The battlefields are quiet and even tranquil today, but the average Civil War soldier faced horror and exhaustion.
By John Blake, CNN April 11, 2011 -- Updated 1307 GMT (2107 HKT)
CNN -- He stood 5-foot-8 and weighed 145 pounds. His face was gaunt and sunburned. Ticks, fleas and lice covered his body.
Before battle, his lips would quiver and his body went numb. When the shooting started, some of his comrades burst into maniacal laughter. Others bit the throat and ears of their enemy. And some were shattered by shells so powerful that tufts of their hair stuck to rocks and trees.
Take a tour of a Civil War battlefield today, and it's difficult to connect the terrifying experience of an average Civil War soldier -- described above from various historical accounts -- with the tranquil historic sites where we now snap pictures today.
But you don't have to tour a battlefield to understand the Civil War. Look at today's headlines. As the nation commemorates the 150th anniversary of its deadliest war this week, some historians say we're still fighting over some of the same issues that fueled the Civil War.
"There are all of these weird parallels," says Stephanie McCurry, author of "Confederate Reckoning," a new book that examines why Southerners seceded and its effect on Southern women and slaves.
"When you hear charges today that the federal government is overreaching, and the idea that the Constitution recognized us as a league of sovereign states -- these were all part of the secessionist charges in 1860," she says.
These "weird parallels" go beyond the familiar debates over what caused the war, slavery or states' rights. They extend to issues that seem to have nothing to do with the Civil War.
The shutdown of the federal government, war in Libya, the furor over the new health care law and Guantanamo Bay -- all have tentacles that reach back to the Civil War, historians say.
They point to four parallels:
The disappearance of the political center
If you think the culture wars are heated now, check out mid-19th century America. The Civil War took place during a period of pervasive piety when both North and South demonized one another with self-righteous, biblical language, one historian says.
The war erupted not long after the "Second Great Awakening" sparked a national religious revival. Reform movements spread across the country. Thousands of Americans repented of their sins at frontier campfire meetings and readied themselves for the Second Coming.
They got war instead. Their moral certitude helped make it happen, says David Goldfield, author of "America Aflame," a new book that examines evangelical Christianity's impact on the war.
Goldfield says evangelical Christianity "poisoned the political process" because the American system of government depends on compromise and moderation, and evangelical religion abhors both because "how do you compromise with sin."
"By transforming political issues into moral causes, you raise the stakes of the conflict and you tend to demonize your opponents," Goldfield says.
Contemporary political rhetoric is filled with similar rhetoric. Opponents aren't just wrong -- they're sinners, Goldfield says.
"The erosion of the center in contemporary American politics is the most striking parallel between today and the time just before the Civil War," Goldfield says.
In the lead-up to the war, political campaigns were filled with religious fervor. Political parties paraded their piety and labeled opponents infidels.
"Today's government gridlock results, in part, from this religious mind set that many issues can be divided into good and evil and sin and salvation," he says.
How much power should the federal government have?
Nullification, states' rights and secession. Those terms might sound like they're lifted from a Civil War history book, but they're actually making a comeback on the national stage today.
Since the rise of the Tea Party and debate over the new health care law, more Republican lawmakers have brandished those terms. Republican lawmakers in at least 11 states invoked nullification to thwart the new health care law, according to a recent USA Today article.
It was the kind of talk that led to the Civil War, historians say.
"One of the biggest debates during the Civil War was how far should governments go in dictating our lives. We still debate those politics," says William Blair, director of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Pennsylvania State University.
The Southern answer to that question ignited the war. When they seceded, their leaders said that they were protecting the inherent rights of sovereign states. They invoked the 13 Colonies' fight for independence.
H.W. Crocker III, author of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War," says Southern secessionists were patriots reaffirming the Founding Fathers' belief that the Colonies were free and independent states.
"If the Southern states pulled out of the union today after, say, the election of Barack Obama, or some other big political issue like abortion, how many of us would think the appropriate reaction from the federal government would be to blockade Southern ports and send armies into Virginia?" Crocker asks.
He says men such as Jefferson Davis, the leader of the Confederacy, are American heroes.
"Jefferson Davis was not trying to force anything on the people in the North," he says. "We wanted to be left alone. What actually caused the war is Lincoln's insistence that no, we can't let these people go."
Slavery caused the war, says McCurry, author of "Confederate Reckoning," and most historians.
Southern slaveholders invoked the Revolution while trying to build an antidemocratic slave state "dedicated to the proposition that all men are not created equal," McCurry says.
They also didn't want to lose the tremendous wealth generated by slave labor, she says.
"They felt confident because they were the biggest producers of cotton in the Western world at the height of the Industrial Revolution."
Unleashing the dogs of war
During the run-up to the Iraq War, former Vice President Dick Cheney famously declared that American troops would be welcomed as "liberators" in Iraq.
Cheney made the mistake that political leaders have been making for ages -- he didn't know the enemy, says Emory Thomas, author of "The Dogs of War," which examines how ignorance on both sides led to the Civil War.
"Cheney thought it was going to be France in 1944, but it ended up Georgia in 1864," Thomas says.
Civil War leaders made the same mistake, Thomas says. Northern leaders like Lincoln didn't really think ordinary Southerners who had no slaves would fight in defense of slavery. Southerners didn't think Northerners were willing to go to war to preserve the Union, he says.
