Free On Hallowed Ground by Robert M Poole Page B

wagons—was the result of Lincoln’s
second, and more famous, Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, which liberated some three and a half million slaves
in Confederate states. 49
    As that historic New Year’s Day approached, a group of former slaves crowded into a school house in Washington to celebrate their imminent freedom. An elderly man named Thornton rose to explain how Lincoln’s announcement would change
old ways: “Can’t sell your wife and children any more! … No more dat!” Thornton declared, his speech rendered in minstrel’s
vernacular by a journalist. “Goin’ to work, I feel bad. Overseer behind me! No more dat! No more dat!” 50 Many of the able-bodied went to work for the federal war effort, first as civilian laborers or teamsters, or later as members
of the newly formed U.S. Colored Troops, segregated army units that helped tip the momentum of war in the Union’s favor.
    About the same time, almost unnoticed, Robert E. Lee summoned a justice of the peace in Spotsylvania County, where he was
camped for the winter at Fredericksburg, and went over the papers that finally freed his family’s slaves, in accordance with
his late father-in-law’s wishes. Given Lincoln’s sweeping Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the reality that many of the
Lee slaves were already living within Union lines, one might wonder if the general’s gesture was a needless formality. But
Lee was nothing if not punctilious, even amid the distractions of war.
    “I desire to do what is right and best for the people,” Lee wrote his wife that December, referring to the slaves. “Any who
wish to leave may do so … They can be furnished with their free papers & hire themselves out … Those at Arlington
& Alexandria I cannot now reach. They are already free & when I can get to them I will give them their papers.” Like other
men of his day, Lee took a paternalistic view toward blacks, which caused him to worry about how they would fare without masters.
“The men could no doubt find homes,” he wrote, “but what are the women & children to do?” Without resolving that question,
he made it clear that any slaves remaining on Lee family property would be expected to work, with the net proceeds of their
labor set aside “for their future establishment.” 51 In the deed conveying their liberation, Lee scrupulously listed each of the 196 slaves by name, along with their places of
residence, and ordered that they be “forever set free from slavery.” He signed the deed of manumission on December 29, 1862,
beating Lincoln’s historic declaration by barely three days. 52
    That winter, when Lee was not basking in the glow of his recent military triumphs, he took a moment to assess his own financial
prospects. They looked anything but promising. His wife was living in a rented house in Richmond. His enemies occupied family
properties at Arlington and Smith Island. Their White House home had burned to the ground as Union forces withdrew from the
peninsula. Only the Lees’ Romancock plantation remained largely untouched by war, at least for the moment. Lee’s meager investments
in Virginia bonds and railroad stocks would soon be worthless. And now the slaves were going. Even though he disapproved of
slavery, the pernicious institution had made possible his family’s sprawling land holdings and the earnings flowing from them.
That affluence was dissolving, along with the old certainties of Virginia’s aristocratic order, in which the Lees had been
leading actors. “I have no time to think of my private affairs,” he confided to Mrs. Lee that winter. “I expect to die a pauper,
& I see no way of preventing it.” 53
    With nothing to lose, Lee would become all the more dangerous in the months ahead. He provided thousands of new casualties
for the hospitals and cemeteries as the campaign of 1863 unfolded. Emboldened by his success at Chancellorsville in May, but still desperately short of