美国内战与重建美国内战与重建transcript16.doc

Civil War and Reconstruction: Lecture 16 TranscriptMarch 6, 2008 backProfessor David Blight: The first formally recognized or organized black regiment in the Civil War was known as the First South Carolina Volunteers. It was organized entirely and exclusively among freed slaves, along the Sea Islands of South Carolina. It had an amazing non-commissioned officer whose name was Prince Rivers, a man whod been a slave yesterday but a free man by 1862, and whose white commanding officer, Thomas Wentworth Higginson said, in another land, in another time, he could command any army in the world. Thomas Wentworth Higginson was an abolitionist from Worcester, Massachusetts who ended up the colonel and the commander of that regiment. Nearly 1,000 freed slaves were recruited among the roughly 35 to 40,000 former slaves along the Georgian/South Carolina Sea Islands. Higginson went on to write a great book about it called Army Life in a Black Regiment, and among the remarkable descriptions he left in that classic is this description from Thanksgiving Day 1862; so its November 62. The preliminary Emancipation Proclamation is in place but the final Emancipation Proclamation hasnt quite happened yet. It was actually the first formally, legally, federally recognized Thanksgiving Day; so decreed by Abraham Lincoln. And Higginson had his headquarters in an old plantation house. He looked out of broken windows, at this abandoned plantation in the Sea Islands, through what he described as the great avenues of great live oaks, and he observed that quote, All this is a universal southern panorama, but five minutes walk beyond the hovels and the live oaks will bring one to something so unsouthern that the whole southern coast at this moment trembles at the suggestion of such a thing, a camp of a regiment of freed slaves. Almost two years later one of those freed slaves named George Hatton wrote a couple of letters from the front. George Hatton was a former slave. He had lived part of his life in Washington, DC, part of his life in Virginia, North Carolina; hed been around. He was at this point, by April of 1864, a non-commissioned sergeant in Company C, First Regiment, United States Colored Troops. They were in camp New Bern, North Carolina, and he sat down to write a letter to reflect upon the circumstance that he found himself in. Hatton, his fellow soldiers, and their families had lived generations as slaves. And this is what he wrote. He says, Though the government openly declared that it did not want the Negroes in this conflict, I look around me and see hundreds of colored men armed and ready to defend the government at any moment. And such are my feelings that I can only say the fetters have fallen, our bondage is over. A month later Hattons regiment was in camp near Jamestown, Virginia-and he didnt miss the irony of being at Jamestown, the founding site of Virginia. And into his lines came several black freed women who all declared they had recently been severely whipped by a master. Members of Hattons company managed to capture that slave owner, a Mr. Clayton, the man who had allegedly administered the beatings on these women. The white Virginian was stripped to the waist. He was tied to a tree and he was given 20 lashes by one of his own former slaves, a man named William Harris, who was now a member of the Union Army. In turn, each of the women that Clayton had beaten were given the whip and their chance to lay the lash on this slaveholders back. The women were given leave, said Sergeant Hatton-his words-to remind him that they were not longer his but safely housed in Abrahams bosom and under the protection of the Star Spangled Banner and guarded by their own patriotic, though once downtrodden race. In Hattons letter he once again felt lost for words to describe the transformation he was witnessing. Oh that I had the tongue to express my feelings, he wrote, while standing on the banks of the James River on the soil of Old Virginia, the mother-state of slavery, as a witness of such a sudden reverse. The day is clear, the fields of grain are beautiful and the birds are singing sweet melodious songs while poor Mr. Clayton is crying to his servants for mercy. Thats a revolution, described in the words of a former slave, words that were trying to capture the transformations of history at the same time his actions were trying to transform history. Words. Now, we will forever debate in this society the meaning of the Emancipation Proclamation. Over and over and over again we debate: did it really free anybody? Why did it only free the slaves in the states in rebellion? Why was Lincoln so bloody legalistic in this document? Was Richard Hofstadter right when he said it had all the eloquence of a bill of lading (which means a grocery list)? Why was it written like it was a legal brief in court, here and there laced with some remarkable phrases? Why was he so careful not to free the slaves in the Border States that hadnt left the union? And on and on. But I think we should make no mistake, the Emancipation Proclamation is a terribly important American document. Emancipation is not just the story of great documents, as Im trying to argue, but this ones important. The second paragraph reads-and this is, by the way, Lincolns own handwriting; this is a facsimile of the original; he wrote some three or four originals-that on the First Day of January in this year of Our Lord, One Thousand Eight Hundred and Sixty-Three, 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-God, is this legalistic-shall be then-this is not legalistic-then, thenceforward and forever free. And the Executive governments of this United States, including the military and naval authority thereof-the Army and Navy are now bound to do this it says-will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom. Actual