Themes of the American Civil War

CHAPTER
Slavery and Emancipation
The African-American Experience during
the Civil War
DAVID TURLEY
There is a central paradox that articulates the experience of very many
African-Americans during the era of the Civil War. Without the transforming upheavals of war they would not have been able to gain their freedom as rapidly as they did, but often they pursued that freedom and began to give it content by means they had adopted within the constraints of slavery before the war. As the dynamic transition from slavery to freedom developed,
African-Americans also sometimes expressed hope through fresh aspirations.
Customary patterns of behavior, however, even when combined with new hopes prompted by the course of events, failed fully to define the wartime experiences of slaves and ex-slaves. Much recent scholarship on the Civil War era has attributed a more active role than previous writing to African-
Americans, but recognition of black initiative is not the same as being able to assert black autonomy. Showing that African-Americans did much to make their own history must also entail recognizing (to paraphrase Marx)
that they did not make it under conditions of their own choosing.
This should surprise no one. The 4 million black slaves in 1861 were subjected to a system commanding the loyalty of the majority of the Southern white population whether they were directly implicated in slaveholding or not. The demographic and geographic expansion of the slave system, producing profitable staples and underpinned by a large internal slave trade as well as master-led migrations, resulted in an economically confident South.
Even if confidence was periodically in counterpoint with anxieties about slave discipline, the system showed little sign of evolving in the direction
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of free labor by 1861. So far as most Southern whites were concerned emancipation was anathema.
1
Slaves had been able to resist control in day-to-day ways, including running away fora period. The majority lived insufficiently large groups to develop a sense of community, allowing common religious activity and cultural practices. Slave agency was also manifested in an informal economy of fishing, hunting, the rearing of birds and animals, production of foodstuffs on garden plots, and the making of handicrafts. Many were able to accumulate modest property and experience limited economic freedom within the structure of slavery.
2
The coming of war, however, only intensified the fears of slaveowners about the possibilities of loss of control and social disorder. When conflict began, white southerners initially tried to impose even more rigorous discipline on their laborers. As it developed, many African-Americans had to improvise forms of behavior to deal with unprecedented circumstances.
Shaping those improvisations was the objective of seeking a freer life, if not immediately complete legal freedom, and initially slaves acted in ways familiar to them from pursuing living space under peacetime slavery.
Eventually some of their behavior indicated larger ambitions.
3
By April, 1865, some half a million ex-slaves were involved in free labor activity informer Confederate territory under the sanction of Union authorities. Many more were technically still enslaved at the time of Appomattox,
in areas of the South that Union troops had not yet reached, and in the loyal states of Delaware and Kentucky, which acceded to emancipation only on completion of the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December. Large numbers, however, had managed to negotiate looser economic relations with owners in return for staying with them. Yet others had escaped to the free states in the North. Thus, as the fighting ended, perhaps a million blacks had already experienced a significant transformation in their legal and/or real status or circumstances. This estimate does not take into account the tens of thousands dislodged by Union forces or who flocked after them and had found only temporary places of rest. It is appropriate, therefore,
to begin detailed discussion of the African-American experience of the war by considering how blacks dealt from within with the gradual dissolution of the Confederacy. The chapter will then turn to the ways in which they maintained a livelihood, especially on the land. Finally, with brief reference to the freedmen’s military experience and its impact on their families,
indications of their hopes and aspirations for the future will be reviewed.

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