Rereading 'How Slavery Really Ended in America'

Was it only powerful white guys? Besides Union soldiers—180,000 of them Black—was it only politicians deigning to end what should be recalled as crimes against humanity?

June 30, 2023. Posted from near Point Comfort. 780 words.

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When New York Times Magazine deployed the 1619 Project to the history wars in 2019, a blurb directly on the cover photo began, “In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists.”

A quarter millennium later, right there where British North American slavery had begun, Point Comfort had become Fort Monroe—the Union’s mighty, and mighty symbolic, bastion in Confederate Virginia. There on May 23, 1861, mere weeks into the Civil War, enterprising slavery escapees Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend asked for asylum.

Fort Monroe at Point Comfort—for centuries, the Chesapeake Bay’s flat, commanding Gibraltar—contains the majestic, moated stone citadel that slavery escapees came to call Freedom’s Fortress.

The three freedom strivers’ escape and request started what Edward L. Ayers has called “the greatest moment in American history.” Henry Louis Gates Jr.  declared it “the beginning of the end of slavery.” For James M. McPherson, the phrase was “the story of the end of slavery in America.” 

Adam Goodheart, adapting from his 1861: The Civil War Awakening, explained the story in the New York Times Magazine article “How Slavery Really Ended in America.”

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The article appeared in 2011, when sesquicentennial reconsideration of the Civil War was starting. Later, on a 2015 panel looking back at the sesquicentennial, Goodheart elaborated on the momentous answer the three escapees got. The fort’s commanding general designated them contraband of war, making the federal government their “liberator”—a “revolutionary change,” Goodheart observed, since always before, “U.S. authority had protected slaveholding as a constitutional right.”

The article begins, “On May 23, 1861, little more than a month into the Civil War, three young black men rowed across the James River in Virginia and claimed asylum in a Union-held citadel.” History came to Fort Monroe, the article declares, “not amid the thunder of guns and the clash of fleets, but stealthily, under cover of darkness, in a stolen boat.”

The history that came was Black agency’s centrality in emancipation’s Civil War political evolution.

The article quotes President Lincoln’s secretaries John Hay and John Nicolay about the three freedom strivers’ escape: “Out of this incident seems to have grown one of the most sudden and important revolutions in popular thought which took place during the whole war.”

But the article calls the revolution in the minds of the enslaved themselves even more important. “By early June,” it reports, “some 500 fugitives were within the Union lines at Fort Monroe.”

They were forerunners of the hundreds of thousands across the land who, as Eric Foner has put it, “forced the fate of slavery onto the national political agenda.”

Goodheart’s article quotes a Union soldier who saw a “universal desire” among the slavery escapees at Fort Monroe “to be free.”

It quotes another watchful northerner: “Somehow there was to my eye a weird, solemn aspect to them, as they walked slowly along, as if they, the victims, had become the judges in this awful contest, or as if they were . . . spinning, unknown to all, the destinies of the great Republic.”

Goodheart ends by emphasizing that attributing emancipation’s evolution only to powerful politicians is too simple:

When Lincoln finally unveiled the Emancipation Proclamation in the fall of 1862, he framed it . . . not as a humanitarian gesture but as a stratagem of war. On the September day of Lincoln’s edict, a Union colonel ran into William Seward, the president’s canny secretary of state, on the street in Washington and took the opportunity to congratulate him on the administration’s epochal act.

Seward snorted. “Yes,” he said, “we have let off a puff of wind over an accomplished fact.”

“What do you mean, Mr. Seward?” the officer asked.

“I mean,” the secretary replied, “that the Emancipation Proclamation was uttered in the first gun fired at Sumter, and we have been the last to hear it.”

Historians generally remained slow to hear it. But no less than McPherson, addressing the question of who freed the enslaved, observed in 2008 that although the “traditional answer” had been Abraham Lincoln, in the 1980s a “self-emancipation thesis became dominant.”

Self-emancipation. In 2023 it appears to me that in general, that interpretation has extensive, though not rigidly uniform, standing among scholars.

It appears to me that it should appeal to all sides in the history wars. It calls to mind Chinese human-rights activist Liu Xiobao’s Nobel Prize speech assertion that “no force . . . can put an end to the human quest for freedom.” It foregrounds enterprising, self-reliant Black agency.

But it also appears to me that the self-emancipation thesis is only just beginning to influence national memory. This new Substack, The Self-Emancipator, its name inspired by the antebellum abolitionist publication The Emancipator, will monitor and engage—and advocate—its progress.

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Next posting: On views of the term self-emancipation.