The Irony of Emancipation in the Civil War South Clark Scott Nesbit, Jr. Richmond, Virginia B.A., Swarthmore College, 2001 M.A., University of Virginia, 2005 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Corcoran Department of History University of Virginia December, 2013 2 © Clark Scott Nesbit, Jr., 2013 3 ABSTRACT Nearly everyone in the Civil War South had opportunity to feel the irony of emancipation. This irony arose from the wartime difference between ending slavery as a regime and freeing slaves, as individuals. This dissertation explores the ways in which white southerners sacrificed, or refused to sacrifice, their interest in the enslavement of particular southern blacks for the sake of a regime that would safeguard slavery. It argues that African Americans at times sought their own freedom even if it meant aiding the Confederate regime, and at other times sought to avoid warzones even if it meant remaining legally enslaved. It argues that the Union’s war to defeat the Confederacy was also a war waged against the Confederates’ main source of labor. Such a war meant, for most who became free in the Civil War, emancipation through displacement and integration into a new system for managing former slaves, the refugee camp/plantation/recruitment complex. For those who remained in the wake of Sherman’s marches and other U.S. raids, it meant living in a land with little food. 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my dissertation committee, Ed Ayers, Gary Gallagher, Peter Onuf, and Maurie McInnis for their patience and thoughtful critiques. I owe gratitude to a much larger group of the faculty at the University of Virginia, including Brian Balogh, Valerie Cooper, Grace Hale, Michael Holt, James Hunter, Charles Marsh, Louis Nelson, and Daphne Spain. Good friends, such as Allison Elias, Julian Hayter, Chris Hearn, Chris Loomis, Calvin Schermerhorn, Peter Slade, and Megan Stubbendeck gave much needed cheer through a lengthy graduate career. My colleagues at the University of Richmond Digital Scholarship Lab, Rob Nelson, Nate Ayers, and Justin Madron have been essential allies as I finished the dissertation. I would like to acknowledge the generous support of numerous institutions during my graduate study: at the University of Virginia I have benefitted from the program in southern history, the Corcoran Department of History, the Carter G. Woodson Institute, the William R. Kenan summer fellowship program, and especially the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. Outside UVA, I owe thanks to the Virginia Historical Society, Duke University Library, and the Presbyterian Historical Society for their support. Though the project was not initially built for this purpose, my dissertation made extensive use of Visualizing Emancipation, a project supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Richmond. I would like to thank my family; Clark and Patsy Nesbit for their continuous encouragement; Liz Caritj for not tiring of her brother; Faith, Glenn, John, and Colin, for enduring childhood with a father who was still in school. Most of all I would like to thank Erin, for everything. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 6 CHAPTER ONE: FIRST CONTACTS 22 CHAPTER TWO: RUNNING AWAY 61 CHAPTER THREE: OCCUPATION 108 CHAPTER FOUR: REFUGEES AND RAIDERS 153 CHAPTER FIVE: "A HUNGRY BELLY AND FREEDOM" 200 EPILOGUE 245 APPENDICES 249 INTRODUCTION Nearly everyone in the Civil War South had opportunity to feel the irony of emancipation. The tension they experienced, the absurdity visited on them by the juxtaposition of war and freedom, might be put this way: in the Civil War, ending slavery was not the same as freeing slaves. To admit a difference between the two is to open a puzzle often passed over, but one powerfully experienced by those bound together in the conflict. Enslaved people saw a war they knew could end in their liberation destroying their homes, devouring their food, and taking what little stability they had carved out of their enslavement. Slaveholders could not help but grimace at the choices they faced, in which the regime they built to safeguard slavery in turn demanded the sacrifice of their slaves to ensure its survival. Northern generals “made Georgia howl” and devised strategies to dismantle the Confederacy by simultaneously destroying slavery and bringing war, with all its destruction, to black southerners’ doors. Slavery and the American Civil War have always been at the center of ironic interpretations of American history. Reinhold Neibuhr’s Irony of American History closed with a meditation on Abraham Lincoln and his ability both to act in history and stand detached from “the partiality of all historic commitments.” C. Vann 7 Woodward saw in the South’s experiences of slavery and defeat, of learning “the taste left in the mouth by the swallowing of one’s words,” a possibility that it might similarly be “set apart,” given