James Mitchell Ashley
Would it surprise you to know that President Abraham Lincoln was
not an abolitionist when the Civil War broke out in 1881? He wanted
desperately to preserve the Union. Although he personally found the
practice of slavery abhorrent, he knew that neither Northerners nor
the residents of the border slave states would support abolition as a
war aim. The idea of granting freedom to nearly 4 million slaves in
America was not his political concern.
Lincoln wrote in a famous letter to Horace Greeley on August 1862 ...
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”
Even in his first inaugural address, Lincoln declared that he had
“no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with slavery in
the States where it exists.”
So, how did the Thirteenth Amendment that formally abolished
slavery in the United States come about? Who led the cause, and what
pressures caused President Lincoln to act? The story may surprise
you. Although somehow lost in the annals of history, the person most
notably credited with applying direct action in the right places was
an abolitionist with a Portsmouth, Ohio connection.
Prior to the Thirteenth Amendment, the United States Constitution
did not expressly use the words
slave or
slavery but
included several provisions about unfree persons. Since the American
Revolution, states had divided into states that allowed and states
that prohibited slavery.
Slavery was implicitly permitted in the original Constitution
through provisions such as Article I, Section 2, Clause 3, commonly
known as the “Three-Fifths Compromise,” which detailed how each
slave state's enslaved population would be factored into its total
population count for the purposes of apportioning seats in the United
States House of Representatives and direct taxes among the states.
For purposes of the Fifth Amendment, which was ratified in 1791 as
part of the Bill of Rights – “no person shall… be deprived of…
property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be
taken for public use, without just compensation.” – slaves were
understood as property. They or their descendants could be sold or
inherited like any other personalty. Like other property, human
chattel was governed largely by laws of individual states. The Fifth
Amendment rights of due process in the pursuit of life and liberty
did not apply to slaves.
President Lincoln’s position on “Union above all” did pivot
as the war progressed. It did so largely for a very utilitarian
reason. By the fall of 1862, he had begun to believe that freeing the
slaves could aid in his ultimate goal of reuniting the states as he
saw the military benefit provided by the thousands of slaves who had
fled their owners and joined the Union forces fighting behind enemy
lines. After all, the Confederacy was using slaves as trench
builders, teamsters, cooks, and in many other ways to help their
cause. Lincoln was convinced that abolition had become a sound
military strategy, as well as the morally correct path.
Foremost, Lincoln wanted to change the tide of the war. It was
going badly for the Union. After the Northern armies had won a string
of military victories in the early months of 1862, they suffered
demoralizing reverses in July and August. He saw that emancipation
would weaken the Confederacy and strengthen the Union by siphoning
off part of the Southern labor force and adding this manpower to the
Northern side.
Also, most Republicans had become convinced by 1862 that the war
against a slaveholders’ rebellion must become a war against slavery
itself, and they put increasing pressure on Lincoln to proclaim an
emancipation policy. By the summer of 1862, it was clear that he
risked alienating the Republican half of his constituency if he did
not act against slavery.
Yet, even when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which
declared that all slaves in areas still in rebellion on January 1,
1863, “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free,” the
mandate did not apply to border states or slave-holding territory
already seized by the North.
It should be understood the proclamation only freed slaves; it did
not abolish slavery itself. It pronounced freedom for all slaves in
the Confederacy – states over which Lincoln had no control. Still,
the symbolic directive had the effect of highlighting the centrality
of slavery to the Union cause.
As historian Eric Foner writes, “never before had so large a
number of slaves been declared free. By making the army an agent of
emancipation and wedding the goals of Union and abolition, it ensured
that northern victory would produce a social transformation in the
South and a redefinition of the place of blacks in American life.”
Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery in the
nation, it captured the hearts and imagination of millions of
Americans and fundamentally transformed the character of the war. It
was much more symbolic than practical.
