Civil War and Aftermath

Negroes, both slaves and free Blacks, were not citizens and therefore could not sue in the federal courts; a slave’s residence in a free state did not make him a free man; and

The Missouri Compromise of 1820, prohibiting slavery in parts of the Louisiana Purchase, was an unconstitutional use of Congressional power.

The Supreme Court hoped to settle all questions arising about slavery by saying that the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights were not intended to apply to Black Americans. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote that, at the time the Constitution was adopted, Blacks had been “regarded as beings of an inferior order” with “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” In addition, Taney wrote that any law excluding slaves from the territories was a violation of the Fifth Amendment prohibition against the seizure of property without due process of law. In other words, slavery could not be banned in the territories, and any slaveholder would be free to take his slaves into any western territory.

This ruling suited President James Buchanan, who felt that Kansas should be a slave state and that Southern slaveholders should have the right to take their chattel there. The newly formed Republican Party, according to a party historian, saw the Dred Scott decision as part of a “conspiracy” of the Southerners to nationalize slavery.

Dred Scott, his wife, and children were returned to his original slaveholding family—now his friends who freed them shortly after the Supreme Court ruling. Scott made his living as a hotel porter in St. Louis until his death on September 17, 1858, little more than a year after the decision that bears his name.

In February, a group of citizens met in Ripon, Wis., to form what they named the Republican Party. The new party stood for the belief that slavery must be barred from the Western territories.

In Pittsburgh, antislavery sentiments intensified. David N. White, editor of the Daily Pittsburgh Gazette, sometimes called the father of the Republican Party, organized two meetings in the city: a county convention, followed by a state organizing meeting. White told the assemblies, “The Democratic Party is tied hand and foot to the … slave masters.”

White met privately with Salmon P. Chase, who would become Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury. Chase liked what he heard about the Republican Party. The next year a national convention was held in Pittsburgh, welcoming all who opposed slavery. Some 500 Republicans came from 24 states and two territories, both slave and free. The group began the process of solidifying a party and formulating a platform. As an outcome of this meeting, Abraham Lincoln (who did not attend) renounced his Whig political affiliation and joined the Republicans.

Four parties entered candidates in the 1860 presidential race. The Republicans selected the little-known Lincoln. Although Lincoln won less than 40 percent of the popular vote, he receieved 180 electoral college votes, a clear and decisive victory.

In March 1861, Lincoln traveled by train to his inauguration, stopping in Pittsburgh on the way. Though it rained a chilling, persistent rain, a crowd of 4,000 lined the streets for hours, waiting to see their new leader. Lincoln told the crowd: “I couldn’t help thinking as I traveled here, that if all … people were in favor of the Union, it can certainly be in no great danger.”

Lincoln was wrong about the strength of the Union. Even before his inauguration, South Carolina voted to secede from the Union, followed by six other Southern states. President Lincoln, who revered the Union, made ready for war. His course ended with the abolition of slavery—and with his own assassination.

The deep South states—those states with the most slaves—followed in January 1861 with the upper South withdrawing from the Union after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, and the start of the Civil War.

Despite the furor over slavery in the run up to the Civil War, ending slavery was not the stated purpose for the war at first. Lincoln held that his goal was to preserve the Union and quell the Southern rebellion. Although committed to abolitionism, Lincoln feared that preaching emancipation would drive away the support of Northern Democrats and people in the Union slave states of Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Delaware. Also, many Republicans and Northerners, although opposed to slavery, doubted that Blacks had the ability to be free and care for themselves.

In the South, Confederate politicians rallied people around the right to live free of Northern meddling rather than around the slavery issue, because only a minority of Southerners owned slaves. Instead, slaveholders—who held nearly all the power and wealth—warned of Northern efforts to disturb the structure of White male supremacy. Many in the South resisted this message, however, and resented the control of the slaveholders, particularly in the aforementioned border South that refused to secede and in regions populated mostly by small landholders.

As the war dragged on into 1862 with limited success for the Union Army, Lincoln, already under pressure from abolitionists, saw an opportunity to make the war about ending slavery. Emancipation, he hoped, would help reinvigorate stagnant recruitment efforts, particularly by attracting the scores of free Black men eager to liberate the South. Moreover, as the bloodshed escalated, much of public opinion had shifted from wanting to merely restore the old Union to wanting to crush the Southern aristocracy and forge a new nation without slavery. Reports of the heroics of Black Union troops and of slaves abandoning their duties and plantations as Union troops advanced helped convince many Northerners that Blacks wanted—and deserved—freedom.

Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, granting freedom to all slaves living in the Confederacy. The proclamation symbolized Lincoln’s aim of abolishing slavery, but it was controversial: it applied to rebel territory where it could not be enforced, but not to border slave states under Union control. Southerners balked and Northerners criticized the proclamation’s limitations. But the document ensured that the Union would not accept slavery. As the federal army advanced through the South, scholars estimate that as many as 700,000 slaves, or around 20 percent of all slaves, escaped to Union lines. They exercised their liberty as contractors and paid workmen and served as soldiers along with 34,000 free Blacks until the Confederate surrender at Appomattox on April 9, 1865.

The second, issued on January 1, 1863, specifically named states in which the proclamation would apply—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia.

The proclamation came at a time when the call for nationwide abolition had reached a fever pitch. Congress had outlawed slavery in all U.S. territories in June 1862. Under pressure to take steps toward emancipation since the beginning of his administration, Lincoln first presented a draft of the proclamation to his cabinet and discussed its possible ramifications in the summer of 1862.

Initially, abolitionists viewed the order as ineffective in answering the question of slavery in America. They noted that despite the magnitude of the proclamation’s scope, the document itself effectively freed very few slaves. Indeed, the proclamation’s provisions did not apply to border states fighting on behalf of the Union, nor did it affect slaveholders in Southern territories that had come under Union control, which most notably included several counties and parishes in Virginia and Louisiana. In essence, many viewed the move as a punishment toward rebelling states rather than a move toward the abolition of slavery.

The proclamation’s greatest support came from those who viewed it as an effective military measure designed to both progressively deprive the Confederacy of slave labor and bring additional men into the Union Army. In the final two years of the Civil War, 180,000 African Americans enlisted with the Union Army, constituting 10 percent of the Union’s forces by the war’s conclusion. The proclamation also cast a moral light on the Union’s side of the conflict. Foreign nations such as France and Britain, which already had abolished slavery, found it impossible to support the Confederacy without supporting the institution of slavery.

Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery in America, its ramifications made abolition a feature issue for the remainder of the Civil War.

The 14th Amendment, proclaimed July 28, 1868, was originally enacted to protect the freedman from the stripping of his rights by Southern states. By making the Negro a citizen and by making the federal government responsible for his privileges and immunities, the 14th Amendment sought to build a wall of federal protection around him. Also, before its adoption, the Bill of Rights only protected citizens from invasions of individual liberty by the federal government. The 14th Amendment extended the protections of the Bill of Rights to state and local government actions. This amendment also provided the constitutional means to achieve social progress with the inclusion of arguably the two most important phrases in American constitutional law: due process and equal protection.

At the end of the Civil War, there was little support for allowing African Americans to vote. However, by 1866, the issue of voting rights for African Americans had a prominent place on lawmakers’ agendas. After a long struggle, the 15th Amendment, proclaimed March 30, 1870, granted African American men suffrage. However, this hard fought victory did not come without obstacles. Two decades a fter the ratification of the 15th Amendment, Democrats in several states developed ways to limit the African American vote. Through the institution of poll taxes, gerrymandering, and property ownership qualifications, the vote moved further from the reach of Southern African Americans.

In the coming years, progress continued to move backward as African Americans were regularly denied the use of railroad cars, hotels, and other public facilities. Violence against African Americans also increased dramatically in the 1860s particularly that by a secret society called the Ku Klux Klan, which was founded in Tennessee in 1865.

Pennsylvania’s Act of Gradual Abolition did not usher the children of slaves into freedom but into a status known as indentured servitude, which exposed them until the age of 28 to conditions that also were perilous and confined. The indenture system is at the heart of the 55 Allegheny County records donated to the Senator John Heinz History Center and featured in this exhibition. As we present these accounts of the indentures of some of the Black children of Western Pennsylvania—or those brought here—we place them and other slavery-related accounts displayed here in the national context of the American slavery drama.

That Pittsburgh’s Black children and Black community came through this ordeal with such determination and positive attributes is a tribute to them and a credit to the small but brave band of local White activists who helped them in their struggle.

It is our hope that by seeing specific examples of how slavery in America, Pennsylvania, and in Pittsburgh arose, flourished, and was abolished, we might enhance our insights into understanding contemporary issues that inform life in Western Pennsylvania.

In the days since the close of the antebellum period, Pittsburgh’s African Americans—as those in the rest of the nation—have made enormous progress across the range of human endeavors. Even so, the University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work’s Center on Race and Social Problems published a 2007 landmark study that gives credence to the belief held by many Pittsburghers that Black residents continue to experience differences and disparities in the region’s quality of life.

It is the hope of the University of Pittsburgh, in partnership with the History Center, that the “Free at Last?” exhibition inspires community efforts to fully free Black Pittsburghers from a legacy of slavery so that they may participate in the mainstream of progress that ushers in the next great Pittsburgh renaissance.