January 15, 2025 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Abraham Lincoln is often referred to as "the Great Emancipator"... but that's not the entire truth. Our regular contributor Jon Elfner and Dr. Kate Masur, author of "Until Justice Be Done," tell the rest of the story that begins with three runaway slaves.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we're back with our American stories. Abraham Lincoln's nickname
is the Great Emancipator, But our regular contributor John Elfner
is about to tell us a story on how that's
not quite the whole story.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Here's John. It was a beautiful spring evening in Norfolk, Virginia,
the night of May twenty third, eighteen sixty one. Abraham
Lincoln had recently been inaugurated, and by this night, ten
southern states, including Virginia, had seceded from the Union. The
scope of the Civil War was still not well understood
by most, but the Civil War had begun. Working along
(00:47):
the banks of the James River were three men, Frank Baker,
Shepherd Mallory, and James Townsend. The men were finishing their
assigned task of building a Confederate artillery battery just south
of the James River in a location called Sewell's Point.
The artillery position was designed to assault a Union fort
just across the James River. The fort was called Fort Monroe.
(01:11):
As evening approached, Baker, Mallory, and Townsend decided to abandon
the Confederate post and crossed the James River to Fort Monroe.
And when they traveled that short distance from Sewell's Point
to the fort, they became fugitives. You see, according to
the laws of Virginia, Frank Baker, Shepherd Mallory, and James
Townsend were slaves. They had run away with the hopes
(01:37):
of finding their freedom within Union lines. Any casual student
of American history would likely expect that the Union soldiers
would take them in. After all, the soldier's commander in
chief was Abraham Lincoln, who had eventually earned the nickname
the Great Emancipator. But when the three arrived at Fort Monroe,
the fort's commander, Major General Benjamin Butler, was with a dilemma.
(02:01):
He knew that he shouldn't be returning the escapees based
on Lincoln's public statements about the war.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
The general ethos at the beginning of the war was
We're not here to get involved with slavery. We are
here to try to persuade the Confederates to drop their
arms and come back into the Union.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
That's doctor Kate Maser, professor of US history at Northwestern University.
She writes about the complexities of the abolition movement in
her fantastic new book Until Justice Be Done, and her
research revealed something surprising.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
US military officers sometimes decided to cooperate with slave owners
and return slaves. Everyone knew that the war was about slavery,
so it's not that anyone was disguising that the conflict
was about slavery.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
It's true. Lincoln was pretty clear about the role of
slavery in the war in his first inaugural address just
two months earlier. In that address, he said.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
This, one section of our country believes slavery is right
and not to be extended. Thee it is wrong and
ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Then, why would the escapees not be welcomed into a
Union fort during the Civil War? It's because, moments later,
Lincoln added this, I.
Speaker 4 (03:14):
Have no purpose, directly or indirectly to interfere with the
institution of slavery in the states where it currently exists.
I believe I have no lawful right to do so,
and I have no inclination to do so.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
First, we have to remember that it was the Confederacy
that declared itself out of the Union. The conflict begins
with a series of Southern states saying that they're no
longer part of the United States, and then creating this
thing called the Confederate States of America, which they say
is a separate nation.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
But this was something Lincoln steadfastly denied. Throughout the war.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
The United States government's position was, you cannot secede from
the Union, and if force is necessary to show that
you the Southern States are still in the Union, we
will use force to prove that the United States is
still intact. Lincoln did not want to say that the
government was going to attack slavery.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
This was because Lincoln had a military problem. There were
four slave states which had not left the Union, and
if those so called border states were to join the Confederacy,
it would be devastating for the Union. So any talk
of abolition might have caused Lincoln grave problems in the war,
and he was especially worried about the state of Kentucky.
Lincoln expressed this concern in the private letter to his
(04:35):
close friend Senator O. H. Browning.
Speaker 4 (04:38):
I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Lose the whole game.
Speaker 4 (04:43):
Kentucky gone. We cannot hold Missouri, nor does I think Maryland.
These all against us, and the job on our hands
is too large for us.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
That's because the Confederate state of Virginia already borders Washington, DC,
and if Maryland secedes, the capitol would be surrounded by
Confederate states.
