Emancipation, Reconstruction & Historical Inquiry — Print · U.S. & New York History: Indigenous Nations to Reconstruction, Grade 7

Part 1 · They freed themselves first

Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory and James Townsend rowed across Hampton Roads to Fort Monroe in May 1861 to avoid being sent to build Confederate fortifications. Under the Fugitive Slave Act, still law, Butler was obliged to return them. He declined, reasoning that Virginia claimed to be a foreign country and could not invoke a United States statute, and that labour being used against the army was contraband.

Word travelled faster than anyone expected. Within two months a thousand people had reached Fort Monroe; within a year there were camps outside every Union position in the South. They were often wretched places, short of food and shelter and swept by disease, and people kept coming anyway, which tells you what they were leaving.

Congress followed rather than led. The First Confiscation Act of August 1861 freed people used directly in Confederate military work; the Second, in July 1862, freed those belonging to anyone in rebellion. Both were narrow, hard to apply and widely ignored by officers who returned people anyway.

This order of events matters for how the period is taught. The familiar version has Lincoln deciding to free the enslaved; the records show hundreds of thousands of people making the question unavoidable, then a government catching up and writing down what was already happening. Both things are true, but only one of them is usually in the title.

Part 2 · What the Proclamation covered

Lincoln issued the preliminary proclamation after Antietam in September 1862 and the final one on 1 January 1863. Its authority was the president's war power as commander-in-chief, and that is the key to everything odd about it: a war power reaches enemy territory, not loyal states.

So it exempted the four slave states that had stayed in the Union, and it exempted the parts of Tennessee, Louisiana and Virginia the Union already occupied, naming the parishes and counties one by one. Of roughly 3.9 million people held in slavery, about 3.1 million were covered, and the Union controlled none of them on the day.

Critics then and since called it a document that freed people where it had no power and left them enslaved where it did. The observation is accurate and the conclusion is wrong. From 1 January 1863 every mile the Union army took was an emancipation, carried out by soldiers with written orders, and the Union armies took a great many miles.

It also changed what the war meant abroad. Britain had abolished slavery in 1833 and a British government could not easily enter a war on the side now openly fighting to keep it. After January 1863 the recognition question was closed for good.

One more consequence is easy to miss. The order instructed the armed forces to recognise and maintain the freedom of the people it named, which made emancipation a military duty rather than a political opinion. Officers who had been returning escapees to their enslavers now had written orders not to, and the camps that had grown up outside Union positions stopped being an awkward improvisation and became something the army was obliged to run.

Part 3 · Men in blue

The United States Colored Troops grew to about 180,000 soldiers, roughly a tenth of the Union army, plus 19,000 in the navy. Many were formerly enslaved men who had reached the lines; others were free northerners who had been refused enlistment for two years.

The 54th Massachusetts led the assault on Fort Wagner in July 1863 and lost nearly half its men, including Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who was buried in the mass grave with his soldiers as an intended insult. Northern newspapers that had doubted Black troops would fight stopped printing that doubt.

They were paid less. White privates received thirteen dollars a month; Black soldiers were paid ten with three deducted for clothing, so seven. The 54th refused to accept any pay at all for eighteen months rather than take the lesser sum, and Congress equalised it in June 1864 and made it retroactive.

They also faced a danger white soldiers did not. The Confederate government declared captured Black soldiers would be returned to slavery or executed, and at Fort Pillow in April 1864 Confederate troops killed surrendering Black soldiers. About 40,000 USCT died in the war, the great majority of disease, a higher proportion than among white troops because they got worse camps, worse rations and worse medical care.

Part 4 · Kentucky, and why an amendment was necessary

Kentucky never seceded. It was therefore exempt from the Proclamation, and slavery remained perfectly legal there throughout the war, in a state supplying troops to the Union army. Delaware, Maryland and Missouri were in the same position, though Maryland and Missouri abolished it themselves before the war ended.

