“I think it is best to let slavery be where it is…”

Autograph letter signed by C.M. Fisher, Union soldier, aboard the Steamer Baltic en route to Fortress Monroe, 21 October 1861. Four pages, octavo, written on a vividly illustrated patriotic letterhead depicting two Union soldiers waving American flags.

In this revealing letter to his wife, Fisher records both his impressions of the South and his unvarnished views on race and labor as the Union Army pressed deeper into Virginia in the opening months of the Civil War. His words offer a striking, if deeply prejudiced, glimpse into the mentality of a northern soldier who simultaneously fought to preserve the Union while espousing sentiments that echoed pro-slavery and colonizationist arguments.

Fisher contrasts enslaved African Americans with both free Blacks and impoverished whites, remarking, “there is one thing perhaps you don’t know and that is that the slaves are a great deal better clothed and look a good deal better than the free n----rs. The poor white man here is in a bad state he can’t do anything he is about the same as a free n----r they have to work for about 25 cents a day.” His observations extend to a conversation with a local farmer who owned no slaves but relied on hired labor. The farmer, Fisher records, “hires n----rs to do his work and he says they are a lazy indolent set and furthermore he says that a man from the north that works for a living will do more in a day and follow it right up than any three n-----rs.”

The letter reaches its most revealing point when Fisher articulates his own position on slavery and race: “I think it is best to let slavery be where it is or rather to transport all the n-----rs to Africa I don’t like a n----r they are not my style.”

Such words, penned by a Union soldier in the fall of 1861, represent the complex and often contradictory spectrum of opinion within the northern ranks. While the Union cause would ultimately result in the destruction of slavery, Fisher’s letter demonstrates the persistence of racial prejudice and the popularity of colonizationist rhetoric that sought to resolve the “problem” of slavery by removal rather than emancipation.

[Civil War, Union, Confederate][African Americana, African American History, Black History, Slavery, Enslavement, Abolition, Emancipation]  [Manuscripts, Documents, Letters, Ephemera, Signatures, Autographs]