Emancipation

Lincoln Monument Boston



Inhuman Bondage by David Brion Davis

Chapter 15
The Civil War and Slave Emancipation

An excerpt

"On April 2, 1865, General Robert E. Lee sent a shocking telegram to Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America. Writing from Petersburg, Virginia, then twenty-five miles south of Richmond, where Davis still ruled from the Confederate capital, Lee warned that is was absolutely necessary to evacuate Richmond that night. Since Union troops were already forcing an abandonment of Petersburg, Lee had to choose between the loss or Richmond or the encirclement and loss of his dwindling and beleaguered army. President Davis turned pale when he received the news while attending Sunday services at St. Paul’s Church. He would have been even more devastated if he had known that President Abraham Lincoln would enter Petersburg the next day and on April 4 would actually sit in Davis’s own study, in the Confederate White House, only forty hours after Davis had left it.

Even more shocking, from a Confederate point of view, was the large number of African American cavalry and infantry who took part in the Union Army’s capture of Richmond. As buildings burned and as looters searched for food and goods, huge crowds of black slaves sang and cheered as they greeted a black army of liberation made up mostly of former slaves. Soon troops of black Union soldiers joined a throng of Richmond blacks near “Lumpkin Alley,” a site of public slave auctions and slave jails. As the crowd listened to the speech of a black army chaplain, who “proclaimed for the first time in that city freedom to all mankind,” they began to hear the shouts and chanting of slaves who were still imprisoned behind the barred windows of Lumpkin’s Jail.

Robert Lumpkin, a leading slave merchant, had recently acquired this shipment of slaves for future sale and had frantically tried to transport them outside the city on the same train that enabled Jefferson Davis and others Confederate leaders to escape. When this attempt failed, Lumpkin marched the slaves back to his two-story jail. Only hours later the black Union soldiers broke open the jail’s cells, and many prisoners shouted out praise for God or “master Abe” as their liberators.

As one might expect, Richmond’s terrified whites locked and bolted their doors and windows as black soldiers patrolled the streets. Yet as the historian James M. McPherson describes it, Lincoln “the Emancipator,” who had only days to live, was soon surrounded by an impenetrable cordon of black people shouting, “Glory to God! Glory! Glory! Glory! … The great Messiah! I knowed him as soon as I seed him. He’s been in my heart four long years. Glory, Hallelujah!” “I know I am free,”shouted an old woman, “for I have seen Father Abraham, and felt him.” Overwhelmed by rare emotions, Lincoln said to one black man who fell on his knees in front of him: “Don’t kneel to me. That is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank Him for the liberty you will enjoy hereafter.”"