Speaker 4 (05:03):
We would as well consent to separation at once, including
the surrender of this capital.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
This explains why Lincoln didn't make public statements attacking slavery
early in the war.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
There's a possibility that when white Kentuckians see that, a
critical mass of them are going to say, hey, I
want to join the Confederacy and continue to fight to
preserve slavery. So he does a lot of different things
in the first year or so of the war to
try to satisfy folks in those states. He says that
he's not going to attack slavery. He says, this is
not a war about slavery.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
But the Civil War ended slavery, So how could Lincoln
be saying at the start of the war that he
had no intention and no power to abolish slavery. It's
important to understand that when Lincoln publicly stated that he
had no right to get rid of slavery, he was correct.
After all, how can you get rid of slavery when
just moments earlier he had sworn an oath to uphold
(05:56):
the Constitution, and like it or not, institution protected slavery
in the states where it currently existed.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
There's absolutely no doubt that Lincoln loathed slavery. The question was,
under the United States Constitution, what power does the president
or the federal government have to abolish slavery. He believed
that the federal government did not have the power to
abolish slavery in the states where it already existed, and
(06:25):
at the.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Time of his inauguration, there hadn't been any violence between
the Union and the seceded states, so as far as
Lincoln was concerned, the Constitution was still in effect throughout
the United States, and that included the states that had
claimed to secede.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
They begin with the objective of simply persuading the Confederates
to stop what the US government thought was a ridiculous
and also treasonous enterprise.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Preserving the Union that was Lincoln's stated objective at the
beginning of the war, and to help keep the focus
on preserving the Union, Lincoln's military generals developed a surprising
Military officers frequently returned escaped slaves to their owners.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
US military officers sometimes decided to cooperate with slave owners
and return slaves. This really happened. And when enslavers came
to US officials and said, hey, this person escaped into
your camp. I need them back, the officers would say, okay,
let me go find them. And that's what happened. It
happened regularly. The United States has not recognized the Confederacy
(07:30):
as a separate nation. There is this eighteen fifty Fugitive
Slave Act. Under federal law, when escaping slaves crossed jurisdictions,
the slave owner supposedly has a right to come and
get them back. And so that's one of the types
of claims that the slave owners would have made.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
And what did this mean for Baker Mallory in Townshend,
the three escapees who fled to Fort Monroe. The commander
of the fort, General Butler, certainly knew Lincoln's position, and
Butler also knew that if he didn't return the slaves,
he'd be sending a message that the US forces were
attacking slavery, and that was a message Lincoln was working
hard to avoid. So when Baker, Mallory and Townsend arrived
(08:09):
at the fort, they were taken in and consistent with
the common practice of returning escapees. Butler may have considered
returning them, but when he spoke to the three, he
learned that he couldn't do that the reason they'd been
installing cannon aimed at Fort Monroe. There was a report
written about the conversation, and it said this, These.
Speaker 5 (08:29):
Able bodied men held as slaves were to build breastworks,
to transport or store provisions, to serve as cooks and waiters,
and even to bear arms.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Butler knew he couldn't return the three men, who would
immediately be put back to work installing cannon aimed at
Fort Monroe, but he needed to find a way around
Lincoln's constitutional understanding of the property rights of slave owners.
A decision needed to be made, and it needed to
be made quickly because Confederate Major John Betop Kerry was
approaching the fort seeking the return of the escapees.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
And you've been listening to John Elfner tell the story
of the Civil War, a different kind of story, a
messy story and a difficult story, and one having a
lot to do with what could Lincoln actually do at
the time, as opposed to what Lincoln actually wanted to accomplish.
Lincoln didn't know what was going to happen more of
(09:28):
this remarkable story of the Civil War told by John
Elfner here on our American Stories, and we're back with
(10:10):
our American Stories and the story of how three slaves
escaping to the Union's Fort Monroe provided the spark that
led to Abraham Lincoln earning the nickname the Great Emancipator.
Slaves were traditionally returned to Southern slave owners because the
Union held at the South was still part of the Union,
(10:31):
until this moment changed everything. Back to John Elfner with
the rest of the story.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
Union General Benjamin Butler and Confederate officer John Betop Kerry
met outside Fort Monroe. According to a report, their conversation
went something like this.
Speaker 6 (10:47):
I am informed that three slaves belonging to Colonel Mallory
have escaped within your lines. What do you mean to
do with those escaped slaves?
Speaker 7 (10:56):
I intend to hold them.
Speaker 6 (10:58):
Do you mean, then, to say, aside your constitutional obligation
to return them?
Speaker 7 (11:04):
I mean to take Virginia at her word. I'm under
no constitutional obligations to a foreign country, which Virginia now
claims to be.