And few on both sides expected the war to be so bloody and long.
"America in 1861 didn't realize what the hell they were doing," he says. "They just weren't willing to think of unpleasant possibilities."
We risk the same mistakes when we commit to "limited" military campaigns in places such as Iraq and, most recently, Libya, Thomas says.
When President Obama announced a limited air bombing campaign in Libya, Thomas thought about the political leaders before the Civil War.
Each incrementally committed to various military provocations, thinking events wouldn't spiral out of control. They were wrong.
"Once you commit to war, you don't have any control over how it ends," Thomas says. "It's amazing how that sounds like Libya now. We may blunder into success, but we don't know who these guys (Libyan rebels) are."
The president as dictator
Barack Obama isn't the first black president, according to some Southern secessionists. That would be Abraham Lincoln. He was called a "black Republican" and the "Great Dictator."
There was a reason a large number of Americans despised Lincoln during the war. Think of the nation's recent "War on Terror." Some Americans thought Lincoln used the war to ignore the Constitution and expand the powers of the presidency.
Lincoln suspended habeas corpus (it gives a person who is jailed the right to challenge their detention in court) during the war and used military courts to arrests thousands of civilians.
Those legal decisions loom over post-9/11 America, historians say.
How do we treat American citizens caught attempting to bomb U.S. cities? How do we clamp down on American citizens who preach overthrowing the government? What rights do Guantanamo Bay prisoners possess?
"It's not just what does a president do against an enemy," says Blair, the Civil War historian. "It's what do you do against your own citizens to determine loyalty. That's a big debate today."
Lincoln skillfully addressed that debate, says Brian McGinty, author of "Lincoln & the Court."
He says Lincoln confronted unprecedented problems: The South was in rebellion, the nation's capital was in real danger from rebels in Virginia and their sympathizers in Maryland.
At one point, a mob blocked passage of Northern troops through Maryland to defend Washington.
"His oath of office required him to 'preserve, protect and defend the Constitution' and he believed that the best way to do that was to preserve the Union," McGinty says. "What good would the Constitution be if the country itself was lost?"
McGinty doesn't think Lincoln became a dictator. He says he allowed the presidential election to take place in 1864. He worked with Congress. He asked military officers to arrest disloyal persons sparingly, and he never tolerated abuse of prisoners.
Lincoln said his actions would ultimately be subject to the review of the American people, not the courts, McGinty says.
"He called the people 'The Great Tribunal' and said that they would have the final word on constitutional issues. In the end, The Great Tribunal approved of what he had done. So, for the most part, has history."
The Great Tribunal, however, has yet to render a unanimous verdict on the Civil War.
A century-and-a-half after the war ended, people still clash over the causes and meaning.
Blair says they still clash because the war doesn't fit many Americans' image of themselves or their past.
"The American story of our past has been a hopeful, helpful narrative," he says. "But it's hard for us to understand that there was a time in this country when the Constitution protected slavery, and it was actually legal.
"How do you insert the story of slavery into that?"
MOST Americans know that Memorial Day is about honoring the nation’s war dead. It is also a holiday devoted to department store sales, half-marathons, picnics, baseball and auto racing. But where did it begin, who created it, and why?
At the end of the Civil War, Americans faced a formidable challenge: how to memorialize 625,000 dead soldiers, Northern and Southern. As Walt Whitman mused, it was “the dead, the dead, the dead — our dead — or South or North, ours all” that preoccupied the country. After all, if the same number of Americans per capita had died in Vietnam as died in the Civil War, four million names would be on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, instead of 58,000.
Officially, in the North, Memorial Day emerged in 1868 when the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union veterans’ organization, called on communities to conduct grave-decorating ceremonies. On May 30, funereal events attracted thousands of people at hundreds of cemeteries in countless towns, cities and mere crossroads. By the 1870s, one could not live in an American town, North or South, and be unaware of the spring ritual.
But the practice of decorating graves — which gave rise to an alternative name, Decoration Day — didn’t start with the 1868 events, nor was it an exclusively Northern practice. In 1866 the Ladies’ Memorial Association of Columbus, Ga., chose April 26, the anniversary of Gen. Joseph Johnston’s final surrender to Gen. William T. Sherman, to commemorate fallen Confederate soldiers. Later, both May 10, the anniversary of Gen. Stonewall Jackson’s death, and June 3, the birthday of Jefferson Davis, were designated Confederate Memorial Day in different states.
Memorial Days were initially occasions of sacred bereavement, and from the war’s end to the early 20th century they helped forge national reconciliation around soldierly sacrifice, regardless of cause. In North and South, orators and participants frequently called Memorial Day an “American All Saints Day,” likening it to the European Catholic tradition of whole towns marching to churchyards to honor dead loved ones.
But the ritual quickly became the tool of partisan memory as well, at least through the violent Reconstruction years. In the South, Memorial Day was a means of confronting the Confederacy’s defeat but without repudiating its cause. Some Southern orators stressed Christian notions of noble sacrifice. Others, however, used the ritual for Confederate vindication and renewed assertions of white supremacy. Blacks had a place in this Confederate narrative, but only as time-warped loyal slaves who were supposed to remain frozen in the past.
