• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1833 0

far you will have to go six weeks hence…. The arming of negroes and the liberation of those slaves who offer us aid and assistance are things which must and will inevitably be done.” And in his proclamation, Lincoln for the first time claimed the right as commander in chief to abolish slavery if “it shall become a necessity indispensable to the maintenance of the government.” This marked a significant change in his view of presidential authority. Interestingly, Lincoln never officially communicated the revocation to Hunter. “I wanted him to do it, not say it,” Schurz reported Lincoln remarking when the two met in June. Some Radicals took note of Lincoln’s language holding out the possibility that he might in the future exercise the power he denied to Hunter. Lincoln’s statement, declared the Chicago Tribune, “sounds like a prophet’s word,” warning slaveowners that freedom “will soon dawn.”3

The Hunter imbroglio had an unusual afterlife. On June 9, 1862, the House of Representatives called on Stanton for information about whether Hunter had in fact formed a black regiment. Stanton replied that he had no information to that effect, but forwarded Hunter’s justification of his policy: the white masters had fled the Sea Islands, thus abandoning their self-proclaimed responsibility to feed and clothe their slaves. In the absence of a “fugitive master law,” Hunter had no alternative but to arm “hardy and devoted” slaves in the hope of retrieving their owners. Radicals in Congress laughed and applauded when the letter was read; border representatives denounced their reaction as “disgraceful to the American Congress.”4

I

WHAT WERE the “signs of the times” portending the doom of slavery to which Lincoln referred? In the spring and early summer of 1862, pressures for a change in government policy intensified. As the army pushed into new parts of the Confederacy—coastal North Carolina, portions of Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana—slaves viewed its arrival as a sign of “their approaching millennium,” and thousands fled to Union lines. The war’s destructive impact on slavery was dramatically evident in the sugar plantation region near New Orleans, where the arrival of Union forces inspired mass escapes, strikes, and demands to be paid wages. Even officers who strongly opposed action against slavery found themselves employing more and more black refugees as laborers. Moreover, fugitive slaves provided intelligence about the disposition of Confederate forces, the location of hidden supplies, and routes through unmapped terrain, making commanders reluctant to turn them away. General Ormsby Mitchel, who in March 1862 expelled fugitives from his camp in Tennessee, soon realized the “absolute necessity of protecting slaves who furnish us valuable information.”5

Encounters with runaway slaves strongly affected opinion regarding slavery in the army. “When the Union soldier meets the negro in the enemy’s country,” wrote George E. Stephens, one of the few black war correspondents, “he knows him as a friend.” Stephens did not fail to convey to his readers the deep-seated racism of many soldiers. But witnessing firsthand slaves’ loyalty to the Union and encountering evidence of the cruelty of slavery increased emancipation sentiment. Samuel F. DuPont, who had led the naval expedition that captured Port Royal in the Sea Islands, remarked that he “accounted himself a conservative until he had seen the institution in all its horrors.” He now called himself an abolitionist. James A. Garfield, commanding an Ohio unit in Tennessee, reported that he found “the rank and file of the army steadily and surely becoming imbued with sympathy for the slaves and hatred for slavery.” In this war of “thinking bayonets,” in which soldiers eagerly debated political issues and wrote numerous letters home, sentiment in the army could not but affect northern politics.6

As in 1861, dissension over dealing with slavery flared within the army. The most dramatic incident took place in southern Louisiana. Hoping to conciliate local whites, General Benjamin F. Butler