"Roundheads and Ramblings"
Abolition
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Posted on Friday, March 22, 2013 8:39 AM
Here's the last half of yesterday's talk at the Hilton Head Library. Headed back to Tennessee soon, so postings will be scarce until next week. If you want to hear more about Frogmore, take a look at the dedicated website at http://theroadtofrogmore.co It has lots of pictures of the real characters and places.
Just who were the first abolitionists in South Carolina?
Mansfield French was the leader of the first arrivals. An evangelical Methodist preacher, noted for
founding a school for well-to-do free blacks in Ohio, he was a charismatic speaker but a total
airhead when it came to money matters. Pierce entrusted him with all the funds
to pay teachers and purchase supplies.
Eventually he was tried for embezzlement, but all they ever proved was
gross mismanagement. Money simply melted in his hands.
Austa French, his wife, was an opera singer and the mother
of 7 children, all of whom she sent off to boarding school so that she could
get on with her life. She came to South
Carolina to write a book about the evils of slavery, and spend all of her time
interviewing slaves about the atrocities they had suffered. As soon as she had gathered enough ammunition
for a book, she went back to New York.
Susan Walker was a brilliant mathematician, a wealthy
socialite, and the friend of senators congressmen and Lincoln’s cabinet
officers. She begged to go along with
the abolitionists so she could report back to Chase. Unfortunately, she hated dirt and manual
labor. When she discovered the very
primitive conditions under which she was expected to live, she decided she had
made a mistake. She refused to set foot
in a slave cabin until it was cleaned, would eat food only if she had not seen
how it was cooked, and could not figure out what to do when she was assigned to
do the laundry. She left after only a
couple of months.
Several young Quakers volunteered for abolitionist duty
because their religion would not let them enlist in the army. But much like Susan Walker, they had no idea
how do do the tasks that were given to them.
One, Richard Soule, accidentally fed expensive cotton seed to the
livestock on the plantation to which he was assigned. Another, Charles Ware, followed his slaves to
the fields every morning just to write down the songs they sang while they
hoed. None of them knew anything about raising cotton.
Nelly Winsor and Harriet
Ware were schoolteachers, but they refused to hold classes if the students
arrived dirty. They would send them home
to take baths and put on clean clothes. Of
course, the children had only one set of clothes and no access to water except for the mucky swamps, so they
were at a standoff, and little teaching went on.
Edward Pierce was a wealthy economist who came along to
prove that a plantation run by its owner and worked by paid labor would be more
profitable than the traditional pattern of slaves and slave driver. But to prove his point, he had to buy up land
and pay his workers before he had made any profit at all. Eventually he took on several investors and
recouped his losses, only to be accused of exploiting the slaves who should
have been allowed to purchase the land.
Charlotte Forten was a mulatto, a free Philadelphia black,
who came to teach her people. But “her
people” refused to recognize her. They
called her that “brown gal” and rejected her because she lived with the other
white teachers instead of with them. She violated their understanding of class.
Only one out of the whole group of abolitionists managed to
find a way to work with the slaves and give them the kind of help they
needed. Laura Towne was a 38-year–old
spinster who had never fit in with the society in which she had been raised. She didn’t want to be a wife and mother; she
preferred to live with another woman with whom she had formed a close
relationship. She studied medicine in
the years before women could become doctors. She was a Unitarian, looked down
upon by Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians alike because though religion
should be private and free from doctrine. And of course she was an outspoken
abolitionist when women were expected to hold no political views, or at least
not expected to speak out about them. She was a misfit, but because of that,
she understood the problems the slaves faced.
Laura and her freed slaves needed each other. When the other abolitionists went home and
moved on to the next great issue, Laura
Towne stayed on St. Helena Island for 40 years, teaching and caring for the
people she had come to see as her own. |
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Posted on Thursday, March 21, 2013 4:28 PM
Here's the first half of the lecture I delivered today at the Hilton Head Library. We had another great audience, full of questions and eager to read the book. Thanks, everyone.