The Lost Cause tradition thrived in Confederate Memorial Day rhetoric; the Southern dead were honored as the true “patriots,” defenders of their homeland, sovereign rights, a natural racial order and a “cause” that had been overwhelmed by “numbers and resources” but never defeated on battlefields.
Yankee Memorial Day orations often righteously claimed the high ground of blood sacrifice to save the Union and destroy slavery. It was not uncommon for a speaker to honor the fallen of both sides, but still lay the war guilt on the “rebel dead.” Many a lonely widow or mother at these observances painfully endured expressions of joyous death on the altars of national survival.
Some events even stressed the Union dead as the source of a new egalitarian America, and a civic rather than a racial or ethnic definition of citizenship. In Wilmington, Del., in 1869, Memorial Day included a procession of Methodists, Baptists, Unitarians and Catholics; white Grand Army of the Republic posts in parade with a black post; and the “Mount Vernon Cornet Band (colored)” keeping step with the “Irish Nationalists with the harp and the sunburst flag of Erin.”
But for the earliest and most remarkable Memorial Day, we must return to where the war began. By the spring of 1865, after a long siege and prolonged bombardment, the beautiful port city of Charleston, S.C., lay in ruin and occupied by Union troops. Among the first soldiers to enter and march up Meeting Street singing liberation songs was the 21st United States Colored Infantry; their commander accepted the city’s official surrender.
Whites had largely abandoned the city, but thousands of blacks, mostly former slaves, had remained, and they conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war.
The largest of these events, forgotten until I had some extraordinary luck in an archive at Harvard, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the city’s Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into an outdoor prison. Union captives were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand.
After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston black workmen went to the site, reburied the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”
The symbolic power of this Low Country planter aristocracy’s bastion was not lost on the freedpeople, who then, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged a parade of 10,000 on the track. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”
The procession was led by 3,000 black schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses and singing the Union marching song “John Brown’s Body.” Several hundred black women followed with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantrymen. Within the cemetery enclosure a black children’s choir sang “We’ll Rally Around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner” and spirituals before a series of black ministers read from the Bible.
After the dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches and watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantrymen participating were the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th United States Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite.
The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African-Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic. They were themselves the true patriots.
Despite the size and some newspaper coverage of the event, its memory was suppressed by white Charlestonians in favor of their own version of the day. From 1876 on, after white Democrats took back control of South Carolina politics and the Lost Cause defined public memory and race relations, the day’s racecourse origin vanished.
Indeed, 51 years later, the president of the Ladies’ Memorial Association of Charleston received an inquiry from a United Daughters of the Confederacy official in New Orleans asking if it was true that blacks had engaged in such a burial rite in 1865; the story had apparently migrated westward in community memory. Mrs. S. C. Beckwith, leader of the association, responded tersely, “I regret that I was unable to gather any official information in answer to this.”
Beckwith may or may not have known about the 1865 event; her own “official” story had become quite different and had no place for the former slaves’ march on their masters’ racecourse. In the struggle over memory and meaning in any society, some stories just get lost while others attain mainstream recognition.
*
AS we mark the Civil War’s sesquicentennial, we might reflect on Frederick Douglass’s words in an 1878 Memorial Day speech in New York City, in which he unwittingly gave voice to the forgotten Charleston marchers.
He said the war was not a struggle of mere “sectional character,” but a “war of ideas, a battle of principles.” It was “a war between the old and the new, slavery and freedom, barbarism and civilization ... and in dead earnest for something beyond the battlefield.” With or against Douglass, we still debate the “something” that the Civil War dead represent.
The old racetrack is gone, but an oval roadway survives on the site in Hampton Park, named for Wade Hampton, former Confederate general and the governor of South Carolina after the end of Reconstruction. The old gravesite of the Martyrs of the Race Course is gone too; they were reinterred in the 1880s at a national cemetery in Beaufort, S.C.
But the event is no longer forgotten. Last year I had the great honor of helping a coalition of Charlestonians, including the mayor, Joseph P. Riley, dedicate a marker to this first Memorial Day by a reflecting pool in Hampton Park.
By their labor, their words, their songs and their solemn parade on their former owners’ racecourse, black Charlestonians created for themselves, and for us, the Independence Day of a Second American Revolution.
David W. Blight, a professor of history and the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale, is the author of the forthcoming “American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era.”
A “contraband” slave and a Union soldier in southeastern Virginia, 1862. Library of Congress
By ADAM GOODHEART June 8, 2011, 9:00 pm
It was an extraordinary moment for George Scott, and perhaps even for the nation. Just weeks after Fort Sumter, this black man, a gun at his side, was preparing to lead thousands of Union soldiers forward into combat — indeed, into the first significant land battle of the Civil War.
This landmark episode, almost completely forgotten today, came more than a year before Congress officially allowed the enlistment of African-American troops, and more than two years before the 54th Massachusetts (the famous “Glory” regiment) would win laurels on the battlefield. As the Civil War began, the idea of arming blacks still seemed highly dangerous, even harebrained, so much so that President Abraham Lincoln refused to consider it. When, just after the attack on Sumter, hundreds of free blacks in Philadelphia had rallied near Independence Hall and offered to form two regiments of colored troops “in whose hearts burns the love of country,” they were ignored by the military authorities. Scott, a black Virginian, wore no uniform and held no official rank. Yet in a literal sense, it was he who led — although he did not command — the Union troops at the Battle of Big Bethel. Indeed, one Northern newspaper went so far as to call him “the main spring of the enterprise,” adding: “Without Scott it does not appear that the forces would have found their way to the scene of action.”
