Patrolling the streets of New Orleans on the evening of Sept. 1, 1863, a police officer found a small sheaf of handwritten papers. They were hard to read, written mostly in halting, misspelled English. Glancing over a page, the policeman may have seen at first only snatches of apparently incoherent prose: “Carrige Drivers preachers of the Gospel the best Soldiers the united States Can Raise but the tel lies Sometimes and so dos all negro traders the get Drunk and lawiers and merchants.”
Parts of the document, though, were written perfectly. And they sounded familiar. At the top of the same page, the police officer would have read these lines: “the president Shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and navy of the united States” — a verbatim quotation of Article II, Section 2, of the United States Constitution.
The police officer may not have read the document with sufficient care to deduce exactly what it was all about. But he must have lingered long enough over some of the writer’s clearer lines — “we Care nothing a bout the union we heave been in it Slaves over two hundred And fifty years”; “we are the Blackest and the bravest race” — to decide that these eight handwritten pages meant trouble. He turned them over to the chief of police, who forwarded them the next day to a Union general. There’s no evidence the general followed up on the matter in any way. The only consequence of the police officer’s actions is that these pages, instead of withering and blowing away down the “public street” in which he found them, were preserved in military archives.
What almost was lost to history is a rare glimpse into the mind of a former slave living through the Civil War. His identity is unknown — he signed his name “A Colored Man.” In eight laboriously written pages — a mix of memoir, exposé, political theory, quotation and outrage — he reimagined the Constitution from an African-American perspective.
He may have had no more than one or two readers in 1863 (and probably not appreciative ones). For readers today, this remarkable document remains surprisingly relevant. Over the ensuing 150 years, African-American political rights have seen rises and ebbs, from the 14th and 15th Amendments to Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement, from the Voting Rights Act to the demise of the Voting Rights Act this year at the hands of the Supreme Court. The Colored Man understood that who counts in America was essentially a matter of interpretation. Although his writing may have been unpolished, he was a savvy reader and interpreter, and he knew the stakes of interpreting the Constitution were — as they continue to be — very high.
As summer waned in 1863, the Union had some cause for optimism and pride. Victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg had brightened the North’s military prospects. The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued back in January, and the Army had begun enlisting black soldiers. The most celebrated African-American regiment, the 54th Massachusetts, had distinguished itself in battle at Fort Wagner in July. It was becoming clearer and clearer that the nation was going through not just a terrible war but also a watershed in its identity: more than four million black people who had been deprived of every right were going to become members of American society.
How exactly that was going to happen remained unclear, especially in New Orleans. The Emancipation Proclamation did not apply here; the southern parishes of Louisiana were among the places Lincoln exempted because they already were under Union control in late 1862. Planters outside the city still held slaves, yet the Union Army was accepting — and, in some instances, forcing — black men into the ranks. Many African-Americans simply did not know what their status was. As the Colored Man put it: “it is retten that a man can not Serve two masters But it Seems that the Collored population has got two a reble master and a union master . . . one wants us to make Cotton and Sugar And the siell it and Keep the money the union masters wants us to fight the battles under white officers.” Slavery and freedom, in short, seemed jumbled up together. And the Colored Man, mingling his own words with those of the Constitution, had found a mode of writing that matched his subject.
He had to have had a copy of the Constitution laid out on the table where he was writing. Each of the half-dozen times he quotes from it, every word is in place, spelled perfectly. On some occasions, the Colored Man draws on other government documents, but these he must have committed to memory. He paraphrases one of the last clauses of the Emancipation Proclamation: “the Collored man Should Guard Stations Garison forts and mand vessels according to his Compasitys.”
Though deprived, like all enslaved people, of a formal education, the Colored Man had somehow achieved hardscrabble literacy, and he used it to become distinctly well versed in American political culture. Today it’s hard to find people outside the Beltway who carry copies of the Constitution with them and know phrases from executive orders by heart. The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison had called the Constitution a “covenant with death, and an agreement with hell” because its framers sanctioned slavery, but the Colored Man valued it highly.
