page_title: David Hunter
section_title: General Order No. 11
hierarchical_section_title: David Hunter / Career / American Civil War / General Order No. 11
caption_attribution_description: English: Historical marker at Fort Pulaski, Georgia, US; about General Orders No. 7 for emancipation, which was reversed by President Lincoln. The original cap of the Cockspur Island Lighthouse is seen in the bottom left corner. The marker was erected by the Georgia Historical Society in 2008.
context_page_description: David Hunter was a Union general during the American Civil War. He achieved fame by his unauthorized 1862 order emancipating slaves in three Southern states, for his leadership of United States troops during the Valley Campaigns of 1864, and as the president of the military commission trying the conspirators involved with the assassination of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln.
context_section_description: Hunter was a strong advocate of arming black men as soldiers for the Union cause. After the Battle of Fort Pulaski, he began enlisting black soldiers from the occupied districts of South Carolina and formed the first such Union Army regiment, the 1st South Carolina (African Descent), which he was initially ordered to disband, but eventually got approval from Congress for his action. A second controversy was caused by his issuing an order emancipating the slaves in Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida:
  The three States of Georgia, Florida and South Carolina, comprising the military department of the south, having deliberately declared themselves no longer under the protection of the United States of America, and having taken up arms against the said United States, it becomes a military necessity to declare them under martial law. This was accordingly done on the 25th day of April, 1862. Slavery and martial law in a free country are altogether incompatible; the persons in these three States — Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina— heretofore held as slaves, are therefore declared forever free.
  — Maj. Gen. David Hunter, Department of the South, General Order No. 11, May 9, 1862
  This order was quickly rescinded by President Abraham Lincoln, who was concerned about the political effects that it would have in the border states and who advocated instead a gradual emancipation with compensation for slave holders.  Despite Lincoln's concerns that immediate emancipation in the South might drive some slave-holding Unionists to support the Confederacy, the national mood was quickly moving against slavery, especially within the Army. The president and Congress had already enacted several laws during the war to severely restrict the institution, beginning with the First Confiscation Act in August 1861  and culminating in Lincoln's own Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, taking effect January 1, 1863. Concerned Confederate slave holders had worried since before the war started that its eventual goal would become the abolition of slavery and they reacted strongly to the Union effort to emancipate Confederate slaves. Confederate President Jefferson Davis issued orders to the Confederate army that Hunter was to be considered a "felon to be executed if captured".
caption: Historical marker about General Orders No. 7, erected by the Georgia Historical Society in 2008. Read more on the Georgia Historical Society's website.
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