Even before his first experience of battlefield combat, Scott had led an extraordinary life — and had been accustomed to carrying firearms. Few people, black or white, knew their way around the lower Virginia Peninsula better than he did. And few had more reason to hope for the defeat of the Confederacy, and of slavery.
He had been born into bondage near the town of Hampton, along the James River. Originally the property of a local man, Scott had been sold to one A.M. Graves, a notoriously brutal master. Before Graves could take possession, he slipped away into the surrounding countryside, where he spent two years hiding in a cave, aided by a local white girl who brought him food, and occasionally working as a hired field hand for sympathetic local farmers. During his time as a fugitive he came to know almost every inch of the nearby woods and swamps.
Scott had also proven himself as a fighter. His master, aided by local slave patrollers, had persisted in efforts to recapture him. Once Graves, brandishing a pistol and bowie knife, managed to corner him. The formidable Scott wrenched both weapons out of Graves’s hands before disappearing again into the woods — now well armed against attack.
When the war began, Scott was one of the first local blacks to take refuge within the federal lines at Union-held Fort Monroe, gaining de facto freedom when Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, the post’s commander, declared them “contraband of war [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/magazine/mag-03CivilWar-t.html (the post to which this is a reply; see also preceding and {other} following)].” He almost immediately volunteered as a scout for Butler’s officers, then preparing their first assault against nearby Confederate troops, whose precise location was still unknown.
“I ken smell a rebel furderer dan I ken a skunk,” Scott promised. He was right. Near Big Bethel Church, about eight miles away, Scott discovered several Confederate companies, defended by an artillery battery. He concealed himself in the bushes for a full 24 hours, observing what he could. A sentry finally caught sight of Scott, but he managed to escape – a rebel bullet grazed the sleeve of his jacket as he scrambled away – and reported to Butler’s staff on what he had seen.
Maj. Theodore Winthrop Library of Congress
Apparently Scott had befriended one Union officer in particular: Maj. Theodore Winthrop, a gifted author and ardent abolitionist who had told his family upon setting out to enlist: “I go to put an end to slavery.” Scott now led Winthrop though the woods to reconnoiter the Confederate fortifications. Satisfied that the contraband’s information was correct, Winthrop relied on it for a battle plan that he drew up in consultation with General Butler.
In Butler’s final instructions to his officers was a remarkable order: “George Scott is to have a revolver.” This was apparently added at Winthrop’s urging. It marks the first recorded instance in the Civil War when a Union commander put a gun into the hands of a black man. (A different account by a Union soldier suggests that ultimately Scott was given a rifle.) And when, in the early morning hours of June 10, Winthrop rode out toward the rebel lines at the head of an infantry column, Scott was at his side. Local blacks thronged around the Northern troops to wish them well.
Winthrop’s insistence on arming Scott had, in a sense, been prophetic. “This clear-headed young man,” a Northern journalist wrote after the war, “saw what none of the statesmen had discovered, that the same law that made the slaves contraband of war for working on rebel fortifications would in like manner give them the right to bear arms. The people of the North, however, were reluctant to accept that conclusion. Not till many thousands of brave men laid down their lives would they consent to the enrolling of freed men as soldiers of the Republic.”
It is at this point that one wishes the story could have turned out differently: that Scott’s bold reconnaissance could have resulted in a glorious victory for the Union. But this was not to be. Alerted by local civilians, the Confederates were prepared for the Union troops’ would-be surprise attack. The Battle of Big Bethel — remembered as the first important clash on land in the Civil War — became a Northern rout. Scott, according to a report in The Times [ http://www.nytimes.com/1861/06/13/news/great-insurrection-further-details-conflict-great-bethel-official-dispatches-gen.html?pagewanted=all ], was “in the thickest of the … fight.” So was Major Winthrop, who was killed after dismounting to lead one last desperate charge, while Scott held his horse’s bridle.
In a sense, however, Scott’s participation at Big Bethel — which was reported in various Northern newspapers— was still a victory. Although some tried to blame him for the debacle, he had proven that the South’s newly liberated slaves were ready to serve, and even to risk their lives for, the Union cause. And this, in turn, heralded an even larger revolution, as another former slave, Frederick Douglass, noted in an 1863 speech: “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.”
For the time being, however, there were many more battles to be fought — and not only with the Confederates. Most Northerners remained opposed to enlisting black troops, and many Union officers were prepared to send fugitives like Scott back into slavery. In late June 1861, one Massachusetts journalist wrote: “I advise Geo. Scott to keep his shooting-iron, for protection against slave-catching Yankee colonels, as much as against his own pretended owner.”
The following month, Scott departed from Fort Monroe on an even more extraordinary mission: this one to Washington, D.C. Accompanying a Union colonel, he went “to plead with Pres. Lincoln for his liberties,” according to a contemporary letter. It is unclear if he was given an audience.