freedom. Now, yes, it was a limited document. It didnt free as many slaves as the Second Confiscation Act had legally already set in motion. Thats true. But this is the most important thing to remember about the Emancipation Proclamation. Most black folks didnt care about the details of it. What they cared about is that the United States Government had acted and said they were going to be free. There were at least four immediate and visible effects of the Proclamation, once it went into effect on January 1. Every forward step of the Union armies now would be, whether some of those officers liked it or not, a liberating step. Secondly, news of this Proclamation, whatever the details and the fine print, would spread like wildfire across the South, and it would bring about-theres no question-it will bring about increased activity, increased flight, increased movement toward Union lines by freed people, where they can do it. And theres all over the record we have testimony of Confederate soldiers themselves, of Southerners, white Southerners themselves saying they first heard about the Emancipation Proclamation from their slaves. Third, it committed the United States Government in the eyes of the world-and thats terribly important when we remember that Great Britain was on the verge of recognition of the Confederacy-more on that a bit later in the course, of how that foreign relationship and the problem of Civil War diplomacy is being managed by the two governments, Union and Confederate. And fourth, on the second page of the Emancipation Proclamation-or is it the third-in another very legalistic paragraph Lincoln formally authorizes once and for all, although its already begun to happen, the recruitment of black men into the Union Armies and Navy, and it authorizes a formal process now to recruit black men to the Union uniform. And before the war will end about ten percent of all Union forces will be African-American- approximately 180,000-eighty percent of whom were former slaves, from the slave states. Now, in that fall of 1862, Frederick Douglass put down his cudgel that hed been beating Lincoln with for a year in his editorials-and he beat him bitterly at times. At one point in late 61 he called Abraham Lincoln the most powerful slave catcher in the world. That was Douglasss opinion of that denial of asylum policy which said fugitive slaves escaping Union lines had to be returned if their owners were loyal. Douglass, like many others, saw the nonsense in that policy early on. Douglass finally put down the cudgel and he said, with lovely irony, It is really wonderful, said Frederick Douglass, how all efforts to evade, postpone and prevent its coming have been mocked and defied by the stupendous sweep of events; its coming meaning black freedom. And Ill just say lastly, add a fifth to that, emancipation transformed the purpose of the war. Emancipation more than anything else will make the Civil War a war of conquest, a war of near totality, on both sides, and it meant now, now that this was going to be a war of conquest on the Souths social and economic institutions, it meant it would probably only end in unconditional surrender. Now, its a complicated story as to how thisll be enforced, of course. And I strongly urge you to read certain of those Lincoln documents in the Johnson reader, and more importantly, to read at least that greatest hits selection I provided in the reading packet of the documents on emancipation; which, by the way, come out of a book called Free at Last, which is itself a 500 page collection of the greatest hits of the documents of the American emancipation, which are now published in five volumes, all of which are in the National Archives. But one of those Lincoln documents I dont want you to miss, I said the other day, was the James Conkling letter. It comes in August of 63. One of the reasons that letter is interesting is that it shows us that though Lincoln could be one crafty politician; and whether emancipation will ever truly succeed in this war, of course, depends on the Union winning on the battlefield. It really depended on all those deaths at Gettysburg and at Vicksburg and so many other horrible places. And yes, its true that large, large numbers of those Union soldiers who died didnt necessarily believe they were fighting to free slaves, nor did they even want to. But sometimes history is ahead of anyones basic human, individual motives, isnt it? But in this Conkling letter, so called, its a public letter that-Lincoln mastered this presidential art of the public letter more than any previous president and it was his version of the news conference, which didnt happen in those days. It was his version of an exclusive interview with Anderson Cooper, or whatever the hell it would be today. He wrote letters aimed at certain newspapers which would then be reprinted across the country. This was a letter to James Conkling, Congressman from Illinois, of his own party, who was opposing emancipation, who was at least wary of it and worried about it. The great worry about the emancipation policy, of course, was that white Northerners would not accept it, that white northern soldiers would thrown down their arms and say, I aint fighting to free the slaves. Im fighting to preserve the Union, thank you very much. Lincoln had that great fear himself. But God, read that letter. Its one of Lincolns-its Lincoln the ironist; its also Lincoln the persuasive lawyer. On the second page of it he says to Conkling-hes really saying this to white northerners now, because this letter got published everywhere-You dislike the Emancipation Proclamation, he says, and perhaps would have it retracted. You say it is unconstitutional. I think differently. I think the Constitution invests its commander-in-chief with the