That alone would have been reason enough for an amendment, but the deeper problem was the Proclamation's legal footing. A war power lasts as long as the war. Lincoln and his lawyers were genuinely unsure whether a court in peacetime would hold that an emergency military order had permanently changed the property law of a dozen states, and a single adverse ruling could have put hundreds of thousands of people back into slavery.

So the Thirteenth Amendment was written to put it beyond argument: neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime, shall exist within the United States. The Senate passed it in April 1864; the House refused; Lincoln made it the centrepiece of his re-election and pushed it through in January 1865 by a margin of two votes, using patronage and promises that have been argued about ever since.

It was ratified in December 1865, eight months after Appomattox and after Lincoln's death. Kentucky and Delaware voted against it and slavery there ended only because the rest of the country ratified. The exception clause for criminal punishment, inserted almost without debate, became the legal basis for convict leasing within a few years, and is the subject of argument to this day.

It is worth sitting with the timing. The amendment that ended slavery in the United States was ratified by states voting in the ordinary way, eight months after the shooting stopped, and two of them voted no. Nothing about the outcome was automatic, and a different House vote in January 1865 would have left the question to courts deciding, after the emergency had passed, what an emergency order had been worth.

Part 1 · The draft and the three hundred dollars

Volunteering had carried the Union army through two years and was running out. The Enrollment Act made every male citizen between twenty and forty-five liable, assigned each congressional district a quota, and held a lottery wherever volunteering fell short.

The two escapes were written into the law. A drafted man could find a substitute to serve for him, or pay three hundred dollars to the government and be released from that particular draft. Congress intended the fee as a ceiling on what substitutes could charge, which it was; the effect was that a drafted clerk could borrow and pay it, and a drafted dock labourer could not.

The Confederacy had done the same thing a year earlier and worse. Its conscription law of April 1862 exempted one white man for every twenty enslaved people on a plantation, so the largest slaveholders kept their sons at home. Soldiers on both sides noticed, and the twenty-slave law did more damage to Confederate morale than almost any battle.

There is a measurement worth keeping. Of roughly 250,000 men whose names were drawn in the Union draft, only about 6 per cent actually served; most paid, substituted, or were exempted on medical or family grounds. The draft worked less as a way of raising soldiers than as a threat that raised volunteers, and the people it did catch were overwhelmingly those with no way out.

Part 2 · Four days in July

The first lottery drawing on Saturday 11 July passed quietly. The names were printed in the Sunday papers, people read them with their neighbours, and on Monday morning a crowd of several thousand marched on the Ninth District provost marshal's office on Third Avenue and burned it.

By that afternoon the target had changed. Crowds attacked Black men in the street, burned boarding houses and the homes of Black families, and set fire to the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue. The 233 children inside were led out the back as the building burned; every one survived, which was the work of the staff and of a handful of bystanders who stood in the way.

At least eleven Black men were lynched over the following days, some hanged from lampposts and burned. Abolitionists' homes were attacked, as were the offices of Republican newspapers and the houses of the wealthy on Lexington Avenue. The police were overwhelmed by Tuesday.

Regiments were recalled from Gettysburg and reached the city on Thursday 16 July, and the fighting that ended it was house to house with artillery in the streets. Estimates of the dead centre on about 119. New York's Black population, around 12,500 before the riots, had fallen to under 10,000 by 1865 as families left for Brooklyn, New Jersey and further.

The aftermath is told less often than the riot. A merchants' relief committee paid compensation to around 2,500 Black victims, and the orphan asylum was rebuilt uptown. Nobody was ever convicted of any of the lynchings and the city quietly let the matter drop; the draft resumed in August under the guns of several thousand soldiers and proceeded without incident.

Part 3 · Why this city

New York had reasons that were specific and reasons that were general. Specifically, the city's merchants had been the financial centre of the cotton trade and many had opposed the war from the start; Mayor Fernando Wood had proposed in 1861 that the city secede and keep trading. Governor Horatio Seymour spent the spring of 1863 denouncing the draft as unconstitutional, and addressed the crowd on the second day as my friends.

