Historian
Howard Zinn on Abraham Lincoln and the eventual abolition of slavery in
the US. Which shows that Spielberg's new film, Lincoln, is far from
historically accurate.
John
Brown was executed by the state of Virginia with the approval of the
national government. It was the national government which, while weakly
enforcing the law ending the slave trade, sternly enforced the laws
providing for the return of fugitives to slavery. It was the national
government that, in Andrew Jackson's administration, collaborated with
the South to keep abolitionist literature out of the mails in the
southern states. It was the Supreme Court of the United States that
declared in 1857 that the slave Dred Scott could not sue for his freedom
because he was not a person, but property.
Such
a national government would never accept an end to slavery by
rebellion. It would end slavery only under conditions controlled by
whites, and only when required by the political and economic needs of
the business elite of the North. It was Abraham Lincoln who combined
perfectly the needs of business, the political ambition of the new
Republican party, and the rhetoric of humanitarianism. He would keep the
abolition of slavery not at the top of his list of priorities, but
close enough to the top so it could be pushed there temporarily by
abolitionist pressures and by practical political advantage.
Lincoln
could skillfully blend the interests of the very rich and the interests
of the black at a moment in history when these interests met. And he
could link these two with a growing section of Americans, the white,
up-and-coming, economically ambitious, politically active middle class.
As Richard Hofstadter puts it:
Thoroughly
middle class in his ideas, he spoke for those millions of Americans who
had begun their lives as hired workers-as farm hands, clerks, teachers,
mechanics, flatboat men, and rail- splitters-and had passed into the
ranks of landed farmers, prosperous grocers, lawyers, merchants,
physicians and politicians.
Lincoln
could argue with lucidity and passion against slavery on moral grounds,
while acting cautiously in practical politics. He believed "that the
institution of slavery is founded on injustice and bad policy, but that
the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends to increase rather than
abate its evils." (Put against this Frederick Douglass's statement on
struggle, or Garrison's "Sir, slavery will not be overthrown without
excitement, a most tremendous excitement") Lincoln read the Constitution
strictly, to mean that Congress, because of the Tenth Amendment
(reserving to the states powers not specifically given to the national
government), could not constitutionally bar slavery in the states.
When
it was proposed to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, which
did not have the rights of a state that was directly under the
jurisdiction of Congress, Lincoln said this would be Constitutional, but
it should not be done unless the people in the District wanted it.
Since most there were white, this killed the idea. As Hofstadter said of
Lincoln's statement, it "breathes the fire of an uncompromising
insistence on moderation."
Lincoln
refused to denounce the Fugitive Slave Law publicly. He wrote to a
friend: "I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down . .. but
I bite my lips and keep quiet." And when he did propose, in 1849, as a
Congressman, a resolution to abolish slavery in the District of
Columbia, he accompanied this with a section requiring local authorities
to arrest and return fugitive slaves coming into Washington. (This led
Wendell Phillips, the Boston abolitionist, to refer to him years later
as "that slavehound from Illinois.") He opposed slavery, but could not
see blacks as equals, so a constant theme in his approach was to free
the slaves and to send them back to Africa.
In
his 1858 campaign in Illinois for the Senate against Stephen Douglas,
Lincoln spoke differently depending on the views of his listeners (and
also perhaps depending on how close it was to the election). Speaking in
northern Illinois in July (in Chicago), he said:
Let
us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man, this
race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they
must be placed in an inferior position. Let us discard all these
things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall
once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.
Two months later in Charleston, in southern Illinois, Lincoln told his audience:
I
will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing
about in any way the social and political equality of the white and
black races (applause); that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of
making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold
office, nor to intermarry with white people.. . .
And
inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there
must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any
other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the
white race.
