Authors: Daniel Rasmussen
And the American military was there to back up this vision of an Empire for Liberty, systematically eliminating any threats to American power. The rebels of 1811 were just some of the first victims, followed soon after by the massacred refugees of Prospect Bluff. Jackson’s Indian Wars of the 1810s, his destruction of Spanish forces in Florida, and finally the Trail of Tears represented the next wave. The Mexican War proved the culmination of this expansive American push. And it is no coincidence that the territories brought into America by Polk in the 1850s provided the spark that lit the tinder of civil war.
T
he slaves who survived the bloodletting after the 1811 uprising would never forget those turbulent January days. If the estimates are correct, between 100 and 400 of the slave-rebels simply faded away. In addition to those who were killed, some disappeared into the swamps. Others went back into plantation life after the revolt, pretending in front of their white masters that they had never participated in a rebellion. Like Jacob, they would tell their masters, “You know me, I am not capable of such a thing.” But their children knew better.
In the relative privacy of the slave quarters, the aging rebels passed down their stories to the next generation. And for the fifty years leading up to the Civil War, these stories served as an inspiration for those trapped in slavery. Charles Deslondes’, Kook’s, and Quamana’s deaths became legendary—a stark reminder that revolution was always a possibility.
But it would take a war—and massive resistance on the part of African Americans—to separate the American nation from its dependence on slavery and secure the freedom for which the 1811 rebels had fought and died.
* * *
In 1861, the second busiest port in the United States seceded from the Union. Louisiana, led by her queen city of New Orleans, signed the Articles of Confederation and prepared for war. French, German, Polish, and Creole regiments rallied to the Confederate flag, as shipbuilders and factories scrambled to provide them with the warships and weapons needed to fight the more industrialized North. As they received the news of Confederate victories at Bull Run and elsewhere, the wealthy planters and merchants did not predict just how fast and how hard the American military would strike in the Gulf.
By February of 1862, the Union fleet was gathering on a barrier island miles from the mouth of the Mississippi River. David Farragut, the flag officer of the United States Navy, had assembled a powerful attack force: seventeen men-of-war mounting 165 guns, twenty mortar boats, and seven steam gunboats.
Two well-armed Confederate forts—Fort Jackson and Fort St. Philip—stood guard over the lower Mississippi, armed with about 150 guns, fifty fire rafts, and a ragtag band of retrofitted Louisiana vessels. The rebels had created a chained set of rafts to block passage. To get at New Orleans, the federal navy would have to run the gauntlet between these two embankments and also destroy the rafts.
But Farragut was a careful and deliberate man. He sent out small expeditions to tie rags to branches to determine wind patterns and the best positions for gunboats. He fixed chain armor to the sides of the ships to protect the engines, fixed chain cables around the boats, placed sandbags around the guns, smeared river mud over all visible areas of the ship, and whitewashed his guns so that the sailors would be able to easily manipulate them in the night.
On April 18, he ordered his fleet of mortars to move upriver and hide in a bend of the river below the two forts. They then opened fire, raining shells down on the Confederates, who had to guess where the federal gunboats were located. In the first day, Farragut’s fleet launched over 1,400 shells, setting fire to the wooden barracks, nearly lighting the forts’ magazines, and knocking out seven of Fort Jackson’s guns. Farragut divided his boats into three watches of four hours each, with orders to fire 168 times per watch.
For four days the bombardment continued, and the Confederates did not surrender. Farragut decided it was time for a change in tactics. He would simply run his ships past the forts in the cover of night—an incredibly risky tactic.
Around two in the morning, the flag officer raised two red lights into the air. It was the signal, seen through the night mist, to advance. Slipping through a breach in the chain raft, the mortars went first, moving into position near the forts and opening up such heavy fire as to drive the Confederates from their guns.
Then, under the cover of darkness, Farragut’s mud-smeared naval fleet began to creep by the forts. Despite Confederate fire, all but three of his boats made it past. And once past the forts, they caught the Louisiana navy by surprise, annihilating every ship with mortar fire and barely receiving any return fire.
