The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism Read Online Free PDF Page B

bigger and bloodier battles with almost every passing month. By late 1862, the two warring republics, one slave and the other still part-slave, had between them almost a million men under arms. The Union barely blunteda southern invasion in a battle when 3,600 soldiers died and 17,000 were wounded on a single September day at Antietam Creek in western Maryland.
    Most of the press focused on the eastern theater of war. Much of the nation’s historical memory continues to focus on the drama and the generals of that front of battle. Yet the war was also decided on the cotton frontier of the Mississippi Valley,the theater where many of the fundamental dramas of American economic development had been played out. And the key event here occurred at the end of April 1862, when a Union fleet—succeeding where the British had failed—broke through the Mississippi River’s collar of forts and reached New Orleans. Confederate officials fled the South’s biggest city, and Union troops disembarked on the same levee whereRachel and so many others had landed.
    Soon after the Union captured New Orleans, “contrabands” began to leave nearby slave labor camps and stream into the army’s Camp Parapet just west of the city. Parapet’s Union commandant resisted enslavers’ entreaties for him to sort out the bondpeople of “loyal” masters and send them back. So many thousands of runaways thronged the facility that the armysoon built a second camp in St. Charles Parish at Bonnet Carré, not far from the 1811 slave revolt’s epicenter.
    Since the beginning of the war, Lincoln had been working to convince politicians in the loyal border states to agree to gradual or compensated emancipation plans. His efforts already represented a more active support for freedom than those of all previous presidents combined. In April1862, Congress passed a law freeing—in return for payments to enslavers totaling $1 million—all 3,000 people enslaved in the District of Columbia. Maryland, Delaware, and Kentucky politicians refused to bend, holding out for permanent slavery. Yet after the Union won its narrow victory at Antietam, Lincoln felt that he could act more decisively against slavery. He released a document he’d writtenmonths before. 5
    The Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation would prove to be the most important executive order ever issued by an American president. It announced that as of January 1, 1863, any slaves in rebel-held areas would be free. The Proclamation wasn’t complete. It excluded the enslaved in Union-heldterritory, which meant not only the border states, but also the western Virginia countiesthat were forming themselves into a separate pro-Union state. Also exempted was southern Louisiana, where Union leaders were trying to create a “reconstructed” state government and didn’t want to antagonize local whites.
    Yet the Emancipation Proclamation offered the possibility of freedom to enslaved people held in the giant prison that was the Confederacy. So its tide ran ahead of the blue-coatedarmy. Liza’s Iberville Parish enslaver tried to move Liza farther from the flood, to Texas. African Americans called this maneuver “refugeeing.” At any moment after early 1862, thousands of people were being refugeed all over the South to make it more difficult for them to trek to Union lines. But as the column of slaves was passing through Opelousas, Union raiders swooped down, scattering theConfederate guards. Marching the newly liberated people back to the river, the soldiers put Liza and hundreds of liberated African Americans onto boats bound for New Orleans.
    Because Liza had been in the Confederate zone, the Proclamation officially freed her. But after being disembarked on the New Orleans levee, she and the others were herded into the city’s cotton warehouses. “From there,”Liza remembered, decades later, “we were all scattered about” to different Union-controlled plantations to do forced labor: “I went on the