Review

Leonard L. Richards. Who Freed the Slaves? The Fight over the Thirteenth Amendment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. 306.

 
Leonard L. Richards asks an old question within the title of his new book that rarely fails to provoke debate: who freed the slaves? His short answer may surprise some readers. Shifting attention away from Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, Richards focuses on James Ashley, the Ohio congressman who shepherded the Thirteenth Amendment through Congress, thereby playing the crucial role in ending the institution of slavery in the United States. The author thus recognizes the limits of Lincoln’s actions while restoring Congress to the role of an active and significant agent of liberation. Furthermore, he emphasizes the absolute necessity of the amendment to guarantee the various kinds of emancipation prompted by slaves, military men, and politicians that took place during the war. He not only enlightens readers about the wheeling and dealing that moved the amendment to the states but also explores the events suggested by his subtitle. Not fixing his story to Capitol Hill, however, Richards moves beyond the congressional battle to tell the complex story of how the war turned the Constitution into the nation’s expression of its commitment to freedom. In doing so, he fulfills his purpose of rescuing the Thirteenth Amendment from the shadows cast by other Civil War and Reconstruction events and gives Congressman Ashley his due.

Given the expansive nature of the study, Richards’s choice of primary title is not exactly an accurate one. To be sure, the pithy question immediately issues a challenge and attracts attention, suggesting that the author is jumping into an old debate by lining up behind either James M. McPherson, who maintains the centrality of Lincoln in the process of freeing the slaves, or Ira Berlin, arguably the most prominent proponent of the essential role of the slaves as the generators of the great change. Simply stated—and admittedly both McPherson and Berlin are too good at their work to look simplistically at such things—McPherson accepts the role of a great man in working a radical change, while Berlin assigns power to common people who force the great men to see the need for action.[1] Richards, however, does not exactly take either side. Rather, without ignoring the contributions of other historians or the complexity of bringing freedom out of slavery, he adds his twist to the debate when he emphasizes the central role of Congress and especially Ashley. Indeed, Richards accepts that not-­so-­great (or even not-­so-­good) men did something extraordinary when marginal congressmen, some probably lured by sub-­rosa deals, joined Ashley in his fight for the Thirteenth Amendment.

Richards’s approach, therefore, acknowledges that the old argument over who freed the slaves does not address the larger necessary question. He makes clear that freeing slaves was one thing; ending slavery was quite another matter. Wartime presidential proclamations, confiscation laws, and absconding from plantations to Union lines could give the illusion of emancipation without guaranteeing national freedom. As Richards points out, freeing slaves could be a very tentative thing. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 banning slavery in those territories has long been held as an example of the new nation’s commitment to the eventual ending of slavery. Yet slavery, he notes, still lingered into the nineteenth century in states carved from that territory because Congress could not enforce the law it had passed.

Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Richards also points out, had significant limitations. As a presidential proclamation, it did not have guaranteed staying power. Issued by a president in time of war, it could be rescinded by another president in time of peace. Political favors and shifting alliances could change minds, especially if men in power considered freed slaves not worthy of their new status. Even in defeat there were former Georgia Confederates who believed that Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, could and should overturn the Emancipation Proclamation or at least postpone its enforcement until things quieted down in the cotton fields.[2]

As Richards reminds readers, Lincoln’s proclamation technically might have freed many slaves, but it did not free all of them. Beyond the rebellious territory of the so-­called Confederacy, the institution of slavery remained intact. State action was required in Missouri and Maryland to end slavery in those loyal states. The slaveholders of Kentucky, committed to keeping their property from within the Union, understood the proclamation’s irony very well and held on to their slaves longer than their counterparts in the seat of the slaveholders’ rebellion, South Carolina. It took the Thirteenth Amendment to end slavery in that border state as well as in Delaware. For Richards, the role of Congressman Ashley in guiding the amendment through the House of Representatives after the Senate had approved it and to the states for their approval was what led to the ultimate blow.

