by James Oakes
PROCLAMATIONS PROSAIC AND POSTPONED
In the spring of 1862, those closest to Lincoln noticed that, like most Republicans, he was coming to the conclusion that federal antislavery policy would have to become much more aggressive. In late May, as Congress was debating the bill that would become the Second Confiscation Act, Secretary Stanton assured Senator Charles Sumner that “a decree of Emancipation would be issued within two months.”2 In June, Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase sensed that although Lincoln’s “mind is not finally decided,” the president recognized that the “contingency” of a general emancipation was rapidly becoming a “necessity.”3 Lincoln was hardly alone. During late spring and early summer of 1862, Republicans everywhere were declaring themselves converts to universal emancipation.
On July 11, the House of Representatives approved the joint committee report of the final version of the Second Confiscation Act, freeing the slaves of all rebels in the seceded states pending a proclamation by the president. On July 12, the Senate adopted the same report. The next day, during a carriage ride on the way to the funeral of Stanton’s son, Lincoln told two other cabinet members—Gideon Welles and William Seward—that he would issue the proclamation called for in the bill. “It was on this occasion and on this ride,” Welles recalled some years later, that Lincoln “first mentioned to Mr. Seward and myself the subject of emancipating slaves by Proclamation.”4 It was in many ways a momentous announcement. “I scarcely know what to make of it,” Welles wrote to his wife that evening.5
Yet if Welles and Seward appreciated the implications of what Lincoln told them, they could hardly have been surprised. Certainly the president’s reasoning would have been familiar to both of them. Lincoln had “come to the conclusion,” he said, that a proclamation “was a military necessity absolutely essential for the salvation of the Union, that we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.”6 At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, on the floor of Congress, most Republicans were saying the same thing. Moreover, during the preceding months of congressional debate, the only serious division among Republicans regarding the prospective emancipation provision of the Second Confiscation Act—and it wasn’t all that serious—was whether it should require a presidential proclamation within sixty days of passage or whether the president should be given more discretion about when to issue it. It scarcely occurred to Republican lawmakers that Lincoln would sign the law and then not issue the proclamation. There was never any reason to doubt that Lincoln would do so.
Years later, after the war was over, the carriage ride to the funeral entered into the folklore of the Emancipation Proclamation, along with several other belated recollections by less reliable witnesses who maintained that Lincoln had told them even earlier that he had decided to issue it. Some claimed that Lincoln showed them his earliest draft of the proclamation, and still others remembered being in the room when he drafted it. These dubious recollections often suggest a Pauline-style conversion—a sudden, “momentous decision” by Lincoln to “free the slaves”—that nobody at the time seemed to notice.7 In fact, Lincoln had long supported the emancipation of slaves escaping to Union lines, and he was hardly alone in concluding that a general emancipation was necessary to suppress the rebellion. If there was a decisive moment, it was determined by Congress. When Lincoln signed the Second Confiscation Act on July 17, he would surely issue the proclamation shortly thereafter, but he didn’t.
In July of 1862, Congress went out of session the way it usually goes out of session, with a flurry of legislation requiring presidential signatures and authorizations. There was nothing new about passing laws that would be activated by presidential proclamations. They were often required for emergencies when Congress was in recess, so it was hardly surprising that during the Civil War several congressional statutes required presidential proclamations before they could take effect. After the loss of Fort Sumter, Lincoln borrowed the wording of the 1792 Militia Act, which authorized the president to issue a proclamation calling for troops if they were needed to suppress a domestic insurrection. In June of 1862, a month before Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act, Republicans enacted a law allowing the seizure of real estate in areas where the rebellion made it impossible for federal authorities to collect direct taxes. It would take effect as soon as the president “by his proclamation, shall declare in what States and parts of States said insurrection exists.” Lincoln issued the proclamation a few weeks later. Shortly thereafter, the Senate passed the West Virginia bill requiring a presidential proclamation to certify when the new state met the congressional requirement for gradual abolition and could therefore be admitted to the Union. The First Confiscation Act required a presidential proclamation to determine which areas were in rebellion and were thereby subject to the law’s provisions. By the time Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act, it must have seemed fairly ordinary to link emancipation to a presidential proclamation.8