*
Sources: A.M. Green, “The Colored Philadelphians Forming Regiments,” in “Letters and Discussions on the Formation of Colored Regiments, and the Duty of the Colored People in Regard to the Great Slaveholders’ Rebellion”; Lewis C. Lockwood to “Dear Brethren,” April 17, 1862, American Missionary Association Papers, Fisk University; Benjamin Quarles, “The Negro in the Civil War”; Theodore Winthrop, “The Life and Poems of Theodore Winthrop”; Springfield Weekly Republican, June 29, 1861; New York Times, June 13, 1861 [ http://www.nytimes.com/1861/06/13/news/great-insurrection-further-details-conflict-great-bethel-official-dispatches-gen.html?pagewanted=all ]; Charles P. Poland, Jr., “The Glories of War: Small Battles and Early Heroes of 1861”; Benson J. Lossing, “Pictorial History of the Civil War in the United States of America”; Charles Carleton Coffin, “Drum Beat of the Nation”; Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Vol. 2; Alfred Davenport, “Camp and Field Life of the Fifth New York Volunteer Infantry”; New York World, June 14, 1861.
Adam Goodheart is the author of “1861: The Civil War Awakening [ http://knopfdoubleday.com/goodheart/ ].” He lives in Washington, D.C., and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he is the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.
There are few places in America where the full sweep of our nation’s past — from tragedy to triumph — are more palpable and immediate than on this small, fishhook-shaped spit of land near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. Fort Monroe, Va., stands where African-American slavery began — and also, in a sense, where it ended. It marks the birthplace of black America, and the place of its rebirth into freedom.
In 1619, the first shipload of captive Africans arrived at this spot, which was then an outpost of the Jamestown colony. By a remarkable coincidence, it is also where, in the spring and summer of 1861, slavery received its deathblow, as the first black fugitives of the Civil War began pouring into Union lines, a small trickle that soon became a mighty river. (I told this story in greater detail in an article [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/magazine/mag-03CivilWar-t.html?pagewanted=all (the post to which this is a reply)] in The New York Times Magazine in April.) Their bold escape, perhaps even more than Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation more than a year later, was responsible for slavery’s extinction.
Fort Monroe today, with the city of Hampton, Va., beyond it. The star-shaped citadel is the Civil War-era fortress. Courtesy of the City of Hampton
With such a history behind it, Fort Monroe might seem to deserve a place alongside Plymouth Rock and Gettysburg in the pantheon of America’s historic places. Yet relatively few ordinary citizens have heard of it, much less visited. For more than four centuries, it has been in almost continuous use as a working military base guarding the harbor known as Hampton Roads. Army officers and their families live alongside the parade ground where the fugitives once camped; a children’s swing set stands in the shadow of medieval-looking stone battlements. It feels like a place outside of time — more quiet backwater than national shrine.
Still, it is worth remembering that many of America’s historic icons spent decades or centuries languishing in obscurity. The Liberty Bell was once slated to be sold for scrap metal, saved only because it proved not worth the cost of hauling it away. The bus on which Rosa Parks took her stand against segregation was left rusting in an Alabama field, used to store lumber and farm tools; it now sits [ http://www.hfmgv.org/exhibits/rosaparks/home.asp ] at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.
Now Fort Monroe faces a new and uncertain chapter of its history — and perhaps a chance to take its rightful place among the touchstones of American history. Next month it will be deaccessioned by the Army under the terms of the federal Base Realignment and Closure Act of 2005. Its future beyond that point is in the hands of President Obama, who is deliberating whether to use his executive powers to declare the citadel a national monument, the first such act of his presidency.
Fort Monroe during the Civil War. Library of Congress
This might not seem like the most propitious moment for the president to unilaterally create a new unit of the National Park Service, which has seen its budget slashed by nearly $500 million over the past several years. But the idea, which began as the lonely effort of a few local activists, including descendants of the fugitive slaves, is currently the subject of intensive discussions among federal, state and local officials. Interior Secretary Kenneth Salazar visited Fort Monroe in late June, and last week Jon Jarvis, the director of the Park Service, told Politico [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/61247.html ] that the site “has very high potential” as a national monument.
If the grassroots movement to add Monroe to the National Park System succeeds, it will in some ways echo the events of 150 years ago, when a few ordinary Americans took a stand that ended up moving the levers of federal power. On May 23, 1861, three enslaved Virginians named Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory and James Townsend fled from their master, a Confederate colonel who had put them to work building rebel fortifications, and sought protection at the Union-held citadel. When their owner asked for the return of his “property” under fugitive-slave laws, Union Gen. Benjamin F. Butler declared the three men “contraband of war,” classifying them as captured goods being used for military purposes by the enemy and thus subject to legitimate seizure.
Within days, dozens and then hundreds more African Americans came for safe harbor within what they soon began calling “Freedom’s Fortress,” and Butler’s decision was soon ratified as official policy by Congress and the Lincoln administration. Soon, these refugees, known as “contrabands,” were contributing to the Union cause in myriad ways, sometimes even joining the federal troops in battle [ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/to-have-a-revolver/ (at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=64096475 )]. Before the Emancipation Proclamation took effect a year and a half later, tens or even hundreds of thousands of fugitives had escaped bondage throughout the South, and even many conservative whites had come to accept that slavery’s days were numbered.
