The Civil War, 1860–1865

This is Unit Fifteen, part three, on emancipation and the end of the war. Part two closed with Lincoln telling Horace Greeley he would save the Union by freeing all, some or none. This half is how that changed, and who changed it. Carry two corrections. The first is about the Emancipation Proclamation, which is the most misunderstood document in this course. The familiar line is that it freed nobody where the United States actually had power, and that version is too strong — the exceptions were enumerated by name, not stated as a general rule, and where the Union held ground the document had not named, people were free at once. The second correction is that the Proclamation's largest practical effect, in the anchor's own judgement, was diplomatic rather than domestic. By the end you will be able to state its legal architecture. To state that diplomatic effect. To say what Black soldiers were paid. To distinguish the two Fort Pillows. And to read a first-hand account properly.

Three entries, and note who acts first in all of them.

Who forced the question.

USH1 2144 The Contrabands

The enslaved forced the question first, and from the war's start thousands fled to Union lines rather than waiting for a policy about them, with General Benjamin Butler labelling them contrabands of war in May eighteen sixty-one. His reasoning was that since the southern states had left, federal fugitive slave law no longer bound him. They were protected, not returned.

What Congress passed.

USH1 2145 The Confiscation Acts

The Confiscation Act of August eighteen sixty-one let the Union seize property used by the Confederacy, including enslaved persons, and a second act followed, with slavery abolished in Washington in April eighteen sixty-two and banned in the territories that year. The territorial ban made the Wilmot Proviso and the Free-Soil dream real at last. None of these addressed slavery as an institution.

The plan Lincoln gave up.

USH1 2146 Colonization Abandoned

Lincoln's plan for enslaved people once freed had long involved sending them to Liberia, and in August eighteen sixty-two he proposed a Central American colony, which Black leaders and abolitionists rejected outright. Lincoln abandoned it. Unit Thirteen covered colonization as one of three answers to slavery, and this is where the oldest of the three dies.

One entry now, and it is the one people get wrong in both directions.

The Proclamation.

USH1 2147 The Emancipation Proclamation

Lincoln issued an ultimatum on September twenty-second, eighteen sixty-two, shortly after Antietam, giving the Confederate states until January first, eighteen sixty-three to return, after which slavery would end at the war's conclusion. The Confederacy did nothing. The Proclamation issued that January declared that 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. Its legal architecture is what exams test. It rested on commander-in-chief powers. It excluded territory outside Lincoln's control, so slaveholders there could not sue. It did not apply to the Union slave states of Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware and Missouri, so they could not sue either. And its exceptions were enumerated by name: thirteen Louisiana parishes including New Orleans, the forty-eight counties of West Virginia and seven more Virginia counties including Norfolk and Portsmouth, and Tennessee entire. The familiar version says it freed no one where the United States had power, and that version is too strong. The exceptions were named, not general. Where the Union held territory the Proclamation had named, slavery deliberately stood; where it held territory the Proclamation had not named, such as the South Carolina sea islands and parts of Florida, people were free at once and the army was there to make it so. Every exception is a place where a suit could have been brought or a border state lost. What the document did was change what the war was for, and one hundred and ninety thousand Black soldiers followed from it.

Four entries on how it landed at home, and the first is the ugliest thing in the unit.

The draft riots.

USH1 2148 The Draft Riots

On July thirteenth, eighteen sixty-three, two days after the first draft lottery, a drafted fire company commander started a riot that spread across New York, with White mobs killing Black New Yorkers and destroying an African American orphanage. Federal troops ended it on the fourth day. Over a hundred died, a thousand were injured, and a fifth of the Black population fled.

Vicksburg.

USH1 2149 Vicksburg

Vicksburg was a commercial centre on the bluffs above the Mississippi, and two attempts to take it in eighteen sixty-two both failed, with residents hiding in caves and eating pets to survive a siege of more than a month. The trapped Confederates surrendered on July third, eighteen sixty-three, and the Confederacy was split in two along its central river.

Gettysburg.

USH1 2150 Gettysburg

Lee invaded the North after beating a larger Union army at Chancellorsville, hoping to pull troops from Vicksburg and win British and French recognition, and three days at Gettysburg in July cost him more than a third of his army. Around fifteen thousand men made Pickett's Charge across nearly a mile of open field and more than half died.

What Lincoln said there.

USH1 2151 The Gettysburg Address

David Wills, a Gettysburg attorney, campaigned for a national cemetery at the battlefield, and Lincoln spoke briefly at its dedication after a two-hour featured speech, finishing the address as a guest at Wills's house the day before. He dedicated the nation to a new birth of freedom, and to government of the people, by the people, for the people.

Two entries abroad, and the first is the second correction I promised.

Why Britain never recognised the Confederacy.

USH1 2152 Britain and the Proclamation

The Confederacy expected cotton dependence to secure British support, and Britain did build and sell ironclads to run the blockade, including the CSS Florida and CSS Alabama, both destroyed during the war. But Britain avoided war with the United States, which supplied its grain and bought its goods, and found other cotton in India and Egypt. The Confederacy's staunch commitment to slavery eventually worked against British recognition, Britain having abolished slavery in eighteen thirty-three, and the Proclamation resolved British doubts about Union objectives, with many British citizens supporting Union victory after January eighteen sixty-three. The anchor calls this the Proclamation's largest practical effect, and it is diplomatic. Pair it with the previous entry and the shape appears: the document that freed almost nobody on the day it was signed may have decided the war abroad, by making recognition of the Confederacy politically impossible in a country that had abolished slavery thirty years earlier.

What France was doing.

