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Chapter 7: The Treasury’s Part in Confiscation
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The Treasury’s Part in Confiscation I f anyone in the administration might have had sympathy for confiscation and its aims, it should have been Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase. He certainly had the greatest antislavery and radical reputation of the men Lincoln chose for the Cabinet.1 As well, the Treasury Department was authorized to handle a diverse assortment of property in the South as it followed in the wake of the military. Treasury agents had excellent opportunities to evaluate what might be confiscable in the considerable amount of captured and abandoned property they encountered, thereby helping the implementation of the confiscation acts. But, for a number of reasons, Chase and his agents did not exert themselves on behalf of confiscation. Most significantly, Chase decided that for political reasons he could not be seen as ahead of Lincoln on the abolition question. Like many others, Chase also came to believe that freedmen needed to participate first in the economy as workers rather than as landowners . Furthermore, the system Chase and his agents set up to handle land in the South worked against any concerted interest in confiscable property. In addition, Attorney General Bates was as worried about Chase’s and his officers’ interfering in his administration of the confiscation acts as he was about Secretary of War Stanton and his officers. Finally, there were conflicts between Treasury agents and other officials, particularly in New Orleans, that limited the success of confiscation. The first indication of Chase’s cautious attitude toward using confiscation for abolition came in the fall of . Following John C. Frémont’s proclamation Chase wrote to Green Adams, a Kentucky friend, that Lincoln had ‘‘had some difficulty in consenting’’ to the First Confiscation Act for fear it might be ‘‘construed’’ as an attack upon slavery. No one in the administration, Chase asserted, wished ‘‘to convert this War’’ into an attack upon any state institution. Nonetheless, should the war be prolonged, as it would if ‘‘Secessionism shall gain the upper hand’’ in Kentucky, then slavery’s death was almost inevitable. ‘‘But certainly,’’ Chase proclaimed, ‘‘the Govt. is seeking no such result.’’ In the meantime, the administration would observe the policy inaugurated by Cameron ’s response to Butler in May with the result that eventually freed slaves would be ‘‘sent out of the country, or in some other way reconciling’’ their freedom with the general good. Freed slaves, in other words, would not necesPAGE 103 ................. 11265$ $CH7 03-11-05 11:39:20 PS T C W C A sarily be treated as equal to whites. Beyond employing those slaves who volunteered to assist the government, ‘‘no interference with Slavery is thought of.’’ More than three weeks later, Chase explained to a former colleague in the antislavery cause that it was almost impossible to discriminate between slaves of loyal and disloyal masters. The military, he said, should not be involved in ‘‘catching & returning slaves at all.’’ ‘‘You may rely upon it that Acts, not Proclamns ., will advance the cause,’’2 but events soon outstripped this confident prediction. By early January , Chase and the Treasury Department were handling the land and freed slaves of rebels. In early November , a number of islands off the coast of South Carolina fell to Union forces. Plantation owners there had fled to the mainland, leaving about eight thousand slaves and their property. Because the land had been abandoned and the cotton crop needed to be harvested, the Treasury Department assumed responsibility for the islands under an act Congress had passed in July to supervise commerce in formerly rebellious portions of the South. Several correspondents urged Chase to use the Sea Islands as a means to attack slavery, just as many simultaneously wrote Trumbull and his colleagues to attack slavery as the cause of the war. The administration, however, ignored these proposals. In his message to Congress on December , , Lincoln suggested these slaves be colonized; it was not clear that he believed they were free. At the same time Chase appointed Edward L. Pierce, an abolitionist friend from Boston, to administer the islands. Chase hoped Pierce could prevent the ‘‘deterioration of the estates’’ and realize ‘‘the greatest possible benefit’’ to those who labored on them, a vague way of alluding to the slaves’ the future on the islands. In February, the reformer George William Curtis noted to Chase the ‘‘novel’’ duties the government had assumed under the first act in South Carolina. He urged that Chase appoint Frederick Law Olmsted to care...
