Confronting Slavery: Edward Coles and the Rise of Antislavery Politics in Nineteenth-Century America

Introduction

Introduction On a cold February day in 1862, Edward Coles opened the latest edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer only to discover that his son Roberts had been killed in the Battle of Roanoke Island. Initial reports were spare. Extracts republished from southern newspapers recorded only that a “Captain Coles” was “among the killed.” There was a chance that this Captain Coles was not his son, but on February 15, a more detailed account of the two-day battle appeared in the paper. As he scanned the two pages of reports, his weary eyes stopped at the end of a long article entitled “The Great Victory!” There, in bold capital letters, was the name Roberts Coles. In this section presenting scenes from the battlefield, the war correspondent described “dead bodies lay[ing] about in every conceivable position” and a landscape littered with a “great variety of articles which had been cast aside by the retreating foe.” One particular casualty had caught the reporter’s attention. There amid the thicket and underbrush lay the body of “a well-dressed officer . . . with his face upward and eyes partially closed, as if resting in delicious and dreamy sleep.” This initial impression was a mere illusion; for upon closer examination it became clear that “the hue of life had departed.” What a shame, the writer observed, that this Rebel soldier, whose parents lived in Philadelphia , had allowed his “impulsive spirit” to overwhelm his “better judgment.” Coles’s youngest son, a captain in the 46th Virginia Infantry Regiment, was indeed dead.1 A lifetime of moving back and forth from Philadelphia to Albemarle County, Virginia, had led Roberts to see himself not as a Philadelphian 2 / introduction figure I.1. “Gallant Charge of Hawkins’s Zouaves upon the rebel batteries of Roanoke Island,” Harper’s Weekly, March 1, 1862. (Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.) but as a Virginian. In so large and affectionate a family with such diverse views, Roberts probably assumed that, as had always been the case, a difference of opinion would not weaken any bond of affection. “I do not believe,” he wrote to his Uncle John Rutherfoord in October 1861, that “father ever supposed my entering the army was in want of respect for him; he knows too well the love I bear him, & which he so well deserves at the hands of all his children.” The truth of the matter was, declared Roberts, that although Philadelphia was the place of his birth, Virginia was where his heart belonged. He had never kept these feelings a secret. Indeed, “my father and mother know my feelings as well as I do.” It was this devotion to Virginia as well as his determination to “claim my share of paternity in Enniscorthy,” the Coles family plantation, that had led Roberts to declare “the corresponding right to defend it” by joining the Confederate Army. Roberts consoled himself with the hope that “in spite of his objections to its institutions,” his father “would shudder at the thought of” the Old Dominion “being overrun by any invader” and, for this reason, would respect if not support his decision “to strike for Virginia.” Coles learned of his son’s enlistment in the fall of 1861 and introduction / 3 responded despondently: “From what has occurred, and will probably occur, there is little or no prospect of my ever being again happy.”2 Edward Coles was hardly the first or the last nineteenth-century father to experience the tragedy of a beloved son’s death in the American Civil War. During the two-day battle for Roanoke Island, sixty Confederate and Union men lost their lives. This relatively small number paled in comparison to the thousands of young men who had died on battlefields in Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and along the Gulf Coast and Mississippi River in 1861 or the hundreds of thousands of men who would perish before the war’s conclusion in 1865.3 But the death of Roberts Coles, and the pain felt by his father, was somewhat different, for his death proved to be the last in a series of difficult sacrifices Edward Coles made in a lifelong struggle against slavery. More than forty years earlier , he had made the difficult decision to abandon the South rather than remain in a slaveholding state. In doing so, he forfeited the wealth and status he had inherited from his father...