[Today, on Presidents’ Day, we rightly celebrate Abraham Lincoln
for helping end slavery. But we shouldn’t forget the unstoppable
force that also brought down the Slave Power: the several million
slaves who left the plantation, many of whom joined the Union Army.]
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THE GREAT SLAVE STRIKE THAT HELPED END SLAVERY  
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Mark A. Lause
February 20, 2023
Jacobin
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_ Today, on Presidents’ Day, we rightly celebrate Abraham Lincoln
for helping end slavery. But we shouldn’t forget the unstoppable
force that also brought down the Slave Power: the several million
slaves who left the plantation, many of whom joined the Union Army. _

Stereograph showing a group of escaped slaves including men, women,
and children gathered outside a building at the Foller Plantation in
Cumberland Landing, Pamunkey Run, Virginia. May 14, 1862., James F.
Gibson / Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons

 

Several million slaves walked off their jobs over the course of the
Civil War. As in most such disputes between workers and employers, the
latter provided most of the documentation; the striking workers left
little in the way of sources.

Yet we know that from the onset of the war, slaves were increasingly
forthcoming about their views. On Christmas Eve 1861, Kentucky whites
watched as sixty slaves paraded “singing political songs and
shouting for Lincoln.” That winter, as white Unionists sabotaged
railroad bridges in the Upper South, Confederate authorities also
began blaming disgruntled slaves for arson. At year’s end they
blamed unsupervised slaves encamped in Charleston for a fire that
swept through the city, destroying hundreds of buildings.

Elsewhere in South Carolina, authorities followed rumors into a swamp
where they found an encampment of runaways growing their own crops.
Soon after, Confederates in Adams County, Mississippi, found that
field slaves had stashed arms and supplies in a similarly isolated
maroon. Even as slaveholders repeated rumors of armed slave
insurrections, they reported remarkably more pragmatic plans, such as
that for “a stampede
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of a hundred slaves into the wilderness or toward Union lines.

White and black Union soldiers during the Civil War. (Wikimedia
Commons)

The authorities responded ruthlessly to maintain their power. Arkansas
slaveholders executed blacks for an alleged plot at Monroe, while
similar executions took place in May and June across the river in
Mississippi. At New Orleans a dozen ships burned at anchor and, “on
more than one plantation, the assistance of the authorities has been
called in to overcome the open resistance of the slaves.” Similar
rumors stirred central Kentucky and Tennessee.

At first, Federal authorities — even those who later became
prominent emancipationists — balked at allying themselves with slave
insurrection. In the war’s first weeks, General Benjamin F. Butler
assured Maryland officials that his troops would prevent a servile
insurrection there. As late as August 1862, Butler, then in Louisiana,
worried that “an insurrection [that] broke out among the negroes”
threatened whites. He squelched “the incipient revolt . . . by in-
forming the negroes that we should repel an attack by them upon the
women and children.” That fall, a threatened rebellion north of
Thibodeaux concerned officials of the Federal occupation.

Confederate paranoia aside, African Americans sustained organizations
[[link removed]] of their own that
pressed their own agenda. Black resistance to slavery had forced white
supporters to help shape a new “underground railroad.” Even in the
most contested and supervised circumstances in Virginia, enslaved
black workers established and maintained their own associations. A
Union prisoner at Staunton and a spy at Richmond stumbled onto these
societies “composed almost exclusively of colored men.”

Escaped slaves at a Union general’s headquarters, circa 1862.
(Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University via
Wikimedia Commons)

The growing numbers of aggrieved nonslaveholders, including armed
Confederate deserters and escaped Union prisoners, provided slave
rebels a growing number of whites ready to transgress the color bar.
Civilian authorities far from Federal lines clamored for martial law
and the assignment of troops to suppress small bands of armed blacks.
Increasingly, Confederates feared a convergence of “deserters from
our armies, Tories and runaways.”

By early 1864 Confederate officials in South Carolina reported
[[link removed]] “five
to six hundred negroes” not in “the regular military organization
of the Yankees” who “lead the lives of banditti, roving the
country with fire and committing all sorts of horrible crimes upon the
inhabitants.” Florida officials reported “500 Union men,
deserters, and negroes . . . raiding towards Gainesville,” while
similar groups formed to commit “depredations upon the plantations
and crops of loyal citizens and running off their slaves.” At Yazoo
City, Mississippi, they not only attacked such private estates but
successfully burned the courthouse.

