In August 1864 Abraham Lincoln, fearful that he was going to lose his bid for reelection to the presidency, called Frederick Douglass to the White House. The two men had met a year earlier, when Douglass visited Lincoln to express his concerns about the federal government’s response to the Confederate mistreatment of captured Black Union troops. This time Lincoln was worried that if he was not reelected, the emancipation process would come to a halt before the vast majority of slaves had been liberated. War-weariness had encouraged the growth of a Northern peace party committed to renouncing emancipation in the interest of reuniting the North and South.
In principle Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863 covered approximately three million slaves in the seceded states. In reality, he believed, only those who had actually come within Union lines and been “practically” emancipated would be free when the war ended. It was a reasonable concern. By the time Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox in the spring of 1865, only about 15 percent of Southern slaves were inside Union lines. If Lincoln was reelected the chances were good that the Thirteenth Amendment—which the Senate had passed in April 1864—would secure the complete abolition of slavery everywhere in the United States. But if he lost, Lincoln feared, the amendment would not be passed by the House and ratified by the required number of states, and most slaves would remain in bondage.
Lincoln told Douglass that slaves were not coming into Union lines as quickly as he had hoped. Douglass noted that slaveholders knew how to keep word of the Emancipation Proclamation from reaching them. Lincoln agreed, so he asked Douglass to organize a cadre of Blacks who could move through the South urging slaves to escape to Union lines, where they would be emancipated.
By August 1864 it was all but certain that the Union was going to win militarily. And yet Lincoln and Douglass agreed that the end of slavery was anything but certain, even at that late date. Fortunately the tide of the war soon shifted in the North’s favor, Lincoln was reelected, and his nightmare scenario was averted. The final push for the Thirteenth Amendment began shortly after the November election, and a year later it was ratified.
Robert K.D. Colby’s deeply researched An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South demonstrates conclusively that Lincoln and Douglass were right to be concerned and that slavery in the Confederate states was alive, if not quite well, until the final days of the Civil War. His evidence comes from the domestic slave trade, without which, he aptly observes, “American slavery—and the socioeconomic systems resting upon it—could not function.” Where the slave trade was thriving, slavery was surviving.
Colby begins with an able synthesis of the impressive body of recent scholarship on the domestic slave trade. Before the American Revolution some slaves were bought and sold within the colonies, but it was not until the 1790s that a thriving domestic trade began to take shape. It was driven by the federally sponsored expansion of the United States into the southwestern territories, where slavery was already entrenched. An expansionist policy at a time of exploding global demand for cotton, Eli Whitney’s invention of the ginning machine, and the development of hardier strains of cotton all combined to make its production in the Southern interior commercially viable. Once the native inhabitants were violently “removed” from their lands, a Cotton Kingdom burst into life, creating an insatiable demand for slave laborers. Banned in 1808 from importing slaves from Africa, Southerners came to rely on an increasingly efficient and sophisticated domestic slave trade that pushed the center of the slave economy southward and westward.
Although the spread of slavery into places like Alabama and Mississippi often had the feel of a speculative fever, it nevertheless required stable financial mechanisms that could transfer funds efficiently and provide credit to the buyers and sellers of enslaved laborers. Over time the domestic slave trade also benefited from the development of a network of roads, rail lines, and canals that could move valuable human properties over vast distances in a timely and reliable manner. Large slave-trading firms emerged in Richmond and Alexandria, Virginia, to conduct business with equally large firms in Mobile, New Orleans, and Galveston. The result was a forced migration that eventually swept up as many as a million slaves. A million more were likely bought, sold, and bought again locally.
The business model was established in the late 1820s when two slave traders, John Armfield and Isaac Franklin, joined forces to create the firm of Franklin and Armfield. It systematized slave trading, in part by establishing close ties to Southern banks as well as to the short-lived Second Bank of the United States. Armfield, based in Alexandria, sent agents into the countryside to collect slaves who were then dispatched to Natchez and New Orleans, where Franklin and his agents would sell them to cotton and sugar planters. Franklin funneled the profits back to Alexandria, where Armfield used them to purchase more slaves. Franklin and Armfield owned ships to transport enslaved people along the coast to the plantation districts of the lower South, supplementing the rapidly developing overland transportation network.
