Before Lincoln gave his Emancipation Proclamation, slaves had already been taking bold steps towards securing freedom, a phenomenon known as “self-emancipation.” While slaves and their labor were an asset to the South, they also proved themselves to be a liability both to their masters and to the Confederate military. In the same respect, the North discovered what an asset slaves were to them, as well, and slaves knew this, just as they were aware that a Union victory would mean the end of the South, and perhaps the end of slavery. Through the acts of slaves and the Northern military, as well as through abandonment by former masters, slaves began to free themselves from bondage. They made of themselves such an issue in the war that the North had no choice but to recognize the slave cause as imperative to success in the North.

Slaves essentially freed themselves when they ran away and escaped to Union lines. Some runaway slaves camped just within Union lines far enough that Confederate soldiers could not touch them, but apart from Union officers who might return them or turn them away.[1] For the Union armies that did accept the runaway slaves, the slaves became sources of Confederate information, as well as served to fill other positions that proved beneficial to the army such as that of cooks and repairmen. In some cases, old masters never sought out their runaway slaves, thus allowing them to maintain the freedom they secured, though some masters did come to retrieve their slaves and the slaves were returned to their former condition.

However, many Northern officers were hostile to Confederate slaveholder superiority in the matter of collecting runaway slaves. Also, Northern officers had a problem with being forced into returning slaves who had shown themselves to be of great value to the Northern army.[2] To contend with this new issues for the military, and to figure out how to keep runaway slaves across Union lines out of the hands of their former Southern masters where they would be an asset to them, the North enacted their contraband policy. After ratifying the contraband policy, slaves no longer had to be returned to their former masters. Because slaves were property, certainly not citizens or people, they could be confiscated by the North.[3] By running away, slaves had set about a chain of events that led to many of them escaping the bonds of slavery.

As the North trudged over Southern land, frightened civilians began to abandon their homes, and with them, their slaves. Slaves without their masters could either stay where they were on deserted plantations, without Masters, or follow the North. One slave, when asked why he joined the Union army said, “massa done run'd away, an' he spec he scare to def, so he clar'd out fur de Yankees.”[4] Some masters did escape with their slaves, only to find that their slaves promptly ran away to return to plantations to be with family who had been left behind. Unwilling to return to collect their slaves, the masters let them go, and the slaves found themselves with no owner. These slaves were now masterless men and women and were released from bondage. They were a far from being American citizens, and their place in society was questionable and uncertain. But, it sufficed that they were no longer held within the former confines of slavery, and the North was left to question what to make of these men, women, and children afterwards.

Slaves in the South had begun to free themselves, to self-emancipate, long before the North took official steps to emancipate them. Slaves escaped from their condition by running away to the North, at first under the threat that their masters may come to collect them, but later secure under the Northern contraband policy that stated they were rightly seized property of war. Slaves afterwards found themselves in a peculiar state of freedom after either running away from or being left behind by masters fleeing their threatened land. The self-emancipation efforts of Southern slaves had impact enough that it thrust the issue of slavery into such importance that many men in the North knew that they had to address slavery in order to secure victory for the

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Works Cited

Perman, Michael, ed. Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998.

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Endnotes

1 Michael Perman, ed, , Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998), 292.

2 Ibid, 292.

3 Ibid, 300.

4 Chicago Times (Chicago), 03 June 1862.