Category: Race and the North

Invading North Carolina

The high point of General Burnside’s 1862 invasion of the Outer Banks and culminated with the capture of New Bern. When the 44th Massachusetts Regiment of nine-month men arrived they were treated with disdain by 3-year enlistees who received no favorable enlistment term.

Lincoln’s first proconsul at occupied New Bern, Edward Stanly, noted the ships offloading blue-clad troops returned north loaded with libraries, artwork and furniture liberated from New Bern homes.

Invading North Carolina   

“Abandoned by their owners upon the approach of the Union army, the elegant homes of New Bern’s merchant and professional class were now occupied by Federal officers. Several hundred blacks were employed, if not conscripted, to build fortifications at New Bern and other coastal points. [General] Burnside directed that they be paid eight dollars a month, given one ration a day and clothing.

[The New England soldiers] held many anti-black sentiments. One Maine soldier reflected the anti-black view of many New England troops in eastern North Carolina when he wrote that slavery “is wrong, a curse,” but that he “could not bear” the sight of blacks. Along with others in General [John G.] Foster’s army, this soldier favored emancipation as a wartime measure designed to weaken the Confederacy, and only secondly as an act of humanity for the slaves. Such men did not hesitate to exploit black refugees, forcing them to work as servants for little compensation.

In April [1863] the War Department authorized Col. Edward Wild to raise a brigade of blacks in North Carolina. Wild began recruiting in May [but] had to recruit in eastern Virginia in order to raise some of the troops for the 2nd and 3rd North Carolina Colored Volunteer regiments. Even before the recruitment had been completed, the 55th Massachusetts Colored Regiment joined the three North Carolina regiments to form Col. Wild’s African Brigade.

During the summer Wild’s brigade participated in the unsuccessful Federal campaign against Charleston and later, in an independent action, raided a guerilla stronghold in northeastern North Carolina, [carrying off] 2,500 slaves, seizing arms and provisions, and burning four rebel camps.”

(In the Country of the Enemy. Civil War Reports of a Massachusetts Corporal. William C. Harris, ed., University Press of Florida, 1999, pp. 12-13; 28-29)

Nine-Month Men

Lincoln spent much of 1862 in efforts to colonize the many contrabands coming within advancing Northern lines, using his emancipation edict to solve the question of ownership. Both the Danes and Dutch were interested in taking them for labor on their Caribbean sugar plantations.

But after several bloody defeats in1862, few white northern men stepped forward to enlist. Massachusetts Republican Governor John Andrew, fearful of losing reelection due to an angry electorate, asked Lincoln to allow his regiments to serve nine-month terms and especially in non-lethal regions. Also, Lincoln allowed the counting of black non-residents against his quota which began a rush of agents to the occupied South to credit contrabands to their particular State. This competition led to the formation of US Colored Troops in early 1863.

It is noted below that the Boston Irish were “hostile to blacks” which the author did not clarify. The Irish were among the poorest segment of Massachusetts society who feared contrabands would migrate northward and depress wages.

Nine-Month Men     

“June 6, 1863, the happy day of departure for home, finally came for the nine-month troops of the 44th Massachusetts. General Foster tried to persuade “the boys” to reenlist at New Bern in a new artillery regiment, but most wanted to go home before considering serving again. Of the regiment’s 1,018 original members, 902 returned to civilian life – casualties were eight men who died of actual battle wounds, and twenty-four who succumbed to disease – including the regiment’s surgeon. Three men had deserted.

The 44th Regiment’s service in the State militia continued until the end of the war. Indeed, a month after their return from the South, in mid-July, Governor Andrew called out the 44th regiment, along with other militia units, to prevent violence in Boston and nearby towns at the time of New York City’s Draft Riot. Upon the Governor’s request, Federal troops in nearby garrisons were brought into the city.

As in New York, the enforcement in July of the Federal conscription law, combined with Lincoln’s emancipation policy, inflamed thousands of men and women in the North who opposed the war, particularly Irish Democrats in the eastern cities who opposed the war and [were] hostile to blacks. In Boston, an angry mob of nearly 5,000 citizens, including women, stormed the armory on Cooper Street where a unit of Federal troops awaited them inside the building. The troops fired into the crowd killing eight and wounding many others.”