At times, black resistance fueled the worst Confederate
fears, nowhere more famously
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in Jones County, Mississippi. A Confederate conscript and deserter
named Newton Knight organized and captained a small but effective band
of guerrilla fighters.

The rolling strike of the slaves defied the official policies of both
governments and made itself the great incontrovertible and
irreversible fact of the war. It established the foundations for a
substantive interracial cooperation and forced the capitulation of one
of those contending governments to rethink and expand its war goals.

Through the summer of 1862, even as President Abraham Lincoln remained
aloof from abolitionist proposals, he decided to expand the Union’s
goals as commander in chief. In September, though, the
president issued
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“preliminary proclamation” of emancipation.

The Federal Government and the Transition to Wage Labor

The Federal government accepted emancipation because it had no
alternative. The farther the Union armies penetrated into the South,
the denser population of slaves responded with a general, though not
universal, abandonment of the plantations.

On the Carolina coast, in the lower Mississippi Valley, and in the
later march through Georgia, the numbers of enslaved workers who
abandoned their labors and escaped to freedom came to outnumber the
Union troops who seized and garrisoned these areas. Those who had been
the most powerless and downtrodden people on the continent had placed
emancipation beyond the control of presidents and generals.

At times, black resistance fueled the worst Confederate
fears, nowhere more famously
[[link removed]] than
in Jones County, Mississippi. A Confederate conscript and deserter
named Newton Knight organized and captained a small but effective band
of guerrilla fighters.

The rolling strike of the slaves defied the official policies of both
governments and made itself the great incontrovertible and
irreversible fact of the war. It established the foundations for a
substantive interracial cooperation and forced the capitulation of one
of those contending governments to rethink and expand its war goals.

Through the summer of 1862, even as President Abraham Lincoln remained
aloof from abolitionist proposals, he decided to expand the Union’s
goals as commander in chief. In September, though, the
president issued
[[link removed]] his
“preliminary proclamation” of emancipation.

The Federal Government and the Transition to Wage Labor

The Federal government accepted emancipation because it had no
alternative. The farther the Union armies penetrated into the South,
the denser population of slaves responded with a general, though not
universal, abandonment of the plantations.

On the Carolina coast, in the lower Mississippi Valley, and in the
later march through Georgia, the numbers of enslaved workers who
abandoned their labors and escaped to freedom came to outnumber the
Union troops who seized and garrisoned these areas. Those who had been
the most powerless and downtrodden people on the continent had placed
emancipation beyond the control of presidents and generals.

Eastman Johnson, A Ride for Liberty — The Fugitive Slaves, circa
1862. (Brooklyn Museum via Wikimedia Commons)

African Americans had never entirely been strangers to wage labor.
Some slaves as well as free blacks had participated in labor
activities and organizations. The Waiter’s Protective Union at New
York, a decade before the war, had surely not been unique. Almost as
soon as the war ended, ongoing black labor discontent gave rise to
local “ringleaders” and “troublemakers.” A South Carolina
freedman named Sandy was described as one who “works when he
chooses, and only such work as he chooses to do . . . all the time
exciting the people with falsehoods and rebellions principles.” He
and his followers appealed persistently
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the Freedmen’s Bureau, but Federal concerns proved to be nothing if
not ambiguous.

Associations for mutual aid sprang up across the South, some achieving
considerable size and influence. The Church Pension Society of
Freedmen at Columbia, South Carolina, appeared quickly enough to hint
at older networks among blacks. African Americans in Tennessee
established two prominent mutual-aid societies at Memphis and
Chattanooga, the former strong enough to support on its own two
hundred indigent freed people.

Other associations, such as the Union Progressive Association,
organized blacks or sometimes racially mixed memberships. This
“literary society of the colored men of Boston” sponsored a
celebration of emancipation that drew “a very large attendance, a
considerable portion of those present being white.

Most dramatically, the unexpectedly disastrous level of casualties
opened one avenue of work, traditionally reserved for whites, to
African Americans. As events drove the white South to an ever-heavier
reliance on conscription and coercion, the Union turned to black
troops. Strikers accounted for most of the roughly quarter-million
soldiers who served in the “colored volunteer” regiments, where
they performed the same work being performed by whites, though not at
the same pay or under the same terms.

