I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling [that slavery is wrong]…I understood…that in ordinary course of civil administration this oath even forbade me to practically indulge my primary abstract judgment on the moral question of slavery…I aver that, to this day, I have done no official act in mere deference to my abstract judgment and feeling on slavery.
He not only had not done such an act; he understood that his oath forbade him to do so.
But that oath required him to defend the United States, and when events made necessary extraordinary action in that defense, he chose emancipation by federal decree as an instrument. He might have chosen otherwise. Others would not have made that decision. But as a strong opponent of the monstrous institution, he made the huge moral and intellectual jump from the sort of antislavery efforts he had been proposing all the way to a national immediate emancipation with the force of the Union army behind it. It was one of the central moral decisions of American history.
This is not to say that Lincoln’s appeal to military necessity was in any degree a mere cover for what he wanted to do independently; prevailing militarily over the rebellion was his prime duty, and this action was a strong instrument for that purpose. Lincoln calculated what it would mean to move the slave population from one side of the war to the other, doing the “arithmetic” as he often did, saying the effect could be measured as a physical force, as steam power can be measured.
Lincoln scholar Phillip Paludan has written, in a provocative and illuminating way, about Lincoln’s two great achievements and identities—Savior of the Union and Great Emancipator—which, he wrote, have too often been divided.
Freeing the slaves and saving the Union were linked as one goal, not two optional goals. The Union that Lincoln wanted to save was not a Union where slavery was safe…Slave states understood this; that is why they seceded and why the Union needed saving.
These last two sentences are surely correct and important, but we might qualify the first one: “saving the Union” had to be, for the oath-bound office-holding president, something more than a “goal.” It was now his supreme duty. “Freeing the slaves”—that is, opposing the evil institution of slavery—although indeed for him closely linked in aspiration to the moral essence of the Union that was to be saved, was not a mandatory formal obligation but a profound purpose springing from a deep moral conviction. Bringing these two moral claims into accord would be not the beginning but the triumph of his presidency.
FOREVER FREE
THERE HAD BEEN ONE moment in the preliminary document—repeated when Lincoln pasted it into the final version—when, for all the repetitive formality of the expression, a glint of moral profundity did peep out. It is a phrase that stood in the short draft back on July 22 at the very end, as a climax, but with a subtle defect: the former slaves, Lincoln wrote in that short first draft, “shall then, thenceforward, and forever, be free.” Rewriting this for the preliminary proclamation, Lincoln saw that that little word “be” needed to be relocated. On September 22 the passage read: “All persons held as slaves…shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” That lawyerly threefold coverage, including the first alliteration, lifts itself to the huge word “forever,” which appears in the second alliteration that carries immense meaning—“forever free”—and gives this one phrase a sudden bell-ringing resonance.
The phrase remains in the final proclamation in the pasted-in quotation from the preliminary proclamation, but in the new text Lincoln made two changes, a positive shift in immediacy and a negative shift in permanence. Instead of writing that slaves “shall be” free, he wrote that they “are, and henceforward shall be free.” But he dropped the word “forever,” perhaps because it promised something he was not quite sure at that point he could deliver.
There was one other passage in the September 22 preliminary proclamation that rang some bells for a different reason. Immediately following “forever free,” Lincoln had written: “The Executive Government of the United States will, during the term in office of the present incumbent, recognize such persons as being free, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any effort they may make for their actual freedom.” Lincoln presumably had in mind, in writing this passage, the scandal of the Union army serving as a slave catcher, returning runaways to their “masters,” an outrage now being corrected by the March 1862 act prohibiting the Union army from returning slaves who had escaped into Union lines, and by the Second Confiscation Act, portions of which he pasted into his proclamation.
There would be a particularly consequential editing of this passage. In the cabinet discussion Seward said, according to Chase’s diary, that it might be better to leave out all reference to the act being sustained merely in the current president’s incumbency, and that it might be better to say not only that the government “recognizes” but also that it will maintain the freedom of those herein declared forever free. Lincoln made the change, scratching out lines and entering words above, on the original copy. He added a specification of the role of the armed forces that magnified the unintended effect that the passage was now to have in some quarters. As edited it now read:
The Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.
Eminences in England and France, looking at what these Americans were doing across the water—unsympathetic in the main to the Union, without close awareness of the fugitive slave controversy or the actual American conditions, from their own colonial experiences and ideologies inclined to fear mass insurrections—read something in that passage that Americans, by and large, did not. They seized on this particular passage with simulated fury to insist that Lincoln was proposing that slaves revolt and that the Union army support their insurrection. The army was not to “repress” but to “maintain” “any efforts” the slaves would make for their “actual freedom”: Did that mean a Union-supported servile insurrection?