(In the Country of the Enemy. William C. Harris, editor. University Press of Florida, 1999, pp. 29-31)

 

Colonial Versus British Law

Between 1680-1688 England operated 249 slave ships; from 1713, for twenty years, 15,000 slaves were annually shipped to America; by 1786, England had brought over 97,000 slaves. Though Liverpool was the chief port for this trade, Bristol was a close second. New England was not slow in this nefarious system – by 1725 it had become the center of the transatlantic slave trade. After the Pequot tribe was vanquished in the latter 1630s, Puritans sold captive men, women and children into West Indies slavery.

Colonial Versus British Law

“Slavery [in American colonies] simply evolved in practice, as a custom, and then received statutory recognition. Actually, the process of “recognition” was implicit, involving no articulation of first principles. In 1636 the governor and council of Barbados decreed that “Negroes and Indians, that come here to be sold, should serve for Life, unless a Contract was made before to the contrary.” A Rhode Island statute of 1652 cited “the common course practiced among English men to buy Negars, to that end that they may have them for service or slaves forever.”

The famous Fundamental Constitutions, drawn up by John Locke and the Earl of Shaftesbury in 1669 for the nascent South Carolina colony, guaranteed that “Every Freeman of South Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over Negro Slaves.” [And] the reality is that slavery was principally acknowledged in law by an extensive set of police measures.

Chief Justice Sir John Holt reasoned that “as soon as a negro comes to England, he becomes free; one may be a villein in England, but not a slave.” Yet in an earlier opinion he concluded to the contrary that Africans were indeed commodities; yet in no case did the common law ever meddle with, ratify, reject or otherwise directly address slavery in the colonies, as opposed to England, other than as the apparent custom of the colonies.

In fact, there are many reported cases concerning the English slave-trading monopoly, indebted tobacco or sugar planters, the duties charged on various plantation commodities, and trade to Africa and America, all matters whose circumstances frequently involved black slaves.”

(Slavery and the Law, Paul Finkelman, ed., Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002, pp. 382; 388-389)

Crafty Draft Dodger

The letter below was sent to Mary’s brother-in-law, Corporal Josiah H. Sturtevant of the 17th Maine Regiment, who was offered an officer’s commission in the 80th US Colored Troops regiment in March 1863. As few white officers would accept service in a colored regiment, an effective strategy was to offer a white enlisted men receiving $15 per month a pay increase to $105 as a second lieutenant. Ironically, Sturtevant continued receiving enlisted pay while incurring the expenses of an officer through the end of the war and not receiving restitution until 25 years after the war.

The letter also refers to the $300 commutation which bought a substitute for conscripted Northern men – and reveals the great interest in colored troops serving in place of white Northern citizens who wished to remain at home.

Mount Vernon, N.Y., January 3, 1864

Dear Brother Josiah:

“Mr. Lee, the patriotic Dutch Reformed Minister, was drafted. He has always said if he was drafted, he should certainly go. After he was drafted, he said: “The Lord had given him a loud call to go, and if he didn’t give him a louder one to stay at home, he should go. He whined and griped around till he begged $300 to pay his commutation.

What did he do but pay $100 for a Town bond that draws 10% interest, cooly pockets the other $200, and at the end of the year gets the other $100 and so the $300 eventually comes out of the town taxpayers.

Now I say such a rascal ought to be roasted over a slow fire, at least till the war is over, and I would willingly gather faggots to keep it burning till my arms were worn off my shoulders.

I have always contended that the African, give him an equal chance, will make as good if not better soldiers than his white brother, and I believe we shall see the day that nine-tenths of our standing army will be composed of the freed men of the Nation.

