Never Call Retreat (18 page)

A few weeks later the President sent more specific advice.

The governor of Missouri had called a constitutional convention and a plan for gradual emancipation was being adopted, and now Schofield wanted to know what he should do when this plan went into effect. Should he give military protection to slave-owners in their exercise of human property rights during the time when emancipation was proceeding gradually? In other words, would the United States Army uphold slavery up to the time the cut-off point was reached? This presented the author of the Emancipation Proclamation with a nice question, and in his reply Mr. Lincoln carefully drew a line between the extremes. In substance, he said that slavery had to die but that there could be some flexibility if the slave-owners themselves consented to its death. His letter to the general read thus:

"Desirous as I am that emancipation shall be adopted by Missouri, and believing as I do that
gradual
can be made better than
immediate
for both black and white, except when military necessity changes the case, my impulse is to say that such protection should be given. I cannot know exactly what shape an act of emancipation may take. If the period from the initiation to the final end should be comparatively short, and the act should prevent persons being sold, during that period, into more lasting slavery, the whole would be easier. I do not wish to pledge the general government to the affirmative support of even temporary slavery, beyond what can be fairly claimed under the constitution. I suppose, however, that this is not desired; but that it is desired for the military force of the United States, while in Missouri, to not be used in subverting the temporarily reserved legal rights in slaves during the progress of emancipation. This I would desire also. I have very earnestly urged the slave states to accept emancipation; and it ought to be and is an object with me not to overthrow or thwart what any of them may in good faith do to that end.

"You are therefore authorized to act in the spirit of this letter, in conjunction with what may appear to be the military necessities of your department."
⁷

5.
The Way of the Liberated

THE TROUBLE WAS that events were moving too fast. The Emancipation Proclamation had been nothing more than a statement of intent, written by a man who supposed that there would be time to make all necessary adjustments. What was happening in Missouri was a case in point: the people of this state were trying to work out a slow transition, and the President was willing to allow a margin for trial-and-error expedients in the hope that other slave states would fall in line. But emancipation came with such a rush that there was no time to adjust anything. Men found that they were living with it while they still wondered whether it ought to happen at all.

In his notable speech Congressman Vallandigham warned that nothing of the kind could possibly occur. The institution had too many roots and the roots went down too far in too many hearts. Sudden change was out of the question.

"You cannot abolish slavery by the sword; still less by proclamations, though the President were to 'proclaim' every month," he cried. "Neither, sir, can you abolish slavery by argument. As well attempt to abolish marriage, or the relation of paternity."
¹

This was a perfectly logical argument, robbed of its meaning by the fact that what Vallandigham considered impossible was actually being done. Slavery
was
being abolished by the sword and by proclamation, by fire and by sudden uprising of the spirit; perhaps because there was no other earthly way to do it. The greatest single change in American life arrived without the benefit of any advance planning.

To begin with, the proclamation was taken with deadly seriousness by the people most concerned, the Negroes themselves. To others it might be no more than a piece of paper that would mean much or nothing depending on how the war went; to the Negroes it was the parting of the Red Sea. It meant freedom now and everywhere, as fast as the word could travel, and the Negroes acted on this belief. Even though it had always been buttressed by unlimited force, slavery in America really existed by the-consent of the governed. This consent, to be sure, came largely because the governed were utterly helpless, but it was a basic element in the institution, and the worst nightmares of slaveholding society arose from the fear that consent might someday be withdrawn, with violence. Now, almost overnight, the consent was gone. The Negro was using no violence; he just was not consenting any more, and he never would consent again no matter what happened because he had at last been told that he did not have to.

The lack of violence may have been at least partly due to the fact that the proclamation had been issued. The feeling that the Federal government was on their side relieved the Negroes from the desire to start the war for freedom on the plantations; the dreadful nightmares failed to come true because the slaves believed that they were or soon would be under the protection of the United States Army. Some time earlier Mr. Lincoln had told an acquaintance that the proclamation was essentially conservative, sparing the slave-owners possible horrors and making servile insurrection unnecessary.
²
Now events were bearing him out.

Because the Negro response was so strong, Mr. Lincoln began to see that the problems that came with freedom would have to be solved in America. His long-held idea that it might be possible to avoid these by transferring the Negroes en masse to some far-off colony began to fade when he realized that the colored folk not only wanted freedom but wanted to be Americans, enjoying their freedom in America and not elsewhere. He still gave the colonization project some support but he no longer really fought for it; the place he had suddenly taken in the Negroes' hearts made it impossible. On January 1, just after the signing of the final draft of the proclamation, the abolitionist Benjamin Rush Plumly wrote to him to tell how the free Negroes of Philadelphia had held watch-night services in their churches, praying, singing, weeping, and displaying "the solemn joy of an old Jewish Passover." Plumly, who had attended some of the meetings, tried to tell the President how these people felt:

"The Black people trust
you.
They believe that you desire to do them justice. They do not believe that
you
wish to expatriate them, or to enforce upon them any disability, but that you cannot do
all
that you would . . . Someone intimated that you might be forced into some form of colonization. 'God won't let him,' shouted an old woman. 'God's in his
heart,'
said another, and the response of the Congregation was emphatic.