The first and simplest point the Colored Man seeks to make is that freed people embrace the nation’s legal framework and founding documents. The United States had harbored slavery from the beginning, and in Louisiana the Colored Man saw the federal government abusing black people at worst and botching emancipation at best. But the proper response, he implied, was neither to rebel against the American political system — rebellion is what slaveholders did — nor to leave the country — colonization is what racist white northerners (and even Lincoln himself, for a time) wanted. Carefully recopying the Preamble in his own hand — even adding a little flourish on the “W” — the Colored Man seized the first-person plural, making a demonstration of belonging among “We the People.”
Though committed to the American republic, the Colored Man certainly was not blind to its imperfections. In fact, his dominant theme is hypocrisy. In almost every anecdote he relates about current events in southern Louisiana, a white Unionist or federal official says one thing and then does another: “on the 4 of last July it was Said to the colored population that the were all free and on the 4 of August locked up in Cotton presses like Horses or hogs By reble watchmen.” He describes going to the office of a white Unionist lawyer whom he had heard make speeches about black freedom. Before seeing to the Colored Man’s business, the lawyer wanted to know whether he was “free or Slave.” He replied that he was free, but the lawyer then asked if he was born free. “No Sir Said i.” Feeling the enduring stigma of slavery, he wrote, “we have been made fools of.”
By juxtaposing anecdotes about federal abuses with quotations from the Constitution, the Colored Man broadens these individual stories into a sweeping charge that the nation is not living up to its ideals. Only a few lines separate his careful inscription of the Preamble and his recollection that he “heard a federal officer say after the fall of Port hudson to a Collored Soldier we will not want any more negro Soldiers go home to your master.”
Nevertheless, the Colored Man seems to find that the events of the war were conspiring to unlock the Constitution’s potential as a better, more just document — a true guarantee of African-Americans’ place in society. Despite his outrage over the Union army’s offenses, the Colored Man clearly is pleased about, and proud of, the enlistment of black men, whom he called “the best Soldiers the united States Can Raise.” In fact, he carefully works out the constitutional logic by which military service will translate into citizenship.
After paraphrasing the part of the Emancipation Proclamation that officially welcomed African-American men into the military, the Colored Man pivots to a quotation of the Second Amendment in its entirety. Then, he quotes the tail end of Article VI: “we are to Support the Constitution but no religious test Shall ever be required as a qualification to Any office or public trust.” It seems like a random sequence of excerpts, but it’s not.
The association is fairly plain between colored men garrisoning forts and the “right of the people to keep and bear arms.” If they are shouldering muskets in the Union Army, African-Americans must be among the “people” whose rights are protected by provisions such as the Second Amendment.
How, and why, the Colored Man moves from there to “no religious test” is more obscure. But the two words that are the Colored Man’s own, not pulled from official documents — we are — reveal the thrust of his argument. He substituted those two words for “The senators and representatives before-mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation . . .” Into that company the Colored Man writes himself and everyone he’s writing for. Once enlisted in the army, African-Americans are rights-bearing people, and once they are that, they stand equal to everyone else, senators and judges not excepted.
Seated with pen and paper, writing and thinking his way through the progress of the war and the state of African-American rights in 1863, the Colored Man was also reading and re-reading the Constitution that lay on the table. In it he discerned a certain kind of elasticity, if not the kind Constitutional scholars talk about. What he read he copied, rearranged and saw anew. Frederick Douglass famously taught himself to write by copying a white child’s letters in the margins of a cast-off schoolbook. The Colored Man, too, wrote in margins, teaching himself politics by copying a model. He also grasped a great truth of the American experiment, that the Constitution is a paradox — a rock-solid foundation and a matter for constant reevaluation.
Sources: Statement of A Colored Man, enclosed in Lt. Col. Jas. A. Hopkins to Brig. Gen. James Bowen, 2 September 1863, H-99 1863, Letters Received, ser. 1920, Civil Affairs, Department of the Gulf, Record Group 393 Part I, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C. A transcription appears in Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., “Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War” (New York: New Press, 1992), 453-458.