Even as Richards describes the other characters and the relevant wartime events that helped to erode the institution of slavery, he allows Ashley to claim center stage. Probably better remembered as the congressman who initiated the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, Ashley had been committed to slavery’s end before the birth of the Republican Party. As Richards explains, Ashley accepted that the end of slavery and the nation’s commitment to free labor would benefit white people as well as black ones. He believed that the authors of the Constitution had crafted an antislavery document that white southerners commandeered for their own dishonest proslavery use. As with so many future Republicans, the Kansas-­Nebraska Act of 1854 undermining the “sacred” Missouri Compromise is what prompted Ashley to shift his political allegiance to a new antislavery party. He left the Democratic Party and in 1858 won election to Congress as a Republican. When secession came in the wake of Lincoln’s election, Ashley the radical saw no reason to try to compromise with the traitors of the South. Let the war come, hang some rebels, and take their property was Ashley’s advice, Richards explains, for dealing with secession.

From the outset of the war, Ashley believed emancipation would help bring the war to a victorious end for the Union. As far as Ashley was concerned, Lincoln, for whom Ashley had campaigned in 1860, was wrong to try to tempt the loyal slaveholding border states to do the right thing with compensated, gradual emancipation. By the end of 1863, he was especially tired of the president’s efforts to appease Kentuckians, but by mid-­1864, despite his efforts, Ashley had failed to persuade his fellows in the House to pass the abolitionist amendment. Ashley nevertheless fought halfway measures and Democrats, helping to keep radicalism alive in Congress. When the opportunity again presented itself, he mustered his energy, overcame strong opposition, won or bought support form lame-­duck congressmen, and had his victory.

In fairness to the president, Richards appreciates the difficult political and constitutional situation in which Lincoln found himself. The loyal border states were committed to slavery, and they were essential to preserving the Union, both realities that hampered any antislavery policy, radical or moderate, initially coming from the White House. More important, as Richards shows, Lincoln’s own commitment to the Constitution restrained his wish to take property without compensating its owners. That commitment also limited his desire to interfere with what he believed to be a state’s constitutionally given power to deal with slavery within its own borders. The concept of states’ rights was not foreign to loyal governors, so it followed that even Delaware, with fewer than two thousand slaves, resisted the president’s overtures for gradual and compensated emancipation. Richards also notes Lincoln’s consideration of voluntarily resettling freed slaves outside the nation’s borders, an idea that always diminishes the president in the eyes of many modern students of the Civil War. It was, as historian James Oakes describes it, another failed Republican tactic to persuade loyal slave states to emancipate their slaves and reassure those northerners who feared that free black people would migrate into their neighborhoods. Congressional Republicans, Oakes explains, early on put the idea to rest probably because they worried that a successful colonization program would hinder their efforts to prove the effectiveness of free labor ideology in the cotton fields. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation put an end to the president’s promotion of the idea.[3]

Emphasizing Lincoln’s deliberate if not slow movement toward emancipation and then the limited effect of his proclamation, however, does the president’s commitment to ending slavery a disservice. As McPherson noted, before Lincoln was elected to the presidency, he was a one-­issue politician and that issue was slavery.[4] Lincoln never doubted, historian Allen C. Guelzo argues, that he would at least see the beginning of the end of slavery during his administration. As Guelzo explains, Lincoln was a prudent man who for most of his presidency believed in the efficacy of state emancipation because such a course of action would be able to withstand any attack in the courts.[5] Historian Christian G. Samito also explains Lincoln’s commitment to state-­generated emancipation as the soundest approach at the time, until the president threw his weight behind the Thirteenth Amendment. Such an amendment, Samito argues, suited Lincoln’s constitutional views concerning state action, his belief in the importance of legislative participation in securing the amendment, and the necessity of having the people express their will in the ratification process.[6] In other words, Lincoln was still on his way to earning his title as the Great Emancipator, but it would not be his alone by Richards’s reckoning.

Still, Richards is evenhanded in dealing with Lincoln and does not ignore what other historians see in Lincoln’s efforts. Richards finds Lincoln committed to the idea that the nation could not return to the way it had been in 1860. By the time of the election of 1864, Lincoln “had no intention of turning back the clock, of letting the slave states remain slave states, and of putting millions of men, women, and children back in bondage,” Richards holds (193). He also acknowledges that without Lincoln’s reelection and without his support, the chances of pushing the emancipation amendment through Congress, a difficult enough task, might not have been as good.

