Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (167 page)

These opponents remained in the majority until February 1865. Yet with the Yankees thundering at the gates, their arguments took flight into an aura of unreality. We can win without black help, they said, if only the absentees and stragglers return to the ranks and the whole people rededicate themselves to the Cause. "The freemen of the Confederate States must work out their own redemption, or they must be the slaves of their own slaves," proclaimed the
Charleston Mercury
edited by those original secessionists the Robert Barnwell Rhetts, father and son. "The day that the army of Virginia allows a negro regiment to enter their lines as soldiers they will be degraded, ruined, and disgraced," roared Robert Toombs. His fellow Georgian Howell Cobb agreed that "the moment you resort to negro soldiers your white soldiers will be lost to you. . . . The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong."
¹¹

And was not that the theory the South fought for? "It would be the most extraordinary instance of self-stultification the world ever saw" to arm and emancipate slaves, declared the Rhetts. "It is abolition doctrine . . . the very doctrine which the war was commenced to put down," maintained a North Carolina newspaper. It would "surrender the essential and distinctive principle of Southern civilization," agreed the
Richmond Examiner.
¹²
Many southerners apparently preferred to lose the war than to win it with the help of black men. "Victory itself would be robbed of its glory if shared with slaves," said a Mississippi congressman.

10
.
Charlottesville Chronicle
, reprinted in
Richmond Sentinel
, Dec. 21, 1864, in Durden,
The Gray and the Black
, 147.

11
.
Charleston Mercury
, Nov. 3, 1864, in Durden,
The Gray and the Black
, 99; Toombs quoted in Foote,
Civil War
, III, 860; Cobb in
O.R.
, Ser. IV, Vol. 3, pp. 1009–10.

12
.
Charleston Mercury
, Nov. 3, 19, 1864,
North Carolina Standard
, Jan. 17, 1865, in Durden,
The Gray and the Black
, 99, 114, 177;
Richmond Examiner
, Jan. 14, 1865, quoted in Paul D. Escott,
After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure ofConfederate Nationalism
(Baton Rouge, 1978), 154.

It would mean "the poor man . . . reduced to the level of a nigger," insisted the
Charleston Mercury
. "His wife and daughter are to be hustled on the street by black wenches, their equals. Swaggering buck niggers are to ogle them and elbow them." Senator Louis Wigfall of Texas "wanted to live in no country in which the man who blacked his boots and curried his horse was his equal." "If such a terrible calamity is to befall us," declared the
Lynchburg Republican
, "we infinitely prefer that Lincoln shall be the instrument of our disaster and degradation, than that we ourselves should strike the cowardly and suicidal blow."
¹³

But the shock effect of Lincoln's insistence at Hampton Roads on unconditional surrender helped the Davis administration make headway against these arguments. During February many petitions and letters from soldiers in the Petersburg trenches poured into Richmond to challenge the belief that white soldiers would refuse to fight alongside blacks. While "slavery is the normal condition of the negro . . . as indispensable to [his] prosperity and happiness . . . as is liberty to the whites," declared the 56th Virginia, nevertheless "if the public exigencies require that any number of our male slaves be enlisted in the military service in order to [maintain] our Government, we are willing to make concessions to their false and unenlightened notions of the blessings of liberty."
¹⁴

Robert E. Lee's opinion would have a decisive influence. For months rumors had circulated that he favored arming the slaves. Lee had indeed expressed his private opinion that "we should employ them without delay [even] at the risk which may be produced upon our social institutions." On February 18 he broke his public silence with a letter to the congressional sponsor of a Negro soldier bill. This measure was "not only expedient but necessary," wrote Lee. "The negroes, under proper circumstances, will make efficient soldiers. I think we could at least do as well with them as the enemy. . . . Those who are employed should be freed. It would be neither just nor wise . . . to require them to serve as slaves."
¹⁵

13
. Mississippi congressman quoted in Durden,
The Gray and the Black
, 140;
Charleston Mercury
, Jan. 26, 1865, quoted in Bell Irvin Wiley,
Southern Negroes 1861–1865
(New Haven, 1938), 156–57; Louis Wigfall quoted in E. Merton Coulter,
The Confederate States of America
1861–1865 (Baton Rouge, 1950), 268;
Lynchburg Republican
, Nov. 2, 1864, in Durden,
The Gray and the Black
, 94.

14
. Published in
Richmond Whig
, Feb. 23, 1865, reprinted in Durden,
The Gray andthe Black
, 222–23.

15
. Lee to Andrew Hunter, Jan. 11, 1865, in
O.R.
, Ser. IV, Vol. 3, pp. 1012–13; Lee to Ethelbert Barksdale, Feb. 18, 1865, in Durden,
The Gray and the Black
, 206.