USH1 2153 France in Mexico

Napoleon the Third treated the American war as an opportunity to restore French imperial holdings, and a French fleet captured Veracruz in eighteen sixty-one, with French forces advancing on Mexico City and being defeated by Mexican forces in eighteen sixty-two. France conquered Mexico and held it until eighteen sixty-seven, using the Civil War as cover for its own colonial project.

Three entries on the soldiers the Proclamation made possible, and the third carries a name into the next unit.

Who enlisted.

USH1 2154 African American Soldiers

Union forces used contrabands for manual labour in eighteen sixty-one and sixty-two, and enlisted African American men only after the Proclamation, with over one hundred and ninety thousand serving by the war's end in eighteen sixty-five. About eighty-five percent were formerly enslaved, fighting for universal liberation. The Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts fought at Fort Wagner, South Carolina.

How the army treated them.

USH1 2155 Unequal Pay

African American soldiers received ten dollars a month with three deducted for clothing, while White soldiers received thirteen dollars with no deduction, and many Black regiments hauled supplies, cooked and dug trenches rather than fighting. Racism among White Union soldiers produced beliefs that Black soldiers were ineffective. The pay was corrected in eighteen sixty-four, with equal pay and back compensation from sixty-three.

The fort that appears twice.

USH1 2156 Fort Pillow, 1862 and 1864

Fort Pillow appears twice in this chapter, two years apart, and the two events have nothing in common but the name. On June fourth, eighteen sixty-two, Confederate defenders abandoned Fort Pillow, forty miles from Memphis, without a fight, and Memphis fell two days later. In April eighteen sixty-four Confederate forces under Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest captured the same fort and, rather than imprisoning African American soldiers as they did White soldiers, executed them. The massacre outraged the North and led the Union to refuse further prisoner exchanges. Keep the years attached or the entry is useless. And keep Forrest's name attached to both halves of his career, because he founds the Ku Klux Klan in Unit Sixteen. That is the clearest single line running from the war into Reconstruction's collapse, and it runs through one man who commanded the killing of Black soldiers who had surrendered.

Two entries on the final year, and the second decided an election.

Grant's strategy.

USH1 2157 Grant's Strategy

Grant relied on superior numbers and on the recognition that Union soldiers could be replaced while Confederate soldiers could not, advancing relentlessly despite massive casualties, as at the Wilderness in May eighteen sixty-four, where Confederates halted him and he pushed forward anyway. Spotsylvania followed, then Cold Harbor in early June, then a nine-month siege of Petersburg, the rail centre supplying Richmond.

Atlanta.

USH1 2158 Sherman Takes Atlanta

The losses under Grant hurt northern morale badly and many northerners questioned the war, until the navy took Mobile Bay in August eighteen sixty-four, with Sherman advancing from Tennessee into Georgia against Joseph E. Johnston. Davis replaced Johnston with John B. Hood, whose daring but failed direct attack lost Atlanta on September second, of tremendous significance to a war-weary Union.

One entry, a first-hand account, and the instruction is to read it twice.

Dolly Sumner Lunt.

USH1 2159 Dolly Sumner Lunt

Dolly Sumner Lunt was a Georgia widow running a cotton plantation when Sherman's army passed through, and she recorded what happened. Enslaved workers were forcibly removed. One hid in bed claiming sickness. Another crawled under the floor, was pulled out, and was mounted on a horse. The army tore down her garden fencing, made roads through her back-yard, and drove off her livestock. She wrote that they had wantonly desolated her home when there was no necessity for it. She reckoned herself poorer by thirty thousand dollars than she had been the previous morning, and she declared herself a much stronger Rebel. Sherman's march cut a swath of destruction to Savannah, and despite strict instructions preserving civilian property, houses and barns were burned, homes were looted, food was stolen, crops were destroyed, orchards were burned, and livestock was killed or confiscated. Towns remained standing. Savannah fell on December twenty-first, eighteen sixty-four, which Sherman proclaimed a Christmas gift for Lincoln. Read the passage for what it contains as well as for what it says. Lunt is a reliable witness to the destruction of her property and an unreliable one about what she is watching, and both facts are usable. The thirty thousand dollars she lost was mostly the people, which is why the sum appears in the same sentence as their removal. The person who crawled under the floor was hiding from an army that had come to free them, and the passage does not tell you why, because Lunt could not have known.

One entry to close the unit, on the election and the surrender.

The election, and the end.

USH1 2160 The Election of 1864 and the End

Lincoln's greatest liability was the Proclamation and the enlistment of Black soldiers, and the Copperhead Democrats ran George B. McClellan, who seemed likely to win, until Atlanta fell and Sheridan succeeded in the Shenandoah Valley before the vote. Lincoln lost only New Jersey, Delaware and Kentucky. Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April ninth, eighteen sixty-five, after six hundred thousand deaths.

Look at what you can now do. You can state the Proclamation's legal architecture — commander-in-chief powers, territory outside Lincoln's control excluded, the four Union slave states untouched, and exceptions enumerated by name — and you can correct the familiar version, because where the Union held ground the document had not named, people were free at once. You can state what the anchor calls its largest practical effect, which was diplomatic: it made British recognition of the Confederacy politically impossible. You can say what Black soldiers were paid, which was ten dollars less three for clothing against thirteen with no deduction, corrected in eighteen sixty-four with back pay. You can distinguish the two Fort Pillows, a bloodless withdrawal in sixty-two and a massacre of surrendered men in sixty-four, and name Forrest, who founds the Klan in the next unit. And you can read Lunt's account properly, as reliable about her losses and unreliable about what she was watching, with the thirty thousand dollars being mostly the people themselves.