President Abraham Lincoln Appoints “Outlaw” John W. Phelps a Brigadier General

This led to Jefferson Davis proclaiming him an outlaw, in the first such proclamation Davis made

Following his 1836 graduation from the U. S. Military Academy, John W. Phelps was given command of an artillery regiment and ordered to Florida Territory to take part in the Seminole War. He later served throughout the Mexican War under Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott. In the late 1850s, Phelps was a member of the Utah Expedition. That expedition, the largest U.S. military exercise between the Mexican and Civil Wars, was sent to Utah to suppress a possible revolt from the state’s large Mormon population. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Phelps, an abolitionist, quickly sought service, and in this document President Lincoln appointed him a brigadier general.

Document signed, as President, Washington, August 17, 1861, an ornate, vignetted commission, with an eagle, cannons and flags, naming Phelps “Brigadier General of Volunteers”, and specifying he shall “rank as such from the 17th of May”.

In November 1861, Phelps was transferred to the Department of the Gulf which was led by Major General Benjamin Butler. His regiment supported Commodore David Farragut’s fleet in forcing open the lower Mississippi River in April 1862. They then participated in the taking of Forts Jackson and St. Philip, Louisiana, and were instrumental in the capture of New Orleans, the largest city of the Confederacy, on May 1, 1862.

Phelps was soon stationed seven miles outside New Orleans at Camp Parapet, which quickly became a refuge for fugitive slaves. Not knowing what to do with so many Negroes, Butler at first returned the runaway slaves to their masters. But still the contrabands came, and Butler ceased returning them. Phelps, however, believed that he knew exactly what to do with these Negroes. After large numbers of them had arrived, on his own authority, Phelps organized the black men into three regiments to serve in the Union Army with his command, drilled them daily, and asked General Butler to supply them with 3,000 muskets and 225 swords. He was the first Union general to take this type of action. Butler refused and ordered Phelps to enlist the fugitives in manual work, such as cutting down trees around the camp; and instead of furnishing guns, Butler ordered his quartermaster to send axes and tents for the fugitive slaves. But Phelps flatly refused to employ the blacks as mere laborers, as that would cause him to be viewed as their slave-driver, and he “having no qualification that way.” He remained adamant in pressing the U. S. military into using former slaves as soldiers, not as unskilled labor.

After Butler failed to act, Phelps resigned in disgust on August 21, 1862. That same day the Confederate government declared Phelps an outlaw for his actions, with Jefferson Davis accusing him of having “organized and armed Negro slaves for military service against their masters, citizens of the Confederacy.” This was the first outlaw proclamation Davis made, and it caught President Lincoln’s attention. Butler refused to accept Phelps’ resignation, but Phelps returned his commission to the President, who would not let the matter rest there.

Thanks to the efforts of Phelps and others, and the course of the war in late 1862, President Lincoln’s thinking changed. On January 1, 1863, he issued his Emancipation Proclamation freeing Southern slaves, but he also made known his intention to enlist those freedmen in the U.S. military. The Federal government adopted a policy of organizing regiments of United States Colored Troops. Two years later in the spring of 1865, 175,000 black men were serving in the U. S. Army.

Lincoln had not forgotten Phelps and offered him a Major General’s commission. But to prove that he had been right to advocate enlisting and arming former slaves, Phelps wanted the commission backdated to the day of his resignation the prior year, and the President could not agree. So Phelps did not return to the service. Yet he had made his mark.