Christopher Hager, associate professor of English at Trinity College in Hartford, is the author of “Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing.”
Parts of the document, though, were written perfectly. And they sounded familiar. At the top of the same page, the police officer would have read these lines: “the president Shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and navy of the united States” — a verbatim quotation of Article II, Section 2, of the United States Constitution.
The police officer may not have read the document with sufficient care to deduce exactly what it was all about. But he must have lingered long enough over some of the writer’s clearer lines — “we Care nothing a bout the union we heave been in it Slaves over two hundred And fifty years”; “we are the Blackest and the bravest race” — to decide that these eight handwritten pages meant trouble. He turned them over to the chief of police, who forwarded them the next day to a Union general. There’s no evidence the general followed up on the matter in any way. The only consequence of the police officer’s actions is that these pages, instead of withering and blowing away down the “public street” in which he found them, were preserved in military archives.
What almost was lost to history is a rare glimpse into the mind of a former slave living through the Civil War. His identity is unknown — he signed his name “A Colored Man.” In eight laboriously written pages — a mix of memoir, exposé, political theory, quotation and outrage — he reimagined the Constitution from an African-American perspective.
He may have had no more than one or two readers in 1863 (and probably not appreciative ones). For readers today, this remarkable document remains surprisingly relevant. Over the ensuing 150 years, African-American political rights have seen rises and ebbs, from the 14th and 15th Amendments to Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement, from the Voting Rights Act to the demise of the Voting Rights Act this year at the hands of the Supreme Court. The Colored Man understood that who counts in America was essentially a matter of interpretation. Although his writing may have been unpolished, he was a savvy reader and interpreter, and he knew the stakes of interpreting the Constitution were — as they continue to be — very high.
As summer waned in 1863, the Union had some cause for optimism and pride. Victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg had brightened the North’s military prospects. The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued back in January, and the Army had begun enlisting black soldiers. The most celebrated African-American regiment, the 54th Massachusetts, had distinguished itself in battle at Fort Wagner in July. It was becoming clearer and clearer that the nation was going through not just a terrible war but also a watershed in its identity: more than four million black people who had been deprived of every right were going to become members of American society.
How exactly that was going to happen remained unclear, especially in New Orleans. The Emancipation Proclamation did not apply here; the southern parishes of Louisiana were among the places Lincoln exempted because they already were under Union control in late 1862. Planters outside the city still held slaves, yet the Union Army was accepting — and, in some instances, forcing — black men into the ranks. Many African-Americans simply did not know what their status was. As the Colored Man put it: “it is retten that a man can not Serve two masters But it Seems that the Collored population has got two a reble master and a union master . . . one wants us to make Cotton and Sugar And the siell it and Keep the money the union masters wants us to fight the battles under white officers.” Slavery and freedom, in short, seemed jumbled up together. And the Colored Man, mingling his own words with those of the Constitution, had found a mode of writing that matched his subject.
He had to have had a copy of the Constitution laid out on the table where he was writing. Each of the half-dozen times he quotes from it, every word is in place, spelled perfectly. On some occasions, the Colored Man draws on other government documents, but these he must have committed to memory. He paraphrases one of the last clauses of the Emancipation Proclamation: “the Collored man Should Guard Stations Garison forts and mand vessels according to his Compasitys.”
Though deprived, like all enslaved people, of a formal education, the Colored Man had somehow achieved hardscrabble literacy, and he used it to become distinctly well versed in American political culture. Today it’s hard to find people outside the Beltway who carry copies of the Constitution with them and know phrases from executive orders by heart. The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison had called the Constitution a “covenant with death, and an agreement with hell” because its framers sanctioned slavery, but the Colored Man valued it highly.
