Greg Tucker, Murfreesboro Post, February 18, 2016
President Abraham Lincoln‘s proclamation on Jan, 1, 1863, did not free slaves in Rutherford County, or anywhere else in Tennessee.
Compared to other sections of the South, Rutherford County had few large plantations relying on slave labor in the years before the Civil War. The Davis and Bryant plantations were among the larger.Charles Davis, father of Sam Davis, farmed a large tract just east of Smyrna with about fifty field and domestic slaves. Sherrod Bryant, believed to have been the wealthiest black landowner in antebellum Tennessee, owned property in Nashville and worked a 300-acre tract along the Wilson-Rutherford boundary with about two dozen slaves. Most Rutherford slaveholders had three or four.
The first year and a half of the Civil War did not go well for Union forces. In mid-1862, the president’s military advisors proposed to Lincoln an unusual “war measure for suppressing said rebellion.” See “A Proclamation,” A. Lincoln (January 1, 1863). The military advisors persuaded Lincoln that the Confederacy’s ability to supply and sustain the war was largely dependent on its agricultural and industrial production using slave labor. The plan, which the president approved, was initially to threaten to free slaves in any area of the south in rebellion against the Union.
Accordingly, on Sept. 22, 1862, Lincoln proclaimed that those in rebellion were being given 100 days to end their “rebellion against the United States.” The proclamation was based on what Lincoln considered his vested authority “as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion.” He recognized that he had no constitutional or legal authority, except as a “war measure.”
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation did NOT change the status of slavery in Tennessee…
In his initial proclamation, Lincoln warned that at the end of the specified time period he would identify those states or regions that remained in rebellion and order that in those locales “all persons held as slaves…shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”
Lincoln’s threat had no effect. Consequently, on Jan. 1, 1863, Lincoln issued a second proclamation identifying those states that continued to be “in rebellion.” The list included all of the states of the Confederacy except Tennessee, and certain cities and counties in Virginia and Louisiana. In the specified places of continued rebellion those “held as slaves…are, and henceforward shall be free.” In the “excepted parts,” such as Tennessee, all were “left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued.”
The president went on to “enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self defence; and I recommend to them that, in all cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.”
The so-called Emancipation Proclamation, described by its own terms as “a fit and necessary war measure,” also did not change the legal status of slaves in Kentucky, Missouri, Delaware, or Maryland, slave states that had not seceded. (Some histories include Indiana as a slave state, but the last documented instance of slavery there was in 1840 according to census records.) The word emancipation does not appear in the text or title of the 1863 presidential proclamation. This sobriquet was not popularized until some years after the war.
Tennessee and other “excepted” locales were apparently deemed not to be in rebellion based on their current occupation by the Union army. Political recognition of Union sympathies may also have been a factor. Forty-eight of the “excepted” Virginia counties joined the Union later in 1863 as the new state of West Virginia.
In January 1865 Andrew Johnson, military governor of Tennessee, called a constitutional convention in Nashville to propose revisions to the state constitution. The revision convention met as provided and proposed a number of amendments to the state constitution, among them one forever abolishing slavery. By popular vote on Feb. 22, 1865, the anti-slavery amendment was ratified. Hence, the real emancipation day in Tennessee fell on the anniversary of the birth of George Washington, and Tennessee was the only Confederate state to free slaves by state action.
Rutherford County Historian Greg Tucker can be reached at [email protected].
All words and phrases within quotation marks are from the text of the 1863 presidential proclamation.