The westward expansion of the slave economy is scarcely imaginable without this domestic slave trade. But slave trading did more than lubricate the mechanisms by which enslaved labor was shifted from place to place. It also set the prices and thus established the monetary value of human property. This distinguished Southern slavery from the sugar plantations of Brazil and the Caribbean, where slaves died in such numbers that planters relied on a constant supply of replacements from Africa. In the US South a shorter growing season and milder climate meant that slaves lived relatively long lives, making the reproduction and accumulation of valuable slaves one of the basic goals of Southern slaveholders, alongside the sale of slave-produced crops. The survival of slave trading through the Civil War thus reflected the continued value of human property.
Large parts of the upper South either never joined the Confederacy or—like western Virginia, Tennessee, the lower Mississippi parishes of Louisiana, and the coastal regions of the Carolinas and Georgia—were occupied by the Union Army early in the war and were thus shut out of the domestic slave trade. Similarly, although Colby doesn’t make much of it, the Union naval blockade of the Confederacy effectively shut down the substantial coastal slave trade.
What Colby does show is that despite the Confederate government having been deprived of so much territory, the overland domestic slave trade continued to function wherever Confederates remained in control, primarily in the interior cotton belt. The price of slaves could rise or fall precipitously in areas that were periodically threatened by Union occupation. When General George McClellan’s troops approached Richmond in the spring of 1862, slave traders in the city went to great lengths to transfer their valuable human property farther south and west. But once Lee turned back the Union threat, Richmond’s slave market revived.
Many parts of the cotton belt remained untouched by Northern armies until late in the war or, like Texas, were scarcely touched at all. In those areas slave trading continued. Even as Grant’s armies were making important gains in Tennessee and along the Mississippi River in early 1862, an observer in southern Georgia noticed that there was “a higher estimate placed upon negroes now than ten years ago” and that “Old Abe is not feared in this region.”
This raises an important question: Why were slaves in the cotton belt still being bought and sold even after the Union embargo had effectively shut down the cotton market and the coastal slave trade? The fact that they were valuable commodities in and of themselves made them highly prized during the tremendous economic upheavals caused by the war. While Confederate currency became virtually worthless, Colby writes, “the Confederacy’s unfolding economic collapse perversely and specifically incentivized slave commerce by making enslaved people appear to be relatively safe repositories of value.”
As the war dragged on, Southerners invested in slaves the way some people today invest in gold. One explained that he preferred to buy “some negroes at…half the former prices” rather than risk holding on to “paper money.” A Texan was willing to pay “a big price” for slaves rather than keep “Confederate money laying idle.” The treasurer of North Carolina, Jonathan Worth, advised a friend against selling “negroes” because they were “far better property than the currency or stocks of the Confederate Government.” And a North Carolina newspaper explained that the high price of slaves reflected “not so much the value of the negro as the want of value in the currency.”
Purchasing slaves was often a bullish bet on a future in which the Confederacy secured its independence and a starved cotton market reopened. Some Southerners took comfort in precisely what so worried Lincoln and Douglass in August 1864. Hopeful that the Northern peace party would emerge victorious in November, John Jones, a clerk in the Confederate War Department, explained in his diary that “everything depends upon the result of the Presidential election.” Walter Lenoir, a staunch North Carolina Confederate, calculated that “after the war” slave property “must almost necessarily rise again in price.”
The fact that slaves were accumulated not only for their labor but also for their intrinsic value meant that enslaved women continued to be appraised according to their ability to produce children. Edwin Fay whipped his slave Cynthia “almost to death” for failing to reproduce. “I bought her to breed,” he explained, “and she shall or I won’t own her long.” Enslaved men were expected to do their part. One Mississippi owner purchased a “prime” male slave to be the husband of a woman he already owned. Using a vulgar metaphor, he likened his plan to breeding livestock. Uniting the enslaved man and woman would make for “productive property,” he explained, “as it is not easy for hens to lay eggs & have chicks without a ‘Cock.’” Purchasing the man would thus be “profitable in the way of negro increase.”
Although the Civil War seriously disrupted the domestic slave trade, it also created new opportunities for buying and selling human beings. Enslaved workers, Colby writes, “became critical cogs in the Confederacy’s war-making machine.” Railroads purchased hundreds of enslaved men in a desperate effort to shore up the collapsing Confederate rail system. Various war industries hired or purchased thousands of slaves. It was relatively easy for businesses to adapt to downturns by selling off enslaved workers. “The Confederacy’s industrializing efforts encouraged the purchase of people,” Colby writes, “but the agricultural sector’s failings often incentivized their sale.” Whether the war machine expanded or agriculture foundered, the slave trade adapted.