Generally, the city held a very large Irish immigrant population at the bottom of the wage ladder, arrived after the famine of the 1840s, poor, crowded and resented. They were told constantly that they were at the bottom, and told by Democratic newspapers that emancipation would bring competition that would push them lower.

A month before the riots that argument acquired a concrete image. Longshoremen struck in June 1863, and the employers broke the strike by hiring Black workers under police protection. For men already angry about a draft they could not buy out, that was the whole case made visible on the docks.

None of this makes the violence anything other than what it was, and the distinction is worth teaching explicitly. Explaining how a thing happened is not the same as excusing it, and the test of whether you have understood a riot is whether you can say both what drove it and what it did, without using one to soften the other.

Part 4 · The war everyone else fought

Civilians away from the fighting still ran much of the war effort. The United States Sanitary Commission, a private organisation staffed largely by women, raised something like twenty-five million dollars through fairs and subscriptions and supplied hospitals, ambulances and camp inspections. Dorothea Dix, last seen campaigning for asylums, became Superintendent of Army Nurses.

The work changed what women were understood to be able to do. Thousands nursed, ran relief organisations, taught in the contraband camps, and took over farms and family businesses, and a number of them went straight from that into the suffrage campaign after the war.

The Confederate home front was harsher by a wide margin, because the blockade and the fighting were both on its territory. Prices rose to the point where Confederate money bought almost nothing by 1865; the government impressed food and livestock from farms at fixed prices; and in April 1863 several hundred women broke into shops in Richmond demanding bread, dispersing only when Jefferson Davis addressed them personally and threatened to have the militia fire.

The letters are the part students remember. Confederate soldiers received letters from wives describing children with nothing to eat, and desertion rose steeply through 1864 and 1865. Armies are held together by more than orders, and the Confederate home front stopped being able to hold up its end some time before the armies did.

There is a general point here worth carrying beyond this war. Armies are usually described as winning or losing on battlefields, and the records that survive are weighted heavily towards soldiers and generals. The home front leaves thinner evidence -- letters, price lists, ration books, a riot report -- and it is often where the outcome was actually decided.

Part 1 · What freedom was used for

The first thing people did was look for their families. Newspapers aimed at freedpeople carried thousands of advertisements through the 1870s and 1880s: a name, a last known owner, a place and a year of sale, sometimes thirty years earlier. Many were never answered, and reading a column of them is the most direct evidence of what the domestic slave trade had done.

The second was to make marriages legal. Slavery had recognised no marriage among the enslaved, and Union chaplains and Freedmen's Bureau agents registered them by the tens of thousands in 1865 and 1866, often couples who had considered themselves married for decades.

The third was schools. Freedpeople built and paid for schools before any government offered them, and by 1870 something like 4,000 were operating across the South with around 250,000 pupils. Northern missionary societies sent teachers, many of them Black women, and the colleges founded in these years -- Fisk in 1866, Howard in 1867, Hampton in 1868 among them -- are still running.

The fourth was churches of their own. Congregations that had sat in the galleries of white churches walked out and founded their own, which then served as the schoolhouse, the meeting hall and the political organisation. When the violence came in the 1870s, churches and schoolhouses were burned first, which tells you what they were understood to be.

Part 2 · Land, promised and taken back

In January 1865 General Sherman issued Special Field Order 15, setting aside a strip of coastal land from Charleston to Florida for freed families in plots of up to forty acres; the army lent out surplus mules. About 40,000 people settled roughly 400,000 acres under it.

That autumn Johnson revoked it. The land was restored to its former owners and the families on it were given a choice between signing labour contracts with the people who had held them in slavery or being removed by the army. Some had to be removed at gunpoint.

The decision mattered more than any other made in these years. Everywhere else slavery ended in the nineteenth century the freed people were landless, and the result was almost always a return to working someone else's land on someone else's terms. Thaddeus Stevens argued in Congress for breaking up the largest plantations and distributing them, and lost, because a Congress that had just abolished property in people was not willing to confiscate property in land.

The Freedmen's Bureau, created in March 1865, was given the job instead: distribute food, run hospitals and schools, supervise labour contracts, and adjudicate disputes. It did real work -- it issued around 21 million rations and ran the school system described above -- with a staff never larger than about 900 agents for the entire South, which is one agent for several thousand people.

