Transcript
Contraband
May 23–24, 1861
Three enslaved men had been forced to build a Confederate battery. Told they'd be taken south, they took a boat. Two left wives and children behind.
Frank Baker. Shepard Mallory. James Townsend.
Virginia had voted to leave the Union. Fort Monroe, across the water, hadn't.
Next morning, a Confederate major rode up under a white flag and demanded the men back.
The fort's commander, Benjamin Butler, was a Massachusetts lawyer and a Democrat. In 1860 he'd voted to make Jefferson Davis president. Dozens of times.
Butler said Virginia called itself a foreign country. So the Fugitive Slave Act didn't apply.
Enemy property can be seized in war. Butler called the men “contraband.” A lawyer's trick, and it treated people as property. It worked. By July, about nine hundred had come.
The United States went to war to save the Union. Four years later, slavery was over. Who changed what the war was for?
Save the Union
1861–1862
Ask most Union soldiers in 1861 why they were fighting. They'd say: the Union.
Abraham Lincoln I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.
In July, Congress agreed, almost unanimously: the war was for the Union, not against slavery.
Four slave states stayed loyal: Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri.
Abraham Lincoln I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game.
Maryland ringed Washington. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus there, and the army held suspects without charges.
Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of Dred Scott, ruled that only Congress could suspend it. Lincoln kept suspending it.
Abraham Lincoln Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?
In 1863, the army arrested Ohio Democrat Clement Vallandigham for a speech. Lincoln banished him to the Confederacy. He ran for governor from Canada, and lost.
In Missouri, General John C. Frémont declared the slaves of rebels free. Lincoln overruled him, for Kentucky's sake.
Nobody waited for Washington. Thousands walked to every Union fort and camp they could reach.
Each arrival was a worker the Confederacy lost. In 1935, W. E. B. Du Bois called it a general strike.
Congress followed their feet. August 1861: owners forfeited enslaved people put to work for the Confederate army. March 1862: officers could no longer send runaways back.
In April 1862, Congress ended slavery in Washington, D.C. Owners got up to $300 a person. The freed people got nothing.
The Planter
May–August 1862
May 1862. One general declared freedom. One wheelman took it.
On May 9, General David Hunter declared everyone enslaved in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida forever free. Hold on to those two words.
Four days later, the Confederate steamer Planter lay at her Charleston wharf. Her white officers were ashore. Her wheelman, Robert Smalls, was twenty-three and enslaved.
Around three, Smalls put on the captain's straw hat and took her out. At a second wharf, his wife Hannah, their children and other families came aboard.
Then Fort Sumter. Smalls gave the captain's usual whistle signal.
They hauled down the Confederate flags and hoisted a white one. Sixteen people reached the Union fleet.
The navy got a steamer, her guns and a man who knew every channel. His information has been most interesting, and portions of it of the utmost importance.
On May 19, Lincoln voided Hunter's order. He didn't say freeing people was wrong.
Abraham Lincoln Questions which, under my responsibility, I reserve to myself.
That August, Smalls went to Washington. The same month, the War Department let General Rufus Saxton enlist five thousand Black soldiers.
They became the 1st South Carolina Volunteers. Many had been enslaved on the islands around them.
The Letter in the Drawer
July–December 1862
On July 17, Congress passed two laws. The first made people enslaved by rebels 'forever free' if they reached Union lines.
The second let the army take Black men into service.
Lincoln read his cabinet a draft proclamation freeing enslaved people in rebel states. Seward said to wait for a victory.
Otherwise, Lincoln recalled, it would look like 'our last shriek, on the retreat.'
Lincoln asked five Black men from Washington to help start a colony in Central America.
Abraham Lincoln But for your race among us there could not be war, although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other.
Frederick Douglass called it 'canting hypocrisy.' Most Black Americans said no.
On August 20, Horace Greeley's Tribune called Lincoln 'strangely and disastrously remiss.'
Abraham Lincoln My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.
The proclamation had been in his desk for a month.
Read it for its audience: Northerners who'd fight for the Union, not yet for freedom. He was getting them ready.
On September 17, at Antietam, Lee's invasion of the North was stopped.
Five days later, Lincoln set a deadline: January 1.
Abraham Lincoln …shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.
Those two words again.
London's ministers weighed a peace deal.
William Gladstone …they have made, what is more than either, they have made a nation.
Britain's cabinet decided against stepping in. After Antietam and Lincoln's deadline, backing the South meant backing slavery.
Democrats campaigned against emancipation. They gained more than twenty House seats.
In December, Lincoln wrote Congress.
Abraham Lincoln In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free.
The Day of Jubilee
January 1, 1863
In Brownville, Nebraska, the story goes, a clerk opened after midnight for Daniel Freeman's homestead claim. Most of that country had been Otoe-Missouria land until 1854.
With Southern seats empty, Republicans passed what the South had blocked: a Pacific railroad, colleges, tariffs, banks, an income tax. Unit 6 shows what they built, and whose land it was.
Then came greenbacks: paper money not backed by gold. The one-dollar note wears Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase's face. He wanted to be president.
In Washington, Lincoln shook hands at the New Year's reception for about three hours.
Frederick Seward remembered Lincoln pausing: his hand was numb, and a shaky signature might look like doubt. Then he wrote out his full name.
It declared enslaved people in rebelling areas free, and opened the army and navy to Black men. Lincoln's legal basis was military necessity.
That same day, at Camp Saxton in South Carolina, thousands gathered beneath the live oaks. Most had been enslaved.
Dr. William Brisbane, a South Carolinian who had freed the people he once enslaved, read the president's proclamation. Then Colonel Higginson took the regiment's new flag.
Some white guests began to join. Higginson motioned them to silence.
Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson I never saw anything so electric; it made all other words cheap; it seemed the choked voice of a race at last unloosed.
In Boston, Frederick Douglass and a packed hall waited all evening for the telegraph. It came late that night.
Jefferson Davis …the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man.
The Proclamation had a catch, and it was written into the text.
Where Did It Free People?
1863–1865
Lincoln's power came from the war, so it reached only places at war with the Union. He named them. Then he named the exceptions.
Your turn. Test it in four places.
So it mostly declared freedom where the army hadn't arrived yet.
From then on, every mile the army marched was a mile of freedom.
On day one, it freed tens of thousands. About three million were free on paper. Freedom meant reaching the army, or the army reaching you.
Across the ocean, Lancashire's mills were short of Southern cotton. On New Year's Eve, Manchester's working people met anyway, and wrote to Lincoln in support.
Britain found other cotton, in India and Egypt. It never recognized the Confederacy.
Abraham Lincoln an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country.
After January 1, siding with the Confederacy meant siding with slavery, in front of Britain's own people.
Men of Color, To Arms
1863–1865
In 1861, the army turned Black volunteers away. In 1863, it went looking for them.
The Proclamation opened the army, and Frederick Douglass became its recruiter.
Frederick Douglass Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S. …
Frederick Douglass … and there is no power on the earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.
On June 2, 1863, Harriet Tubman guided three Union gunboats up South Carolina's Combahee River.
More than 700 enslaved people reached the boats. Many of the men joined the Union army.
On July 18, the 54th Massachusetts led the assault on Fort Wagner. Its colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, died on the wall.
More than four in ten of the regiment were killed, wounded or captured.
Sergeant William Carney, born enslaved in Norfolk, Virginia, carried the flag back, wounded several times.
Sgt. William H. Carney Boys, the old flag never touched the ground!
Black soldiers earned seven dollars a month. White privates earned thirteen. The 54th refused all pay for nearly eighteen months, until Congress equalized it in 1864.
Many Northerners said they would not fight to free anyone. Lincoln answered.
Abraham Lincoln You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but, no matter.
About 179,000 Black men served in the Union army, one soldier in ten. Most had been enslaved. About 40,000 died, mostly of disease.
At Fort Pillow, Tennessee, in April 1864, Confederate troops killed Black soldiers who were trying to surrender.
Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson As to the simple general fact of courage and reliability I think no officer in our camp ever thought of there being any difference between black and white.
Susie King Taylor I taught a great many of the comrades in Company E to read and write, when they were off duty.
Use HIPP on both. Higginson was a white colonel and abolitionist, writing for Atlantic readers. Taylor was born enslaved, and wrote in 1902, as Jim Crow spread.
Susie King Taylor There are many people who do not know what some of the colored women did during the war.
Both admired the same men, from different places.
General Howell Cobb warned against arming enslaved men:
Howell Cobb If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong—but they won't make soldiers.
In March, the Confederate Congress narrowly voted to recruit enslaved men, without promising them freedom. It was too late to matter.
A New Birth of Freedom
November 1863 – February 1865
Back to November 1863.
November 19, 1863. The Union dedicated a cemetery at Gettysburg for its dead. Edward Everett spoke for two hours. Then Lincoln stood up, with 272 words.
Abraham Lincoln Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation,
Abraham Lincoln conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Four score and seven is eighty-seven. Count back from 1863 and you reach 1776. The Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution, which protected slavery.
Abraham Lincoln that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—
Abraham Lincoln and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
He never used the word slavery. Most historians hear it in 'a new birth of freedom.'
Edward Everett I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion,
Edward Everett in two hours, as you did in two minutes.
A Harrisburg newspaper was less impressed.
Harrisburg Patriot & Union We pass over the silly remarks of the President.
In 2013, it took it back: 'The Patriot-News regrets the error.'
Abraham Lincoln If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.
But the Proclamation was a war measure. A court or a later Congress might undo it. Lincoln wanted freedom in the Constitution.
The Senate passed an amendment in April 1864. The House fell short. Lincoln won reelection on a platform that promised it.
On January 31, 1865, the House passed it, 119 to 56. The galleries erupted.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime… shall exist within the United States. Note that exception. Later films come back to it.
Lincoln signed it the next day. Presidents have no part in amending the Constitution. A week later, the Senate passed a resolution saying so.
The Same Flag
March 4 – April 15, 1865
March 4, 1865. The Capitol dome is finished, with the Statue of Freedom on top. Black soldiers marched in the procession. Then Lincoln spoke about slavery, directly.
Abraham Lincoln These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.
Abraham Lincoln With malice toward none, with charity for all… to bind up the nation's wounds.
That night, Frederick Douglass says, guards tried to turn him away. Lincoln had him brought in.
Frederick Douglass Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort.
On April 11, Lincoln backed the vote for some Black men.
Abraham Lincoln I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.
John Wilkes Booth was in the crowd.
April 14, noon. At Fort Sumter, Robert Anderson raised the same flag he had lowered four years before. Robert Smalls was in the harbor, piloting the Planter.
That night, at Ford's Theatre, Booth shot the president. Lincoln died the next morning.
I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.
Abraham Lincoln I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.
The events had names.
Frank Baker · Shepard Mallory · James Townsend · Mary Peake · Robert and Hannah Smalls · Prince Rivers · Susie King Taylor · Harriet Tubman · William Carney
Frank Baker. Shepard Mallory. James Townsend. Mary Peake. …and about half a million people who reached the Union lines.
Historians still argue about who freed the slaves. The answer needs both the pen and the feet.
In 1867, the sculptor Edmonia Lewis carved a freed man and woman in marble. She called it Forever Free.
The Thirteenth Amendment was ratified that December. Lincoln didn't live to see it. In Texas, word of freedom came last. The next film starts there.