Speaker 6 (11:15):
But you say, we cannot secede, and so you cannot
consistently detain the escapee.
Speaker 7 (11:21):
But you say you have succeeded, so you cannot consistently
claim them. I shall hold these escapees as contraband of war,
since they are engaged in the construction of your battery
and are claimed as your property.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
And with that, Carrie was sent away without the escapees
he'd come to collect. And how is Butler able to
justify keeping the escapees? He was relying on something called
the international laws of war. Doctor kpe Mazer explains.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
There's a tradition in what are called the international laws
of war, and one of the mainstream ideas was nolligerents
or enemies in war can confiscate the property of their enemies. Normally,
we were generally respect the property rights, but in wartime,
especially property that's going to be used in the war effort,
(12:13):
the enemy is allowed to confiscate that property.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
And what are the enslaved legally considered in Virginia property?
Speaker 3 (12:20):
Benjamin Butler at Fort Monroe was thinking about the laws
of war and thinking, yeah, if these enslaved people, who
their owners say their property, well, then I can confiscate
them as contraband.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Of war Under international law. Property was more typically describing
things like guns, horses, and military supplies. But what Butler
had recognized was that the Confederate military had categorized slaves
as property, and therefore the Southerners themselves had opened up
the enslaved to confiscation, or what Butler had called contraband.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
It's not peacetime, it's wartime, and the commanders have choices
about what they're going to do in this situation.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
Butler, with his word contraband, had created a constitutional loophole
that permitted him to hold the escapees, and upon dismissing Kerry,
he may have assumed that that was the end of it.
But this encounter fundamentally changed the role of slavery in
the Civil War. The day after Butler refused to return
the escapees, eight more escaped slaves approached the entrance of
(13:21):
the fort. The following day, forty seven escapees arrived at
Fort Monroe. Within two weeks, over five hundred escaped slaves
had sought asylum there. In word that the Union army
was receiving fugitives and no longer returning them, it began
to spread. The four long Union soldiers stationed outside the
fort were encountering escapees who were asking where could they
(13:43):
find the freedom? Fort Butler, by giving asylum to Baker,
Mallory and Townshend, had moved slavery into the political conversation
in a way that required it to be addressed by
Congress and the president. And it wasn't just Fort Monroe
where the escapees began to run.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
Then every where they go, enslaved people start to escape
and come to Union lines. So the story about Fort
Monroe is one really critical, very early version of that story,
but it's really happening everywhere.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
The members of Lincoln's inner circle in the White House
recognize just how important Fort Monroe was. Lincoln's personal secretaries
John Hay and John Nicolay wrote about the events at
Fort Monroe and their biography of Lincoln. Here's what they said.
Speaker 6 (14:28):
Out of this incident there seems to have grown one
of the most sudden and important revolutions in popular thought
which took place during the whole war.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Baker, Mallory and Townshend, along with General Butler, in a sense,
created the power that Lincoln needed by characterizing the escapees
as contraband of war and the growing number of fugitive
slaves swelling the Union forts forced Congress to act.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
Congress in spring of eighteen sixty two passes legislation that says,
from now on, there's going to be no returning runaway
slaves from our kings. After that point it was policy
of the United States government not to return people.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Lincoln supported this legislation, first signing the bill Congress sent
to him prohibiting the return of slaves and setting the
stage for his later emancipation Proclamation. But how did a
president who said this on his first day of office.
Speaker 4 (15:19):
I have no purpose, directly or indirectly to interfere with
the institution of slavery in the states where it currently exists.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
End up issuing an emancipation proclamation two years later that said.
Speaker 4 (15:32):
This, all persons held as slaves within any state or
designated part of a state, the peopleOf shall then be
in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward,
and forever free.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
It's because upon his inauguration, the Civil War had not
really begun. Sure, seven states had claimed to secede, but
Lincoln's inauguration proceeded any violence towards the federal government by
the states that had seceded. But when the Confederacy fired
on Fort Sumter, a month after Lincoln's inauguration. That action
fundamentally changed the relationship between the rebels and the federal government.
(16:11):
And though Lincoln proceeded cautiously with his public statements about
slavery in the early days of the war, as the
years passed, he acted more and more aggressively to get
rid of slavery, and he used a version of Butler's
argument military necessity to justify the Emancipation Proclamation.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
What happens at Fort Monroe is it just puts down
a marker that things are going to be different, and
that this is not simply a contest between white Northerners
and white Southerners over whether the states and the Confederacy
are going to stay in the Union. It proved to
everyone that black people were not going to sit around
and wait to be emancipated.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
So how much credit does Lincoln deserve for the abolition
of slavery.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
There's no doubt Lincoln did a lot to end slavery,
and the Emancipation Proclamation was a key example of that.