African-American fugitives entering the fort in the summer of 1861. Library of Congress
Today there is little to mark Fort Monroe as the birthplace of African-American freedom. It has no memorial to General Butler or the contrabands, nor to the slaves who arrived in 1619, save for a couple of modest wayside markers. (It does contain a Jefferson Davis Memorial Park, dedicated in the 1950s by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which commemorates the rebel leader’s imprisonment there after the war.) Yet the fort’s historic structures are remarkably intact: the granite bastions and moat; the parade ground shaded by gnarled live-oaks; the officers’ quarters where Lincoln stayed during an 1862 visit. The adjacent city of Hampton, Va., is also redolent with African-American history: a makeshift school established there for fugitive slaves became Hampton University, one of the nation’s first historically black colleges.
Just a few years ago, according to Hampton’s mayor, Molly Ward, some state and federal officials “laughed at the idea” that Fort Monroe could be a national park after its closure as a military base. The plan was for the facility to become a mixed-use development of residences, shops and offices. But the efforts of activists and local officials began gradually making headway, and the 150th anniversary of the Civil War has lent additional impetus. Virginia’s congressional delegation and its Republican governor, Robert McDonnell, have endorsed turning 200 of the fort’s 565 acres over to the Park Service, with the remainder open to development under strict controls, when the Army officially cedes ownership on September 15.
“Nobody’s laughing at the idea now,” Ward told me. “It’s almost like the stars are aligned and things are falling into place.” Last month, the Park Service held a public comment session at the local convention center; more than a thousand people attended and not one spoke against the national monument designation. The only dissent, Ward said, was over whether the 200-acre enclave would be sufficient.
It remains to be seen whether President Obama — despite the current budget woes — will use his authority to make the Fort Monroe national monument a reality, a power that he holds under the Antiquities Act of 1906. (President Bill Clinton used the act to designate no fewer than 19 national monuments; President George W. Bush created six.) Many supporters have suggested that this would be a fitting way to honor the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, which has received relatively little federal recognition.
As yet, Obama has paid no official visit to Fort Monroe. In July 2009, however, not long into his presidency, he and his family toured Cape Coast Castle in Ghana [ http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39512422 (and preceding and following, also http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39512772 )], a fortress where African slaves once awaited transportation across the Middle Passage to America — following in the footsteps of Clinton and Bush, who had paid similar visits to Senegal’s Gorée Island. The president spoke there of its evocative power as a place of both profound sadness and hope, a beacon of the courage that would “abolish slavery and ultimately win civil rights for all people.”
Fort Monroe is America’s own Cape Coast Castle or Gorée Island. Indeed, it is more than that — for here liberty, as well as slavery, began. The weeks ahead may determine whether it will become a similar place of pilgrimage, much closer to home.
Adam Goodheart is the author of “1861: The Civil War Awakening [ http://knopfdoubleday.com/goodheart/ ].” He lives in Washington, D.C., and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he is the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.
Slavery's Global Comeback Slaves pan for gold in Accra, Ghana. Many have children with them as they wade in water poisoned by mercury that's used in the extraction process. Buying and selling people into forced labor is bigger than ever. What "human trafficking" really means. Dec 19 2012 http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/12/slaverys-global-comeback/266354/ [with comments]
ONE hundred and fifty years ago, on Jan. 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln presided over the annual White House New Year’s reception. Late that afternoon, he retired to his study to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. When he took up his pen, his hand was shaking from exhaustion. Briefly, he paused — “I do not want it to appear as if I hesitated,” he remarked. Then Lincoln affixed a firm signature to the document.
Like all great historical transformations, emancipation was a process, not a single event. It arose from many causes and was the work of many individuals. It began at the outset of the Civil War, when slaves sought refuge behind Union lines. It did not end until December 1865, with the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which irrevocably abolished slavery throughout the nation.
But the Emancipation Proclamation was the crucial turning point in this story. In a sense, it embodied a double emancipation: for the slaves, since it ensured that if the Union emerged victorious, slavery would perish, and for Lincoln himself, for whom it marked the abandonment of his previous assumptions about how to abolish slavery and the role blacks would play in post-emancipation American life.
There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Lincoln’s statement [ http://www.nps.gov/resources/story.htm?id=234 ] in 1864 that he had always believed slavery to be wrong. During the first two years of the Civil War, despite insisting that the conflict’s aim was preservation of the Union, he devoted considerable energy to a plan for ending slavery inherited from prewar years. Emancipation would be undertaken by state governments, with national financing. It would be gradual, owners would receive monetary compensation and emancipated slaves would be encouraged to find a homeland outside the United States — this last idea known as “colonization.”
Lincoln’s plan sought to win the cooperation of slave holders in ending slavery. As early as November 1861, he proposed it to political leaders in Delaware, one of the four border states (along with Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri) that remained in the Union. Delaware had only 1,800 slaves; the institution was peripheral to the state’s economy. But Lincoln found that even there, slave holders did not wish to surrender their human property. Nonetheless, for most of 1862, he avidly promoted his plan to the border states and any Confederates who might be interested.
