Emancipation in Washington 160 years ago deserves remembering.
Emancipation in Washington 160 years ago deserves remembering.
T oday marks a milestone in the history of the nation’s capital: the day 160 years ago that Abraham Lincoln signed a law passed by the Republican Congress emancipating the slaves in the District of Columbia. The date is marked by a holiday in D.C., but it is far less-remembered nationally than the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment, or even the Texas-specific holiday Juneteenth. That is a shame, because D.C. emancipation sheds a good deal of light on Lincoln and the fight against slavery.
The District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act was the first true emancipation under federal law. It was the first federal law to free slaves held in bondage where slavery had been legal, without resort to war powers focused on the exigencies of rebellion. It was thus a dramatic step toward the end of slavery.
Laws against slavery began during the American Revolution: Vermont passed the world’s first constitutional ban on slavery in 1777, and Pennsylvania passed the world’s first legislative ban in 1780. Slavery was legally banned by four other original states (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire) by 1784. That left the two northern states with the most slaves — New York and New Jersey — which enacted gradual state emancipation laws in 1800 and 1804, respectively. These were principally structured as “free womb laws,” meaning that the focus was not on freeing all slaves immediately, but rather on freeing children born to slave mothers after enactment — and even then, only after serving bonded apprenticeships until they reached adulthood.
The federal government took some important early steps against slavery, but with the aim of controlling its expansion rather than freeing already-enslaved people. Thus, the 1787 Northwest Ordinance banned slavery in the territories that became the states of the Midwest, and Congress banned the transatlantic slave trade in 1807. The Missouri Compromise in 1820 and the Compromise of 1850 each placed additional limits on where slavery could be brought into western territories (bans the Supreme Court tried to invalidate in Dred Scott v. Sandford, a contorted decision that required the Court to invent the doctrine of substantive due process).
Supreme Court mischief aside, the one place where nobody seriously doubted that Congress was supreme was D.C. This is precisely why anti-slavery advocates focused particular energy on making a difference there. Lincoln, in 1849 near the end of his one term in the House, introduced a bill to abolish slavery in D.C. Easier said than done.
At the time the Constitution was written, both Virginia and Maryland had state-law bans on importing slaves into the state, passed during periods of Revolutionary-era skepticism of slavery (Virginia’s was passed in 1778 and signed by then-governor Thomas Jefferson; Maryland’s passed in 1796). In 1801, Congress passed a law that adopted Maryland’s slave laws, thus continuing these anti-importation rules in force even after they were repealed in Virginia and Maryland. Under federal law, therefore, no slaves could be imported to the Maryland part of the District except from Maryland, and no slaves could be imported to the Virginia part of the District except from Virginia. The barrier between the two halves was dropped in 1812, but as late as 1834, in Lee v. Lee, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of slaves who argued that they had been hired out into the District as a subterfuge to get around the importation laws. In 1846, in part to get away from this arrangement and return to a state with unrestricted movement of slaves, Alexandria was retroceded to Virginia.
Despite the legal complexities, both slavery and the slave trade thrived in D.C., which by virtue of its location had one of the most active slave trades in the country — a galling contrast for the capital of the world’s freest nation. When the Compromise of 1850 banned the slave trade in the District, it was a step in the direction of restoring the Founding-era status of enslavement in the capital, but slaves remained very much a visible presence.
Social conditions, however, also increased the agitation against local slavery. “By 1850, free African Americans outnumbered those enslaved by almost two to one. According to the US Census, there were 8,461 free and 4,694 enslaved African Americans.” By the 1860 census, the number of slaves held in D.C. had declined to 3,185, compared with 11,131 free black Americans. When war broke out, more fugitives from enslavement in the seceded states streamed into D.C., eventually more than doubling its free black population by the end of the war.
The secession of the Southern states was, in addition to its other flaws, a disaster for Democrats and their power to protect slavery in Congress. Republicans abruptly gained their first-ever Senate majority, and by the end of the 37th Congress, they held 30 of 48 seats in the Senate (there were eleven Democrats and seven Unionists), and 105 of 182 seats in the House (with 44 Democrats, 31 Unionists and two others). For the first time, an anti-slavery party had the votes to enact federal legislation. Where to start?
At first, with a war to avoid and then to prosecute, and with slaveholding border states of uncertain loyalty, Lincoln pumped the brakes. He spent the early months of 1861 trying to reassure the South that Republicans had no designs to ban slavery, then trying in vain to prevent the secession of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas, and the rest of the year working to keep Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, and Missouri in the Union. Events ran ahead of him, which would allow Lincoln to portray the dismantling of slavery as something he was reluctantly dragged into. Meanwhile, in February 1862, Lincoln refused to commute the death sentence of Nathaniel Gordon, a convicted slave trader hanged in New York (characteristically, Lincoln did grant a two-week stay of execution to give the condemned man time to get right with the Lord first).
The first blow struck against slavery came from the battlefield, with Major General Benjamin Butler in May 1861 in Fort Monroe, Va., declaring fugitive slaves who reached the Army to be “contraband of war” and thus the property of the Army to do with as it pleased — including setting them free. Congressional Republicans pounced, passing the First Confiscation Act. The bill declared forfeit any property used to support the Confederate war effort — including slaves. Lincoln signed the law on August 6, 1861. In effect, the policy of the First Confiscation Act served as a reverse Fugitive Slave Act: Slaves who freed themselves would not be returned, but the Army was not yet ready to begin liberating them itself.