Lee's great prestige carried the day—but just barely. Although the powerful
Richmond Examiner
dared to express a doubt whether Lee was "a 'good Southerner'; that is, whether he is thoroughly satisfied of the justice and beneficence of negro slavery," even this anti-administration newspaper recognized that "the country will not venture to deny to General Lee . . .
anything
he may ask for."
¹⁶
By a vote of 40 to 37 the House passed a bill authorizing the president to requisition a quota of black soldiers from each state. In deference to state's rights, the bill did not mandate freedom for slave soldiers. The Senate nevertheless defeated the measure by a single vote, with both senators from Lee's own state voting No. The Virginia legislature meanwhile enacted its own law for the enlistment of black soldiers—without, however, requiring the emancipation of those who were slaves—and instructed its senators to vote for the congressional bill. They did so, enabling it to pass by 9 to 8 (with several abstentions) and become law on March 13. In the few weeks of life left to the Confederacy no other state followed Virginia's lead. The two companies of black soldiers hastily organized in Richmond never saw action. Nor did most of these men obtain freedom until the Yankees—headed by a black cavalry regiment—marched into the Confederate capital on April 3.
¹⁷

A last-minute diplomatic initiative to secure British and French recognition in return for emancipation also proved barren of results. The impetus for this effort came from Duncan F. Kenner of Louisiana, a prominent member of the Confederate Congress and one of the South's largest slaveholders. Convinced since 1862 that slavery was a foreign-policy millstone around the Confederacy's neck, Kenner had long urged an emancipationist diplomacy. His proposals got nowhere until December 1864, when Jefferson Davis called Kenner in and conceded that the time had come to play this last card. Kenner traveled to Paris and London

16
.
Richmond Examiner
, Feb. 16, 25, in Durden,
The Gray and the Black
, 199, 226.

17
. War Department regulations governing the recruitment of slave soldiers bootlegged a quasi-freedom into the process by stipulating that a slave could be enlisted only with his own consent and that of his master, who was required to grant the slave in writing, "as far as he may, the rights of a freedman." Whether this ambiguous language actually conferred freedom, as several historians maintain, must remain forever moot. See Durden,
The Gray and the Black
, 268–70; Escort,
After Secession
, 252; and Emory Thomas,
The Confederate Nation 1861–1865
(New York, 1979). 296–97.

as a special envoy to offer abolition for recognition. Davis of course could not commit his Congress on this matter, and these lawmakers could not in turn commit the states, which had constitutional authority over the institution. But perhaps European governments would overlook these complications.

Kenner's difficulties in getting out of the Confederacy foretokened the fate of his mission. The fall of Fort Fisher prevented his departure on a blockade-runner. He had to travel in disguise to New York and take ship from this Yankee port for France. Louis Napoleon as usual refused to act without Britain. So James Mason accompanied Kenner to London, where on March 14 they presented the proposition to Palmerston. Once again the Confederates learned the hard lesson of diplomacy: nothing succeeds like military success. "On the question of recognition," Mason reported to Secretary of State Benjamin, "the British Government had not been satisfied at any period of the war that our independence was achieved beyond peradventure, and did not feel authorized so to declare [now] when the events of a few weeks might prove it a failure. . . . As affairs now stood, our seaports given up, the comparatively unobstructed march of Sherman, etc., rather increased than diminished previous objections."
¹⁸

II

While the South debated the relationship of slavery to its Cause, the North acted. Lincoln interpreted his re-election as a mandate for passage of the 13th Amendment to end slavery forever. The voters had retired a large number of Democratic congressmen. But until the 38th Congress expired on March 4, 1865, they retained their seats and could block House passage of the Amendment by the necessary two-thirds majority. In the next Congress the Republicans would have a three-quarters House majority and could easily pass it. Lincoln intended to call a special session in March if necessary to do the job. But he preferred to accomplish it sooner, by a bipartisan majority, as a gesture of wartime unity in favor of this measure that Lincoln considered essential to Union victory. "In a great national crisis, like ours," he told Congress in his message of December 6, 1864, "unanimity of action among those seeking a common end is very desirable—almost indispensable." This was

18
. Frank Lawrence Owsley,
King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America
(Chicago, 1931), 550–61; quotation from 560.

an expression of an ideal rather than reality, since most war measures, especially those concerning slavery, had been passed by a strictly Republican vote. For the historic achievement of terminating the institution, however, Lincoln appealed to Democrats to recognize the "will of the majority" as expressed by the election.
¹⁹

But most Democrats preferred to stand on principle in defense of the past. Even if the war had killed slavery, they refused to help bury it. The party remained officially opposed to the 13th Amendment as "unwise, impolitic, cruel, and unworthy of the support of civilized people." A few Democratic congressmen believed otherwise, however. The party had suffered disaster in the 1864 election, said one, "because we [would] not venture to cut loose from the dead carcass of negro slavery." Another declared that to persist in opposition to the Amendment "will be to simply announce ourselves a set of impracticables no more fit to deal with practical affairs than the old gentleman in Copperfield."
²⁰
Encouraged by such sentiments, the Lincoln administration targeted a dozen or so lame-duck Democratic congressmen and subjected them to a barrage of blandishments. Secretary of State Seward oversaw this lobbying effort. Some congressmen were promised government jobs for themselves or relatives; others received administration favors of one sort or another.
²¹

This arm-twisting and log-rolling paid off, though until the House voted on January 31, 1865, no one could predict which way it would go. As a few Democrats early in the roll call voted Aye, Republican faces brightened. Sixteen of the eighty Democrats finally voted for the Amendment; fourteen of them were lame ducks. Eight other Democrats had absented themselves. This enabled the Amendment to pass with two votes to spare, 119 to 56. When the result was announced, Republicans on the floor and spectators in the gallery broke into prolonged—and unprecedented—cheering, while in the streets of Washington cannons boomed a hundred-gun salute. The scene "beggared description,"