Behind
the secession of the South from the Union, after Lincoln was elected
President in the fall of 1860 as candidate of the new Republican party,
was a long series of policy clashes between South and North. The clash
was not over slavery as a moral institution-most northerners did not
care enough about slavery to make sacrifices for it, certainly not the
sacrifice of war. It was not a clash of peoples (most northern whites
were not economically favored, not politically powerful; most southern
whites were poor farmers, not decisionmakers) but of elites. The
northern elite wanted economic expansion-free land, free labor, a free
market, a high protective tariff for manufacturers, a bank of the United
States. The slave interests opposed all that; they saw Lincoln and the
Republicans as making continuation of their pleasant and prosperous way
of life impossible in the future.
So,
when Lincoln was elected, seven southern states seceded from the Union.
Lincoln initiated hostilities by trying to repossess the federal base
at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and four more states seceded. The
Confederacy was formed; the Civil War was on.
Lincoln's
first Inaugural Address, in March 1861, was conciliatory toward the
South and the seceded states: "I have no purpose, directly or
indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States
where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have
no inclination to do so." And with the war four months on, when General
John C. Fremont in Missouri declared martial law and said slaves of
owners resisting the United States were to be free, Lincoln
countermanded this order. He was anxious to hold in the Union the slave
states of Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and Delaware.
It
was only as the war grew more bitter, the casualties mounted,
desperation to win heightened, and the criticism of the abolitionists
threatened to unravel the tattered coalition behind Lincoln that he
began to act against slavery. Hofstadter puts it this way: "Like a
delicate barometer, he recorded the trend of pressures, and as the
Radical pressure increased he moved toward the left." Wendell Phillips
said that if Lincoln was able to grow "it is because we have watered
him."
Racism
in the North was as entrenched as slavery in the South, and it would
take the war to shake both. New York blacks could not vote unless they
owned $250 in property (a qualification not applied to whites). A
proposal to abolish this, put on the ballot in 1860, was defeated two to
one (although Lincoln carried New York by 50,000 votes). Frederick
Douglass commented: "The black baby of Negro suffrage was thought too
ugly to exhibit on so grand an occasion. The Negro was stowed away like
some people put out of sight their deformed children when company
comes."
Wendell
Phillips, with all his criticism of Lincoln, recognized the
possibilities in his election. Speaking at the Tremont Temple in Boston
the day after the election, Phillips said:
If
the telegraph speaks truth, for the first time in our history the slave
has chosen a President of the United States. . . . Not an Abolitionist,
hardly an antislavery man, Mr. Lincoln consents to represent an
antislavery idea. A pawn on the political chessboard, his value is in
his position; with fair effort, we may soon change him for knight,
bishop or queen, and sweep the board. (Applause)
Conservatives
in the Boston upper classes wanted reconciliation with the South. At
one point they stormed an abolitionist meeting at that same Tremont
Temple, shortly after Lincoln's election, and asked that concessions be
made to the South "in the interests of commerce, manufactures,
agriculture."
The
spirit of Congress, even after the war began, was shown in a resolution
it passed in the summer of 1861, with only a few dissenting votes: "...
this war is not waged . . . for any purpose of... overthrowing or
interfering with the rights of established institutions of those states,
but... to preserve the Union."
The
abolitionists stepped up their campaign. Emancipation petitions poured
into Congress in 1861 and 1862. In May of that year, Wendell Phillips
said: "Abraham Lincoln may not wish it; he cannot prevent it; the nation
may not will it, but the nation cannot prevent it. I do not care what
men want or wish; the negro is the pebble in the cog-wheel, and the
machine cannot go on until you get him out."
In
July Congress passed a Confiscation Act, which enabled the freeing of
slaves of those fighting the Union. But this was not enforced by the
Union generals, and Lincoln ignored the nonenforcement. Garrison called
Lincoln's policy "stumbling, halting, prevaricating, irresolute, weak,
besotted," and Phillips said Lincoln was "a first-rate second-rate man."
