After the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War surely there were some slave owners that said “fuck that!”. I’m thinking there had to be at least a few belligerent southern folk.
How were such people dealt with, by whom, and what were their consequences?
I seem to recall reading that a number of slaveholders took themselves and their slaves off to Brazil, where slavery remained legal for some further years. I don’t know if anybody stayed on their property and tried to enforce slavery there, though.
That was the point of Reconstruction. Northern civilians went south and essentially took over the running of local governments to clean out any lingering traces of slavery. They had the support of freed blacks (who knew the local situation) and the Union Army (which had the guns to back them up). So it would have been extremely difficult for anyone to “hide out” and keep their slaves without people knowing and intervening.
They certainly tried to keep the essentials of slavery in place. In at least one place the contract that they got them to sign said, [paraphrasing slightly] “everything to be the same as in slave time, except we have to pay you something”.
American Indians kept slaves legally well after the Civil War, and former Doper GregAtlanta wrote Lay This Body Down: The 1921 Murders of Eleven Plantation Slaves, based on the practice of peonage actually being more slavery than anything else. They were killed after they spoke to Federal Investigators regarding their work conditions, I seem to recall.
The big issue about slavery was that it was everywhere. Slaves could try to escape but as soon as they did they were pursued and hounded (often literally with hounds). They could be pursued legally even to non-slave states.
When slavery ended, slave owners no longer had this protection. If they tried to keep slaves they’d have to watch them 24 hours a day or the slaves could leave and they’d have no recourse.
As said, it was far, far easier to just pay them a miserable wage and not change anything else. Trying to maintain them as slaves was a losing and self-defeating proposition.
This is a common misconception about slavery–that it was something an individual master did to an individual slave. In fact, slavery was a system under which one part of the population controlled the state to enslave another portion. Slavery requires more than a master with a gun–it requires the support network of passes, free papers, slave catchers, auctions, and legal protection for masters.
Attempts to replicate slavery, therefore, involved attempting to control the Southern state governments to replicate the legal support network. After the first round of postwar whites-only elections in 1865, Southern legislatures enacted “Black Codes” to skate as close to slavery as they could (criminalizing unemployment and breach of contract, binding out children as “apprentices”, bans on black people owning land or firearms) without blatantly violating the Thirteenth Amendment.
It didn’t work, because the federal government recognized it for what it was, and mandated biracial suffrage. After the collapse of biracial Reconstruction, the Southern states were able to resume the struggle more modestly, carving out slavery-like environments such as the convict lease system.
But a rogue master with a gun? The chances of success weren’t good. Somewhere down the road, your escapees could sharecrop with someone else.
13th Amendment:
If you were a criminal or your behavior criminalized you could find yourself in slavery conditions i.e. the convict lease program.
This was precisely where the peonage workers were “recruited” for the book mentioned above, the plantation owner paid their fees to the prisons where they were held for sometimes the early 20th Century equivalent of DWB, and they went to him to work it off, never getting it paid off. Locked inside a building, chained from the outside at night, guarded with guns during the day.
The Confederados. It’s debatable how many of them took slaves with them, though. The emperor of Brazil was providing other inducements to persuade American planters to emigrate. Brazil wanted to encourage the growing of cotton at that point:
Just a minor clarification. The Emancipation Proclamation (effective Jan 1 1863) only freed the slaves in the Confederate States – precisely those states in rebellion. So Slaves in Kentucky, Delaware, Missouri, Maryland, and West Virginia, were not freed by it. Slaves in the Nebraska Territory and (I think) Indian Territory (Oklahoma) also were not freed.
The Emancipation Proclamation freed over 4million slaves.
The rest (around 40,000) were all freed by the 13th Ad, a little while later in 1865.
Thus the Emancipation Proclamation freed over 99% of the slaves, so saying " the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves" is pretty correct.
Why was the Emancipation Proclamation necessary or desirable as a formal act? It obviously had no effect where the Union army wasn’t in force, and slaves escaped from rebel masters were already considered “contraband”, legally forfeited under the laws of war. As far as I can tell, it was simply the most that Lincoln could unilaterally do by executive order to ban slavery, but politically it risked as much or more than it dared. What was the thinking behind it?