Pushing for the Thirteenth Amen, which constitutionally abolished slavery, was
a great example of that. But on how slavery really
ended during the Civil War. It's actually a lot more
complicated than just the president suddenly deciding in his wisdom
to waive his wand and issue an emancipation proclamation. And
(17:15):
so we need to take into consideration if we want
to really understand the history, what enslaved people themselves were doing,
how they made themselves a factor in the war, what
Congress was doing, and what the US armed forces were doing,
and how all of these different parties kind of came
together to destroy slavery during the course of the Civil War.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Lincoln is, without a doubt a masterful politician. So when
considering his nickname the Great Emancipator, there's no denying that
Lincoln solved the riddle of how the federal government could
order that slaves be permanently free, and in so doing,
nearly four million slaves were freed over the course of
the Civil War. But it took lesser known people like
Frank Baker, Shepherd Mallory, and James Townsend who had the
(17:59):
courage to escape. It took the cleverness of General Benjamin
Butler to find a way to refuse their return. It
took the hundreds and later thousands of enslaved who escaped
to Union lines to pressure Congress to prohibit Union commanders
from returning escapees, and took the lives of over three
hundred thousand Union soldiers to carry out Lincoln's orders. Yeah,
(18:20):
Lincoln did a lot, but he had a lot of
help along the way.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
And a special thanks to John Elfner for the storytelling
on that piece. And he's a history teacher in Illinois,
and there are so many great history teachers in this country.
They may not have PhDs, and they may not be
writing fancy books, but we just got to sit in
John Elfner's classroom, And what a privilege that is. Special
thanks also to Kate Maser her book Until Justice Be Done,
(18:50):
America's first civil rights movement from the Revolution to Reconstruction.
Go to your local bookstore or the usual suspects and
buy a copy. My goodness, what a story about three
courageous slaves and a courageous general who found a way
to do what was right, to do what was in
the end, the beginning of the end of slavery, the
(19:11):
great emancipators. How the Civil War openly became about slavery.
That story here on our American Stories
And we're back with our American stories. Abraham Lincoln's nickname
is the Great Emancipator, But our regular contributor John Elfner
is about to tell us a story on how that's
not quite the whole story.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Here's John. It was a beautiful spring evening in Norfolk, Virginia,
the night of May twenty third, eighteen sixty one. Abraham
Lincoln had recently been inaugurated, and by this night, ten
southern states, including Virginia, had seceded from the Union. The
scope of the Civil War was still not well understood
by most, but the Civil War had begun. Working along
(00:47):
the banks of the James River were three men, Frank Baker,
Shepherd Mallory, and James Townsend. The men were finishing their
assigned task of building a Confederate artillery battery just south
of the James River in a location called Sewell's Point.
The artillery position was designed to assault a Union fort
just across the James River. The fort was called Fort Monroe.
(01:11):
As evening approached, Baker, Mallory, and Townsend decided to abandon
the Confederate post and crossed the James River to Fort Monroe.
And when they traveled that short distance from Sewell's Point
to the fort, they became fugitives. You see, according to
the laws of Virginia, Frank Baker, Shepherd Mallory, and James
Townsend were slaves. They had run away with the hopes
(01:37):
of finding their freedom within Union lines. Any casual student
of American history would likely expect that the Union soldiers
would take them in. After all, the soldier's commander in
chief was Abraham Lincoln, who had eventually earned the nickname
the Great Emancipator. But when the three arrived at Fort Monroe,
the fort's commander, Major General Benjamin Butler, was with a dilemma.
(02:01):
He knew that he shouldn't be returning the escapees based
on Lincoln's public statements about the war.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
The general ethos at the beginning of the war was
We're not here to get involved with slavery. We are
here to try to persuade the Confederates to drop their
arms and come back into the Union.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
That's doctor Kate Maser, professor of US history at Northwestern University.