Farragut had done what the Confederate government in New Orleans thought impossible: run an entire federal fleet through the twin forts. “People were amazed, and could scarcely realize the awful fact, and ran hither and thither in speechless astonishment,” wrote an English observer.
The planters and their slaves lined the riverbank to watch the bold fleet move inexorably toward New Orleans. To the white residents, the sight of Union ships in the heart of the Confederacy was a depressing omen of the collapse of their society. But to the slaves, the ships represented a beacon of freedom. “To the negroes we evidently appear as friends and redeemers,” wrote one sailor. “Such joyous gatherings of dark faces, such deep-chested shouts of welcome and deliverance, such a waving of green boughs and white vestments, and even of pickaninnies, such a bending of knees . . . salutes our eyes . . . as makes me grateful to Heaven for this hour of triumph.”
These joyous celebrations were only the beginning. The slaves reacted instantly to the presence of the Union army—with armed allies in control of New Orleans, they would not remain slaves for long.
As Union columns advanced into cane country, one writer wrote that it was “like thrusting a walking stick into an ant-hill.” As soon as General Benjamin Butler’s troops arrived, hundreds of slaves abandoned their plantations and rushed to Union lines. Those who stayed behind refused to work. Plantation discipline collapsed. “Revolt & Insurrection among the negroes,” wrote one planter. The slaves “all went up to McManus’s plantation. Returned with flags & drums shouting Abe Lincoln and Freedom.”
A planter just outside of the city recorded the disintegration of his world in his plantation diary. On July 7, ten of his slaves ran away. The next day, he reported a “stampede” from the plantations toward Union lines. In early October, he reported that the slaves in the neighborhood were in a state of discontent, and he feared many would soon escape to Union lines. Things happened faster than he expected: by the end of the month, the slaves had all left. In early November, he recorded a rebellion on a nearby plantation. The slaves were forcing the disintegration of the plantation economy.
Everywhere across the state, the slaves picked up and left their plantations. In August of 1862, slaves on the German Coast, armed with cane knives, scythe blades, and clubs, marched toward the city to demand their freedom. Eleven succeeded in finding respite among the Union soldiers, several died, and the rest were captured.
Generals on the ground had to deal with the influx of what they referred to as “contraband.” “I shall treat the negro with as much tenderness as possible, but I assure you it is quite impossible to free them here and now without a San Domingo. There is no doubt that an insurrection is only prevented by our bayonets,” wrote General Butler. “We shall have a negro insurrection here I fancy.”
Butler attempted at first to prevent the slaves from entering his lines, but the slaves would hear none of it. Though the Emancipation Proclamation had not yet been signed, these slaves knew that the presence of the Union army meant freedom. The planters could no longer apply the force necessary to keep the slaves in submission, and so the slaves simply up and left. There was no longer any reason to remain in captivity. Before long, Butler began to advocate for some sort of policy that would allow him formally to employ the increasingly large numbers of black escapees who rushed to Union lines. (Notably, Lincoln reprimanded Butler for his actions to emancipate contraband slaves.)
And it was not just in Louisiana where this occurred. Across the front lines of the Civil War, slavery was disintegrating. By the fall of 1862, 200,000 slaves had escaped to Union lines and offered themselves to work for the army in whatever capacity necessary. In virtually all cases, the slaves freed themselves once the Union forces were near. Moreover, the Union army did not seem capable of winning the war without the aid of black men.
Generals and political leaders simply could not avoid emancipating the slaves. “Any attempt to secure peace to the whites while leaving the blacks in chains . . . will be labor lost,” wrote Frederick Douglass. “The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time; but the ‘inexorable logic of events’ will force it upon them in the end.” Day by day, as the Union fought on—mostly unsuccessfully—against the Confederate army, Douglass’s argument seemed to be more and more true.
Lincoln issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862. The proclamation stated that slavery would be abolished only in areas actively in rebellion—leaving the Confederate states three months to surrender before their black slaves would be turned against them. In January 1863, the proclamation took effect, “in time of actual armed rebellion against authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion.” But the proclamation did not apply to the lands where Charles, Kook, Quamana, and their brethren lived, fought, and died. In a parenthetical statement, the proclamation read, “(except the Parishes of St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James Ascension, Assumption, Terrebonne, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the City of New Orleans).” For these areas were already under federal control and not actively in rebellion.
