John Hennessy on the Impact of the Second Bull Run Campaign on Emancipation & Black Freedom

On April 20, I attended the University of Virginia Signature Conference on the Second Bull Run in Charlottesville, Virginia. I have already posted on Gary Gallagher’s excellent presentation, now I want to report on John Hennessy’s lecture. I have met John Hennessy in the past, at Spotsylvania on the 150th Anniversary of the Battle and on a walk with Damian Shiels, Harry Smeltzer, and Hennessy on the Irish at the First Bull Run. John was the chief historian at Fredericksburg for the National Park Service and his book Return to Bull Run is the outstanding work on the battle. With such a great wealth of knowledge about the Second Bull Run, I was surprised to hear how he started off his talk:

“What I am going to talk about is a chapter that should have been written thirty years ago. My book did not really include any discussion between the relationship between the Army of Virginia, Pope’s [Union] army, and enslaved people, or the institution of slavery. Today you could not write a book with the declared ambition of Return to Bull Run without that being included. At the time, I did not receive a word of commentary from anybody in 1993…Now we see how the scholarly world has evolved over the years. My task is to look at this army, at the most important issue being discussed in the army in 1862, at slavery and freedom as it related to the Union war effort.”

Hennessy said that “Those enslaved people whose names were not recorded, whose fates were largely unknown to us on an individual basis, presented themselves to the army and the Federal government and basically challenged them-‘What are you going to do with us?'” Hennessy said he looked into how the interaction of enslaved people effected the attitudes and impacted the soldiers in the Army of Virginia.

Many of the Union soldiers who joined the Army of Virginia were racists, says Hennessy. While historians now see the men of Army of Virginia as hastening emancipation, Hennessy also found how deep-seated racism was among the men and leaders. Union soldiers really did not have direct connections with enslaved people during their civilian lives and some said they never thought of slaves before the war and did not enter the army to free the slaves. However, Hennessy found that by the summer of 1862, that “sort of ambivalence would not survive.”

Soldiers were concerned over what would bring them home victorious faster. Soldiers began to blame Southern white civilians for plunging the country into war and became less concerned with protecting the enslaved property of the very people behind secession.

Hennessy says that the big question in 1862 was whether the Union armies “should be a tool for extinguishing slavery where it could be reached.” These soldiers in 1862, says Hennessy, were very politically aware of what they were doing. They wrote home and became powerful voices for change. Interesting, John Pope, the commander of the army, did not  officially mention slavery at all while he led this army.

Soldiers marching through Virginia saw enslaved African Americans that they passed by drop their tools and came out to greet the Union forces. One old man told a soldier that they had been waiting a long time for the United States forces to come. Hennessy said that this convinced soldiers that the propaganda that slaves were “loyal to their masters” was a myth.

Throughout his lecture, the historian gave many examples of interactions between men of the Army of Virginia and those escaping slavery, as well as their reports home.

Note on feature photo: Gary Gallagher (left) and John Hennessy (right) speaking after John’s presentation. Photo by Pat Young.

 

 

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