An exchange of letters between Lincoln and Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, in August of 1862, gave Lincoln a chance to express his views. Greeley wrote:
Dear
Sir. I do not intrude to tell you-for you must know already-that a
great proportion of those who triumphed in your election ... are sorely
disappointed and deeply pained by the policy you seem to be pursuing
with regard to the slaves of rebels,... We require of you, as the first
servant of the Republic, charged especially and preeminently with this
duty, that you EXECUTE THE LAWS. ... We think you are strangely and
disastrously remiss . .. with regard to the emancipating provisions of
the new Confiscation Act....
We think you are unduly influenced by the councils ... of certain politicians hailing from the Border Slave States.
Greeley
appealed to the practical need of winning the war. "We must have
scouts, guides, spies, cooks, teamsters, diggers and choppers from the
blacks of the South, whether we allow them to fight for us or not.... I
entreat you to render a hearty and unequivocal obedience to the law of
the land."
Lincoln
had already shown his attitude by his failure to countermand an order
of one of his commanders, General Henry Halleck, who forbade fugitive
Negroes to enter his army's lines. Now he replied to Greeley:
Dear
Sir: ... I have not meant to leave any one in doubt. .. . My paramount
object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save
or destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave,
I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I
would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others
alone, I would also do that. What I do about Slavery and the colored
race, I do because it helps to save this Union; and what I forbear, I
forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. . .. I
have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty, and I
intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men,
everywhere, could be free. Yours. A. Lincoln.
So Lincoln distinguished between his "personal wish" and his "official duty."
When
in September 1862, Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation
Proclamation, it was a military move, giving the South four months to
stop rebelling, threatening to emancipate their slaves if they continued
to fight, promising to leave slavery untouched in states that came over
to the North:
That
on the 1st day of January, AD 1863, all persons held as slaves within
any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be
in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward and
forever free. . . .
Thus,
when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued January 1, 1863, it
declared slaves free in those areas still fighting against the Union
(which it listed very carefully), and said nothing about slaves behind
Union lines. As Hofstadter put it, the Emancipation Proclamation "had
all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading." The London Spectator
wrote concisely: "The principle is not that a human being cannot justly
own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the
United States."
Limited
as it was, the Emancipation Proclamation spurred antislavery forces. By
the summer of 1864, 400,000 signatures asking legislation to end
slavery had been gathered and sent to Congress, something unprecedented
in the history of the country. That April, the Senate had adopted the
Thirteenth Amendment, declaring an end to slavery, and in January 1865,
the House of Representatives followed.
With
the Proclamation, the Union army was open to blacks. And the more
blacks entered the war, the more it appeared a war for their liberation.
The more whites had to sacrifice, the more resentment there was,
particularly among poor whites in the North, who were drafted by a law
that allowed the rich to buy their way out of the draft for $300. And so
the draft riots of 1863 took place, uprisings of angry whites in
northern cities, their targets not the rich, far away, but the blacks,
near at hand. It was an orgy of death and violence. A black man in
Detroit described what he saw: a mob, with kegs of beer on wagons, armed
with clubs and bricks, marching through the city, attacking black men,
women, children. He heard one man say: "If we are got to be killed up
for Negroes then we will kill every one in this town."
The
Civil War was one of the bloodiest in human history up to that time:
600,000 dead on both sides, in a population of 30 million-the
equivalent, in the United States of 1978, with a population of 250
million, of 5 million dead. As the battles became more intense, as the
bodies piled up, as war fatigue grew, the existence of blacks in the
South, 4 million of them, became more and more a hindrance to the South,
and more and more an opportunity for the North. Du Bois, in Black Reconstruction, pointed this out:
..
. these slaves had enormous power in their hands. Simply by stopping
work, they could threaten the Confederacy with starvation. By walking
into the Federal camps, they showed to doubting Northerners the easy
possibility of using them thus, but by the same gesture, depriving their
enemies of their use in just these fields....