Lincoln also took his proposal to black Americans. In August 1862, he met with a group of black leaders from Washington. He seemed to blame the presence of blacks in America for the conflict: “but for your race among us there could not be war.” He issued a powerful indictment of slavery — “the greatest wrong inflicted on any people” — but added that, because of racism, blacks would never achieve equality in America. “It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated,” he said. But most blacks refused to contemplate emigration from the land of their birth.
In the summer of 1862, a combination of events propelled Lincoln in a new direction. Slavery was disintegrating in parts of the South as thousands of slaves ran away to Union lines. With the war a stalemate, more Northerners found themselves agreeing with the abolitionists, who had insisted from the outset that slavery must become a target. Enthusiasm for enlistment was waning in the North. The Army had long refused to accept black volunteers, but the reservoir of black manpower could no longer be ignored. In response, Congress moved ahead of Lincoln, abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, authorizing the president to enroll blacks in the Army and freeing the slaves of pro-Confederate owners in areas under military control. Lincoln signed all these measures that summer.
The hallmark of Lincoln’s greatness was his combination of bedrock principle with open-mindedness and capacity for growth. That summer, with his preferred approach going nowhere, he moved in the direction of immediate emancipation. He first proposed this to his cabinet on July 22, but Secretary of State William H. Seward persuaded him to wait for a military victory, lest it seem an act of desperation.
Soon after the Union victory at Antietam in September, Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, a warning to the Confederacy that if it did not lay down its arms by Jan. 1, he would declare the slaves “forever free.”
Lincoln did not immediately abandon his earlier plan. His annual message to Congress, released on Dec. 1, 1862, devoted a long passage to gradual, compensated abolition and colonization. But in the same document, without mentioning the impending proclamation, he indicated that a new approach was imperative: “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present,” he wrote. “We must disenthrall our selves, and then we shall save our country.” Lincoln included himself in that “we.” On Jan. 1, he proclaimed the freedom of the vast majority of the nation’s slaves.
The Emancipation Proclamation is perhaps the most misunderstood of the documents that have shaped American history. Contrary to legend, Lincoln did not free the nearly four million slaves with a stroke of his pen. It had no bearing on slaves in the four border states, since they were not in rebellion. It also exempted certain parts of the Confederacy occupied by the Union. All told, it left perhaps 750,000 slaves in bondage. But the remaining 3.1 million, it declared, “are, and henceforward shall be free.”
The proclamation did not end slavery in the United States on the day it was issued. Indeed, it could not even be enforced in most of the areas where it applied, which were under Confederate control. But it ensured the eventual death of slavery — assuming the Union won the war. Were the Confederacy to emerge victorious, slavery, in one form or another, would undoubtedly have lasted a long time.
A military order, whose constitutional legitimacy rested on the president’s war powers, the proclamation often disappoints those who read it. It is dull and legalistic; it contains no soaring language enunciating the rights of man. Only at the last minute, at the urging of Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, an abolitionist, did Lincoln add a conclusion declaring the proclamation an “act of justice.”
Nonetheless, the proclamation marked a dramatic transformation in the nature of the Civil War and in Lincoln’s own approach to the problem of slavery. No longer did he seek the consent of slave holders. The proclamation was immediate, not gradual, contained no mention of compensation for owners, and made no reference to colonization.
In it, Lincoln addressed blacks directly, not as property subject to the will of others but as men and women whose loyalty the Union must earn. For the first time, he welcomed black soldiers into the Union Army; over the next two years some 200,000 black men would serve in the Army and Navy, playing a critical role in achieving Union victory. And Lincoln urged freed slaves to go to work for “reasonable wages” — in the United States. He never again mentioned colonization in public.
Having made the decision, Lincoln did not look back. In 1864, with casualties mounting, there was talk of a compromise peace. Some urged Lincoln to rescind the proclamation, in which case, they believed, the South could be persuaded to return to the Union. Lincoln refused. Were he to do so, he told one visitor, “I should be damned in time and eternity.”
Wartime emancipation may have settled the fate of slavery, but it opened another vexing question: the role of former slaves in American life. Colonization had allowed its proponents to talk about abolition without having to confront this issue; after all, the black population would be gone. After Jan. 1, 1863, Lincoln for the first time began to think seriously of the United States as a biracial society.
While not burdened with the visceral racism of many of his white contemporaries, Lincoln shared some of their prejudices. He had long seen blacks as an alien people who been unjustly uprooted from their homeland and were entitled to freedom, but were not an intrinsic part of American society. During his Senate campaign in Illinois, in 1858, he had insisted that blacks should enjoy the same natural rights as whites (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness), but he opposed granting them legal equality or the right to vote.
By the end of his life, Lincoln’s outlook had changed dramatically. In his last public address [ http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/last.htm ], delivered in April 1865, he said that in reconstructing Louisiana, and by implication other Southern states, he would “prefer” that limited black suffrage be implemented. He singled out the “very intelligent” (educated free blacks) and “those who serve our cause as soldiers” as most worthy. Though hardly an unambiguous embrace of equality, this was the first time an American president had endorsed any political rights for blacks.
