Here is an incident that I read about recently set during the early period of Reconstruction while the Civil War was still raging. I found it in the new book Embattled Freedom by Amy Taylor.
Monroe Bogan was an Arkansas slaveowner who, in December of 1863, claimed to own West Bogan. The problem with this claim was that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed Dennis on January 1, 1863. Monroe Bogan was a twenty-eight-year-old. He had only recently arrived in Arkansas from South Carolina (so much for the Lost Cause myth that “a man’s state was his country”). In the 1860 Census he is listed as owning 37 people.
On December 15, 1863, Monroe had chastised West for refusing an order to work and for trying to run off to the Union soldiers at Helena, Ark. At least two of Monroe’s enslaved people had left the plantation to enlist in the fight against the Confederacy already. According to historian Taylor:
Their second encounter was then witnessed by a woman named Maria Bogan, who was nursing her infant at the time. She realized something was happening only when children came running into her dwelling, shouting, “Master is trying to whip West.” Maria then went to the door just in time to look outside and see West strike back with an axe. She quickly turned and shielded the children—and herself—from the scene. It was a grisly one: her master was hit on the head and neck at least twice and his head was “nearly severed” from his shoulders. Monroe Bogan was dead. [From: Taylor, Amy Murrell. Embattled Freedom (Civil War America) (p. 137). The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition.]
West escaped to Helena, Arkansas, a free city in a land of slavery, and obtained employment. Two weeks later he was arrested by Union forces and accused of murdering Monroe Brogan. In February, 1864 West was tried by court martial, with no African Americans on the panel, convicted and sentenced to hang. Months later, Maj. Gen. Frederick Steele blocked the execution and ordered a review of the case. Union Army Chaplain John Herrick advocated for West, arguing that evidence of Monroe Brogran’s cruelty toward his slaves had not been allowed to be introduced at trial and that West did not have the intention of killing Monroe, merely of defending himself from a whipping.
Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt became involved in the case and was convinced that West’s act was not murder. According to Taylor:
The crucial, most telling detail in Holt’s view was Monroe Bogan’s attempt to whip his slave in the first place; this, concluded Holt, was something “he had no right to do,” thanks to the “changed relations of the white and black population of the Southern States.” Relations had changed, Holt argued in a written appeal to President Lincoln about the case, because the Emancipation Proclamation had changed them. The president’s January 1863 order did more than alter the meaning of the war in the abstract; it did more than authorize the freeing of slaves in rebellious territory or the enlistment of black men in the Union army. It changed the meaning of each and every daily encounter between master and slave on the South’s plantations. To hold a man in slavery, and to impose on him “ceaseless toil and cruel punishments,” as Monroe Bogan did, Holt explained, was, in the aftermath of the proclamation, “in violation of law and right.”
Therefore, it was to be expected, even justified, that a man illegally enslaved would do what it took to free himself. The axe West Bogan wielded had rightfully changed from an “implement with which he was quietly going to his unrecompensed toil,” Holt concluded, “into a weapon of revenge.” Taylor, Amy Murrell. [From: Embattled Freedom (Civil War America) (p. 138). The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition.]
In July, 1864, Abraham Lincoln signed his name next to the notation “Sentence Disapproved,” ending any danger of execution.
Black men, women, and children held in those areas covered by the January 1, 1863 Emancipation Proclamation were free as of that date, and their former masters who continued to treat them as slaves did so illegally.
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