It
was this plain alternative that brought Lee's sudden surrender. Either
the South must make terms with its slaves, free them, use them to fight
the North, and thereafter no longer treat them as bondsmen; or they
could surrender to the North with the assumption that the North after
the war must help them to defend slavery, as it had before.
George Rawick, a sociologist and anthropologist, describes the development of blacks up to and into the Civil War:
The
slaves went from being frightened human beings, thrown among strange
men, including fellow slaves who were not their kinsmen and who did not
speak their language or understand their customs and habits, to what W.
E. B. DuBois once described as the general strike whereby hundreds of
thousands of slaves deserted the plantations, destroying the Smith's
ability to supply its army.
Black
women played an important part in the war, especially toward the end.
Sojourner Truth, the legendary ex-slave who had been active in the
women's rights movement, became recruiter of black troops for the Union
army, as did Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin of Boston. Harriet Tubman
raided plantations, leading black and white troops, and in one
expedition freed 750 slaves. Women moved with the colored regiments that
grew as the Union army marched through the South, helping their
husbands, enduring terrible hardships on the long military treks, in
which many children died. They suffered the fate of soldiers, as in
April 1864, when Confederate troops at Fort Pillow, Kentucky, massacred
Union soldiers who had surrendered-black and white, along with women and
children in an adjoining camp.
It
has been said that black acceptance of slavery is proved by the fact
that during the Civil War, when there were opportunities for escape,
most slaves stayed on the plantation. In fact, half a million ran away-
about one in five, a high proportion when one considers that there was
great difficulty in knowing where to go and how to live.
The
owner of a large plantation in South Carolina and Georgia wrote in
1862: "This war has taught us the perfect impossibility of placing the
least confidence in the negro. In too numerous instances those we
esteemed the most have been the first to desert us." That same year, a
lieutenant in the Confederate army and once mayor of Savannah, Georgia,
wrote: "I deeply regret to learn that the Negroes still continue to
desert to the enemy."
A
minister in Mississippi wrote in the fall of 1862: "On my arrival was
surprised to hear that our negroes stampeded to the Yankees last night
or rather a portion of them.... I think every one, but with one or two
exceptions will go to the Yankees. Eliza and her family are certain to
go. She does not conceal her thoughts but plainly manifests her opinions
by her conduct-insolent and insulting." And a woman's plantation
journal of January 1865:
The
people are all idle on the plantations, most of them seeking their own
pleasure. Many servants have proven faithful, others false and
rebellious against all authority and restraint. .. . Their condition is
one of perfect anarchy and rebellion. They have placed themselves in
perfect antagonism to their owners and to all government and control.. .
. Nearly all the house servants have left their homes; and from most of
the plantations they have gone in a body.
Also in 1865, a South Carolina planter wrote to the New York Tribune that
the
conduct of the Negro in the late crisis of our affairs has convinced me
that we were all laboring under a delusion.... I believed that these
people were content, happy, and attached to their masters. But events
and reflection have caused me to change these positions.. .. If they
were content, happy and attached to their masters, why did they desert
him in the moment of his need and flock to an enemy, whom they did not
know; and thus left their perhaps really good masters whom they did know
from infancy?
Genovese
notes that the war produced no general rising of slaves, but: "In
Lafayette County, Mississippi, slaves responded to the Emancipation
Proclamation by driving off their overseers and dividing the land and
implements among themselves." Aptheker reports a conspiracy of Negroes
in Arkansas in 1861 to kill their enslavers. In Kentucky that year,
houses and barns were burned by Negroes, and in the city of New Castle
slaves paraded through the city "singing political songs, and shouting
for Lincoln," according to newspaper accounts. After the Emancipation
Proclamation, a Negro waiter in Richmond, Virginia, was arrested for
leading "a servile plot," while in Yazoo City, Mississippi, slaves
burned the courthouse and fourteen homes.
There were special moments: Robert Smalls (later a South Carolina Congressman) and other blacks took over a steamship, The Planter, and sailed it past the Confederate guns to deliver it to the Union navy.