Part 3 · Black Codes and the congressional answer

Mississippi passed the first Black Code in November 1865 and the others copied it. Freedpeople had to produce written proof of employment each January; leaving before the contract ended forfeited the year's wages; anyone without a contract could be arrested for vagrancy, fined, and hired out to pay the fine. Courts could apprentice Black children to employers, with the former enslaver given first refusal.

The codes were slavery's working arrangements rewritten as labour law, and they were enacted in public with numbered sections, which is why they are such useful evidence. Congress read them and concluded that Johnson's plan had restored the old order under a new name.

The answer came in stages. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 made everyone born in the United States a citizen with equal rights to contract, sue and own property; Johnson vetoed it and Congress overrode him, the first time in American history that a major bill became law over a presidential veto. The Fourteenth Amendment followed, to put the same guarantee beyond a later Congress.

The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 went further: the ten unreconstructed states were placed under military districts and required to write new constitutions with Black male suffrage and to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment before readmission. Johnson obstructed, Congress impeached him in 1868, and the Senate acquitted him by a single vote.

Part 4 · Officeholding, overthrow, and the crop

Between 1867 and 1877 roughly 2,000 Black men held public office in the South: sheriffs, judges, legislators, sixteen members of Congress, and two United States senators from Mississippi, Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce. South Carolina's lower house had a Black majority from 1868. These governments built the South's first public school systems and its first public hospitals, and taxed land to pay for them.

The reaction was organised violence. The Ku Klux Klan began in 1866 and spread as a paramilitary wing of the Democratic Party, attacking officeholders, teachers and voters; at Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873, a white militia killed scores of Black men after they had surrendered. Federal enforcement acts in 1870 and 1871 broke the Klan for a few years, and nothing broke what came after it.

The end was political. After the disputed presidential election of 1876, the settlement that made Rutherford Hayes president withdrew the remaining federal troops from the South in 1877. The state governments fell one by one to men who called the process redemption, and Black voting was suppressed first by violence and then, from the 1890s, by poll taxes and literacy tests written to be applied selectively.

Underneath the politics sat the economics. Sharecropping emerged as the compromise nobody chose: the landowner supplied land, tools and seed; the family worked it and handed over a third to a half of the crop; the merchant advanced food and supplies on credit at interest rates often above 50 per cent, secured against the crop. A bad year meant a debt carried into the next one, and the law in most states made leaving while in debt a crime. By 1880 about three quarters of Black farmers in the South were sharecroppers or tenants.

Poor white farmers were caught in the same arrangement in large numbers, which is worth saying plainly because it cuts against the way the period is often summarised. Sharecropping was a system for extracting a crop from whoever had no land, and by the 1890s roughly a third of southern white farmers were in it too. That shared position is exactly what the Populist movement briefly tried to organise, and exactly what the politics of racial division was deployed to prevent.

Part 1 · Three amendments, each closing the last one's gap

The Thirteenth ended the institution. It was necessary because the Emancipation Proclamation was a war measure that had never reached the loyal slave states and might not survive the peace. Its exception for punishment after conviction of a crime was barely debated and became, within five years, the legal foundation of convict leasing, in which states rented prisoners to private companies under conditions that killed a great many of them.

The Fourteenth answered the Black Codes. Section 1 is the one that matters most: everyone born here is a citizen of the United States and of the state they live in, and no state may abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens, deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process, or deny any person the equal protection of the laws. It says person rather than citizen in the second half, which is why it reaches non-citizens too.

It also contained a punishment nobody ever used. Section 2 provides that a state denying the vote to adult male citizens shall have its representation in Congress cut in proportion. Southern states denied the vote wholesale for seventy years and no Congress ever reduced a single seat.

The Fifteenth answered the fact that the Fourteenth had not actually required Black suffrage. Republicans had reasons both principled and practical: Black votes were the basis of their southern support. The amendment passed in a form narrow enough to pass, which is to say narrow enough to be evaded.