And then there was his magnificent second inaugural address [ http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=38 ] of March 4, 1865, in which Lincoln ruminated on the deep meaning of the war. He now identified the institution of slavery — not the presence of blacks, as in 1862 — as its fundamental cause. The war, he said, might well be a divine punishment for the evil of slavery. And God might will it to continue until all the wealth the slaves had created had been destroyed, and “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn by the sword.” Lincoln was reminding Americans that violence did not begin with the firing on Fort Sumter, S.C., in April 1861. What he called “this terrible war” had been preceded by 250 years of the terrible violence of slavery.
In essence, Lincoln asked the nation to confront unblinkingly the legacy of slavery. What were the requirements of justice in the face of this reality? What would be necessary to enable former slaves and their descendants to enjoy fully the pursuit of happiness? Lincoln did not live to provide an answer. A century and a half later, we have yet to do so.
THE Emancipation Proclamation, signed 150 years ago today, was a revolutionary achievement, and widely recognized as such at the time. Abraham Lincoln himself declared, “If my name goes into history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.”
On New Year’s Eve, 1862, “watch-night” services in auditoriums, churches, camps and cabins united thousands, free as well as enslaved, who sang, prayed and counted down to midnight. At a gathering of runaway slaves in Washington, a man named Thornton wept: “Tomorrow my child is to be sold never more.”
The Day of Jubilee, as Jan. 1, 1863 was called, arrived at last and celebrations of deliverance and freedom commenced. “We are all liberated by this proclamation,” Frederick Douglass observed. “The white man is liberated, the black man is liberated.” The Fourth of July “was great,” he proclaimed, “but the First of January, when we consider it in all its relations and bearings, even greater.”
Yet the day never took hold as Emancipation Day, an occasion to commemorate freedom for all Americans. Nearly three years would pass before the ratification of the 13th Amendment officially abolished slavery. All too quickly, the joy of emancipation succumbed to the reality of a circumscribed freedom in which blacks found themselves the victims of economic injustice and racial discrimination.
Settling on a single day to celebrate emancipation was further complicated by the variety of dates on which actual freedom, or word of it, came to the slaves: for example, slavery ended on April 16, 1862 [ http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured_documents/dc_emancipation_act/ ] in Washington, but it didn’t come to Virginia until April 3, 1865; word of the war’s end and emancipation didn’t reach Texas until June 19, 1865, a day celebrated as “Juneteenth.” Some areas marked Feb. 1, 1865, when Lincoln signed the joint resolution approving the 13th Amendment. As a result, local traditions took the place of a nationwide anniversary.
But those local traditions don’t preclude a national observation. Indeed, today’s sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation provides an opportunity to observe Jan. 1 as a day of emancipation and to rededicate ourselves to freedom. In 1963, standing before the Lincoln Memorial, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. labeled the Proclamation a “beacon light of hope” to African-Americans and used the centennial to call for a renewed commitment to civil rights in America. Fifty years later, we might consider what a new Emancipation Proclamation would look like, one written for our times.
It would, above all, focus American and international attention on the millions of people still held in servitude. In September, the Frederick Douglass Family Foundation, an organization devoted to securing personal freedom and rights for all individuals, began a project called 100 Days to Freedom. Students in schools across the country were invited to craft a New Proclamation of Freedom, which the foundation hopes will be signed by President Obama on Jan. 11, which is recognized worldwide as Human Trafficking Awareness Day.
In the United States, thousands are held against their will; minors, especially, are the victims of ruthless exploitation. While other countries are worse offenders, the United States, according to State Department reports, serves as both a source and a destination for the trafficking of children.
In a speech delivered in September at the Clinton Global Initiative, President Obama declared that the time had come to call human trafficking by its rightful name: modern slavery. “The bitter truth is that trafficking also goes on right here, in the United States,” he declared. “It’s the migrant worker unable to pay off the debt to his trafficker. The man, lured here with the promise of a job, his documents then taken, and forced to work endless hours in a kitchen. The teenage girl, beaten, forced to walk the streets. This should not be happening in the United States of America.”
That same month the president signed an executive order that stated the United States would “lead by example” and take steps to ensure that federal contracts are not awarded to companies or nations implicated in trafficking. “We’re making clear that American tax dollars must never, ever be used to support the trafficking of human beings,” he said.
Still, the invisibility of modern slavery makes it all the more pernicious and difficult to eradicate. The organization Slavery Footprint asks on its Web site [ http://slaveryfootprint.org/ ], “How many slaves work for you?” A survey poses a series of seemingly innocuous questions such as what do you eat, what do you wear, what medicine do you take, and what electronics do you use? Upon completion, a number is revealed: I discovered that 60 slaves work for me — cutting the tropical wood for my furniture, harvesting the Central Asian cotton in my shirts or mining the African precious metals used in my electronics.
One way to reduce our complicity and attack human trafficking is to participate in Made in a Free World, a platform started by Slavery Footprint to show companies how to eliminate forced labor from their supply chains. A smartphone app also allows consumers to identify items made by forced labor and send letters to the manufacturers, demanding that they investigate the origins of the raw materials used in their products.
At his speech condemning human trafficking, President Obama referred to Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation as having “brought a new day — that ‘all persons held as slaves’ would thenceforth be forever free. We wrote that promise into our Constitution. We spent decades struggling to make it real.”
Today we should celebrate the extraordinary moment in the nation’s history when slavery yielded to freedom. But the work must continue. For those who insist they would have been abolitionists during the Civil War, now is the chance to become one.
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