Most
slaves neither submitted nor rebelled. They continued to work, waiting
to see what happened. When opportunity came, they left, often joining
the Union army. Two hundred thousand blacks were in the army and navy,
and 38,000 were killed. Historian James McPherson says: "Without their
help, the North could not have won the war as soon as it did, and
perhaps it could not have won at all."
What
happened to blacks in the Union army and in the northern cities during
the war gave some hint of how limited the emancipation would be, even
with full victory over the Confederacy. Off- duty black soldiers were
attacked in northern cities, as in Zanesville, Ohio, in February 1864,
where cries were heard to "kill the nigger." Black soldiers were used
for the heaviest and dirtiest work, digging trenches, hauling logs and
camion, loading ammunition, digging wells for white regiments. White
privates received $13 a month; Negro privates received $10 a month.
Late
in the war, a black sergeant of the Third South Carolina Volunteers,
William Walker, marched his company to his captain's tent and ordered
them to stack arms and resign from the army as a protest against what he
considered a breach of contract, because of unequal pay. He was
court-martialed and shot for mutiny. Finally, in June 1864, Congress
passed a law granting equal pay to Negro soldiers.
The
Confederacy was desperate in the latter part of the war, and some of
its leaders suggested the slaves, more and more an obstacle to their
cause, be enlisted, used, and freed. After a number of military defeats,
the Confederate secretary of war, Judah Benjamin, wrote in late 1864 to
a newspaper editor in Charleston: ". . . It is well known that General
Lee, who commands so largely the confidence of the people, is strongly
in favor of our using the negroes for defense, and emancipating them, if
necessary, for that purpose. . . ." One general, indignant, wrote: "If
slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong."
By
early 1865, the pressure had mounted, and in March President Davis of
the Confederacy signed a "Negro Soldier Law" authorizing the enlistment
of slaves as soldiers, to be freed by consent of their owners and their
state governments. But before it had any significant effect, the war was
over.
Former slaves, interviewed by the Federal Writers' Project in the thirties, recalled the war's end. Susie Melton:
I
was a young gal, about ten years old, and we done heard that Lincoln
gonna turn the niggers free. Ol' missus say there wasn't nothin' to it.
Then a Yankee soldier told someone in Williamsburg that Lincoln done
signed the 'mancipation. Was wintertime and mighty cold that night, but
everybody commenced getting ready to leave. Didn't care nothin' about
missus - was going to the Union lines. And all that night the niggers
danced and sang right out in the cold. Next morning at day break we all
started out with blankets and clothes and pots and pans and chickens
piled on our backs, 'cause missus said we couldn't take no horses or
carts. And as the sun come up over the trees, the niggers started to
singing: Sun, you be here and I'll be gone
Sun, you be here and I'll be gone
Sun, you be here and I'll be gone
Bye, bye, don't grieve after me
Won't give you my place, not for yours
Bye, bye, don't grieve after me
Cause you be here and I'll be gone.
Anna Woods:
We
wasn't there in Texas long when the soldiers marched in to tell us that
we were free. ... I remembers one woman. She jumped on a barrel and she
shouted. She jumped off and she shouted. She jumped hack on again and
shouted some more. She kept that up for a long time, just jumping on a
barrel and back off again.
Annie Mae Weathers said:
I
remember hearing my pa say that when somebody came and hollered, "You
niggers is free at last," say he just dropped his hoc and said in a
queer voice, "Thank God for that."
The Federal Writers' Project recorded an ex-slave named Fannie Berry:
Niggers
shoutin' and clappin' hands and singin'! Chillun runnin' all over the
place beatin' time and yellin'! Everybody happy. Sho' did some
celebratin'. Run to the kitchen and shout in the window:
"Mammy, don't you cook no more.
You's free! You's free!"