Part 2 · How a state kept the vote without mentioning race

Mississippi went first, with a new constitution in 1890, and the others copied it over the following fifteen years. The devices were a poll tax payable months before the election and in cash, a literacy test in which an official decided whether an applicant could read and interpret a clause of the state constitution, and a property or residency requirement.

None of them names race, and all of them were administered by a white registrar with complete discretion. A Black schoolteacher could be failed on an interpretation question; a white man who could not read could be passed. Where even that was thought insufficient, a grandfather clause exempted anyone whose grandfather had been entitled to vote before 1867, which no Black applicant's had been.

The Supreme Court let it stand. In Williams v. Mississippi in 1898 it held that the state's provisions did not on their face discriminate by race, and that proving discriminatory administration was the challenger's burden. The grandfather clause was finally struck down in 1915, by which time the registration rolls had already been cleared and the other devices remained.

This is the single most transferable idea in the unit. A rule can be written in perfectly neutral words, applied by officials with discretion, and produce an almost perfectly racial result -- and then be defended on the ground that the words are neutral. Learning to ask what a rule does rather than only what it says is most of what historical and civic literacy consists of.

Part 3 · Reading the collapse

The figures in the diagram are the state of Louisiana's own. In 1896, 130,344 Black men were registered. In 1900, two years after the new constitution, 5,320. In 1904, 1,342. The Black share of the electorate fell from about 44 per cent to under one per cent while the Black share of the adult male population barely moved.

A fall like that cannot be explained by people losing interest. The population was there, the registration requirement had changed, and the figures move in the year the requirement changed. Historians look for exactly this shape: a sharp break timed to a known cause, with the underlying population flat.

Compare that with the change the same figures would show for white registration, which fell too -- the poll tax caught poor white men as well -- but by a fraction as much, and many of those were restored by the grandfather clause. The two curves together are the argument: a rule that was neutral on its face fell on one group roughly a hundred times harder.

What followed lasted until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which worked by attacking the administration rather than the wording, requiring states with this history to get federal approval before changing voting rules at all. That is nearly a century between the Fifteenth Amendment and the law that made it operate, which is the measure of how much a well-drafted evasion can be worth.

Part 4 · What the amendments did do

It would be a mistake to finish this unit concluding that the amendments were worthless. They abolished slavery outright and permanently, which is not a small thing, and they wrote birthright citizenship into the Constitution, which remains the law and remains contested.

The Fourteenth Amendment in particular became the main instrument of American constitutional law in the twentieth century, long after Reconstruction ended. Equal protection is the clause behind Brown v. Board of Education in 1954; due process is the clause through which most of the Bill of Rights was applied against the states at all.

So the accurate summary is that the amendments were written to be enforced and were then not enforced for roughly ninety years, and that when enforcement finally came it came using their text, unchanged. The words were adequate; the political will was not, and the gap between the two is where the period's history actually lives.

That also means the century after 1870 is not a story of a law failing but of a country declining to use one. It is a distinction worth holding on to, because the two produce completely different conclusions about what to do next.

One last caution about the sources. The registration figures in this lesson come from the states that were doing the excluding, which is unusual and useful: an institution reporting a number that damns it is about as reliable as evidence gets, because it had every reason to report otherwise. When you meet a statistic in a textbook, the question to ask first is not whether it is large but who counted it and what they stood to gain by the count coming out differently.

Part 1 · What a claim has to have

Start with a claim that is too broad and watch what is wrong with it: the Civil War was about slavery. It is true, it is worth knowing, and as a claim it is almost useless, because it names no period, proposes no mechanism, and there is nothing you could show the writer that would make them revise it rather than restate it.

Now a usable version: the seceding states left over slavery, as their own declarations of causes say in 1860 and 1861, but the Union's war aim in 1861 was the preservation of the Union, which is why emancipation arrived as a military measure in 1863 rather than as a war aim in 1861.