Human property had still other uses in the Confederacy. Draftees sometimes purchased substitutes with slaves rather than cash. The so-called Twenty Negro Law exempted from military service planters who owned twenty or more slaves. Owners of eighteen or nineteen sometimes scrambled to purchase one or two more to qualify for the exemption. Wartime shortages forced some owners to sell slaves to purchase food and other necessities. In these and other ways the insecurity that the slave trade always imposed on the lives of the enslaved was multiplied by the upheavals of war.
Amid such profound disruption the slave trade also managed to persist in familiar ways. Sheriffs continued to confiscate and sell slaves owned by Southerners unable to pay their debts. Courts continued to destroy slave families as they divided up the estates of deceased owners. Planters still shed crocodile tears whenever they were “forced” to sell some of their slaves, except now the disruptions of war or the approach of the Union Army prompted those decisions more often. When several of John Berkley Grimball’s slaves escaped to the Union Army, he decided to sell those who had remained loyal. One of them, Nelly, opposed his plans, and another, Alfred, begged Grimball not to separate him from his family. But he disregarded their requests, shattered their families, and then claimed that he had just concluded a “sickening business.”
As the war progressed and Union armies penetrated farther into the Confederacy, slaves found more opportunities to escape to federal lines. Slaveholders responded, often in panic, by hurriedly selling slaves most likely to run off. Sometimes individual slaves suspected of rebellious behavior were sold to traders. At other times planters, fearing the approach of Union troops, divested themselves of all their slaves. Colby detects widespread ambivalence about the future of slavery, even as the end of the war approached and Confederate defeat was clearly inevitable. Plenty of owners sold out rather than risk the likelihood of uncompensated emancipation, but there were always traders who could find buyers optimistic about the fate of the Confederacy and willing to pay fire-sale prices for slaves.
Colby is particularly adept at evoking the constantly shifting border between Confederate territory and Union occupiers and the uncertainty it created for Southerners white and Black. But his primary emphasis on the persistence of slavery leads him to underestimate the various federal policies aimed at destroying slavery and slave trading. For decades antislavery activists had been demanding that the federal government regulate the interstate slave trade and ban the coastal slave trade. It was hardly an accident that from the earliest days of the war Union troops shut down slave-trading firms wherever they went.
A full explanation of why the Union Army was such a threat to slave trading, and thus to slavery, would require a clear account of the antislavery policies adopted by Lincoln and the Republicans. Here Colby’s book falls short. Like most historians who have studied the emancipation process, Colby shows that enslaved men and women clearly understood that the approach of the Union Army meant the possibility of freedom. But he cannot explain this widespread belief among the slaves because he accepts what might be termed the Myth of the Reluctant Emancipators. He makes misleading claims about Union policy and vague references to Union “policy makers,” the Union “high command,” or Union “authorities,” without specifying who they were. He repeatedly describes federal authorities as inconsistent or hesitant about emancipation—he even suggests that they were initially determined to protect slavery—despite his own evidence demonstrating the opposite. Sometimes Colby suggests that there was no coherent federal antislavery policy when in fact there was. At other times he suggests, misleadingly, that it was only sporadically enforced.
A particularly telling example is Colby’s account of a group of Union soldiers who not only returned fugitives to slavery but actually sold slaves back to their owners. He sees this as an example of the way “authorities within the United States treated those fleeing bondage inconsistently.” Which “authorities”? Those soldiers were violating a federal policy that had been clearly affirmed in a resolution passed by House Republicans in early July 1861 that declared, quite unambiguously, that it was not the business of anyone in the Union military to participate in the capture and return of fugitive slaves. This was an explicit statement of the familiar position established by slavery’s opponents long before the Civil War began: ordinary soldiers were not qualified and had no legal authority to decide the fate of fugitive slaves.
Frustrated by the fact that individual Union soldiers were violating the policy, Congress passed a law in March 1862 making it a crime for any soldier to participate in the capture or return of fugitive slaves. The soldiers Colby cites who sold slaves back to their owners were not exposing an inconsistent federal antislavery policy. They were criminals acting in violation of a clear, unambiguous one.