On July 21, a few days after Congress adjourned, Lincoln arrived at the next cabinet meeting with a stack of proclamations and authorizations implementing the laws that Congress had enacted the previous week in the closing days of the session. Most of them concerned the shift to a more aggressive policy of “hard war” against the Confederacy, and universal emancipation was part of that shift. The cabinet discussions continued into the next day, at which time Lincoln read aloud his first draft of an emancipation proclamation. It was a mere two paragraphs. First Lincoln cited Section 6 of the Second Confiscation Act, which required a proclamation warning the rebels of the consequences of their continued insurrection. The second paragraph reiterated the two antislavery policies Republicans had developed over the previous year: federal compensation for loyal states that implemented gradual emancipation, and immediate, uncompensated military emancipation in the disloyal states. By yoking the two policies together in a single paragraph, Lincoln was once again using the threat of military emancipation to encourage abolition by the states, but in this case the threat was aimed at the seceded states rather than the Border States. End your rebellion and return to the Union, Lincoln was suggesting, and you might still be able to abolish slavery gradually, with compensation and federal subsidies for voluntary colonization. When Congress comes back into session at the end of the year, Lincoln vowed, he would urge it to pass a law funding his compensation proposal. This was the first of many indications that Lincoln did not expect the seceded states to return to the Union unless they abolished slavery. As for the states still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, Lincoln’s draft declared that “all persons held as slaves . . . shall then, and thenceforward, and forever, be free.”9 Once again compensation was offered as an inducement to loyal states that abolished slavery gradually on their own, whereas immediate and uncompensated military emancipation would be imposed on disloyal states. To all appearances, then, Lincoln was fully prepared to proclaim the emancipation of all slaves in rebel states when he came to the cabinet meeting on July 21.
Although no one in the cabinet objected in principle to the new emancipation policy, there was a good deal of discussion about the details. Only Secretary of War Stanton supported Lincoln without reservation. Attorney General Edward Bates endorsed the proclamation but wanted emancipation tied to compulsory colonization, a proposal Lincoln quickly and predictably rejected. Some wondered whether a presidential proclamation was the best way to implement the new policy, at least at that moment. Montgomery Blair, the postmaster general, proclaimed himself a supporter of emancipation but thought it inexpedient to issue the proclamation at that time. Navy Secretary Gideon Welles likewise approved of the policy, endorsed Lincoln’s draft, and supported its immediate promulgation, but he was skeptical of its military rationale; he doubted emancipation would end the rebellion more quickly. “Something more than a Proclamation will be necessary,” Welles explained, because it was just as likely to “make opponents of some who are now friends,” particularly in the Border States. Chase gave his “cordial support” to the new emancipat
ion policy but thought that, rather than one all-encompassing presidential proclamation, individual generals should issue proclamations as they occupied new areas of the South. Emancipation “could be much better and more quietly accomplished,” Chase explained, by “directing the Commanders of Departments to proclaim emancipation within their districts as soon as practical.”10
None of these qualifications deterred the president, but William Seward’s did. The secretary of state was an unwavering opponent of slavery and an ardent supporter of emancipation, but he was so convinced that the destruction of slavery was inevitable that he saw no reason to issue a superfluous proclamation saying so—at least not in July of 1862. The Union army had only recently been humiliated by the failure of General McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign to achieve its objective: the capture of the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. Release the proclamation now, Seward warned, and it will seem like an act of desperation. Better to wait for a Union victory so that the proclamation appears more like an expression of triumph. “I approve the measure,” Lincoln later recalled Seward telling him, but “I suggest, sir, that you postpone its issue, until you can give it to the country supported by military success.” Lincoln was persuaded. “The wisdom of the view of the Secretary of State struck me with great force,” Lincoln recalled. “The result was that I put the proclamation aside.”11 It turned out to be a fateful decision.