Yours,

Mary”

(Josiah Volunteered. A Collection of Diaries and Letters. Arnold H. Sturtevant. 1977, pp. 114; 115)

Fredericksburg’s Field of Death

In mid-December 1862, Abraham Lincoln dispatched an army of over 122,000 men under Gen. Ambrose Burnside to northern Virginia with orders to defeat Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army of 72,000 near Fredericksburg. The debacle that followed cost Lincoln the lives of nearly 13,000 men, another 10,000 wounded, and the virtual end of voluntary northern enlistments. This forced Lincoln to resort to large financial bounties to attract mercenaries, and substitutes could be bought for northern men to escape conscription.

Fredericksburg’s Field of Death

The commander of a Maine regiment wrote of the battle’s aftermath:

“We had to pick our way over a field strewn with incongruous ruin; men torn and broken and cut to pieces in every indescribable way, cannon dismounted, gun carriages smashed or overturned, ammunition chests flung wildly about, horses dead and half-dead still in harness . . .” Col. Joshua Chamberlain

Also, poet Walt Whitman visited the aftermath of Fredericksburg in search of his wounded brother George:

“Fredericksburg had turned into a massacre. [General] Burnside sacrificed wave after wave of his troops against the strong Confederate positions – only to be stopped short, again and again, in bloody carnage at a sunken road beneath Marye’s Heights . . . From this chaos came row upon row of cold, stone grave markers still covering acres of highlands over Fredericksburg City. Some 13,000 of Lincoln’s soldiers dead.”

Began my visits among the camp hospitals in Burnside’s army. Outside a house used as a hospital, at the foot of a tree, within ten yards of the entrance, I noticed a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, etc. – a full load for a one-horse cart. Several dead bodies lie nearby [with] each covered by a brown woolen blanket. In the dooryard, towards the river, are fresh graves, mostly of officers, their names on pieces of barrel staves or broken boards stuck in the dirt.”

“Death is nothing here. As you step out in the morning from your tent to wash your face, you see before you on a stretcher a shapeless, extended object, and over it is thrown a dark gray blanket. It is the corpse of some wounded or sick soldier of the regiment who died in the hospital during the night; [or it might be] a row of three or four corpses covered over. No one makes an ado. There comes a detail of men to bury them; all useless ceremony is omitted. The stern realities of the marches and many battles of a campaign make the old etiquette a nuisance.”

(Josiah Volunteered. A Collection of Diaries and Letters. Arnold H. Sturtevant. 1977, pp. 75-81)

 

The South’s Great Fear

By the early 1700s, Liverpool’s dominance in slave ship construction had been surpassed by Providence, Rhode Island, with New England prospering greatly from trading Yankee notions for slaves held by African tribes. These ships returned to the Western Hemisphere with their human cargo for West Indies and British American plantations.

Then came the cotton gin which increased the speed that cotton fibers were separated from the seeds – invented and patented in 1794 by Massachusetts tinkerer Eli Whitney. This new device increased the need for more laborers in the South to harvest more cotton to be sold to Northern and European markets. Before the gin, cotton separation was a slow process which restricted the harvesting to local farm clothing usages, which likely would have doomed the American slave economy in a peaceful manner.

The South’s Great Fear

“Only three years before the Whitney invention, an event occurred which caused tremors in plantations across America and caused many slave owners to seriously rethink the safety of owning slaves. This tragedy was the bloody uprising of African slaves in the French colony of Saint Domingue, or Santo Domingo, and known today as Haiti.

This uprising of some 500,000 Africans was led by a voodoo priest named Boukman in a revolt against the French colonists and possibly inspired by the bloody French Revolution of the same time. On Saint Domingue, about 5,000 white colonists, men, women and children, were butchered in massive riots that swept the island. White men were beheaded, drowned or burned to death; women were raped, butchered and disemboweled, and if pregnant their babies were torn out of their wombs. White children were impaled on spears and carried through the streets as symbol of the revolt.

After two months of this living hell, over 1,000 farms and sugar plantations had been burned to the ground. After news of this revolt reached American shores, relations between white and black took a new turn with daily slave patrols becoming the norm, and every slave uprising in America, real or imagined, would be compared to Santo Domingue.”