She writes about the complexities of the abolition movement in
her fantastic new book Until Justice Be Done, and her
research revealed something surprising.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
US military officers sometimes decided to cooperate with slave owners
and return slaves. Everyone knew that the war was about slavery,
so it's not that anyone was disguising that the conflict
was about slavery.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
It's true. Lincoln was pretty clear about the role of
slavery in the war in his first inaugural address just
two months earlier. In that address, he said.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
This, one section of our country believes slavery is right
and not to be extended. Thee it is wrong and
ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Then, why would the escapees not be welcomed into a
Union fort during the Civil War? It's because, moments later,
Lincoln added this, I.
Speaker 4 (03:14):
Have no purpose, directly or indirectly to interfere with the
institution of slavery in the states where it currently exists.
I believe I have no lawful right to do so,
and I have no inclination to do so.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
First, we have to remember that it was the Confederacy
that declared itself out of the Union. The conflict begins
with a series of Southern states saying that they're no
longer part of the United States, and then creating this
thing called the Confederate States of America, which they say
is a separate nation.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
But this was something Lincoln steadfastly denied. Throughout the war.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
The United States government's position was, you cannot secede from
the Union, and if force is necessary to show that
you the Southern States are still in the Union, we
will use force to prove that the United States is
still intact. Lincoln did not want to say that the
government was going to attack slavery.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
This was because Lincoln had a military problem. There were
four slave states which had not left the Union, and
if those so called border states were to join the Confederacy,
it would be devastating for the Union. So any talk
of abolition might have caused Lincoln grave problems in the war,
and he was especially worried about the state of Kentucky.
Lincoln expressed this concern in the private letter to his
(04:35):
close friend Senator O. H. Browning.
Speaker 4 (04:38):
I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Lose the whole game.
Speaker 4 (04:43):
Kentucky gone. We cannot hold Missouri, nor does I think Maryland.
These all against us, and the job on our hands
is too large for us.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
That's because the Confederate state of Virginia already borders Washington, DC,
and if Maryland secedes, the capitol would be surrounded by
Confederate states.
Speaker 4 (05:03):
We would as well consent to separation at once, including
the surrender of this capital.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
This explains why Lincoln didn't make public statements attacking slavery
early in the war.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
There's a possibility that when white Kentuckians see that, a
critical mass of them are going to say, hey, I
want to join the Confederacy and continue to fight to
preserve slavery. So he does a lot of different things
in the first year or so of the war to
try to satisfy folks in those states. He says that
he's not going to attack slavery. He says, this is
not a war about slavery.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
But the Civil War ended slavery, So how could Lincoln
be saying at the start of the war that he
had no intention and no power to abolish slavery. It's
important to understand that when Lincoln publicly stated that he
had no right to get rid of slavery, he was correct.
After all, how can you get rid of slavery when
just moments earlier he had sworn an oath to uphold
(05:56):
the Constitution, and like it or not, institution protected slavery
in the states where it currently existed.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
There's absolutely no doubt that Lincoln loathed slavery. The question was,
under the United States Constitution, what power does the president
or the federal government have to abolish slavery. He believed
that the federal government did not have the power to
abolish slavery in the states where it already existed, and
(06:25):
at the.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Time of his inauguration, there hadn't been any violence between
the Union and the seceded states, so as far as
Lincoln was concerned, the Constitution was still in effect throughout
the United States, and that included the states that had
claimed to secede.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
They begin with the objective of simply persuading the Confederates
to stop what the US government thought was a ridiculous
and also treasonous enterprise.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Preserving the Union that was Lincoln's stated objective at the
beginning of the war, and to help keep the focus
on preserving the Union, Lincoln's military generals developed a surprising
Military officers frequently returned escaped slaves to their owners.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
US military officers sometimes decided to cooperate with slave owners
and return slaves. This really happened. And when enslavers came
to US officials and said, hey, this person escaped into
your camp. I need them back, the officers would say, okay,
let me go find them. And that's what happened. It
happened regularly. The United States has not recognized the Confederacy
(07:30):
as a separate nation. There is this eighteen fifty Fugitive
Slave Act. Under federal law, when escaping slaves crossed jurisdictions,
the slave owner supposedly has a right to come and
get them back. And so that's one of the types
of claims that the slave owners would have made.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
And what did this mean for Baker Mallory in Townshend,
the three escapees who fled to Fort Monroe. The commander
of the fort, General Butler, certainly knew Lincoln's position, and
Butler also knew that if he didn't return the slaves,
he'd be sending a message that the US forces were
attacking slavery, and that was a message Lincoln was working
hard to avoid. So when Baker, Mallory and Townsend arrived
(08:09):
at the fort, they were taken in and consistent with
the common practice of returning escapees. Butler may have considered
returning them, but when he spoke to the three, he
learned that he couldn't do that the reason they'd been
installing cannon aimed at Fort Monroe. There was a report
written about the conversation, and it said this, These.