For one thing, it made French and British support for the South, which was arguably tentative at best, completely impossible. Slavery was already illegal in those countries. Buy changing the US Civil War from a succession of states to a debate over slavery, and it wasn’t until then, Lincoln removed legitimacy from any European support. Some contemporary British interests of the time were fuming mad – they painted it as a real dirty trick.
Actually, not. The proclamation didn’t free a single slave. OldGuy is basically right: the proclamation only appled to “the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in
rebellion against the United States . . .” In other words, it only applied to the Confederacy, which was about a likely to go along with anything Lincoln said as Obama is to enforce a German law applying to the US. Lincoln had no jurisdiction in any of the states where he was “freeing” the slaves.
It was important as a statement of principle, of course, and changed the war into one fought over slavery, which helped the North (it kept Great Britain out).
As the Northern army took over land, they declared any slaves free, but the actual proclamation had no direct effect on them.
Too bad the government doesn’t agree with a word of this. The National Archives states:
Here’s a transcript of the Emancipation Proclamation.
The wording is clear enough. It was a statement of intent, intended for political purposes. No slaves were freed in practice on Jan. 1, 1863. None of the stated areas were represented in Congress by then, so there could be no legal effect.
Slaves were freed de facto one by one by the military actions of the Army. Even so, the Army didn’t really know what to do with them because they had no legal status.
Slavery legally ended with the 13th Amendment and not before, even if the institution had collapsed by then.
On preview, Chuck beat me.
That’s nitpicking. It’s like saying the 18th Amendment didn’t stop the sale of alcohol. It’s the enforcement of the law that acheives its goal. And Lincoln went on to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation.
It’s also untrue that the Emancipation Proclamation did not free any slaves on the day it was issued. There were several hundred slaves who had escaped from the CSA and had fled behind Union Army lines. Prior to the Emancipation Proclamation, their status was unclear. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was still legally in effect and these slaves would theoretically have been returned to their owners after the war ended. But the Emancipation Proclamation ended this possibility and declared that these slaves were free.
Were any of these union lines in the listed states or parts thereof on January 1, 1863? And if so, which?
Umm, dude. “The Emancipation Proclamation did not immediately free a single slave” and “the Emancipation Proclamation freed over 4million slaves” do not disagree with each other. Note the word “immediately”.:rolleyes:
Sure it took until the end of the war to free all 4 million slaves, but some were freed right after as the Union occupied slave states. However, the 13th Ad only freed about 40K slaves in Dec 1865, the Emancipation Proclamation eventually freed more than 4 million prior to that date.
Lincoln had plenty of juristiction over the areas of the CSA the Union army occupied. At the end of the war Emancipation Proclamation was in effect through-out the entireity of the South. But you’re only off by about 4 million, give or take.
*"It first directly affected only those slaves who had already escaped to the Union side. Hearing of the Proclamation, more slaves quickly escaped to Union lines as the Army units moved South. As the Union armies conquered the Confederacy, thousands of slaves were freed each day until nearly all (approximately 4 million, according to the 1860 census[2]) were freed by July 1865…
…Some slaves were freed immediately by the proclamation. Runaway slaves who had escaped to Union lines were held by the Union Army as “contraband of war” in contraband camps; when the proclamation took effect, they were told at midnight that they were free to leave. The Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia were occupied by the Union Navy earlier in the war. The whites had fled to the mainland while the blacks stayed…
… In January 1865, Congress sent to the state legislatures for ratification what became the Thirteenth Amendment, banning slavery in all U.S. states and territories. The amendment was ratified by the legislatures of enough states by December 6, 1865. There were about 40,000 slaves in Kentucky and 1,000 in Delaware who were liberated then.[2]"*
True, when it was enacted, the Emancipation Proclamation was mostly a gesture, a promise. But the promise was fulfiled as the Union army beat the crap out of the South.