Some historians believe issuing the proclamation gave Lincoln
great benefit from a position of strength, rather than one of
desperation. And, by shifting the Civil War’s main purpose from
preserving the Union to universal liberty, Lincoln was hurling a
moral challenge in the face of the British and French at a time when
they were considering recognition of the Confederate government. In
essence, it said, “You both abolished slavery – are you really
going to recognize a nation built on that institution now, just to
have access to the cotton grown by their slaves?” Britain and
France balked.
A major concern was that the proclamation was executed by a
president exercising greatly expanded wartime powers, and the
president and his supporters were concerned that courts might rule it
a temporary emergency measure invalid once the war concluded. Lincoln
had preferred to see abolition codified on the state level, and by
early 1864 several states had enacted laws prohibiting slavery.
Radical Republicans were opposed during the Civil War by the
Moderate Republicans (led by Lincoln), by the conservative
Republicans, and by the largely pro-slavery and later by
anti-Reconstruction Democratic Party, as well as by conservatives in
the South and liberals in the North during Reconstruction. The
abolitionist group tried to convince the president that slavery would
only be outlawed with an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. One of
them was James Mitchell Ashley – the man with connections to
Portsmouth, Ohio.
Born near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, James Ashley moved with his
parents and siblings to Portsmouth in the spring of 1826 at the age
of two and grew to manhood here. His father, John Clinton Ashley was
a minister in the Disciples (Campbellite) Church and served as a
Justice of Peace and Township Trustee, providing the young Ashley a
model of public service.
Still, Ashley and his father had a tense relationship. His father wanted him to follow family tradition and become a Baptist minister. Ashley did not want to do so. Therefore, Ashley grew very close to his mother, and he learned many things, both intellectually and morally, from her. She had many abolitionist friends, and this learning is said to have molded him into becoming a strong abolitionist. \
The young boy witnessed white men who refused to let their cattle drink from a stream in which his father had baptized slaves. Ashley grew to hate the "peculiar institution" (which he considered a violation of Christian principles) and the oligarchy that supported it.
When James Ashley was 14 years old, rather than attend a seminary, he ran away to become a cabin boy on Ohio and Mississippi River boats, and later he worked as a clerk on those boats. Ashley did not speak or write to his father again until he was twenty-one, but wrote often to his mother.
Nelson Evans, in his History of Scioto County account of the young Ashley, notes that it was “during his life on the river that he saw much that horrified him with the slave system. He saw coffles of chained slaves being walked to the Deep South, boys his own age being sold. In later years Ashley used to relate how free Negroes employed to work on the same steamer with him would be kidnapped.”
He recalled: “At landing places where the steamer would stop to
take on freight, they (Negroes) would go ashore to help with the
work, and would be arrested on the charge of being runaway slaves,
and being unable, without money or friends, to make a defense, and no
owner appearing, would finally be sold to pay the expenses of
apprehending them.”
James Ashley began to help fugitives. Reports confirm that Ashley
began helping slaves to escape as early as 1839. According to W. H.
Siebert, a pioneering historian of the Underground Railroad, James
Ashley began his active participation in the movement in 1841, at the
age of seventeen, when he assisted two groups of slaves across the
Ohio (
one a group of
seven and another of five), transferring them by a
small boat from near Greenup, Kentucky, to two operators that lived
below Portsmouth, on the West Side.
Late in his life Ashley relished telling stories of the families he had saved. Ashley explained in an interview when he was 70 years old: “The five was the most exciting time I ever had. From the group of seven, all of them got away.”
Ashley worked the river for several
years, then he returned home to Portsmouuth and educated himself in
the printing industry. By 1842, Ashley had begun working for various
newspapers, particularly the Scioto Valley Republican. And,
in 1848, he became editor and part owner of the Portsmouth (Ohio)
Democrat in 1848 – the first Democratic party-aligned
newspaper in Portsmouth. Ashley and the other owner would soon sell
the paper to Francis Cleveland, who continued the enterprise.
