Once, Twice, Three Times a Free Man

PETER: We recently read an anecdote that caught our eye in a book called After Appomattox. It’s about an enslaved man on a North Carolina plantation in 1865. His name is Ambrose Douglas, and years later, he described his very drawn out process of liberation this way. “I guess we must have celebrated emancipation about 12 times. Every time a bunch of Northern soldiers would come through, they would tell us we was free, and we’d begin celebrating. Well, before we could get through, somebody else would tell us to go back to work.”

GREGORY DOWNS: It’s an amazing quote. I mean, I think as with any quotes, especially older people remembering their youth, I’m not positive that we’d want to fact check 12 specifically. I mean, I think he’s trying to capture a truth behind it. It’s possible that some people certainly did have soldiers march through that many times.

BRIAN: This is historian Gregory Downs. We noticed this story in his book.

GREGORY DOWNS: But even if it was only three or four, what he’s trying to point us to is a problem that emerged for slaves, and through them, as a problem for the US government. Which is, what did emancipation mean, and when would it arrive?

BRIAN: The legal story’s this– in January of 1865, the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery finally passed the House of Representatives. Ratification by the states would take another 10 months. But in the meantime, 100,000 Union soldiers, who might have thought that the war’s end meant that they soon would be heading home, were instead sent out into the countryside. Their orders? To free those still held in bondage.

PETER: Now imagine you are one of these soldiers, riding out across the south that spring. Plantation to plantation, town to town. You might think that all you’d need to do was announce the arrival of freedom. As it turned out, the job was a lot more complicated than that.

BRIAN: Many northern– white Northerners lived in societies where you didn’t have to have the force of the state to make basic freedom felt. And the legal system seemed to operate naturally. But the question that Ambrose Douglas asks us is, what do we do if we have abstract rights, but we cannot defend them?

PETER: The first lesson, then, was that emancipation needed to be enforced. But what exactly did that mean? There’s no doubt that you, our northern soldier trekking around the South, were free. But why? Was it simply that you weren’t enslaved, or was it something more?

BRIAN: To be something other than negative, to be something other than not slavery, freedom has to involve some sort of positive attributes. And I think by the 19th century, and certainly in our time, those attributes have largely been located around rights that are not just abstract or human rights, but are rights that you can call upon people to help you enforce.

PETER: This may have been a brand new concept to many white Union soldiers. But freed people were all too aware of the specific rights they had been denied their entire lives– the right to move, contract with an employer, own property. The right to use public goods, and to marry. At the first opportunity, these freed people found their ways to military outposts set up to help them find employment, and they filed complaints about all the rights they were still being denied. Leaving it up to you, the soldier, to find ways to guarantee those rights.

BRIAN: Seem a little daunting? Well, what if you just guaranteed that negative? Guaranteed that these people weren’t actually being enslaved? Well, that wasn’t especially clear either.

GREGORY DOWNS: Separate from sale, there are other forms of slavery that speaks to a kind of slavery as personal domination, that’s meant to keep the government from being able to step into this relationship. And that becomes much more nebulous, because as soon as that gets opened up, it’s a Pandora’s box. Because when does it end?

If slavery is being whipped, and northern officers very frequently banned whipping– but as you know, in some northern states, employers could whip employees, and that didn’t make them slaves.

BRIAN: Throughout the summer of 1865, Southern states passed what became known as black codes. In many cases, these were seemingly innocuous laws that, for instance, required freed slave children to remain on their plantations, working in so-called apprenticeships. Army officials responded by throwing out laws that they saw as propping up de facto of slavery.

Downs points to one example of vagrancy law in Virginia that was pretty much identical to the one on the books in Massachusetts.

GREGORY DOWNS: And so you go into this gray zone that army officers and free people are navigating, where things that might be legal in a society that has a standard of freedom, like Massachusetts, start being defined as illegal in a southern society, precisely because of the way that it’ll be enforced. And when we think about slavery in those terms, as a series of customs and practices, that’s going to be a much, much more difficult thing to define and to overthrow.

BRIAN: Now, grappling with the meaning of emancipation was pretty clearly a heady endeavor. But the challenge of enforcing could hardly be more concrete. And that’s because there were a lot of people committed to keeping anything that resembled emancipation from taking effect.

GREGORY DOWNS: White Southern soldiers have returned from fighting still fighting. They might not be wearing their uniforms, but they’re attacking. And who are they attacking?

Well, they’re attacking soldiers if they’re caught away from their away from their posts, and they’re attacking free people.

PETER: Many soldiers told stories of finding the bodies of former slaves who attempted to walk away from their plantations. In one case, a plantation owner slit the throats of three children rather than grant them freedom.

GREGORY DOWNS: So you have a population that’s trying desperately to sustain slavery, and not willing to give up anything more than they have to. And they talked openly about the fact that they intended to restore slavery legally once peacetime came, by blocking the 13th Amendment, and by taking the Emancipation Proclamation and other military orders to court.

BRIAN: So you’ve got to ask, where does that leave you, you the Northern soldier in 1865? Now the overall purpose of your mission may have been straightforward. But its nuts and bolts have proven to be anything but. You’re under the threat of physical violence all the time. Not to mention the fact that you’re still recovering from everything you’ve experienced in the past four years– four years of exhausting and bloody war.

Downs says the letters he found from soldiers like you reflect a range of emotions.

GREGORY DOWNS: In the summer of 1865 and into the fall of 1865, I think that many of them still hope– well, if this time, I tell this plantation owner, then he’ll get it. But over the course of the next months and years, many of them will become deeply, deeply skeptical of their own power.

PETER: Greg Downs told us the story of a man named Hugo Hillebrand, a veteran of military campaigns in Hungary and Italy. He had immigrated to the US to fight for the Union cause. If anyone was going to be a wholehearted enforcer of freedom, it would be Hillebrand.

He was stationed in North Carolina, as Downs tells it, in 1867– two years after the end of the war– when a freedman finds him.

GREGORY DOWNS: And he makes a complaint that he’d been denied his previous year’s crop when he left to work for a new landlord. Hillebrand writes out an order, that freedman takes it back 15 miles, hands it to his previous landlord, and the landlord throws it on the ground. Says I’ll see Hillebrand farther in hell than a jaybird can fly. I don’t intend to be obeying no such order.

When the freedman comes back– Peter Price is his name– comes back to Hillebrand, Hillebrand has to say, as a matter of practicality, that’s right. Hillebrand had to leave a dying US soldier in the road a few miles outside of town earlier, because he was told by townspeople if he went out to rescue him, he would be murdered.

And so his control, as he writes, is a very small radius around his office. And beyond that, the government can write out– soldiers can write out as many orders as they want. But how do they make them felt? And that skepticism will torment them over the next few years.

PETER: Gregory Downs is a historian at the City College of New York. His new book is called After Appomattox– Military Occupation at the Ends of War.