But the slaves did not let such legalities interfere with their interpretation of the document. In their minds, they were now forever free. At Mooreland Plantation, workers put a Confederate soldier into the plantation stocks, entertaining themselves by mocking and abusing him. The slaves gathered in great convocations to pray and determine their next course of action. Slaves at the Bayou Teche plantation lit a huge bonfire and hundreds danced to the sound of fiddles. Cries of “Glory to God” and “Glory to Abe Lincoln” could be heard ringing out in the night air.
The planters panicked. Whites across the state banded together into paramilitary vigilance committees to attempt to subjugate their newly emancipated labor force. Four months after Lincoln’s proclamation, a planter in Grand Coteau wrote that “the slave population is . . . in a state of disorganization and without control committing depredations that menace the honor, the virtue and lives of our families.” Men who had built their livelihoods—and their senses of self—on slavery now faced the collapse of their entire world.
But the worst was yet to come. Lincoln’s proclamation freed the slaves in all areas not controlled by the Union army and allowed for the enlistment of black troops. The contraband slaves who had fled to Union lines were now free—and free to enlist in the military.
Black men recognized that fighting in the war was a way to secure the rights of citizenship, and service in the military conferred a new sense of dignity and manhood to many former slaves. “If we hadn’t become sojers, all might have gone back as it was before; our freedom might have slipped through de two houses of Congress & President Linkum’s four years might have passed by & notin been done for we,” one black corporal told his men in 1864. “But now tings can never go back, because we have shoed our energy & our courage & our naturally manhood.”
For twenty-three-year-old Octave Johnson, joining the Union army meant everything. A planter had sold his mother away when Johnson was fourteen, before selling him for $2,400 six years later. “One morning the bell was rung for us to go to work so early that I could not see, and I lay still, because I was working by task; for this the overseer was going to have me whipped, and I ran away to the woods,” he recalled. For years, he lived four miles behind the plantation house, deep in the swamps, stealing beef cattle and sleeping on logs. For months, he was hunted by hounds—eight of which he killed during the course of his maroonage. When Union forces arrived, Johnson saw the perfect opportunity. He escaped to the Union outpost at Camp Parapet and then worked his way up from the commissary’s office to a position in one of the first black regiments.
Johnson was one of the first to make the transition from refugee to soldier. The first black regiments were raised in the fall of 1862, after the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation. The first black regiments came from New Orleans, Missouri, Kansas, and the Sea Islands of south Georgia. Black regiments from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut emerged in 1863. In May of 1863, the War Department established the Bureau of Colored Troops, sending Northern agents to recruit freed slaves from Southern areas held by Union troops.
Initially, there was much resistance to the idea of black troops. White Northerners objected to the enlistment of black soldiers both because they did not want to fight side by side with African Americans and because they suspected African American soldiers of cowardice. “There is not one man in ten but would feel himself degraded as a volunteer if negro equality is to be the order in the field of battle,” one New York officer wrote. Black soldiers would have to prove themselves in battle.
Over the next two years, black soldiers proved themselves again and again on the field of battle. Black soldiers totaling 178,985 enlisted men and 7,122 officers served in the war. Of these, 37,300 blacks laid down their lives for freedom. Seventeen black soldiers and four African American sailors won Congressional Medals of Honor. They fought in 449 engagements, of which thirty-nine were major battles.
By the end of the war, black soldiers constituted nearly 10 percent of the fighting force of the North. Lincoln recognized their importance to the Union war effort. “We can not spare the hundred and forty or fifty thousand now serving us as soldiers, seamen, and laborers,” Lincoln wrote in 1864. “This is not a question of sentiment or taste, but one of physical force which may be measured and estimated as horse-power and steam-power are measured and estimated. Keep it and you can save the Union. Throw it away, and the Union goes with it.” African Americans had made themselves indispensable to the war effort, and they demanded new rights in return.