(Countdown to Manassas, The Antebellum Chronology: July 4, 1776-July 21, 1861. Ken Drew; Ken Drew Publisher, pg. 8; 10)

 

The South’s Manpower Advantage

In his efforts to overwhelm the American South’s resistance, Grant ended prisoner exchanges with soldiers returning to the South’s ranks while those in blue went home. He knew the late war, poor-quality conscripts and diseased substitutes he received wouldn’t fight and would desert at the first opportunity. This reality accelerated the capture and removal of colored laborers who represented an important part of the Southern war effort.

The South’s Manpower Advantage

“The responsibility for effectively assembling Negro manpower became that of the Virginia lawmakers and the Confederate Congressmen. Speaking on this point, President Jefferson Davis stated, “much of our success was due to the much-abused institution of African servitude.”

This opinion was shared by General Ulysses S. Grant who was well-aware of the need to remove from the South her vast army of noncombatants. Grant said, “the 4,000,000 colored noncombatants are equal to more than three times their number in the North, age for age, sex for sex.” Both Grant and Davis early recognized that the mobilization of the Negro constituted an extremely valuable resource.

At the call to repel the Yankee invaders, for example, Virginia looked to its Negro population as a major source of civilian workers. [The majority] of Negroes employed by the quartermaster, ordnance, niter and mining bureaus, and military hospitals were hired through voluntary contracts with free Negroes and the owners of bondsmen.

In February 1862 the State legislature passed an act which required local courts to register all male free Negroes within their jurisdiction between the ages of 18 and 50. The selected free persons were not required to serve longer than 180 days without their consent, and entitled to compensation, rations, quarters and medical attention. Their pay, rations and allowances were borne by the Confederate States.

[In early 1863, and in response to Lincoln’s so-called emancipation decree,] the Richmond Examiner asserted that the North had discovered from this war the value of the slave to the South as a military laborer, and “Lincoln’s proclamation is designed to destroy this power in our hands.”

(The Confederate Negro: Virginia’s Craftsmen and Military Laborers, 1861-1865. James H. Brewer. University of Alabama Press, 1969, pp. 6-7; 14)

Seddon’s View of Black Southern Troops

By 1856 the new Republican party had acquired control of most northern State governments, while being denounced as the chief “disunionists” of the country for reintroducing slavery agitation as a party tactic.

Its party platform in 1860 was very clear on the territories, favoring subsidies for immigrant homesteaders, and a transcontinental railroad crossing Indian lands in the way of rail lines carrying Northern goods westward. Once Southern members departed Congress in early 1861, Republicans created a Federal corporation, the Union Pacific, which extinguished Indian titles and any defense of their land when driven off by military force.  The Indian tribes were to be progressively eliminated as obstacles to settlement and industrial expansion, and before the Civil War ended this policy was in full force.

As the South’s colored population fell into their hands as plantations were overrun, they were designated “contrabands” and utilized as hard labor battalions. As US Colored Troops, they were used as prison guards or cannon fodder in futile assaults and rightly assumed they would suffer the same fate as the Indians under northern rule.

Seddon’s View of Black Confederate Troops

“Hon. James A. Seddon, Confederate Secretary of War, in his report, supplemented Mr. Davis’s message with some still stronger recommendations of his own. The slaves, he said, had an even stronger interest in the victory of the Confederacy than did the white people. The latter risked their political independence, but the former their very existence as a race.

If the eternal enemies of the South should triumph, they would extinguish the negroes in a few years, as they had already extinguished the Indians. He recommended that the States which had absolute and exclusive control of the matter, should legislate at once with a view to the contingency of negro enlistments.

On the 15th [of March 1865] the subject of enlistments came up in the Virginia legislature . . . and on the 27th instructed its Senators to vote for the [negro] enlistment measure in the Confederate Congress. [About this time] a letter of General Lee’s was published looking to approval, considering it “not only expedient but necessary.” If the Confederates did not make use of the slaves, the Federals would.

The vote in the Senate on the final passage of the bill, March 7, 1865, the President was authorized to ask for and accept from slave owners the services of as many able-bodied slaves as he thinks expedient; to the same to organized by the commander-in-chief under instructions from the War Department, and to receive the same rations and compensation as other troops.

