Thread by @ErikLoomis

This Day in Labor History: April 9, 1865. Robert E. Lee surrenders, effectively ending 4 years of Treason on Defense of Slavery. Big part of the reason it failed is that slaves engaged in a general strike, walking away from the plantations. Let's talk about this.

As many of you know, the idea of the Slave General Strike was developed by WEB DuBois in his great 1935 book Black Reconstruction. White historians, being racists, ignored this for decades. But it's the most compelling vision of why the North won the Civil War.

Slaves wanted freedom from the moment they were enslaved. The civil rights movement began in 1619. It continues today. For the vast majority of that time--including today--most whites just didn't care or actively opposed it.

Whether committing suicide on the slave ships by jumping into the ocean, engaging in open rebellions like Nat Turner or the Stono Rebellion, running away, or just dreaming of a free life, slaves always wanted freedom from the hell of their lives.

They took any change to get it. During the American Revolution and the War of 1812, thousands of slaves fled to British lines because of the promise of freedom. Many thousands more would have fled if they could have reached the British.

The Civil War provided another opportunity for that long-cherished freedom. As soon as U.S. troops marched south, slaves began fleeing to their lines.

This most famously became an issue for the American armies to deal with when three slaves reached Fort Monroe, Virginia, which was controlled by the U.S. and where General Benjamin Butler was in charge.

When the owner came back and demanded the slaves back (by the way, the sheer temerity of Confederates to complain that the U.S. was violating the Fugitive Slave Act, as they did throughout the war, is amazing), Butler refused.

Butler wisely saw the slaves as contraband and acted on that principle. Now, that's kind of offensive. But it was also the only way that Lincoln and Congressional Republicans would approve of this. It worked brilliantly. Now ex-slaves had already started changing the nation.

This received the approval of Republicans in Washington, who soon passed the Confiscation Act, which stated that if the Confederacy recognized slaves as property, that the United States had the right to confiscate that property in order to win the war.

But really, even without the Confiscation Act, slaves were going to take matters into their own hands anyway.

Slaves like Robert Smalls took enormous risks for freedom, in his case stealing a boat in the Charleston harbor while dressed as a Confederate ship captain, then picking up the families of the men with him who were at a waiting point, then fleeing north. Smalls became famous.

Many fled to McClellan’s armies in the Peninsular Campaign in 1862. Planters quickly realized the danger and attempted to move slaves into the Confederate interior, especially western states like Texas and Arkansas.

Perhaps most importantly, the slaves forced American officials and the Lincoln government to take the question of slavery seriously. Much to abolitionists’ frustration, Lincoln did not use the outbreak of war to end slavery. Union was his more important issue.

But the slaves self-emancipating changed that. Faced with a fait accompli that slaves were going to flee on their own, Lincoln moved toward issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.

I do think that Lincoln would have eventually done such a thing anyway, but certainly not in the fall of 1862.

Slaves’ desire to flee slavery and then fight for the United States was an overwhelming argument for Lincoln and it shows how slave agency is absolutely central to our understanding of the decline of slave labor as an American institution.

Often, they completely overwhelmed northern armies that were marching in the South. That was especially true of that of William Tecumseh Sherman marching through Georgia and South Carolina.

These slaves were often very poor and in terrible health. With the Confederacy going hungry by 1864 generally, slaves were getting less food than ever. But their sheer determination to win their freedom moved Sherman, who was no racial radical.

These people were truly starving. Later they remembered scouring the ground to find nuts, roots, or wild greens to get something in their stomachs.

Sherman marching through Georgia actually made slaves more hungry, but it also gave them the opportunity to win their freedom. Thousands of refugees were following Sherman’s armies by the time he got to Savannah in December 1864.

That doesn’t mean that the officers wanted them. Some embraced the self-freed slaves, others wanted rid of them by any means necessary, but the now freed people were going to do whatever it took for obtain and keep that freedom.

Many of these slaves wanted to join the American military and fight for their own freedom and that of their loved ones. John Boston fled from a Maryland plantation in 1862. He joined the military and later he was able to write to his wife, still stuck in slavery. He wrote.....

“My Dear Wife it is with grate joy I take to let you know Whare I am i am in Safety in the 14th Regiment of Brooklyn this Day I can Address you thank god as a free man I had a little truble in giting away But as the lord led the Children of Isrel to the land of Canon....

...So he led me to a land Whare freedom Will rain in spite of earth and hell Dear you must make your Self content i am free from all the Slavers.” Powerful stuff.

This is how African-Americans self-emancipated. They simply walked away. When Confederate power faded, as it did with the arrival of American armies near plantations where authority was waning, they took their lives into the own hands.

They effectively stopped growing cotton and rice, stopped working in the house, stopped supporting the plantation system. They followed the American army to freedom.

They wanted more–primarily land, education, and eventually, the vote. Most of that would be temporary or denied or granted and then repealed in the case of Sherman’s Special Order No. 15 that gave slaves 160 acres of confiscated plantation lands between Charleston and GA-FL line.

The promises of emancipation would not be fully implemented. But whatever happened, slavery was dead. And it was dead in no small part because the slaves themselves decided they wouldn’t be slaves any longer.

And, not surprisingly, the now-freed slaves joyously rubbed their freedom in their masters’ faces when they could

If you've never read Jourdon Anderson's letter to his old master, a masterpiece kiss off and possibly the single greatest document in American history, treat yourself on this, Crushing Treason in Defense of Slavery Day.

lettersofnote.com/2012/01/to-my-…

The most important event in American labor history is not the National Labor Relations or Fair Labor Standards Act. It's the end of slavery. And yet we so often don't recognize this as fundamentally a labor issue, which of course was the point of slavery.

I was highly disturbed in 2016 and 2017 when a few prominent leftists--who I already thought were assholes--embraced a quasi-racism in the aftermath of Trump. I could name names, but I guess I won't. There is no room for Class Not Race analysis. None. It's racist.

There is no understanding of class in this nation that makes any sense without race being at the center of it. And you can't subsume race into class. We aren't all oppressed workers. We are oppressed workers in different ways.

And few have done more to oppress black workers than white workers.

And, no, the racism of white workers is not some nefarious scheme of white capitalists. White workers are plenty racist without capitalists somehow convincing them to do so. Which is not to say that capitalists didn't take advantage of this racism.

Anyway, my book, A History of America in Ten Strikes, is coming out in October. Amazingly, Noam Chomsky wrote a blurb for it. One of the 10 strikes I focus on is the Slave General Strike. If you want a good 9,000 words on this, it will be there.

amazon.com/History-Americ…

I am now going to celebrate the rest of Crushing Treason in Defense of Slavery Day by driving to southern Indiana to see where Lincoln grew up, and then eat western Kentucky BBQ in Owensboro. See you on the road.

Back on Wednesday with a thread on the Hormel P-9 strike in 1986 and the crushing of unions in the late 20th century.