A broader order by Major General John C. Frémont — the 1856 Republican presidential candidate — proclaiming the emancipation of all slaves of rebels in Missouri went too far for Lincoln, who revoked the order and ended up removing Frémont from command. Even in May 1862, after the passage of emancipation in D.C., Lincoln would overrule a similar order by General David Hunter, commanding Union-held parts of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Lincoln went out of his way to proclaim that Hunter’s act was unauthorized: “Whether it be competent for me, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, to declare the slaves of any State or States, free, and whether at any time, in any case, it shall have become a necessity indispensable to the maintenance of the government, to exercise such supposed power, are questions which, under my responsibility, I reserve to myself, and which I cannot feel justified in leaving to the decision of commanders in the field. ”
That power, of course, would be exercised later in the year in the Emancipation Proclamation. But discussion of Lincoln pushing the nation toward emancipation by unilateral executive wartime orders overlooks the importance of what Congress had already done by the fall of 1862. The First Confiscation Act began that process, and in the spring of 1862, the next target was D.C.
What made emancipation in D.C. distinct was that it would extend to all slaves, not only those held by rebels. It was therefore not simply a military policy; it was a blueprint for the extinction of slavery itself. The bill was written and introduced by Henry Wilson of Massachusetts after Congress reconvened in December 1861. Wilson would go on in later years to be vice president under Ulysses S. Grant. It reflected its particular moment in time.
Lincoln still wanted to convince the loyal slave states to voluntarily accept compensated emancipation, with the federal government making payments to the slaveowners. Thaddeus Stevens calculated the cost. From Fergus Bordewich’s Congress at War:
Stevens . . . estimated that perhaps half the 429,441 slaves in the border slave states belonged to loyal men, and perhaps another 80,000 slaves belonged to presumed loyalists scattered elsewhere in the South. In all, then, compensation might be offered for some 300,000 slaves at, say, $200 apiece, adding up to a total of $60 million. “Manumit the slaves, and the war would end in six months,” he predicted. “Leave them to the rebels, and I doubt if six years will end it.” The war was already costing the federal government at least $500 million a year. . . .
This was not an entirely realistic assessment, but it was not totally irrational. After the Union lost the war’s first major battle at Bull Run in July 1861, nearly everything had gone its way in smaller engagements and naval and diplomatic maneuvers through April of 1862, culminating in the decisive Union victory in the western theater at Shiloh on April 6-7. This was before Robert E. Lee assumed command of the Army of Northern Virginia; the Union was on a roll.
The other feature of the bill was subsidies for voluntary colonization. Since Henry Clay, a “moderate” anti-slavery position had been to end slavery but promote the resettlement of freed slaves back to their ancestral African homeland. This was a classic mix of utopianism, hard-headed assessment of the unreadiness of white Southerners to accept black equal citizenship, and racist desire to rid the country of black people. Some black Americans enthusiastically chose colonization — the nation of Liberia was founded by them, on the model pioneered by the British freed-slave colony at Sierra Leone — but the great majority rejected the fundamental premise of colonization: that slaves were Africans who ought to be restored to Africa, rather than Americans who knew only their American home, had imbibed American language, religion, culture, and ideals, and wished to take their full share of the blessings of American liberty.
Lincoln was, for years, a proponent of colonization; there remains some scholarly debate about the extent to which he was using it as political cover by 1862, but he did continue to press the issue. In any event, the bill provided $100 of federal assistance for those freed slaves who chose colonization to Liberia or Haiti. Notably, this was less than the $300 a head allocated for compensation to slaveowners. But buried in the compensation provision were two radical innovations. One, freed slaves were authorized to testify in court to their former owners’ loyalty — a break from the precedent of barring slaves from testifying. Also, freed slaves could apply for a share of the compensation if their owners didn’t claim it.
When it came to a vote, nearly every House Republican and a group of Unionists and northern Democrats voted for D.C. emancipation, which passed the House 92 to 38. It sailed through the Senate, 29-14. Lincoln, in his signing statement, announced:
I have never doubted the constitutional authority of Congress to abolish slavery in this district, and I have ever desired to see the National Capital freed from the institution in some satisfactory way. Hence there has never been in my mind any question upon the subject except the one of expediency, arising in view of all the circumstances.
The occasion was a joyous one for D.C.’s black residents, who held church services in thanksgiving, made the District a haven thereafter for fugitives, and began celebrating Emancipation Day. The commemoration fell into disuse but was revived in the 1990s. Abolitionists, often skeptical of how far Lincoln and his party would go, saw the significance of the day. William Lloyd Garrison, writing in The Liberator, enthused, “It is the nation that is freed! It is our government that has been emancipated! The President walks upon free soil. The birds will sing sweeter. The grass will grow greener. Mothers own their daughters! Men own their wives! Washington is free!”
Compensated emancipation ended up costing the federal government about $1 million, but Lincoln’s hope that states would follow the example never materialized — not even in Delaware, whose slave population was barely half that of D.C.’s. Congress would have to continue taking the lead, which it did in July 1862, passing the central plank of the Republican platform: a ban on slavery in the territories. It also passed the Second Confiscation Act, declaring slaves freed under the First Confiscation Act “forever free.” It was those multiple layers of support from Congress that gave Lincoln the confidence in the legality of his position — and political legitimacy and support — to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. The liberation of D.C. had provided a critical step along that path.