Nevertheless, military service imposed similar experiences upon black
and white men, and many responded with an acknowledgement of the
familiar. “You would be astonished,” Sergeant George Washington
Beidelman of the Philadelphia Typographical Union assured
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father, “to see in what short time these rough and uncouth, and
hitherto despised and ignorant men, attain proficiency as good
soldiers — both in drill and discipline. We have many visitors daily
— both citizens and soldiers, and all are surprised and delighted. I
think the Government has ‘hit the nail on the head’ in this
instance; for it is evidently fast becoming its strongest arm for the
suppression of the rebellion.”

Despite the Lincoln administration directive to commission black
officers, the military high command placed whites in charge of such
regiments. Many in power retained the racist expectations that the
entire project was but a disaster in the making. Other white officers
generally ascribed lesser status to a “nigger colonel” and, with
many of the white soldiers, initially accorded black men in arms
little respect. Finally, Confederate policy was to regard all black
soldiers as slave rebels and their officers as instigators of slave
rebellion, liable to summary execution.

Illustration of emancipation in Harper’s Weekly, 1863. Wikimedia
Commons)

Early on, radical abolitionists such as Elizur Wright urged black
recruitment as an essential mechanism of a sweeping social
reconstruction. Various African Americans became involved in such
military activities through the work of a number of important
recruiters. Martin R. Delany, James McCune Smith, William H. Day,
and Peter Humphries Clark
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who had long-standing, if selective, association with white radicals
and labor reformers — seemed to see equal participation in the
military as a means of fostering a more equal participation in the
wider society.

Along the western border of the war, former Chartist and socialist
Richard J. Hinton served in the First Kansas Colored, and then the
Second Kansas Colored, the Seventy-Ninth and Eighty-Third United
States Colored Troops. William H. T. Wakefield, future vice
presidential candidate of the United Labor Party, served as a
lieutenant among Arkansas black soldiers. The presence of such
officers should not obscure the generally miserable experience of
African Americans in uniform.

Whites generally chafed under the brutal discipline and hardship of
nineteenth-century military life, but most black soldiers faced far
worse. More than whites, they got pay, food, and shelter that often
looked more symbolic than real. When they responded, as did members of
the Corps d’Afrique at Fort Jackson December 1863
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the full force of military law fell upon them. While the shadow of
such insubordination and its repression might be short among whites,
it remained a long, dark, and brooding presence over the
African-American experience.

The Politics of Class and Slave Liberation

As Typographical Union brother Beidelman struggled to recover from
wounds in both legs gotten at Gettysburg, he reflected on the war’s
impact on his own racial views. He entered the war a small-town
Jacksonian Democrat with no love for abolitionists or blacks.

However, he decided that emancipation came from “the house of the
Lord — the refiner’s fire that will purify our nation.” He
publicly challenged a bishop back home who had sermonized that slavery
had not in itself been a sin. Recovering at a camp where they trained
new black regiments, Beidelman had a transformative experience of
interracial camaraderie
[[link removed]].
“Thank God, the inhuman and hell-begotten prejudices, which would
deprive these people of the dearest privileges of men and citizens,
are fast disappearing; and a new order of things will no doubt attend
the results of this great rebellion and the cleaning out of the Augean
stables of our political system.” By his death on March 14, 1864,
Beidelman messed and socialized with his new black comrades and wrote
of them with open admiration.

African Americans found some strong allies for equality, often with
close ties to the abolitionist and antebellum labor currents. However,
they were too few, too far between, and too preoccupied with the war
to matter greatly until later, and then it proved far too little to
counterbalance
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great social weight of the plantation elite, particularly as it
forgave the nation for its defeat and came back to the exercise of
power. Moreover, even as the mass slave strike secured emancipation,
Federal responses struggled to translate the achievement into an act
of government philanthropy that had nothing to do with what the slaves
or abolitionists had done.

But from a labor perspective, the slave strike repressed an
uncompromising and overwhelming appeal to numbers. It introduced a
qualitatively new kind of mass action.

_Adapted from Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American
Working Class [[link removed]] by
Mark A. Lause. Used with permission of the University of Illinois
Press. Copyright 2015 by the Board of Trustees of the University of
Illinois._

_MARK LAUSE is professor of history at the University of Cincinnati
and the author of numerous books, including, Long Road to Harpers
Ferry: The Rise of the First American Left, Race and Radicalism in the
Union Army and most recently, The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets,
Ballots and Class Conflicts in the American West._

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* slavery
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* Civil War
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* U.S. history
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* African American history
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* Labor
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* strike
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