law of war, in time of war. The most that can be said, if so much, is that the slaves are property. Is there, has there ever been any question that by law of war property, both of enemies and friends, may be taken when needed? So theres that argument. Whatever you think of the morality of this, folks, slaves are property of the enemy; Im taking their assets. Its a legal argument. Then you go to the next page-hes also beginning to make there an argument, if you read that part of the letter carefully, its an argument for total war, to unconditional surrender, and hes trying to condition public opinion for this. Then you go to the next page. You say you will not fight to free Negroes. Some of them seem wiling to fight for you. But no matter, fight you then, exclusively to save the Union. I issued the Proclamation on purpose to aid you in saving the Union. Whenever you shall have conquered all resistance to the Union, if I shall urge you to continue fighting, it will be an apt time then for you to declare you will not fight to free Negroes. All right, crawl into your cul-de-sac and say youre only fighting to save the Union, but heres another way to save the Union. And then he goes on. I thought that in your struggle for the Union, to whatever extent the Negroes should cease helping the enemy, to that extent it weakened the enemy in his resistance to you. Do you think differently? I thought that whatever Negroes can be got to do as soldiers leaves just so much less for white soldiers to do in saving the Union. Its almost as if hes appealing to Conklings racial self-interest; does it appear otherwise to you? And then Lincoln says, But Negroes, like other people, act upon motives. Why should they do anything for us if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive, even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made must be kept. Okay, blah, blah, blah, lots of words, right? Words, words, words, words. Yes, but meanings are almost always somewhere, somehow embedded in words. Now, as I said, now every forward step of the Union armies is going to be a liberating step. And I want to show just a quick map here to illustrate something. And I can zoom in on that. I hope you can see the colors here to some extent. The simple point of this map is this. Its a map that shows the conquest of the South by Union forces, its the movement, generally speaking, of Union lines into the South in what becomes now, by 62, 63 and 64, a war of conquest, West and East. But I want to especially stress that the most important factor in when and where a slave might attain his or her freedom; the first factor had everything to do with where the armies went. It was proximity to the war that made emancipation possible in northern Virginia in 1862; Sea Islands of Georgia, South Carolina, 62; around the whole New Orleans region in 62; but not possible at all in southern Georgia until after the war was over; not possible really at all in the southern half of Alabama until the whole war was over; not possible at all in parts of Mississippi until the whole war was over. Hence, thats why the large majority of American slaves were not actually within Union lines or technically free, in any way, until the war ended. Ill make one other point about this. Theres a nice book by a historian named Stephen Ash. Its called When the Yankees Came, and its all about the process of Union occupation of parts of the South. He goes in and studies towns in Tennessee and towns in northern Georgia and towns in northern Virginia, and tries to understand, so what happened when an area of the South, an area of the Confederacy, came under Union control? And he divides the South usefully here; and its very useful in understanding how emancipation actually happened on the ground as a human, sometimes brutal, ugly, chaotic, painful process. He divides the South into what he calls three regions: one, the Confederate frontier; the second he calls no-mans land; and the third he calls garrisoned towns. Now thats pretty easy to understand. If you think of-just take Tennessee, up there in the middle. By 1862 Nashville became a-it was the capital of Tennessee-it became a garrisoned Union town; that is, its occupied, its resources, its railroad, its everything, were taken over by the Union forces. And then theres the so called no-mans land, the region say between a Nashville and where the Confederate forces were, the land between the armies, which of course fluctuated a great deal back and forth. And then lastly he calls it the Confederate frontier, or at times hell call it the Confederate hinterland, that is the land behind the lines that was never taken by Union forces, the land behind the lines where Confederate resources, relatively speaking, remained intact. Theyre still producing cotton crops, in the summer of 64 and the fall of 64, and theyre still planting in the whole southern half of Georgia and the whole southern half of Alabama, by and large, right on into 1865. But where you happen to be geographically was the first important factor of where and how emancipation might occur, in proximity particularly to the armies. Now, a second factor that would determine when and if slaves would be free was the character of the slave society in any given region. Were they in a densely populated slave region like the Sea Islands, parts of the cotton belt? Or were they in sparsely populated areas? And again, it had to do with geography. Were you in the Lower Mississippi Valley, huge concentrations of slaves? When Grants forces move down the Mississippi and eventually take Vicksburg by July 1863, this entire region-in fact it is in the Lower Mississippi Valley; this is why some people argue that the war, the Civil War was really won and lost in the West. And Ill engage that argument after the break when we talk about U