Ashley then studied law with Charles O.
Tracy, and he was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1849. However, he chose
not to practice law. Instead, he ran for mayor in 1851.
Evans noted that Ashley lost the election because he split the
Democratic vote with Judge William Oldfield. This loss discouraged
young Ashley with Portsmouth.
Evans record also relates that Ashley realized his secret and
illegal underground railroad activities had become common knowledge
when “he met a Quaker whom he knew had “anti-slavery sentiments”
on the street who said to him, “James, I think thee needs this,’
at the same time handing him $20.00.”
In 1851, he was
married to Miss Emma Smith of Kentucky. That same year he and Emma
decided to leave Portsmouth. They moved to Toledo, Ohio, to avoid
prosecution under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. There, he opened a
drug store. He sold his portion of the business in 1858 in order to
focus on politics. James and Emma had four children.
Ashley decided to relaunch his political career in northwest Ohio,
where he abandoned the Democratic Party and helped establish the new
Republican Party. Soon, James Ashley became an active abolitionist.
He even traveled with John Brown's widow to Brown's execution in
December, 1859, and reported on the event in the still-extant local
newspaper, the
Toledo Blade.
Ashley said of Charles Town (Charlestown, now in West Virginia):
“It is enough to say, that any anti-slavery man would have been safer from personal injury and insult in...countries whose language he could not speak, a stranger without a passport...than in the town of Charlestown, in my own country, for the past few days.” The way Ashley got into the city without arrest or confrontation was to get an old horse and rickety buggy and quietly drive into town. Ashley even spoke to Mrs. Brown who was present to fetch her husband’s body. Mrs. Brown had brought a few friends with her for support, but she was made to leave them behind when she spoke with her husband. Ashley reported that she was treated terribly, even made to strip to be certain she had no poisons or weapons upon her person to relay to her husband.
Ashley was very sorry for what she went through, “A poor, broken hearted woman, with two gentlemen and a Quaker lady friend, harmless and unarmed...” Many people still ask why Harper’s Ferry was such an excitement to slaveholders, and Ashley said that “It is inseparable from the system of slavery.” Of Brown’s execution, he had somewhat torn feelings. To quote him,“However much I condemn and lament, as I most since rely do, his attack on this place, I cannot but admire his heroism, his straight-forward independence, and his undoubted courage.”
On the morning of December 2, 1859, Brown wrote:
“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the
crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.
I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much
bloodshed it might be done.”
Brown read his Bible and wrote a final letter to his wife, which
included his will. At 11:00 a.m. he was escorted from the county jail
through a crowd of 2,000 soldiers a few blocks away to a small field
where the gallows were. Among the soldiers in the crowd were future
Confederate general Stonewall Jackson and John Wilkes Booth (the
latter borrowing a militia uniform to gain admission to the
execution).
Brown was accompanied by the sheriff and his assistants, but no
minister since he had consistently rejected the ministrations of
pro-slavery clergy. Since the region was in the grips of virtual
hysteria, most northerners, including journalists, were run out of
town, and it is unlikely any anti-slavery clergyman would have been
safe, even if one were to have sought to visit Brown.
Brown elected to receive no religious services in the jail or at
the scaffold. He was hanged at 11:15 a.m. and pronounced dead at
11:50 a.m. His body was placed in a wooden coffin with the noose
still around his neck. His coffin was then put on a train to take it
away from Virginia to his family homestead in New York for burial. In
the North, large memorial meetings took place, church bells rang,
minute guns were fired, and famous writers such as Emerson and
Thoreau joined many Northerners in praising Brown.
French poet, novelist, and dramatist Victor Hugo had tried to
obtain a pardon for John Brown. This text, written at
Hauteville-House on December 2, 1859, warned of a possible civil war:
“Politically speaking,
the murder of John Brown would be an uncorrectable sin. It would
create in the Union a latent fissure that would in the long run
dislocate it. Brown's agony might perhaps consolidate slavery in
Virginia, but it would certainly shake the whole American democracy.