This country’s first experiment with the abolition of slavery began right here on
Hilton Head Island in 1861. The federal
government put together an expedition to capture a safe harbor to be used by
their blockading ships. At the end of
October, 1861, 88 ships, carrying 12 regiments (12,000 soldiers), sailed for
the coastline of South Carolina. In a terribly one-sided battle, they destroyed
two confederate forts, manned by a total of 200 men equipped with 7 guns. From Charleston, General Robert E. Lee sent
word that the Low Country of South Carolina could not be defended. Those left out of the original 200 men took
flight and headed for the safety of Charleston.
Right behind them were the white plantation owners who now had no one to
defend their lives and property.
Left behind were some
10,000 slaves who had never been off their respective plantations. They had no
one to direct their labor, no one to supply their usual food allowances and
clothing allotments, no one to treat their illnesses or help them survive on
islands now in the hands of Yankees.
The soldiers who had occupied the islands knew nothing about
actual slavery or its conditions. In
letters from those soldiers, we find complaint after complaint that went
something like this. They had come to
free the slaves. They had done so. Now why didn’t the slaves go on and
leave? And of course, the slaves did not
understand the question. Where were they
supposed to go? And how would they get there?
Their little cabins weren’t much but they were home. Their families had lived there for
generations. They didn’t want to
leave. But they did want someone to take
care of them, because someone always had
provided for their simple needs .
What was worse, no one in the Union army had expected to
find freed slaves there, and there were no plans for dealing with them. Frantic letters flew back and forth to
Washington DC. “We have 10,000 blacks,
ill, hungry, and helpless, unable to care for themselves? What are we to
do?” Lincoln had a quick answer. He turned to his Secretary of the Treasury,
Salmon P. Chase, and said, “Handle it.”
Chase responded by hiring two gentlemen – William Reynolds
to take charge of gathering the cotton crops and administering the plantations
and Edward Pierce to provide humanitarian aid for the slaves. The cotton agents and their adventures would
make a story on their own, but I want to concentrate on the Abolitionists hired
by Pierce to do “something” about the slaves themselves.
To this day, when you try to find out what the abolitionists
wanted, there’s only a single answer – to do away with all slavery. But nowhere will you find a clear explanation
of what they thought would happen to the slaves. There were no plans. They were an odd bunch
from the beginning, some 75-80 volunteers who for one reason or another were
free to uproot their lives and travel into a war zone to provide for the needs of 10,000 slaves. Looking at some of their personalities will
demonstrate the flaws in the abolitionist goals. We'll do that tomorrow. |
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Posted on Monday, September 24, 2012 12:57 PM
150 years ago today, people were talking about Abraham Lincoln's bold new declaration on Emancipation. That anniversary deserves more notice than it has received. So I am pleased to pass along this New York Times column on the event.
Lincoln’s
Great Gamble Countless
school children have been taught that Abraham Lincoln was the Great
Emancipator. Others have been taught - and many have concluded - that the
Emancipation Proclamation, which Abraham Lincoln announced on Sept. 22, 1862,
has been overemphasized, that it was inefficacious, a sham, that Lincoln's
motivations were somehow unworthy, that slavery was ended by other ways and
means, and that slavery was on the way out in any case.
The
truth is that Lincoln's proclamation was an exercise in risk, a huge gamble by
a leader who sought to be - and who became - America's great liberator.
Since
before his election in 1860, Lincoln and his fellow Republicans had vowed to
keep slavery from spreading. The leaders of the slave states refused to go
along. When Lincoln was elected and his party took control of Congress, the
leaders of most of the slave states turned to secession rather than allow the
existing bloc of slave states to be outnumbered.
The
Union, divided from the Confederacy, was also divided itself. Many Democrats
who fought to stop secession blamed Republicans for pushing the slave states
over the brink; some were open supporters of slavery. And if the Democrats were
to capture control of Congress in the mid-term elections of November 1862,
there was no telling what the consequences might be for the Republicans'
anti-slavery policies.
The
Emancipation Proclamation wasn't always part of the plan. Republicans, Lincoln
included, tried push their anti-slavery program by measured degrees, since they
feared a white supremacist backlash. That was what made Lincoln's decision to
issue an emancipation edict, and to do it before the mid-term congressional elections
of 1862, so extraordinarily risky.
In
the first half of 1862, he had tried to institute a program of gradual and
compensated emancipation in Delaware, Kentucky and Maryland, the slave states
that had not fallen under the control of secessionists. But the border-state
leaders refused to listen. So Lincoln decided in July that he would turn his
attention to rebellious slave states, and there, in the name of preserving the
Union, he would institute immediate and uncompensated emancipation.