The first and simplest point the Colored Man seeks to make is that freed people embrace the nation’s legal framework and founding documents. The United States had harbored slavery from the beginning, and in Louisiana the Colored Man saw the federal government abusing black people at worst and botching emancipation at best. But the proper response, he implied, was neither to rebel against the American political system — rebellion is what slaveholders did — nor to leave the country — colonization is what racist white northerners (and even Lincoln himself, for a time) wanted. Carefully recopying the Preamble in his own hand — even adding a little flourish on the “W” — the Colored Man seized the first-person plural, making a demonstration of belonging among “We the People.”
Though committed to the American republic, the Colored Man certainly was not blind to its imperfections. In fact, his dominant theme is hypocrisy. In almost every anecdote he relates about current events in southern Louisiana, a white Unionist or federal official says one thing and then does another: “on the 4 of last July it was Said to the colored population that the were all free and on the 4 of August locked up in Cotton presses like Horses or hogs By reble watchmen.” He describes going to the office of a white Unionist lawyer whom he had heard make speeches about black freedom. Before seeing to the Colored Man’s business, the lawyer wanted to know whether he was “free or Slave.” He replied that he was free, but the lawyer then asked if he was born free. “No Sir Said i.” Feeling the enduring stigma of slavery, he wrote, “we have been made fools of.”
By juxtaposing anecdotes about federal abuses with quotations from the Constitution, the Colored Man broadens these individual stories into a sweeping charge that the nation is not living up to its ideals. Only a few lines separate his careful inscription of the Preamble and his recollection that he “heard a federal officer say after the fall of Port hudson to a Collored Soldier we will not want any more negro Soldiers go home to your master.”
Nevertheless, the Colored Man seems to find that the events of the war were conspiring to unlock the Constitution’s potential as a better, more just document — a true guarantee of African-Americans’ place in society. Despite his outrage over the Union army’s offenses, the Colored Man clearly is pleased about, and proud of, the enlistment of black men, whom he called “the best Soldiers the united States Can Raise.” In fact, he carefully works out the constitutional logic by which military service will translate into citizenship.
After paraphrasing the part of the Emancipation Proclamation that officially welcomed African-American men into the military, the Colored Man pivots to a quotation of the Second Amendment in its entirety. Then, he quotes the tail end of Article VI: “we are to Support the Constitution but no religious test Shall ever be required as a qualification to Any office or public trust.” It seems like a random sequence of excerpts, but it’s not.
The association is fairly plain between colored men garrisoning forts and the “right of the people to keep and bear arms.” If they are shouldering muskets in the Union Army, African-Americans must be among the “people” whose rights are protected by provisions such as the Second Amendment.
How, and why, the Colored Man moves from there to “no religious test” is more obscure. But the two words that are the Colored Man’s own, not pulled from official documents — we are — reveal the thrust of his argument. He substituted those two words for “The senators and representatives before-mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation . . .” Into that company the Colored Man writes himself and everyone he’s writing for. Once enlisted in the army, African-Americans are rights-bearing people, and once they are that, they stand equal to everyone else, senators and judges not excepted.
Seated with pen and paper, writing and thinking his way through the progress of the war and the state of African-American rights in 1863, the Colored Man was also reading and re-reading the Constitution that lay on the table. In it he discerned a certain kind of elasticity, if not the kind Constitutional scholars talk about. What he read he copied, rearranged and saw anew. Frederick Douglass famously taught himself to write by copying a white child’s letters in the margins of a cast-off schoolbook. The Colored Man, too, wrote in margins, teaching himself politics by copying a model. He also grasped a great truth of the American experiment, that the Constitution is a paradox — a rock-solid foundation and a matter for constant reevaluation.
Sources: Statement of A Colored Man, enclosed in Lt. Col. Jas. A. Hopkins to Brig. Gen. James Bowen, 2 September 1863, H-99 1863, Letters Received, ser. 1920, Civil Affairs, Department of the Gulf, Record Group 393 Part I, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C. A transcription appears in Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., “Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War” (New York: New Press, 1992), 453-458.
Christopher Hager, associate professor of English at Trinity College in Hartford, is the author of “Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing.”
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