You save your shame, but you kill your glory. Morally speaking, it
seems a part of the human light would put itself out, that the very
notion of justice and injustice would hide itself in darkness, on
that day where one would see the assassination of Emancipation by
Liberty itself.
“Let America know and
ponder on this: there is something more frightening than Cain killing
Abel, and that is Washington killing Spartacus.”
While in Toledo, Ashley was active in
local politics and served as chairman of the Ohio Republican Party in
1858. A year later, in 1859, he was elected to the United States
House of Representatives in the 36th Congress. During his tenure,
Ashley was one of the abolitionist movement’s leaders. His service
to Congress spanned the entire Civil War and part of the
Reconstruction Era.
According to biographer Robert F.
Horowitz, Ashley "maintained that under the war powers clause of
the Constitution, the government had the right to interfere with
slavery in the states and to initiate complete abolition, and that
the power should be used against the oligarchic slaveholders. He
firmly believed that his views would eventually be accepted by the
administration and the American people." Such strong support led
to the Emancipation Proclamation.
In 1860, Ashley campaigned for Republican presidential nominee
Abraham Lincoln. During the secession crisis in the winter of
1860-1861, Ashley opposed compromising with the slave-holding South.
As chairman of the House Committee on Territories, Ashley formulated
a radical plan for Reconstruction in December 1861. It would have
abolished slavery, established territorial governments in the seceded
states, redistributed confiscated land to former slaves and Southern
white Unionists, and granted black men the right to vote.
Ashley was also instrumental in the
drafting and passage of the law abolishing slavery in the District of
Columbia in April 1862.
In December 1863,
Ashley introduced a bill proposing a constitutional amendment
abolishing slavery in the entire United States. Modeled after the
wording of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, Ashley's motion was the
foundation for what would become the Thirteenth Amendment.
When President Lincoln presented his much milder Reconstruction
plan, Ashley unsuccessfully attempted to add a provision for black
voting rights. Also in his second term, the congressman was accused
of illegal land speculation and misuse of his office to secure jobs
for relatives. A special congressional committee acquitted him in
1863.
By the summer of 1864 Lincoln’s position on the 13th Amendment
had continued to evolve. At his party’s convention, he pushed for a
Republican platform that called for slavery’s “utter and complete
extirpation,” and in accepting the nomination, he for the first
time called for a federal amendment banning slavery as “a fitting,
and necessary conclusion” to the war.
Emboldened by the 1864 election that not only returned him to the
White House but increased his party’s seats in Congress, Lincoln
threw himself behind the effort to pass the amendment. In his annual
message to legislators in December 1864, Lincoln made clear that he
had no intention of waiting for the inauguration of the new Congress
in March. “The next Congress will pass the measure if this does
not,” he wrote. “May we not agree that the sooner the better?”
As the 2012 Steven Spielberg biopic “Lincoln” portrayed, the
president and Secretary of State William Seward were willing to
strong-arm border Unionists and horse-trade with reluctant Democrats
to secure their votes or at least their abstentions in order to lower
the threshold for a two-thirds majority. The administration took
advantage of the timing of the lame-duck Congress by offering
patronage jobs – and in one case an ambassadorship to Denmark –
to defeated Democrats.
As floor manager of the Republican majority, James Ashley then
steered the Thirteenth Amendment through the House of Representatives
until its passage in January 1865 by 2 votes. The constitutionally
required three-quarters of the states ratified the Thirteenth
Amendment and it became part of the U.S. Constitution on December 6,
1865, eight months after the end of the Civil War.
The chamber grew silent as House of Representatives Speaker
Schuyler Colfax declared the results of the historic vote with a
quiver in his voice: “On the passage of the joint resolution to
amend the Constitution of the United States, the ayes have 119, the
noes 56.” The measure passed by the narrowest of margins, with
eight members abstaining. Sixteen Democrats, all but two lame ducks,
joined the full slate of Republicans in approving the measure.