In
the months that followed, he worked to soften public opinion in the North - to
get the public ready for the fact that he intended to free some slaves. In
August, he wrote a letter to Horace Greeley, editor of The New York Tribune.
This letter would soon become famous. Lincoln claimed that his "paramount
object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either
to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any
slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I
would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I
would also do that."
This
was a clever deception in light of the fact that no breach in the Union would
have happened in the first place had Lincoln and his fellow Republicans not refused
to admit more slave states to the Union. Lincoln's letter to Greeley was
misleading; he wrote it in an effort to appeal to patriotic Unionists and get
them used to the idea that he might start freeing slaves. What he hoped was
that people would view the proclamation as a patriotic necessity.
Some
observers got the point; Sydney Howard Gay, a leading abolitionist, wrote to
Lincoln: Your
letter to Mr. Greeley has infused new hope among us at the North who are
anxiously awaiting that movement on your part that they believe will end the
rebellion by removing its cause. I think the general impression is that as you
are determined to save the Union tho' slavery perish, you mean presently to
announce that the destruction of Slavery is the price of our salvation.
Lincoln
himself confided to Representative Isaac N. Arnold that, as Arnold recounted,
"the meaning of his letter to Mr. Greeley was this: he was ready to
declare emancipation when he was convinced that it could be made effective, and
that the people were with him." Others,
however, concluded from the letter that Lincoln was hopelessly obtuse in regard
to the moral issues of the war. Wendell Phillips, another abolitionist leader,
called the letter a "disgraceful document" and asserted that Lincoln
"can only be frightened or bullied into the right policy . . . . He's a
Spaniel by nature - nothing broad, generous, or highhearted about him."
In
early September the deceptions thickened as Lincoln pretended he had not yet
decided on the matter; he even played devil's advocate and told a group of
visiting abolitionists that he was plagued with doubts about emancipation:
"how can we feed and care for such a multitude," he asked a group of
Chicago anti-slavery petitioners who visited him on Sept. 13. Once again, he
was being deceptive; not only was he positive that he would take this step -
the proclamation had been written already - but he was ready to act in advance
of the November elections. He was waiting for a battlefield victory that would
permit him to issue the proclamation from a position of strength. At one point
he made this very clear to his listeners: "There is a question of
expediency as to time, should such a proclamation be issued. Matters look dark
just now. I fear that a proclamation on the heels of a defeat would be
interpreted as a cry of despair. It would come better, if at all, immediately
after a victory."
After
Lee's invasion of Maryland was stopped in the battle of Antietam on Sept. 17,
Lincoln made up his mind to go ahead. He later told a Massachusetts congressman
that "when Lee came over the river, I made a resolution that if McClellan
drove him back I would send the Proclamation after him." On Sept. 22, he
read the proclamation to his cabinet.
The
Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation is called "preliminary" because
it was framed as a warning to rebels, a threat to take action by a certain date
if they refused to lay down their arms. Lincoln warned that if the rebellion
continued past Jan. 1, 1863, All
persons held as slaves within any state, or designated part of a state, the
people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be
then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the executive government of the
United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will
recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts
to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their
actual freedom."
The
warning was clear: the rebels were risking the permanent loss of their slaves
if they refused to lay down their arms by New Year's Day. Lincoln's armies
would not only "recognize" the freedom of slaves, they would work to
"maintain" that freedom.
When
the proclamation was released to the press later that day, reactions spanned a
very broad range. The black abolitionist Frederick Douglass complained that it
"touched neither justice nor mercy. Had there been one expression of sound
moral feeling against Slavery, one word of regret and shame that this accursed
system had remained so long the disgrace and scandal of the Republic, one word
of satisfaction in the hope of burying slavery and the rebellion in one common
grave, a thrill of joy would have run round the world." The abolitionist
Lydia Maria Child wrote that "it was done reluctantly and stintedly . . .
. It was merely a war measure, to which we were forced by our own perils and
necessities." "How cold the president's proclamation is,"
remarked abolitionist Sallie Holley.