Many
Negroes understood that their status after the war, whatever their
situation legally, would depend on whether they owned the land they
worked on or would be forced to be semislaves for others. In 1863, a
North Carolina Negro wrote that "if the strict law of right and justice
is to be observed, the country around me is the entailed inheritance of
the Americans of African descent, purchased by the invaluable labor of
our ancestors, through a life of tears and groans, under the lash and
yoke of tyranny."
Abandoned
plantations, however, were leased to former planters, and to white men
of the North. As one colored newspaper said: "The slaves were made serfs
and chained to the soil. . . . Such was the boasted freedom acquired by
the colored man at the hands of the Yankee."
Under
congressional policy approved by Lincoln, the property confiscated
during the war under the Confiscation Act of July 1862 would revert to
the heirs of the Confederate owners. Dr. John Rock, a black physician in
Boston, spoke at a meeting: "Why talk about compensating masters?
Compensate them for what? What do you owe them? What does the slave owe
them? What does society owe them? Compensate the master? . . . It is the
slave who ought to be compensated. The property of the South is by
right the property of the slave. . . ."
Some
land was expropriated on grounds the taxes were delinquent, and sold at
auction. But only a few blacks could afford to buy this. In the South
Carolina Sea Islands, out of 16,000 acres up for sale in March of 1863,
freedmen who pooled their money were able to buy 2,000 acres, the rest
being bought by northern investors and speculators. A freedman on the
Islands dictated a letter to a former teacher now in Philadelphia:
My
Dear Young Missus: Do, my missus, tell Linkum dat we wants land - dis
bery land dat is rich wid de sweat ob de face and de blood ob we back. .
. . We could a bin buy all we want, but dey make de lots too big, and
cut we out.
De
word cum from Mass Linkum's self, dat we take out claims and hold on
ter um, an' plant um, and he will see dat we get um, every man ten or
twenty acre. We too glad. We stake out an' list, but fore de time for
plant, dese commissionaries sells to white folks all de best land. Where
Linkum?
In
early 1865, General William T. Sherman held a conference in Savannah,
Georgia, with twenty Negro ministers and church officials, mostly former
slaves, at which one of them expressed their need: "The way we can best
take care of ourselves is to have land, and till it by our labor. . .
." Four days later Sherman issued "Special Field Order No. 15,"
designating the entire southern coastline 30 miles inland for exclusive
Negro settlement. Freedmen could settle there, taking no more than 40
acres per family. By June 1865, forty thousand freedmen had moved onto
new farms in this area. But President Andrew Johnson, in August of 1865,
restored this land to the Confederate owners, and the freedmen were
forced off, some at bayonet point.
Ex-slave Thomas Hall told the Federal Writers' Project:
Lincoln
got the praise for freeing us, but did he do it? He gave us freedom
without giving us any chance to live to ourselves and we still had to
depend on the southern white man for work, food, and clothing, and he
held us out of necessity and want in a state of servitude but little
better than slavery.
The
American government had set out to fight the slave states in 1861, not
to end slavery, but to retain the enormous national territory and market
and resources. Yet, victory required a crusade, and the momentum of
that crusade brought new forces into national politics: more blacks
determined to make their freedom mean something; more whites-whether
Freedman's Bureau officials, or teachers in the Sea Islands, or
"carpetbaggers" with various mixtures of humanitarianism and personal
ambition-concerned with racial equality. There was also the powerful
interest of the Republican party in maintaining control over the
national government, with the prospect of southern black votes to
accomplish this. Northern businessmen, seeing Republican policies as
beneficial to them, went along for a while.
The
result was that brief period after the Civil War in which southern
Negroes voted, elected blacks to state legislatures and to Congress,
introduced free and racially mixed public education to the South. A
legal framework was constructed. The Thirteenth Amendment outlawed
slavery: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a
punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,
shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their
jurisdiction." The Fourteenth Amendment repudiated the prewar Dred Scott
decision by declaring that "all persons born or naturalized in the
United States" were citizens. It also seemed to make a powerful
statement for racial equality, severely limiting "states' rights":