It was reported that following a short heartbeat of silence, the
chamber erupted in celebration. Parliamentary rules were cast aside
as congressmen cheered wildly and “wept like children.” Then came
the thunder of a 100-gun salute outside the Capitol Building to relay
the news of the vote to the rest of the city. Ashley quickly
telegraphed the
Toledo Commercial, "Glory to God in the
highest! Our country is free."
Although it wasn’t legally necessary, Lincoln affixed his
signature to the engrossed copy of the amendment the following day.
That night, a jubilant crowd led by a brass band gathered by
torchlight outside the White House and raised a great cheer when
Lincoln appeared in a central upper window of the portico. The
president leaned outside and told his supporters that slavery had
caused the Civil War and must be expunged so that it would never tear
apart the country again. “This amendment is a king’s cure for all
the evils,” he said. “It winds the whole thing up.” Before he
left, Lincoln congratulated the country “upon this great moral
victory.” One must wonder what he said to Congressman Ashley.
James Mitchell Ashley is forever known as the Radical Republican
who introduced the first bill which ultimately became the Thirteenth
Amendment to the Constitution. He was good friends with President
Lincoln, yet Ashley views on slavery were deep-seated and more
extreme – breaking away from any compromise that deprived humans of
equality and absolute freedom. Without such pressure on the President
and Congress, the necessary transformation would likely not have
occurred. A radical group led by a radical man had served the nation.
Ashley wasn't finished with his important work. He also became a
leading advocate of the enfranchisement of black men, which was
established by the First Reconstruction Act of 1867 and the Fifteenth
Amendment (1870). Three years before his death, his efforts on behalf
of racial equality were recognized by the Afro-American League of
Tennessee, and he donated the proceeds of a book of his speeches to
build schools.
With his health declining, Ashley developed a bad case of diabetes and it eventually cost him his life. In September of 1896,Ashley took a fishing trip up north. While fishing, he neglected to watch his diet and his health. On September 16th, Ashley suffered a fatal heart attack and died. He is buried in Toledo, Ohio.
While honoring James M. Ashley, William H. Young, the president of the Afro-American League of Tennessee said of Ashley …
“We come to snatch from the consummate statesman, patriot, philanthropist and benefactor, the chill and gloom of ingratitude and to reinvest his being with new life. We come to reassure him that the years of strife, turmoil, and self-abnegation spent for a despised race were ‘as bread upon the water.’
"We come to remind him that we tonight intend that his name and life-work shall be a precious legacy to our children’s children. That they shall rise up and call him blessed. We have come to announce to the world that henceforth, he who shall merit our gratitude shall not go unrewarded.”
With supreme conviction, Ashley fought for his beliefs. He fought for minority rights in a time when minorities had nothing. He pushed the people of his time to abolish slavery and to do away with segregation not only in his state, but also in the entire country. His name should forever be remembered as the person most responsible for the conviction and execution of these words: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” No Founding Father did more for equality in America than James Mitchell Ashley.
Sources
Jean Allain. The Legal Understanding of Slavery: From the Historical to the Contemporary. 2012.
“James Ashley.” Ohio History Central.
Evan Carton. Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of
America. 2006.
“Emancipation Proclamation.”
history.com. History Channel.
Andrew Feight, Ph.D. “James Ashley & the Thirteenth
Amendment.” sciotohistorical.org.
Raelin Ingram. “The Life and
Times of James. M. Ashley.” Washington Senior Research History
Class.
Christopher
Klein. “Congress
Passes 13th Amendment, 150 Years Ago.” history.com.
History Channel. January 30, 2015.
Abigail Perkiss. “Abraham
Lincoln as constitutional radical: The 13th amendment.”
Constitution Daily. July 12, 2013.
David Potter. The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861. 2011.
