President Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863 lent new urgency to the question of “what shall we do with the Negroes.” What had been only a possibility a few months before — the freeing of more than 3 million slaves still behind Confederate lines — had now become a likelihood dependent only on the success of Union armies.
The question possessed both practical and policy implications. Since the beginning of the war, Union field officers had experienced varying degrees of success in offering care and protection to the thousands of slaves fleeing to Union lines. Policy makers in the Lincoln administration, free from the day-to-day demands of camp management, dealt instead with a growing chorus of voices calling for a plan for how best to absorb as many as 4 million freed men and women.
“We must collect facts and use them as ammunition,” argued Samuel Gridley Howe, a noted physician and abolitionist who was also husband to Julia Ward Howe, composer of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The government needed “a general and reliable” survey “of the actual condition of those … out of the house of bondage; their wants and their capacities,” he wrote.
In March 1863, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton responded to this and other calls for action by creating the three-member American Freedman Inquiry Commission. Robert Dale Owen, a Democratic politician and social reformer who opposed slavery but stood apart from mainstream abolitionists, chaired the group. He was joined by James McKaye, a New York-based abolitionist, and Howe himself. The secretary of war tasked them with investigating the conditions and needs of freedmen within Union lines.
After establishing headquarters in New York City, Owen, Howe and McKaye embarked on trips to visit as many parts of the Union-occupied South as possible and to send questionnaires to those areas they could not visit. At each stop they interviewed escaped slaves as well as white men and women who worked in the camps. In April and May of 1863, all three commissioners visited several contraband camps in Virginia, and in June McKaye went on alone to Port Royal, S.C. The result was a treasure trove of historical insight into the lives and conditions of thousands of the newly liberated.
Excerpts from two of these initial interviews provide a sense of what the commissioners heard. In response to the question, “How many of the people called contrabands, have come under your observation?”, Capt. C. B. Wilder, superintendent of contrabands at Fortress Monroe, Va., responded, “Some 10,000 have come under our control, to be fed and clothed.” A query about the extent to which contrabands communicated with those still enslaved elicited the information that “we have had men here who have gone back 200 miles.” Wilder continued that “thousands upon thousands” of those still in slavery would respond positively to a federal policy that “would cause them to be treated with fairness, their wages punctually paid and employment furnished them in the army.”
An interview with Harry McMillan, a 40-year-old escaped slave, in Beaufort, S.C., in June provided insights into life under slavery, and is worth quoting at length:
Question: How many hours a day did you work?
Answer: Under the old secesh times every morning till night–beginning at daylight and continuing till 5 or 6 at night.
Q: But you stopped for your meals?
A: You had to get your victuals standing at your hoe. . . .
Q: If a man did not do his task what happened?
A: He was stripped off, tied up and whipped.
Q: What other punishments were used?
A: The punishments were whipping, putting you in the stocks and making you wear irons and a chain at work. Then they had a collar to put round your neck with two horns . . . so that you could not lie down on your back or belly. . . . Sometimes they dug a hole like a well with a door on top [and kept you] in it two or three weeks or a month.
Q: In speaking of each other do you say “negro”?
A: We call each other colored people, black people, but not negro because we used that word in secesh times.
Q: Do the colored people like to go to Church?
A: Yes, sir; they are fond of that; they sing psalms, put up prayers, and sing their religious songs.
Q: Did your masters ever see you learning to read?
A: No, sir; you could not let your masters see you read; but now the colored people are fond of sending their children to school.
Q: What is the reason of that?
A: Because the children in after years will be able to tell us ignorant ones how to do for ourselves.
Q: Would the colored men like to go back to Africa?
A: No, sir; there is no disposition to go back, they would rather stay where they are.
The findings from these and dozens of other interviews provided the basis for a preliminary report issued on June 30, 1863. “These refugees,” the commissioners found, were “loyal men, putting faith in the Government, looking to it for guidance and protection” and “willing to work for moderate wages if promptly paid.” They were “easily managed, not given to quarreling among themselves, of temperate habits, cheerful and uncomplaining … whenever they are treated with justice and common humanity.”
Testimony also suggested that less involvement by Northern aid societies and equality before the law would solve any potential problems with dependency. A teacher at Port Royal made the case that “land should get into their hands” and would “more than anything else … make them a self-relying and self-respecting people.” Owen, Howe and McKaye stressed that charity was at best a temporary solution, and freedmen should be put to work as soon as possible. Those vices they possessed, the report contended, were “such as appertain to their former social condition.”
That same summer, Howe traveled to Ontario to study conditions among blacks there, most of whom had escaped from American slavery. Owen stayed in New York to conduct extensive research on African-American history and prepare a questionnaire to be sent to officials involved with freedmen throughout the country. His questions included: “Are the colored people generally industrious and self-supporting or not? Do the mulattoes seek public charity in greater or less proportion than whites? Do you consider them on the whole as valuable members of the community, or not?”
At the end of 1863, Owen and Howe toured contraband camps in Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri, while McKaye traveled to New Orleans to conduct interviews there. In May 1864, the commissioners submitted their final report (http://www.civilwarhome.com/commissionreport.htm). Owen, who was the principal author, divided the report into three sections.
The first — “Slavery” — presented an extended discussion of the history of slavery that constituted nearly two-thirds of the document and at the least demonstrated that Owens was an exhaustive researcher. The second — “Emancipation” — was devoted to an extensive justification of Lincoln’s proclamation. The stakes were high, it proposed, nothing less than “the progress of civilization.” Owens argued that Emancipation’s “solution involves not alone the social destiny of 3,000,000 to 4,000,000 of human beings, but also the permanent peace and the national honor of one of the great powers of the world.”
The final chapter — “The Future in the United States of the African Race” — made the case for striking a balance between what the historian Eric Foner has labeled as “laissez-faire and interventionist approaches to the aftermath of emancipation.” Benevolent guardianship was good, but only if it was temporary and a means to self-reliance. “The essential is that we secure to them the means of making their own way; that we give them, to use the familiar phrase, a ‘fair chance,’” wrote Owen. “If, like whites, they are to be self-supporting, then, like whites they ought to have those rights, civil and political, without which they are but laboring as a man labors with hands bound. … Above all, guard them against the virtual restoration of slavery in any form, under any pretext, and then let them take care of themselves.”
The report spurred the immediate creation of the Senate Committee on Emancipation, and later the Committee on Slavery and Freedmen, with Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner as the chair. Sumner felt so strongly about the report’s importance that he commissioned the printing and distribution of 3,000 copies to legislators and other Washington officials.
The establishment of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands also resulted from the report, but it took longer than anticipated. A turf battle over which cabinet department — Treasury or War — would have jurisdiction was not resolved, in favor of the Department of War, until March 1865.
The bureau played a brief but important role in the progress of African-Americans in the immediate postwar years. But its dismantlement in 1872 and the rise of sharecropping and “Jim Crow” laws ultimately led to Owen’s greatest fear, “the virtual restoration of slavery” and white America’s unwillingness to let African-Americans “take care of themselves.”
Rick Beard, an independent historian, is senior adviser for the Pennsylvania Civil War 150 and volunteer coordinator of the Civil War Sesquicentennial for the American Association for State and Local History.
