Lincoln took a scientific approach to military strategy. The Anaconda plan’s focus was on securing the coastlines and the Mississippi River. Recognizing New Orleans as the hub of the cotton trade and commerce, Lincoln saw it as the first port to be targeted for blockade. He also hoped to block southern ship traffic from Charleston, South Carolina to cut off Confederate attempts to woo Great Britain and France to their side. Helping him make this happen was Alexander Dallas Bache and the Coast Survey. The Coast Survey had been authorized by Thomas Jefferson, and Bache, who was Benjamin Franklin’s great-grandson, was quick to send nautical charts of the Chesapeake Bay to Lincoln. He also forwarded two terrestrial maps produced by the Survey that had far-reaching influence on Lincoln’s decisions on emancipation and military strategy.
The first map was of the state of Virginia. A relatively new technique of color-coded shading was used to show the percentage of enslaved population in each county based on the 1860 census. The darker shaded counties reflecting higher percentages of enslaved persons were primarily in the tidewater region and toward the southern part of the state. The mountainous western counties held only small percentages of enslaved. That told Lincoln the western counties were less likely to support the insurrection, and indeed, those counties rejoined the Union as the new state of West Virginia.
The second map showed the entire slaveholding portion of the country. Lincoln quickly recognized that the four “border” states—Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware—had relatively few slaves in most of their counties. That fact helped inform Lincoln’s strategies to retain the border states in the Union, including proposals for gradual compensated emancipation in an effort to stimulate the process of freeing the enslaved. The map also clearly showed that eastern Tennessee had relatively few slaves, which again allowed him to target that region for initial military and diplomatic forays in the hope many of the residents would retain their Union sentiments. Also clear was that the highest densities of enslaved populations were in the cotton belt of the deep South and along the Mississippi River borders of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas, where over 90 percent of the populations of some counties were enslaved. The map reinforced the importance of capturing New Orleans to cut off the main supply and transport line for the Confederate economy. Controlling the Mississippi was the key to the war, which “could never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket.” It also reinforced the belief that the deep South was so dependent on slavery it would never willingly give it up. Lincoln found this second map especially fascinating, according to Francis Carpenter, who spent six months at the White House preparing his famous painting, “First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln.” Carpenter added the southern slavery map to the lower right corner of his painting, reflecting its significance to the decision-making process.
But there is more…much more!
[Adapted from my book, The Fire of Genius, coming from Rowman & Littlefield in 2022]
David J. Kent is President of the Lincoln Group of DC and the author of Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America, in Barnes and Noble stores now. His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World and two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.
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Fascinating. Reinforces the idea that slavery was primarily an economically motivated paradigm, its justifications arising as rationalizations of greed satisfied on the backs of a disempowered population (even as a vast majority). And in this case, Census counting slaves in such regions served only to bolster the political power of that invested minority… though it doesn’t seem like a tenable system in the long term. Were there any leaders in the deep South sympathetic to divesting their economies from the practice?
Yes, slavery primarily reinforced the economic paradigm, i.e., wealth and power in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. But it served in tandem with the belief in white supremacy, which was the norm even among non-rich, non-plantation holding white populace in the South (not to mention most of the white population in the South). It’s easy to get people work against their interests when you can convince them that their caste position of “superiority” was more important than everything else. That is basically the strategy today, although they use code words since being outwardly racist only works for part of one party now.
And yes, that was the tragedy of the 3/5th rule. Enslave African Americans were counted toward giving more power to the very people who were oppressing them. In a sense, it got worse after the 13th Amendment ended slavery. For a short period during Reconstruction, African Americans (both free and freed) voted heavily and things got better for them. Then the black laws in the South, Jim Crow laws, KKK, and other white supremacist-enforced voter suppression eliminated the ability of African Americans to vote, which effectively meant all 5/5th of African Americans were counted toward increasing power to the very people who once again were terrorizing African Americans and eliminating their constitutional rights. Again, not so different from today.
Yes, there were a few leaders in the South that recognized the immorality and bad policy of slavery, but there were negligible in number and mostly silent in the face of the supreme power of the wealthy slaveholding class. There’s also the problem of the disincentive to stop doing something that benefits you/makes you rich. They were seen as “traitors to their class” (something said about FDR as well).
I should caveat the paragraph above. The few who were rethinking slavery were mostly (if not entirely) in the Upper South, where the percentage that enslaved were of the population was smaller. The Deep South were so deeply aligned with slavery (both economically and racial attitude-wise) that there essentially wasn’t anyone with any influence standing up against it.