"Another thought there must be some design of God in having your name 'Abraham,' that if you were not the 'Father' you were to be the 'Liberator' of a people. One minister advised them to thank God that He had raised up an honest man for the White House, whereupon they broke, five hundred strong, into that ringing hymn, 'The Year of Jubilee.' "
³

In the deep South the slaves held no prayer meetings of celebration. They simply walked away from the plantation whenever they heard that there was a Federal army within range and presented themselves to their liberators with a touching faith that a new day had come; beginning thus a tragic pilgrimage that cost many thousands of them their lives and plunged all of them deep into utter misery but that did not quite destroy the appeal of the vision that led them on. Before the winter was out the army in the Mississippi Valley area alone was caring for 30,000 or 40,000 of them— men and women and children whose helplessness was absolute, who had no resources except impossible expectations, and for whom no one on earth was really responsible.
⁴

The army was giving them atrocious care because it had been taken completely by surprise; and so had government, President, War Department, and everyone else. To turn nearly 4,000,000 slaves into free people demanded long-range planning if anything ever did, partly because the problems of transition were so intricate and partly because meeting these problems would inevitably set patterns that would affect Negro life for generations to come. If there had been plenty of time the administration doubtless would eventually have created a special department to handle all of this, with expert planners, a suitable appropriation and a man of cabinet rank to take charge; but that word "eventually" fell out of the language the moment the other word, "freedom," went down the lanes and the grapevine telegraph to the slave cabins, and everything that was done had to be improvised by men whose real concern was something quite different.

There was no way out of it. The soldiers in the field had to do the job simply because they themselves stood where the Red Sea waves had parted. The chaplain of an Ohio regiment in Grant's army wrote that the in-gathering of fugitive Negroes was "like the oncoming of cities." Some of the slaves had fled from their masters and some were adrift because the masters themselves had fled, and all of them were waifs in a baffling world where the only certainties they had ever known were gone forever. They came to the army camps because for the moment they were totally helpless, self-reliance and initiative being traits which had gone undeveloped under slavery. They came because they could think of no other place to go and knew only that they had to be on their way somewhere; as the chaplain said, "a blind terror stung them and an equally blind hope allured them, and to us they came."
⁵
The army had to take some sort of care of them because otherwise the army itself would be swamped.

So the army set up concentration camps, whenever and wherever they seemed to be needed; near enough to be under army protection, remote enough to be out of the army's way. For shelter there were condemned army tents, or makeshift cabins improvised out of stray bits of lumber. Army rations were issued, supplemented by foodstuffs gathered in the neighborhood and later by produce from little vegetable plots cultivated by the Negroes themselves. Sometimes army blankets and clothing could be had; more often, as the business got organized, such things were sent to the camps by charitably minded folk in the North. There were armed guards, to keep order, and at least in theory medical care was available. This was nearly always inadequate, sanitary arrangements barely existed, and a representative of the Western Sanitary Commission, after inspecting a chain of these camps in the Mississippi Valley, wrote that many of the inmates were a good deal worse off than they had been under slavery.

The death rate, naturally, was appalling. By the middle of the summer a camp near Natchez, Mississippi, was having from fifty to seventy-five deaths every day—rather more than half the number recorded at notorious Andersonville Prison in its worst days, although the Natchez camp held only a fraction of the number confined at Andersonville. Part of this came because the whole operation was done on the spur of the moment, with the left hand, and part of it came because so many of the refugees were physically unfit to begin with. Early in the winter Grant notified Halleck that most of the planters who moved South took their healthy, able-bodied slaves with them, abandoning the old, the very young, and the infirm; Frank Blair's notion that all of the canal-digging around Vicksburg might be done by sturdy contrabands was in error because so many refugees were not sturdy enough, and Grant said he was not letting any more Negroes come within his lines, adding tersely: "Humanity dictates this policy."
⁸

But the tide kept rising. As a practical matter there was no way to keep the Negroes out, the container which had held them being in process of collapse. The camps multiplied, and the dictates of humanity were all but inaudible. A white woman sent to the Mississippi Valley by the Western Sanitary Commission to work with the refugees was appalled by what she saw in a camp near Helena, Arkansas. The hospital was "a wretched hovel," the streets were so deep with mud that army wagons stuck there, their mules dying in harness, the refugees themselves lived in quarters "void of comfort or decency," and conditions were so bad that the mere idea that there could ever be an improvement seemed to this woman to be impossible. Many of the refugees, she said, seemed to have come to the camp simply to die, "and they do die, very rapidly." Writing in February 1863, she noted that "the carcasses, filth and decay . . . will make the mortality fearful when warm weather comes."

To make matters worse, "the barbarities from our soldiers are unparallelled," and the refugees were often treated with incredible brutality. This woman cited one example: "One man came to Mr. Sawyer" (the army chaplain detailed to take charge of the camp) "and said that his wife had lived in a tent with soldiers, had been sick; they being ordered away pulled up the tent and left her on the ground, she had died, and now he wished her buried. Storming terribly as it was, the good chaplain started, but found her so far out that she could not be buried that night, for the teams could not get there and back, so they covered her as well as they could with a blanket and left her. In the morning they found her babe a few months old lying with her under the blanket, some person having become tired of it placed it there for the chaplain to see."

Her recital went on, a catalog of horrors. One group of twenty plantation hands came to camp, were robbed by the soldiers of the little they owned, and thirteen of them died of sickness and exposure. Their owner presently came to camp and asked the survivors if they did not want to go back to slavery. "They did not wish to go, faltered, changed their minds daily for a week, we encouraging them all we could, but as destitution, persecution and death stared them in the face the sad sufferers went back." A Federal gunboat brought in eighty-two Negroes, along with a load of cotton; the cotton, having good cash value, was promptly sent North for disposal, but the eighty-two Negroes were dumped at the Helena camp, and "one of the women, a cripple, came to me today, said they had been so abused and starved already that they wished themselves back." One surgeon ordered that contrabands suffering from diarrhea be tied up and flogged, on the theory that this would break them of the abominable habit of soiling their bedding; "it was often done, and to some that were dying."