Speaker 5 (08:29):
Able bodied men held as slaves were to build breastworks,
to transport or store provisions, to serve as cooks and waiters,
and even to bear arms.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Butler knew he couldn't return the three men, who would
immediately be put back to work installing cannon aimed at
Fort Monroe, but he needed to find a way around
Lincoln's constitutional understanding of the property rights of slave owners.
A decision needed to be made, and it needed to
be made quickly because Confederate Major John Betop Kerry was
approaching the fort seeking the return of the escapees.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
And you've been listening to John Elfner tell the story
of the Civil War, a different kind of story, a
messy story and a difficult story, and one having a
lot to do with what could Lincoln actually do at
the time, as opposed to what Lincoln actually wanted to accomplish.
Lincoln didn't know what was going to happen more of
(09:28):
this remarkable story of the Civil War told by John
Elfner here on our American Stories, and we're back with
(10:10):
our American Stories and the story of how three slaves
escaping to the Union's Fort Monroe provided the spark that
led to Abraham Lincoln earning the nickname the Great Emancipator.
Slaves were traditionally returned to Southern slave owners because the
Union held at the South was still part of the Union,
(10:31):
until this moment changed everything. Back to John Elfner with
the rest of the story.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
Union General Benjamin Butler and Confederate officer John Betop Kerry
met outside Fort Monroe. According to a report, their conversation
went something like this.
Speaker 6 (10:47):
I am informed that three slaves belonging to Colonel Mallory
have escaped within your lines. What do you mean to
do with those escaped slaves?
Speaker 7 (10:56):
I intend to hold them.
Speaker 6 (10:58):
Do you mean, then, to say, aside your constitutional obligation
to return them?
Speaker 7 (11:04):
I mean to take Virginia at her word. I'm under
no constitutional obligations to a foreign country, which Virginia now
claims to be.
Speaker 6 (11:15):
But you say, we cannot secede, and so you cannot
consistently detain the escapee.
Speaker 7 (11:21):
But you say you have succeeded, so you cannot consistently
claim them. I shall hold these escapees as contraband of war,
since they are engaged in the construction of your battery
and are claimed as your property.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
And with that, Carrie was sent away without the escapees
he'd come to collect. And how is Butler able to
justify keeping the escapees? He was relying on something called
the international laws of war. Doctor kpe Mazer explains.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
There's a tradition in what are called the international laws
of war, and one of the mainstream ideas was nolligerents
or enemies in war can confiscate the property of their enemies. Normally,
we were generally respect the property rights, but in wartime,
especially property that's going to be used in the war effort,
(12:13):
the enemy is allowed to confiscate that property.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
And what are the enslaved legally considered in Virginia property?
Speaker 3 (12:20):
Benjamin Butler at Fort Monroe was thinking about the laws
of war and thinking, yeah, if these enslaved people, who
their owners say their property, well, then I can confiscate
them as contraband.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Of war Under international law. Property was more typically describing
things like guns, horses, and military supplies. But what Butler
had recognized was that the Confederate military had categorized slaves
as property, and therefore the Southerners themselves had opened up
the enslaved to confiscation, or what Butler had called contraband.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
It's not peacetime, it's wartime, and the commanders have choices
about what they're going to do in this situation.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
Butler, with his word contraband, had created a constitutional loophole
that permitted him to hold the escapees, and upon dismissing Kerry,
he may have assumed that that was the end of it.
But this encounter fundamentally changed the role of slavery in
the Civil War. The day after Butler refused to return
the escapees, eight more escaped slaves approached the entrance of
(13:21):
the fort. The following day, forty seven escapees arrived at
Fort Monroe. Within two weeks, over five hundred escaped slaves
had sought asylum there. In word that the Union army
was receiving fugitives and no longer returning them, it began
to spread. The four long Union soldiers stationed outside the
fort were encountering escapees who were asking where could they
(13:43):
find the freedom? Fort Butler, by giving asylum to Baker,
Mallory and Townshend, had moved slavery into the political conversation
in a way that required it to be addressed by
Congress and the president. And it wasn't just Fort Monroe
where the escapees began to run.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
Then every where they go, enslaved people start to escape
and come to Union lines. So the story about Fort
Monroe is one really critical, very early version of that story,
but it's really happening everywhere.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
The members of Lincoln's inner circle in the White House
recognize just how important Fort Monroe was. Lincoln's personal secretaries
John Hay and John Nicolay wrote about the events at
Fort Monroe and their biography of Lincoln. Here's what they said.