But
other anti-slavery leaders were ecstatic. Theodore Tilton wrote that he was
"half crazy with enthusiasm." Samuel J. May Jr. wrote that "joy,
gratitude, thanksgiving, renewed hope and courage fill my soul." The
Radical Republican Senator Charles Sumner wrote that "the skies are
brighter and the air is purer now that Slavery is handed over to
judgment." Horace Greeley editorialized thus: "Let the President know
that everywhere throughout the land he is hailed as Wisest and Best . . . . He
re-creates a nation." The editor of The Pittsburgh Gazette called the
proclamation "the most important document in world history." Even
Frederick Douglass, despite his doubts, spoke words of praise for public
consumption: "We shout for joy that we live to record this righteous
decree."
On
Sept. 24, some administration revelers met at the home of Salmon P. Chase, the
Treasury secretary, an ardent pre-war Free Soiler and a rival of Lincoln's for
the 1860 nomination. "They all seemed to feel a sort of new and
exhilarated life; they breathed freer," one of Lincoln's secretaries, John
Hay, recorded. "They gleefully and merrily called each other and
themselves abolitionists."
Some
regarded the proclamation as an act of great political shrewdness. The editor
of The Boston Commonwealth wrote that while "we complained bitterly that
the President was slow," it was obvious that "his slowness has been
the means of committing the whole flock of you to a rule of loyalty, which you
cannot abandon . . . . Those who do not stand by the Proclamation will be
branded as those who would rather see the United States Government overthrown
than the end of Human Bondage on this continent."
But
others worried that Lincoln's proclamation might prove a political mistake.
Postmaster General Montgomery Blair warned that it would "endanger our
power in Congress, and put the next House of Representatives in the hands of
those opposed to the war, or to our mode of carrying it on."
White
supremacist Democrats vilified the proclamation. The Louisville Democrat editorialized
that "the President has as much right to abolish the institution of
marriage, or the laws of a State regulating the relation of parent and child,
as to nullify the right of a State to regulate the relations of the white and
black races." The New York Express excoriated the proclamation; no
president had ever before "conceived a policy so well fitted, utterly to
degrade and destroy white labor, and to reduce the white man to the level of
the negro." Lincoln's
gamble was dangerous indeed. But he did what he believed he had to do. It was
not, in the end, a political calculation.
According to the diary of Navy
Secretary Gideon Welles, Lincoln told his cabinet on Sept. 22 he had made a
promise to God. "He had made a vow, a covenant," Welles recounted,
"that if God gave us the victory in the approaching battle, he would . . .
move forward in the cause of emancipation."
And
so the stakes of the war would be raised to a level commensurate with all of
the carnage and all of the sacrifice. The meaning of the war would be changed -
forever changed - by Lincoln's proclamation.
Richard
Striner, a history professor at Washington College, is the author of "Lincoln and Race."
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Posted on Friday, April 20, 2012 1:16 PM
April 1862 was also the month in which a group of teachers and missionaries moved into the sea islands to work with the slaves who had been abandoned when the Union Army arrived in South Carolina. the members of this group are the subjects of my upcoming book, The Road to Frogmore. Although the missionaries were staunch abolitionists, they had little idea of the challenges they would face. A Scratch with the Rebels mentioned a few of them.
As the young Gideonites moved onto the abandoned
plantations of the Sea Islands, they confronted a myriad of situations for
which their college educations had not prepared them. They had arrived with
high expectations of cooperation from the local authorities in their efforts to
prepare the slaves for freedom. They were dismayed to discover that those
seemingly in command could not even cooperate with each other. One new
plantation superintendent, Edward S. Phibrick, reported that he had trouble
getting the crops handled, because of interference from two sources. Gen.
Hunter was trying to call up recruits for his new volunteer troop, and the
cotton agents were hiring the men away for fifty cents a day. Philbrick
complained that the blacks would wonder off and then return several days later,
expecting to see their families and then go back to work: "They are nearly
all active young men and are pleased with this roving sort of life, but you may
imagine how fatal such a state of thing is to my efforts at organization"
Susan Walker also commented on the clashes
over conflicting authorities: "I fear the cotton agent, Salisbury,
stationed here is not a good man. The Negroes complain of him, and they all
look so neglected it is quite evident he has done no good upon the plantation.
