After the Battle of Port Royal Sound on Nov. 7, 1861, the victorious Union forces discovered that all of the plantation owners and their families had fled, leaving thousands of slaves behind. Many of the military officers tried to organize help for the abandoned slaves by requesting government aid. General Hunter's solution was quicker, more expedient, and far less attuned to the anti-abolitionist sentiments still prevalent in much of the Union. He simply emancipated the former slaves. In an order, issued from Hilton Head on 9 May 1862, he wrote:

The three States of Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina, comprising the Military Department of the South, having deliberately declared themselves no longer under the protection of the United States of America, and having taken up arms against said United States, it became a military necessity to declare martial law. This was accordingly done the 25th day of April, 1862. Slavery and martial law in a free country are altogether incompatible; the persons in these three States, Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina, heretofore held as slaves, are therefore declared forever free.

Both the North and the South regarded the proclamation with disapproval. The New York Times dismissed it as absurd: "His declaring freedom to all the slaves in three States, when he has no power to free a single one outside of his camp, is regarded in Washington as an act of stultification highly discreditable to any one holding the rank of General, supposed to have ordinary intelligence."

            On St. Helena Island, the missionaries were as surprised as anyone else to learn of the emancipation, and their reaction reflected their ambivalence toward the former slaves' preparation for independence. Philbrick did not think that the emancipation decree was a very good idea, and he seemed to expect Hunter to lose his job over it. As for the blacks, he called the effect of the proclamation " . . . inconsiderable. They don't hear of it, to begin with, and if they did they wouldn't care for it." On the day the emancipation was announced, however, Harriet Ware overheard one of the house servants tell someone, "Don't call me 'Joe'; my name is Mr. Jenkins." It was a lovely expression of what freedom might mean to former slaves, but the reality was something quite different.

Hunter immediately followed up his proclamation with an intensified drive to recruit soldiers from the newly emancipated slaves. On Sunday, 11 May, "Capt. Hazard Stevens arrived at Pope's Plantation on St. Helena Island, bearing an order from General Hunter notifying the plantation that on Monday morning 'all colored men between 18 and 45 capable of bearing arms shall be taken to Hilton Head'—no explanation."

(This passage is quoted from my first book, A Scratch with the Rebels.)

Tomorrow, we'll look at Lincoln's response to this premature act.