Colby’s lack of familiarity with the Republican Party’s position becomes evident early in the book. He quotes Edmund Ruffin, a prominent proslavery Virginia planter, warning in the 1850s that Republicans would gradually undermine slavery by banning it from the territories, blocking the admission of new slave states, abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, and thwarting the domestic slave trade. According to Colby, Ruffin was mistaken because only the most radical Republicans endorsed such policies. In fact, mainstream Republicans promised to do, and did, everything Ruffin warned against. As Lincoln repeatedly said, and as Ruffin clearly understood, these policies were designed to put slavery “on a course of ultimate extinction.” The goal was to menace it in a variety of ways until it collapsed of its own accord.
Radicals and mainstream Republicans agreed that the federal government could not directly “interfere with”—that is, abolish—slavery in a state. At no point in the war did Congress abolish slavery in a single state, and Lincoln freely acknowledged that he had no power to do so. Yet Colby quotes Lincoln saying so as if it meant that he and the Republicans went into the war determined to protect slavery, when in fact they were determined to destroy it. The war radicalized that determination.
One reason the war accelerated slavery’s destruction was that Republican lawmakers acted on the assumption that disloyal states forfeited their constitutional right to the return of their fugitive slaves. Furthermore, the constitutional war powers authorized Lincoln and the Republicans to emancipate the slaves they did not return. Colby seems unaware of the “forfeiture of rights” doctrine that Lincoln expressly invoked on several occasions, including his first inaugural address. He describes the war powers as a “tenuous” legal basis for emancipation. Jefferson Davis certainly agreed with Colby, but the Founders did not. The precedents for military emancipation in wartime stretched back to the American Revolution. During the Civil War the most distinguished legal scholars in the North all but unanimously defended the constitutionality of military emancipation.
True to the explicit vow he had made in his inaugural address—that fugitives from the seceded states would not be returned at all—Lincoln endorsed Union general Benjamin Butler’s policy of not returning slaves to disloyal owners within weeks of the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter. As the number of fugitives coming within Butler’s lines grew, congressional Republicans clarified their future status in the First Confiscation Act, passed in the first summer of the war. Colby garbles the significance of the law, saying that it authorized the federal government to “withhold fugitives from bondage,” but the government had been “withholding” fugitives for months. The confiscation law clarified their status by declaring that disloyal owners had forfeited their right to their slaves.
Because Colby is committed to the mythology of Republican reluctance, he cannot explain his most persuasive evidence. In late May 1861, for example, with the war having barely begun, Union soldiers crossed the Potomac and occupied Alexandria. They immediately headed for the offices of the slave-trading firm Price, Birch and Co. The slave traders fled and the slaves were freed. Colby says the soldiers did this despite the fact that the federal government was “committed to maintaining slavery.” Yet he goes on to show that the same thing happened in every city Union troops occupied in the first year of the war. They shut down the slave auction houses and freed their enslaved inhabitants in Norfolk, Natchez, and Nashville. Fanning out from Alexandria, Union forces “demolished slave trading centers as they went.” In April 1862, Union naval vessels approached New Orleans “with their guns trained on the South’s largest slave market.”
Despite his own abundant evidence Colby insists that federal antislavery policy emerged lethargically, only after authorities abandoned their supposed determination to protect slavery. He claims that in Louisiana in 1862 the Union “high command” hoped to leave slavery “unmolested,” when in fact Lincoln and Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase explicitly instructed General Butler to emancipate slaves and establish a free labor system on nearby plantations, months before the president issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
Colby claims that it was the slaves themselves who “forced the US government to keep pace” with the revolution from below, but he offers no examples of a policy that escaping slaves forced on otherwise reluctant Republican lawmakers. If anything, the reverse was the case. Lincoln summoned Douglass to the White House in the summer of 1864 because, the president said, the slaves were not escaping fast enough to Union lines to ensure that most of them would be emancipated when the war ended. Republicans turned to the Thirteenth Amendment late in the war because it looked as if the Confederacy would be defeated without slavery having been destroyed.
The irony is that despite Colby’s constant denigration of Republican antislavery policy, no historian has produced more and better evidence that Union authorities were bent on thwarting the domestic slave trade from the earliest weeks of the war. By his own logic—a logic I think is correct—those assaults on the slave trade were necessarily assaults on slavery itself. Yet because he consistently invokes the myth of Republican reluctance, Colby is unable to account for one of the great paradoxes in the history of emancipation. It took so long to destroy slavery not because Republicans were initially determined to protect it. Rather, abolition took a long time despite the fact that countless slaves took advantage of the war to free themselves, and despite the fact that Republicans began attacking slavery almost as soon as the war began.
English (US) · 