The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [130]
With abolition in the District of Columbia, however, the antislavery initiative in Congress temporarily ground to a halt. When the Indiana Radical George W. Julian introduced a resolution in June calling for the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act, the House tabled it by a vote of 66 to 41. Charles Sumner pressed for repeal of an 1825 law limiting employment as mail carriers to white persons. The Senate approved the measure, but the House rejected it, with Republicans divided among themselves.78
Congress also failed to reach agreement on the enlistment of black troops in the Union army. The employment of slave soldiers was hardly unfamiliar. Britain had established a Caribbean slave army numbering more than 10,000 men during the wars of the Age of Revolution, and Parliament in 1807 emancipated them, paying compensation to the owners. Spain had also used slave soldiers in Caribbean wars. Black soldiers had served under George Washington in the War of Independence and Andrew Jackson at the battle of New Orleans. “Why [is it] offensive to employ colored men to fight for the Union,” Senator James Harlan asked in January 1862, “any more than for independence?” Harlan’s Iowa colleague James W. Grimes believed black enlistment would mean “the end of slavery.” Other Republicans supported the idea on purely military grounds. “When a negro rushes in to save the life of my brother or my son from the bayonet of a traitor,” said Lyman Trumbull, “I will say ‘God speed.’” Democrats were appalled. Blacks, they insisted, were unfit to be soldiers. Armed slaves would commit barbarous acts against their owners yet flee the first sign of combat, said Robert Mallory of Kentucky. How was it, Thaddeus Stevens responded, “that they are so dangerous to their masters, when a single cannon shot will put ten thousand to flight?”79
Even more contentious was the debate that raged throughout the session over further confiscation of Confederate property. This raised thorny political, legal, and constitutional questions. Early in December 1861, Lyman Trumbull introduced a bill for the “absolute and complete forfeiture forever” of “every species of property” of “rebels,” including their slaves, who would be “made free.” Trumbull’s proposal envisioned a far more radical attack on slavery than the first Confiscation Act, which applied only to slaves used for military purposes. Most members of the Republican caucus, the New York Herald reported, favored passage of a confiscation measure, but “the general shape of such a law was not agreed on.” This was, to say the least, an understatement. During the course of the next seven months, Congress spent more time debating confiscation than any other question. Radicals pressed for sweeping confiscation as a means of liberating the vast majority of the slaves in the Confederacy. Rebels, declared one congressman, “are entitled to no rights whatever, and least of all to the right of domination over others.” But many moderates held back, fearing that Trumbull’s bill violated the Constitution’s bar on bills of attainder—legislative acts declaring a person guilty of a crime and punishing him without benefit of a trial—as well as its provision limiting forfeiture of property for treason to the lifetime of the offender. Property rights, moderates insisted, were inviolable, even for rebels, unless the property was used directly to support the southern war effort.80
The leading Republican opponent was Lincoln’s old friend Orville H. Browning, who delivered interminable speeches outlining the legal objections to confiscation. Slavery, Browning told the Senate, was “the sole, original cause” of the war and were it “blotted from the American continent,” the conflict could not