a vantage from which to consider myths of national innocence. Robert Penn Warren, who skewered postwar myths of northern and southern whites alike, found little enough to admire in those who found comfort in the outcome of the war.1 For these writers, an ironic stance toward the past derives from a deep skepticism about human action in the world. Such a stance creates and leaves unresolved tension by juxtaposing our highest ideals with the terrible uses of power often necessary to recreate the world as it should be. An ironic history points out the gaps between the ideologies to which historical actors adhere and the conditions in which they find themselves, conditions that seem to make it impossible to act consistently, that break down radical and reactionary politics alike. Such an approach finds vice hidden in the highest virtues and sordid results coming from the most noble purposes. The simple fact that Americans often have not lived up to the better angels of our nature—that American history is full of racism, greed, violence, and bad faith—is not ironic, but life. In those situations, however, in which historical actors looking to protect slavery destroy it, in which they liberate at the expense of those hoping to become free, and in which deferred hopes for freedom 1 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Scribners, 1952), 171- 4; Niebuhr, “The Religion of Abraham Lincoln,” in Allan Nevins, ed., Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address: Commemorative Papers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964), 76; C. Vann Woodward, “The Irony of Southern History” in The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960), 190; Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War (New York: Random House, 1961); Warren, “Uses of the Past,” in New and Selected Essays (New York: Random House, 1989), 29-54. 8 turn out to be preferable to emancipation in the midst of hunger and fire, historians can find irony, a combination of sympathy and detachment for those acting in a terrible war that ended slavery. These earlier, ironic accounts of the Civil War placed slavery at the center of their narratives but did not consider the wartime experience of enslaved men and women themselves. Niebuhr found Abraham Lincoln to be wise because he was able to assign blame for slavery “to both North and South” and tell a grieving nation that God had visited “this terrible war” on them both. Niebuhr approvingly summarized the president, “Sin and punishment, virtue and reward are never precisely proportioned.” Yet Lincoln’s moral accounting of the war treated African Americans as entirely marginal to the contest itself, as though God did not visit war on them, too. Their lives, in such a story, were implicated only in the war’s outcome, in “giving freedom to the slave.”2 Ira Berlin and, recently, scholars of all stripes working on the end of slavery have countered the assumption that blacks were marginal to the conflict. Historians at the Freedmen and Southern Society Project have made nuanced arguments for the centrality of enslaved people as agents in their own emancipation: that enslaved men and women were primary actors in bringing about their own freedom; that black southern men were eager to take up arms for the United States and their own freedom; and that plantations during and immediately after the war were sites of severe labor conflict, pitting the diametrically opposed economic and political desires of the formerly enslaved against landowners and proprietors. There is much 2 Niebuhr, “Religion of Lincoln,” 74, 85. 9 in these arguments with which I heartily agree. Enslaved people certainly played a pivotal role in the end both of their own enslavement and in the United States’ decision to consider the destruction of slavery a worthy means to win the war. Many ran to U.S. lines without regret and suffered little once there, though perhaps not as many did so, and they did with more ambivalence than some scholars have suggested. In both of these arguments, the pivotal moments arrive when the progressive forces of black southerners and their allies come into conflict with the forces of racist and reactionary politics and either achieve victory, as in the case of the destruction of slavery and the black military experience, or a barely concealed détente, in the case of the volumes on labor relations. Likewise, James Oakes’ useful Freedom National tells a tightly organized story with a foregone conclusion, tracing the ideological origins and political triumph of the antislavery movement in the United States. Such histories have very clear winners and losers, those with virtue and those without, depending on the beliefs they carried into the struggle for freedom.3 3 Ira Berlin, et al., eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985-2005); James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery, 1861-1865 (New York: W.W.