Speaker 6 (14:28):
Out of this incident there seems to have grown one
of the most sudden and important revolutions in popular thought
which took place during the whole war.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Baker, Mallory and Townshend, along with General Butler, in a sense,
created the power that Lincoln needed by characterizing the escapees
as contraband of war and the growing number of fugitive
slaves swelling the Union forts forced Congress to act.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
Congress in spring of eighteen sixty two passes legislation that says,
from now on, there's going to be no returning runaway
slaves from our kings. After that point it was policy
of the United States government not to return people.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Lincoln supported this legislation, first signing the bill Congress sent
to him prohibiting the return of slaves and setting the
stage for his later emancipation Proclamation. But how did a
president who said this on his first day of office.
Speaker 4 (15:19):
I have no purpose, directly or indirectly to interfere with
the institution of slavery in the states where it currently exists.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
End up issuing an emancipation proclamation two years later that said.
Speaker 4 (15:32):
This, all persons held as slaves within any state or
designated part of a state, the peopleOf shall then be
in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward,
and forever free.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
It's because upon his inauguration, the Civil War had not
really begun. Sure, seven states had claimed to secede, but
Lincoln's inauguration proceeded any violence towards the federal government by
the states that had seceded. But when the Confederacy fired
on Fort Sumter, a month after Lincoln's inauguration. That action
fundamentally changed the relationship between the rebels and the federal government.
(16:11):
And though Lincoln proceeded cautiously with his public statements about
slavery in the early days of the war, as the
years passed, he acted more and more aggressively to get
rid of slavery, and he used a version of Butler's
argument military necessity to justify the Emancipation Proclamation.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
What happens at Fort Monroe is it just puts down
a marker that things are going to be different, and
that this is not simply a contest between white Northerners
and white Southerners over whether the states and the Confederacy
are going to stay in the Union. It proved to
everyone that black people were not going to sit around
and wait to be emancipated.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
So how much credit does Lincoln deserve for the abolition
of slavery.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
There's no doubt Lincoln did a lot to end slavery,
and the Emancipation Proclamation was a key example of that.
Pushing for the Thirteenth Amen, which constitutionally abolished slavery, was
a great example of that. But on how slavery really
ended during the Civil War. It's actually a lot more
complicated than just the president suddenly deciding in his wisdom
to waive his wand and issue an emancipation proclamation. And
(17:15):
so we need to take into consideration if we want
to really understand the history, what enslaved people themselves were doing,
how they made themselves a factor in the war, what
Congress was doing, and what the US armed forces were doing,
and how all of these different parties kind of came
together to destroy slavery during the course of the Civil War.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Lincoln is, without a doubt a masterful politician. So when
considering his nickname the Great Emancipator, there's no denying that
Lincoln solved the riddle of how the federal government could
order that slaves be permanently free, and in so doing,
nearly four million slaves were freed over the course of
the Civil War. But it took lesser known people like
Frank Baker, Shepherd Mallory, and James Townsend who had the
(17:59):
courage to escape. It took the cleverness of General Benjamin
Butler to find a way to refuse their return. It
took the hundreds and later thousands of enslaved who escaped
to Union lines to pressure Congress to prohibit Union commanders
from returning escapees, and took the lives of over three
hundred thousand Union soldiers to carry out Lincoln's orders. Yeah,
(18:20):
Lincoln did a lot, but he had a lot of
help along the way.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
And a special thanks to John Elfner for the storytelling
on that piece. And he's a history teacher in Illinois,
and there are so many great history teachers in this country.
They may not have PhDs, and they may not be
writing fancy books, but we just got to sit in
John Elfner's classroom, And what a privilege that is. Special
thanks also to Kate Maser her book Until Justice Be Done,
(18:50):
America's first civil rights movement from the Revolution to Reconstruction.
Go to your local bookstore or the usual suspects and
buy a copy. My goodness, what a story about three
courageous slaves and a courageous general who found a way
to do what was right, to do what was in
the end, the beginning of the end of slavery, the
(19:11):
great emancipators. How the Civil War openly became about slavery.
That story here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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