That version names two things and dates them. It proposes a mechanism, the war power, for why the timing went the way it did. And it is vulnerable: if you could show that Lincoln had announced emancipation as a war aim in 1861, or that the declarations of causes talk mostly about tariffs, the claim would be in trouble. Being vulnerable is what makes it worth writing down.

The test to apply to your own first draft is simple. Ask what evidence would make you change your mind. If you cannot name any, you have not yet written a claim -- you have written a sentiment, and the next step is to make it specific enough to be wrong.

One more thing a claim needs, and it is the one most often left out: a mechanism. Saying that the cotton gin caused slavery to expand is a correlation until you say how -- that cleaning was the bottleneck, that removing it made short-staple cotton worth planting inland, and that planting it inland required field labour the domestic slave trade then supplied. The chain is the argument. Without it you have two things that happened near each other in time.

Part 2 · Looking for what does not fit

The difference between a strong explanation and a weak one is almost never the amount of supporting evidence. Anyone can accumulate that. It is whether the writer went looking for the evidence that cuts the other way before a reader did.

Take a claim this course makes it easy to reach: the Erie Canal, opened in 1825, caused New York City's rise. Supporting evidence is everywhere -- freight costs fell by around 90 per cent, the city's population and port traffic rose steeply, and the canal towns grew into cities.

Now look for the trouble. New York was already the country's largest port before the canal opened, so something else had started the process. The canal's most dramatic effects were inland, on wheat prices and on where farmers could afford to settle, not on the harbour. And a rival explanation exists: the city's merchants had pioneered scheduled packet service to Liverpool in 1818, which mattered independently.

None of that destroys the claim; it narrows it. The revised version might be that the canal secured and extended a lead New York already held by making it the outlet for the whole interior, which is a smaller statement, better evidenced, and far harder to knock down. That is what progress looks like in this subject.

Notice where that counterevidence came from. Nobody handed it over; it came from reading the dates carefully and asking what was already true before the thing being credited. That is the habit worth taking out of this course. Ask what was happening immediately before the change you want to explain, because the answer is often that the change had already begun and your cause accelerated it rather than starting it.

Part 3 · Three questions this course can answer

Choose one. Each is genuinely open, each has material in the chapters behind you, and each has been answered differently by serious historians.

First: why did compromise hold in 1820 and in 1850 and collapse in 1854? You have the Missouri line, the five bills of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act and Kansas-Nebraska. A strong answer will have to say something about what makes a thing divisible, and about the moment the argument reached into the free states.

Second: by 1860, had the cotton gin or the Erie Canal done more to decide where Americans lived and what they did? You have production figures, the domestic slave trade, freight costs and settlement patterns. This one rewards arithmetic, and a good answer will notice that the two are not independent.

Third: were the Reconstruction amendments a failure? You have the three texts, the registration figures, Williams v. Mississippi and the ninety years to 1965. The strongest answers to this one usually begin by separating two different questions that the word failure runs together.

Whichever you take, the first move is the same: write down what would have to be true for the opposite answer to be right. If you are going to argue that the amendments did not fail, state plainly what a genuine failure would have looked like and then show that it is not what happened. Doing that at the start, rather than at the end as a concession, is what separates an argument from a defence.

Part 4 · Drafting, breaking, revising

Draft the claim in one sentence before you write anything else, and date it. Then list the three strongest pieces of evidence for it, with a figure, a date or a quotation attached to each, not a general impression.

Then do the part that is uncomfortable. Spend as long hunting for evidence against your claim as you spent gathering evidence for it, and write down what you find even when it is inconvenient. If you find nothing, that usually means the claim is too vague to be contradicted, and you should go back to the first step.

Revise by narrowing rather than retreating. A revision is not an admission that you were wrong; it is the claim becoming more precise about when, where and how much. The clearest sign of a weak draft is a claim that stayed exactly the same from first sentence to last, because that means the evidence never did any work.

Finally, write the limit into the piece itself. One honest sentence saying what your explanation does not cover, or which evidence you could not resolve, does more for a reader's trust than another paragraph of support. You have seen this throughout the course: the sources that stated what they could not establish were the ones worth believing about everything else.