Richards does an excellent job not only describing Lincoln’s predicament and his views, but also directing attention to Congressman Ashley, the problems he encountered, and the process by which he succeeded in pushing the amendment through the House of Representatives. In fact, Richards is especially good at exploring the importance of the all-­but-­forgotten lame-­duck congressmen who helped Ashley achieve his goal. It is more than a curiosity why there were so many of them on Capitol Hill, and Richards does his readers a service by explaining the workings of the nineteenth-­century electoral and congressional calendars. That these political losers would soon be on their way home made them good targets with nothing to lose if they took the risk of voting for the amendment.

There are scholars who argue that Lincoln did not approve of the various deals worked by William Seward’s four political “technicians” in support of Ashley’s efforts to win support for the amendment. Samito, for example, writes, “Allegations that Lincoln involved himself directly in inappropriate measures collapse under scrutiny, and he seems to have relied on moral and political suasion in trying to support the amendment.”[7] Richards accepts the idea that politics could be dirty in support of a good cause. Lincoln “without question” gave Ashley the power to act for him in rounding up support for the amendment (205). The coincidence of deals cut with a wink and a nod suggest that the president in fact understood what that permission entailed. “Although there is no proof ‘beyond a shadow of a doubt’ that Lincoln himself made deals,” Richards concludes after describing some of the political machinations of Seward’s men, “there is ample reason to believe that he [Lincoln] allowed others to do it for him and, also, that he promised to fulfill whatever bargains they made” (205). That is, after all, how presidents act. One cannot ignore the fact, Richards continues, that “nearly every man in Congress had a story to tell” regarding the political trail that eventually led to the acceptance of the Thirteenth Amendment by the House on January 31, 1865 (205).

Richards makes another important contribution to our understanding of the amendment by reminding readers that the lawmakers created a very different kind of constitutional amendment. Instead of restricting the power of Congress, as did the Bill of Rights, the Thirteenth Amendment expanded it. With the very ordinary-­sounding clause giving Congress, stated in Section 2 of the amendment, the “power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation” Congress took for itself extraordinary authority not only to put the institution of slavery to death once and for all, but also to define the meaning of freedom. Richards is aware that the legislators failed to make good on the promise embodied in this clause by refusing to enforce the various Reconstruction laws with a necessary vigor, but that is not his story to tell at this time.

In diminishing the Emancipation Proclamation, Richards diminishes somewhat Lincoln’s place in the wartime abolitionist drama. The president’s actions, however, appear smaller because Richards places them within a larger story, not isolated from other events that moved the nation toward freedom. Richards acknowledges the importance of decisions made by many men, including Lincoln and Ashley, while not ignoring the forces unleashed within the uncertainty of war that might have pushed those men to make such decisions. Slaves ran away, generals prematurely freed them, Congress passed confiscation laws, black men took up arms against the slavocracy, and the Union army became a force of liberation, its final victory contributing to the sealing of slavery’s fate. For Richards, however, all these events could have meant little, leaving freedom in a precarious position, had it not been for Ashley’s efforts and the amendment he championed.

1. James M. McPherson, “Who Freed the Slaves?” in Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 192–207; Ira Berlin, “Who Freed the Slaves? Emancipation and Its Meaning,” in Union and Emancipation: Essays on Politics and Race in the Civil War Era, edited by David W. Blight and Brooks D. Simpson (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997), 105–21. A new, forceful proponent of the slaves’ central role in securing their own freedom is David Williams in his book I Freed Myself: African American Self-­Emancipation in the Civil War Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

2. Paul A. Cimbala, Under the Guardianship of the Nation: The Freedmen’s Bureau and the Reconstruction of Georgia, 1865–1870 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 132.

3. James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 274–75, 281–82.

4. McPherson, “Who Freed the Slaves?” 197.

5. Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 5–10.

6. Christian G. Samito, Lincoln and the Thirteenth Amendment (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015), 2.

7. Ibid., 93.