From Property to Person: Slavery and the Confiscation Acts, 1861-1862 (review)

In April 1861, Abraham Lincoln solemnly denied any intent to attack the institution of chattel slavery. His administration insisted that its sole objective was the preservation of the Union, and most northerners concurred. Yet from the outset, hundreds of slaves were used in direct support of the Confederate military effort. Millions more propped up the Confederate economy. Unsurprisingly, northerners became increasingly willing to confiscate slaves and other property as a means to cripple the rebellion and punish traitors. Between August 1861 and July 1862, Congress passed two bills ostensibly designed for that very purpose, but they were singularly ineffective. "They did not bring southern wealth into the Treasury, they did not materially aid the war effort, and they did not lead to the punishment of the southern rebels" (249). Nevertheless, Siddali argues, they were the vehicle for a useful debate in which politicians, opinion makers, and military men wrestled with some of the most critical legal/constitutional questions of the era. Through exhaustive research in public documents, private papers, and newspapers, Siddali meticulously recreates the ebb and flow of these discussions.

Because northern statesmen denied that the Confederate nation had any legal existence, they were obliged to treat the rebellion, in constitutional terms, as treason on a massive scale. By this logic, the rebels remained American citizens and were thus entitled to due process of law. One difficulty—never really resolved—was how to make court action a realistic system for the confiscation of property. Another, also unresolved, had to do with the status of confiscated slave property. A confiscated horse remained a horse. It simply went from one owner to the next. But a slave? Although a few conservatives contemplated government ownership of slaves, most moderates and all radicals understood that slaves were also human beings. It followed, then, that they were really confiscating not the slaves per se but rather their labor. The new owners of that labor were the former slaves themselves.

Logically, this interpretation might have introduced the question of civil and political rights for slaves freed through operation of the confiscation acts. But on this point, policymakers remained deliberately obtuse. "Few northerners credited black people with much enterprise or intelligence," notes Siddali; "they also insisted that the confiscated slaves had to remain in the South, under some form of military or government control" (186). Many northerners, including Lincoln, favored the idea of colonizing freedmen to South America or the Caribbean. The radical senator James Lane of Kansas wanted the two races separated with "an ocean rolling between them" (112). It was no accident that the Second Confiscation Act authorized $500,000 to support a colonization program.

Large-scale colonization did not materialize, and the confiscation acts had scant practical impact. An 1867 Treasury department solicitor's report showed that less than $130,000 was paid into the Treasury from confiscated rebel property. But that is beside the point of Siddali's study. The debate itself, she maintains, is what mattered. By showing the clumsiness of congressional action as a weapon against enemy property, it reconciled northerners to the need for the major extension of presidential war powers embodied in Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. By showing the hopeless tangle of tensions and contradictions within the old constitutional stance toward property and slavery, it laid the groundwork for the subsequent Reconstruction amendments. Moreover, by underscoring the extreme reluctance with which northern policymakers made provision for a future life for freed African Americans in the United States, the debate revealed the strength of racial prejudice in mid-nineteenth century America.

This book is as sure-footed and careful a study of the Confiscation Acts as we are likely to get. Along with Michael Vorenberg's Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (New York, 2001), it is one of the most significant political and legal/constitutional works on the Civil War to appear in several years.