The most disgraceful of many fierce statements by English and French leaders, worse than most from the slave states themselves, appeared in the London Times: “He [Lincoln] will appeal to the black blood of the African; he will whisper of the pleasures of spoil and of the gratification of yet fiercer instincts; and when blood begins to flow and shrieks come piercing through the darkness, Mr. Lincoln will wait till the rising flames tell that all is consummated, and then he will rub his hands and think that revenge is sweet.”
John Hope Franklin, the distinguished twentieth-century African American historian, would remark: “Few Confederate editors exceeded the London Times in its denunciation of the proclamation as an atrocious measure, hardly worthy of a civilized nation.”
Republicans had lost ground in the 1862 elections, although they retained their majorities, with reduced margins, in Congress. They lost the governor’s seat in New York and lost also in Illinois, New Jersey, and Wisconsin; reaction against emancipation was presumed to be the cause.
Would the president sign the final proclamation on January 1? Losses in the election, congressional criticism, negative stirrings in the army, and disappointing responses from abroad caused some to fear or hope that he would not.
Black Americans, slave and free, awaited the day with tense anticipation. John Hope Franklin observed: “Wherever Negroes were on New Year’s Eve, 1862, there was little time for sleeping!” And on New Year’s Day, as the news spread across the country that Lincoln had signed the proclamation, there were rejoicings that the participants would never forget. As a valuable recent study put it:
However deficient in majesty or grandeur, the president’s words echoed across the land. Abolitionists, black and white, marked the occasion with solemn thanksgiving that the nation had recognized its moral responsibility, that th
e war against slavery had at last been joined, and that human bondage was on the road to extinction. But none could match the slaves’ elation. With unrestrained—indeed, unrestrainable—joy, slaves celebrated the Day of Jubilee. Throughout the South—even in areas exempt from the proclamation—black people welcomed the dawn of a new era.
THE EDICT OF FREEDOM
THE GREAT POINT of the Emancipation Proclamation—the “Edict of Freedom,” as Nicolay and Hay would call it—was that (with all its geographical and legal-temporal limitations) it was national law enforceable by the U.S. armed forces. It was not voluntary, it was not gradual, and it was not left to the states.
The great national moral task here begun was not only to free slaves but also to destroy the evil institution of slavery and to overcome the monstrous race-based social construction upon which it rested and which it fed. And that would not be done—would not be begun—by an emancipation controlled by the states. The sad history after Reconstruction of black codes, white supremacy, Jim Crow, and lynching—the “lost hundred years,” as C. Vann Woodward would call the period from the last civil rights efforts after the Civil War to the civil rights revolution of the 1960s—would show all too plainly what state control of postslavery race relations would mean. Overcoming the “monstrous injustice” (Abraham Lincoln), the “one huge wrong” (Lyndon Johnson), that had been planted in the foundation of the American republic would require national government action.
The final proclamation, signed by Lincoln’s hand on New Year’s Day, had this hugely important departure from the preliminary one, and from Lincoln’s previous efforts: the freedmen were to be received into the U.S. armed services. This was a pivotal, monumental decision whose effect led far beyond its immediate context: henceforth the United States (by the president’s implicit definition) was to be a biracial—a multiracial—society. No one believed that after the freed slaves had faced rebel guns on the nation’s behalf in the Union army they could be returned to slavery or invited to depart.
Critics would say that the Emancipation Proclamation freed no one—that it applied where the Union had no power and did not apply where it did. But it turned the Union armies into armies of liberation wherever they advanced. By its inescapable symbolism it encouraged acts of self-liberation even in areas where the Union army already had control and the proclamation technically did not apply. It meant a great deal more than it said. Its symbolic significance completely outran its technical application. Rarely in history can there have been a document whose moral reach so far exceeded its legal grasp.
The claim that the proclamation freed no one is mistaken in this further regard: it did free one person—Abraham Lincoln. With the proclamation his objectives—saving the Union and ending slavery—implicitly linked but in tension with each other from the start, came now to be explicitly joined. He no longer needed to disguise the strong stuff of emancipation in the club soda of backward-looking Union-saving. Just eighteen days after the signing he could describe the Confederacy’s effort, to the workingmen of Manchester, England, as “an attempt to overthrow this government, which was built upon the foundation of human rights, and to substitute for it one which should rest exclusively on the basis of human slavery.” At Gettysburg he could speak of a “new birth of freedom.” He would be freed to make the decisions of the last two years of his presidency, to recruit black troops, and to defend their role in an eloquent public letter that would guarantee thereby a biracial America; to insist none would be returned to slavery; to seek, when it looked as though he might lose, in August 1864, to increase the number of blacks behind Union lines; to initiate what would become the Thirteenth Amendment and to twist arms to achieve its passage and end American slavery forever.
