March 9, 2011, 8:30 pm

A Glimmer in the Darkness

By ADAM GOODHEART

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

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abraham lincoln, Fort Sumter, Slavery, the civil war

Charleston Harbor, March 1861
It was almost midnight on that still and moonless night – March 11, 1861 – when the Union sentry at Fort Sumter heard a splashing sound alongside the wharf. He looked down to see a slim figure disappearing among the pilings beneath the wooden structures. Eventually the soldier persuaded the mysterious interloper to come out. He was a fugitive slave.

Library of Congress Fugitive slave hiding in a swamp, c. 1863.

The “negro boy,” as he was later described – this probably meant he was a teenager – had just made a long and hazardous journey, paddling a canoe several miles through the darkness across open water, from Charleston’s waterfront out to the small island where Sumter sat. He had not undertaken the trip lightly. His master had nearly beaten him to death before he managed to escape, he said. Now he trusted the Northern “gentlemen” of Sumter to shelter and protect him.
That young slave’s faith turned out to be misplaced. Those Northern gentlemen promptly sent him back to his lawful owner, and to an uncertain fate.
The Union officers seem to have felt little compunction, if any, in doing so. (The garrison’s one outspoken antislavery man, Capt. Abner Doubleday, did not even record the incident in his memoir of Sumter.) After all, they were merely complying with both the policy and practice of federal authorities throughout the nation.
In fact, in an unrelated incident the very next day, another four slaves escaped to Fort Pickens in Florida, the only other major Union military outpost remaining in the Deep South. The commander there, Lt. Adam Slemmer, reported to the War Department that the runaways “came to the fort entertaining the idea that we were placed here to protect them and grant them their freedom. I did what I could to teach them the contrary. In the afternoon I took them to Pensacola and delivered them to the city marshal to be returned to their owners.”
While the besieged Fort Sumter might have seemed at times like an island without a country – neither Northern nor Southern, Union nor Confederate – its occupants were nevertheless constantly reminded of being situated in the middle of slave territory. Each day, Captain Doubleday looked across the harbor at hundreds of tiny figures moving busily over the dunes of Sullivan’s island: slaves whose Confederate masters had brought them from their plantations to assist in constructing defensive earthworks.
The Union officers at Sumter even had their own slave, a lively and bright teenager named James, whose master in Charleston rented him out to serve as their factotum around the fort and to run small errands in the city. James became a cause of contention – and of a rare breach of decorum between besiegers and besieged – when he failed to return from one of these errands.

Library of CongressSlaves mounting a Confederate cannon on Morris Island for the attack on Fort Sumter, early 1861 (detail). Sketch by William Waud. CLICK TO ENLARGE

Maj. Robert Anderson, Sumter’s commander, soon learned that the slave’s master had seized him and was refusing to let him return. It seemed that James, who was apparently literate, had exchanged letters with his mother about a possible uprising in which Charleston’s slaves would attack their masters as soon as the first shots were fired between Union and Confederate forces. She had also been feeding him information about military preparations in the city that might be useful to the Union garrison. (It is unknown whether and how the slaves were punished for their dangerous insubordination.)
In a letter to South Carolina’s secretary of war, Anderson complained that the loss of James’s services “puts gentlemen here at a serious inconvenience.” Moreover, he said, the Union garrison’s members had been unaware that the young man was enslaved. Apparently James – like a fair number of slaves in urban areas – had been permitted to “hire out” his own labor, sending all or most of his earnings back to his master. He never mentioned this arrangement to the Union officers, leaving them to assume he was free.
For his part, the rebel official rudely suggested that the young man’s “temper and principles” had clearly been corrupted by exposure to the Yankee degenerates at the fort. This insult set the usually phlegmatic Anderson’s blood boiling. “I am satisfied that, on further consideration, you will regret it,” he replied – a remark that carried more than a slight threat that he might otherwise challenge his correspondent to a duel. (No response from the Carolinian survives.)

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The entire episode is a fascinating one, for it suggests that slaves – even in the Deep South – were ready to think of the Civil War as a war for their own freedom, even before the first shots were fired. It shows that some of them were already willing, even eager, to aid the Union cause, perhaps even to sacrifice their lives for it. And it contains early hints of the struggle for slaves’ allegiance that would erupt much more openly between Union and Confederate forces after war began.
But the contretemps over James, along with the return of the fugitive slave, also demonstrates the extent to which white Union officials in early 1861 were still unwilling to interfere with the South’s “peculiar institution.” They were taking their cue from on high. In his recent Inaugural Address, President Abraham Lincoln had explicitly renounced any intention of undermining the fugitive slave laws. “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists,” the president said, quoting one of his own speeches from 1858. “I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” Lincoln had gone on to cite the clause in the Constitution requiring “the delivering up of fugitives from service or labor” – reminding his listeners that federal officials were sworn by oath to uphold this as much as any other constitutional provision.
Yet Lincoln tempered this – as very few people, then or since, have noted – by suggesting that free blacks needed to be protected from unlawful seizure. The new president even intimated, in almost incomprehensibly lawyer-like terms, that the federal government should not attempt to overrule the “personal liberty laws.” These were provisions by which some Northern states allowed officials freedom of conscience in refusing to surrender fugitive slaves – and in some cases even forbidding state officials from helping capture or return fugitives. In short, Lincoln was walking a fine line – probably an untenable one – on this contentious issue. It’s no surprise that Union soldiers tried to follow.
Abolitionist leaders like Frederick Douglass found little encouragement, if any, in Lincoln’s stance on fugitives. Like most people, he paid far more attention to the president’s emphatic and clear-cut endorsement of current federal laws than to his convoluted, deliberately ambiguous language about how these laws should actually be enforced. After reading the Inaugural Address, Douglass called it a “double-tongued document” offering little hope “for the cause of our heart-broken and down-trodden countrymen” – that is, the slaves. Lincoln, he observed sadly, “has avowed himself ready to catch them if they run away, to shoot them down if they rise against their oppressors, and to prohibit the federal government indefinitely from interfering for their deliverance.”
Nor, certainly, did Lincoln’s double-talk offer much to slaves like the unfortunate James and the nameless fugitive at Fort Sumter. For the time being, at least, they were no closer to freedom than they had been before. And yet perhaps they were not wholly wrong to glimpse, amid the mounting standoff in Charleston Harbor, the faint glimmer of hope ahead.
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Sources: Original Records of the War of the Rebellion, Ser. I, Vol. 1 and Ser. II, Vol. 1; Samuel Wylie Crawford Diary, Library of Congress; Abner Doubleday, “Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-61”; Harry V. Jaffa, “A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War”; Frederick Douglass, “The Inaugural Address” (Douglass’ Monthly, April 1861).

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Adam Goodheart is the author of the forthcoming book “1861: The Civil War Awakening.” He lives in Washington, D.C., and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he is the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.