He drives the finest horses I have seen in Port Royal or St. Helena, gives good
dinners, entertains largely, has appropriated all the furniture and nearly all
the teams about the place and refuses to give anything to the superintendents
placed there by Mr. Pierce."
Such complaints and others reflected
the various misapprehensions under which the missionaries and other Northern
authorities labored in their early efforts to handle the problems of the
abandoned slaves. Susan Walker found her duties frustrating. Her first
impression of her pupils was that they were "ragged and dirty" but
polite, welcoming, more eager for books than for clothes. She was a teacher by training and an
abolitionist by conscience, and the abolitionist in her believed that to hand
out charity to the blacks would be to deny them their inherent equality. At the
same time, she could not ignore the lack of "social graces" that set
them apart from other students she had known. She was encouraged on the one
hand by their receptiveness but repelled by their lack of basic hygiene. Soon
she was sending at least half of them home from her makeshift classroom each
morning to wash their hands and faces before she would teach them. Not long
after her arrival, she visited the Jenkins' plantation, about eight miles away,
where she met a very pregnant slave woman whose problems overwhelmed her.
"Katy has 7 ragged, dirty children—what shall be done? No husband and nothing.
Some clothes are given for her children—one naked, and must have it at once. Is
Katy lazy? Very likely. Does she tell the truth? Perhaps not. I must have
faith, and she must at least cover her children."
Philbrick's reaction was somewhat
more admiring, although he recognized that his wife might have reservations
about working with the former slaves. He warned her that she could not bring a
servant with her if she chose to join him: "There are plenty of servants
here, which you are supposed to teach not only to read but—what is more
immediately important—to be cleanand
industrious. If you feel any hesitation
about coming in contact with them you shouldn't come, for they are sharp enough
to detect apathy or lurking repugnance, which would render any amount of
theoretical sympathy about worthless."
Perhaps
because he looked for signs that a slave was fully capable of full citizenship,
he found much to commend: "Think of their having reorganized and gone
deliberately to work here some weeks ago, without a white man near them,
preparing hundreds of acres for the new crop! The Irish wouldn't have done as
much in the same position." |
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Posted on Thursday, March 17, 2011 12:51 PM
 On this St. Patrick's
Day, everyone wants to be thought of as at least part-Irish. It provides a wonderful excuse to go out
for a pint of Guinness or some corned beef and cabbage. Irish brogues and Irish
blessings seem to be on everyone's tongue. Green clothes have emerged from the
backs of closets, and a couple of comments on Facebook have reminded everyone
that if you don't wear green today, you can expect to be pinched by one of
those celebrants who may have imbibed a bit too heavily of green beer.
I
am reminded, however, how frequently various nationalities have suffered from
discrimination because they seemed strange or different, and the Irish were no
exception. One hundred and fifty
years ago, it was the Irish who were regarded by many Americans as somehow
inferior forms of humanity. That
form of prejudice leaps out at me as I
have been reading about the abolitionist attempts to prove that the
children of southern slaves were as capable as white children of getting an
education.
Here's just one example,
taken from letter written by
Edward Philbrick, an Abolitionist missionary in South Carolina. He had been telling his wife why he
believed newly-freed slaves were fully capable of becoming useful
citizens. He says, "Think of
their having reorganized and gone deliberately to work here some weeks ago,
without a white man near them,
preparing hundreds of acres for the new crop. The Irish wouldn't have done as much in the same position."
Another of the missionaries commented that to one who was used to seeing the
stupidity of Irish faces, the slaves did not appear to "suggest a new idea
of low humanity."
There
seems to be an underlying assumption in the thinking of the Civil War period,
that some peoples are just naturally inferior to others. Others among the missionaries speak of the
Irish as one of the "degraded races" of people who had fallen from
their original state of natural equality to a lesser status. I've been shocked
to see that the same people who argue for the inherent ability of the former
slaves have no qualms about sneering at the inferiority of the Irish. As a
counterbalance, it is also easy to find the Bostonian Irish making the same
disparaging remarks about Negroes in general, perhaps because they saw them as
competition in the labor force.
I'm
not quite sure what to make of all of this. Are you surprised to learn that the
Irish were attacked in this way? More important, what does it say about our
ability — or inability — to judge the worth of people who are different from
us?
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