In the longer run his great obligations would come together in the reverse direction from the proclamation. Saving the Union, as it would prove—winning the war—would lead to freeing the slaves.
It would do more than free the persons then enslaved: it would free the persons who might tomorrow have become slaves; it would free nonslave Americans from the curse of slavery; it would free the nation from the terrible hypocrisy that Lincoln had identified—and hated—at the outset of his great career. It would end the institution of slavery in the land of the free.
WE CANNOT ESCAPE HISTORY
THE ELOQUENCE excluded from the Emancipation Proclamation had been supplied back on December 1 in the annual message, a month before the proclamation. Lincoln had then surprised many both by his most peculiar proposal and by his most eloquent appeal for the end of slavery.
One might have thought that the president’s efforts at compensated state-controlled emancipation had ended when the border states rejected every effort he had made in that direction, and then when the preliminary emancipation proclamation on September 22 announced an immediate uncompensated Confederacy-wide freeing of slaves by presidential decree and military force, leaving behind, one would have thought, all efforts to persuade states voluntarily to accept a gradual plan.
But his annual message read to the Thirty-eighth Congress on December 1 included his most intricate scheme yet for compensated gradual state-run emancipation, including voluntary colonization. It seems a most peculiar effort. The president of the United States went to all the trouble himself to write out in detail an elaborate program, including the specific wording of three amendments to the Constitution, setting forth proposals that had already been multiply rejected. And then he accompanied this gargoyle with some of the most moving and eloquent prose he ever wrote—that any president, any head of state, ever wrote. Since the Emancipation Proclamation has no lift to it, it has been tempting to borrow phrases from this eloquent ending of the message of December 1 and attach them to the content of the prosaic proclamation of January 1.
One could adduce these reasons for Lincoln’s bizarre effort: first, since the Emancipation Proclamation would proclaim slaves free only in rebel territories, this proposal could be a parallel emancipation for border slave states still in the Union; and second, since the proclamation would be a war measure whose future legal standing was dubious, these amendments could settle the long future and be permanent constitutional law.
But it was not going to happen that way. The gist of Lincoln’s proposal had already been rejected, more than once, by the key states—the slave states still in the Union. Slavery in the United States would in time be ended by amending the Constitution, and Lincoln would be the key figure in making it happen, but it would not be done by these amendments.*50
The limitations of the proposal that it recommended would provide an ironical undertow to the moving appeal with which Lincoln ended his 1862 annual message one month before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. After poignant appeals for collaboration (“We can succeed only by concert”) and for realism (“It is not ‘can any of us imagine better?’ but ‘can we all do better?’”), he pulled out all the stops on the organ and moved into one of the great passages in American political writing.
One may evoke two pictures: one of the harassed president at his desk somehow finding not only the time but the intellectual wattage to compose these paragraphs; the other of the clerk of the Senate, John Forney, reading them out across the assembled congressmen.
Forney must have been reading for more than an hour, through some quite forbidding material—data from the census as well as Lincoln’s detailed proposals—because the message was 8,500 words long. Were the congressmen snoozing, bustling around, chatting, slipping in and out of the chamber? Did a couple of alert ones, noticing what was suddenly being intoned over them from the podium, look at each other in wild surmise?
They were the first to hear, if they did hear, some phrases that would ring forever thereafter in American memory.
The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall our selves, and th
en we shall save our country.
Lincoln himself, rising to the occasion, was disenthralling himself exactly of the limitations this very message had displayed.
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We—even we here—hold the power, and bear the responsibility.
Here, because he was not issuing an order but attempting to inspire and persuade, he was able to include a surpassingly eloquent picture of the weight of the decision that rested on them all, and then, in one majestic flight, of the national accomplishment of which he was to be the leader. Giving freedom to the slave assured freedom to the free, the two tied together, both honorable, and joined together they will “nobly save” the best that this nation represents.
In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth.
The national effort to accomplish that noble objective would be initiated not by the dubious effort that this magnificent ending accompanied but by the actions that the man who wrote it would begin to take a month later with the Emancipation Proclamation.
President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman Page 34