Mr. Lincoln did not think much of the impressment and enlisting of slaves. He said, in a speech made at Washington on the 17th of March, that the negro could not stay at home and make bread and fight at the same time, and he did not care much for which duty was allotted to him by the Confederate government. “We must now see the bottom of the rebels; resources.”

(Confederate Negro Enlistments. Edward Spencer. Annals of the War, Written by the Leading Participants, North and South. 1879, pp. 547-552)

New England’s Slave Past

African slaves existed in colonial New England as early as 1634 – well before any were in what became the American South – and by 1774 New England’s slave population totaled over 16,000. Interestingly, New England clergymen, merchants and lawyers then commonly owned at least one slave; in 1774 Connecticut’s slave population totaled over 5,000. Earlier in that century New England had surpassed England as the center of the nefarious transatlantic slave trade, which carried African slaves first to the West Indies to live and likely die as sugar cane laborers, then back to New England with sugar to make more rum with which to trade to African tribes for their slaves.

New England’s Slave Past

“[New England’s early inhabitants] were of homogenous origin, nearly all tracing their descent to English emigrants of the reigns of Charles the First, and Charles the Second. Along the seaside, wherever there was a good harbor, fishermen . . . gathered in hamlets; and each returning season saw them with an ever-increasing number of mariners and vessels, taking the cod and mackerel, and sometimes pursuing the whale into the icy labyrinths of the Northern seas; yet loving home, and dearly attached to their modest freeholds.

Of [African] slavery there was not enough to affect the character of the people, except in the southeast of Rhode Island, where Newport was conspicuous for engaging in the [transatlantic] slave trade, and where, in two or three towns, Negroes composed even a third of the inhabitants.”

(History of the United States, From the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. IV. George Bancroft. Little, Brown & Company. 1856. pp. 149-150)

 

Seward Insists Upon Servile War

Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward promised the cotton-dependent British an early end to war with “Northern victories releasing the raw cotton” of the South to England. Seward’s claim that New Orleans would soon be under his control was quickly dashed, and all were aware that Southern plantation owners would sooner burn their cotton bales than allow them to fall into enemy hands.  A desperate Seward then followed Virginia’s Royal Governor’s (Lord Dunmore) November 1775 edict to incite race war in the South, threatening both Britain and France that any aid to the American Confederacy would unleash a bloody slave uprising there. This would not only destroy Europe’s cotton source but also repeat the Haitian massacres of the early 1790’s which saw the slaughter of 4,000 white men, women and children. In retaliation, some 15,000 Africans were killed by the French.

Seward Insists Upon Servile War

“Fearing the growth in England, especially, of an intention to intervene, Seward threatened a Northern appeal to the slaves, thinking of the threat not so much in terms of an uncivilized and horrible war as in terms of the material interests of England. In brief, considering foreign attitude and action in relation to Northern advantage – to the winning of the war – he would use emancipation as a threat of servile insurrection, but he did not desire emancipation itself for fear it would cause that very intervention which it was his object to prevent.

On May 28, 1862, Seward wrote to US diplomat Charles Francis Adams, emphasizing two points: first, US diplomats abroad were now authorized to state that the war was, in part at least, intended for the suppression of slavery, and secondly, that the North if interfered with by foreign nations would be forced to unleash servile war in the South.

Such a war, Seward argued, would be “completely destructive of all European interests” and a copy of this was given to Britain’s Lord Russell on June 20th . . . and that any attempts a European mediation of the conflict would result in servile war unleashed upon the South. On July 13, Lincoln told Seward and [Gideon] Welles of the planned [gradual and compensated] emancipation proclamation and that this was his first mention of it to anyone.

On July 28, after Lord Russell reviewed Seward’s arguments, commented on the fast- increasing bitterness of the American conflict which was disturbing and unsettling to European governments, and wrote: “The approach of servile war, so much insisted upon by Mr. Seward in his dispatch, only forewarns us that another element of destruction may be added to the slaughter, loss of property, and waste of industry, which already afflict a country so lately prosperous and tranquil.”

(Great Britain and the American Civil War. Ephraim Douglas Adams. Alpha Editions, 2018 (original manuscript 1924), pg. 388-390)