Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867: Series 3, Volume 1: Land and Labor, 1865

Chapter 1. The Novel Condition of Freedom

1 The Novel Condition of Freedom 72 tHe noVel conDition of freeDom The end of slavery in the American South put former slaves and former slaveholders in situations for which they were not and could not have been fully prepared . Slavery had influenced every aspect of life; its death amid a bloody civil war would reshape all manner of human relationships. But nobody knew just what would change, how fast, or on whose terms. “All men accustomed to a system of servitude—must require time to accomodate their actions to the novel condition of freedom,” declared a former slaveholder in Georgia. Presidential proclamations, congressional laws, and military orders decreed the end of slavery in direct and unambiguous language, but actually eradicating bondage and establishing the foundations of a society based on freedom was a tortuous, drawn-out, and often violent process. The legal status of former slaveholders and former slaves might be transformed at a stroke—not so their hearts and minds, their passions and prejudices, their views of the world as it was and as they wished it to be. Although they were unprepared for emancipation, Southerners were not caught completely unawares. Before the outbreak of the war, both slaveholders and slaves had had occasion to imagine a world without slavery—the owners with dread and the enslaved with hope. During the conflict, events they had only imagined began to become reality. More than 474,000 of the South’s four million slaves not only gained freedom before war’s end but also experienced some form of compensated labor within Union lines. Even in areas removed from federal troops, wartime pressures had eroded slavery. Learning of emancipation in Union-occupied territory and seeing the federal army as the spearhead of their liberation, slaves had acted in ways both great and small to hasten the end of bondage. Facing their slaves’ determined resistance and the rebellion’s declining military fortunes, some slaveholders had given up on slavery even before the Confederate surrender. Others, however, redoubled their efforts to keep black people in thrall. Such efforts were most successful in regions remote from Union armies and on the periphery of established networks of transport and communication—the interior 1. In this essay, quotations and statements of fact that appear without footnotes are drawn from the documents included in the chapter. Published accounts of initial responses to emancipation following the Civil War include Dan T. Carter, When the War Was Over: The Failure of Self-Reconstruction in the South, 1865–1867 (Baton Rouge, La., 1985), chaps. 1, 5; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York, 1988), chap. 3, especially pp. 78–84; Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (NewYork, 1979), especially chaps. 4–6; James L. Roark, Masters without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York, 1977), chap. 4. See also Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1972), pp. 97–112. 2. Joshua Hill to His Excellency Andrew Johnson, 10 May 1865, Papers of Andrew Johnson, vol. 8, pp. 55–57. 3. For estimates of the number of black people who had participated in various forms of labor in different regions of the Union-occupied South, see Freedom, ser. 1, vol. 2: pp. 76–79. On the disintegration of slavery, see Freedom, ser. 1, vol. 1. tHe noVel conDition of freeDom 73 of Florida, Georgia’s southernmost counties, central Alabama, most of Texas, those parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi at a distance from the Mississippi River. Elsewhere they were less effective, being continually undermined as the federal army expanded its reach and slaves seized opportunities for freedom. The surrender of rebel armies in the spring of 1865 found slavery on its last legal legs. Wartime confiscation acts and the Emancipation Proclamation had declared the freedom of most slaves in the seceded states. White unionists in West Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee had written emancipation into new state constitutions . Maryland and Missouri, two of the four slave states that had remained in the Union, emancipated their slaves in November 1864 and January 1865, respectively . A constitutional amendment abolishing slavery throughout the United States had received the approval of Congress and was before the state legislatures for ratification.Only in Kentucky and Delaware did slavery retain de jure status, and even there a sizable proportion of the slave population...