commission turned to the emancipated slaves (barred by District of Columbia law from testifying in court against whites), who reported conversations they had overheard in their owners’ homes. The commissioners worked quickly by Washington standards, and awarded compensation for slightly over 3,000 slaves, who ranged in age from infants to a ninety-three-year-old. At the end of January 1863, hundreds of former slaveholders lined up at the Treasury Department to receive their checks, amounting in total to around $900,000. When Goodloe informed the president that the commission had completed its labors, Lincoln replied that he was “glad to know that somebody had finished something.”75
But if the allocation of compensation was resolved expeditiously, the future status of the emancipated slaves was not. Some Republicans believed colonization would solve (or avoid) the problem. But the $100,000 appropriation, with a maximum of $100 for any individual, would have paid for the emigration of only 1,000 of the 14,000 black residents in the Districts. In any event, this part of the law proved to be an abject failure. Immediately after passage, the American Colonization Society offered to assist potential emigrants. “The number known to entertain that desire,” it discovered, “was one. The colored people…are waiting, in the hope of changes which will make their condition here as good as that of white men.” And soon after passing the emancipation act, Congress repealed the District’s black code, which had barred free blacks from certain occupations, required them to post bonds for good behavior, and limited their freedom of assembly. It soon directed local authorities to establish schools for black children, financed from black property tax payments. Early in May, Lincoln’s secretary William O. Stoddard commented perceptively that the District’s black residents “begin, the best of them, to feel and cherish the notion of their nationality…. The blacks refuse to regard themselves as Africans.”76
The first federal statute to grant immediate freedom to any group of slaves, the law ending slavery in Washington, D.C., fulfilled a long-standing abolitionist dream and marked a significant change in federal policy. It abolished slavery as an institution, rather than releasing individual slaves from their obligations to their owners as the Confiscation Act had done, and freed the slaves of loyal as well as disloyal owners. It ended the anomalous situation that had existed since the beginning of the century in which the civil and criminal laws, including slave codes, of Virginia and Maryland continued in force in the parts of the District these states had ceded to the government to create the national capital. It offered one example of how the war was inexorably expanding federal power.
Abolition in Washington further undermined slavery in nearby Virginia and Maryland, inspiring a new wave of runaways. One Maryland congressman complained to Lincoln that his constituents were “hourly suffering great losses from their slaves being entered into this District.” He demanded to know if Lincoln planned to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. The situation remained unclear and volatile. James S. Wadsworth, the military governor of the District and a strong opponent of slavery, sent troops to arrest the city jailor and release blacks from prison, whereupon Marshal Ward Hill Lamon organized a posse to apprehend the military detachment. Lincoln tried to persuade civil and military authorities to come to some sort of accommodation, but to no avail. In July 1862, Washington’s mayor ordered a Maryland