WAITING FOR THE PROCLAMATION
Even before he signed the Second Confiscation Act on July 17, Lincoln was being pressured to proclaim universal emancipation based on his war powers alone. More and more northerners were coming to the conclusion that only the complete destruction of slavery would end the rebellion. Protestant congregations and synods mobilized to urge the president’s endorsement of universal emancipation in the spring of 1862. Let “liberty be proclaimed throughout the land,” their petitions and resolutions declared, “to all the inhabitants thereof.” Freedom throughout the land had become a common theme among antislavery Christians. A Methodist minister in Pennsylvania forwarded a “Petition for emancipation” to President Lincoln, urging him to exercise his power as commander in chief to “proclaim ‘liberty through all the land.’ ” In June a Quaker petition arrived at the White House urging Lincoln “not to allow the present golden opportunity to pass without decreeing the entire abolition of slavery throughout the land.” Calls for presidential decrees and proclamations were pouring into the White House even before Congress authorized the president to free the slaves of rebels.12
The Lincoln legend tells of a president who waited patiently for public opinion to catch up with him. In fact, as soon as Lincoln signed the Second Confiscation Act, he was bombarded with calls to issue the proclamation immediately. When the announcement failed to emerge from the cabinet meeting of July 22, newspapers published misleading reports claiming that Seward and Blair objected so strenuously to emancipation that they dissuaded the president from issuing it. Only a day after the cabinet met, the radical reformer Robert Dale Owen wrote to Lincoln warning him that in times of national emergency “it may be as dangerous to disappoint, as to conciliate, public opinion. And I confess my fears for the result, if decisive measures are much longer delayed.” Warning that “every day’s delay” strengthens the rebels, one group after another began petitioning the president “to act in his capacity as Commander in Chief” by issuing “the Proclamation of Emancipation.” By the middle of August, Sydney Howard Gay, the managing editor of the influential New York Tribune, explained to Lincoln that there were many people in the North “who are anxiously awaiting that movement on your part which they believe will end the rebellion by removing its cause.” The pressure on the president was mounting.13
Gay’s letter may have been prompted by reports appearing in that day’s papers of a meeting Lincoln had held the day before with a delegation of black leaders from Washington. This was not the first time Lincoln had met with black leaders, but it was an extraordinary encounter all the same. Hoping to build support for the voluntary emigration of freed slaves, Lincoln asked his commissioner of colonization, the Reverend James Mitchell, to arrange for a group of black leaders from the District area to meet with him in the White House on August 14, 1862.
Lincoln’s behavior was shocking. Normally a good listener, on this occasion he instead read his guests a high-handed statement that was insulting in both its tone and its substance. He claimed that “a broader difference” separated blacks from whites “than exists between almost any other two races,” though he did not specify what those differences were. Lincoln also claimed that both blacks and whites “suffer” from each other’s presence. To be sure, slavery was “the greatest wrong inflicted on any people,” Lincoln admitted, but look at the “present condition” of the country, he added. “[O]ur white men cutting each other’s throats” over slavery. “But for your race among us,” Lincoln claimed, “there could not be war.” It sounded as if Lincoln was blaming the war not on slavery but on blacks. “It is better for us both,” he argued, “to be separated.” That was how Lincoln set up his most sustained argument for voluntary colonization.14
At that moment Lincoln was actively pursuing plans to establish a colony—Chiriquí—in Central America for expatriated African Americans. Although the Liberian president had recently visited Lincoln and suggested that his country could absorb several hundred thousand American blacks, Lincoln believed a colony in Central America or the Caribbean was more practical. He hoped Chiriquí would serve that purpose. It had a tropical climate that he believed was naturally attractive to blacks, and it was endowed with natural resources—“very rich coal mines”—that could ensure their future prosperity and “self-reliance.” In such a colony, blacks would be treated as “the equals of the best.”15 Given the reluctance of so many African Americans to emigrate, however, Lincoln was asking his guests to set an example. As the most intelligent and accomplished members of their community, they could get the colony off and running by leading the exodus.
There was something calculated, not to say demagogic, about Lincoln’s performance. In many ways his behavior was out of character. Black leaders who met with Lincoln at other times came away feeling that he had treated them as his equals and had respected what they had to say even when they disagreed. But on this occasion Lincoln’s attitude was preachy; there was little or no dialogue, and he seemed uninterested in discovering the views of his guests. In the past Lincoln had had little to say about race, but when he raised the topic, he often dismissed, even ridiculed, the supposed racial differences between whites and blacks. At this meeting, though, he claimed the “differences”—whatever they were—were vast and unbridgeable. Both the nature and the timing of the meeting suggest that Lincoln had another agenda besides the overt one of persuading a handful of accomplished blacks to lead the way on voluntary emigration. If the president seemed to be talking past his guests, it may be because he was. He had invited a reporter into the room to record a transcript of his remarks—something Lincoln never did—thus making sure they would be published in the newspapers the next day. Why? Possibly to appease the contingent of western racists in the Republican Party. Possibly because Lincoln was still trying to persuade the Border States and war Democrats to at least tolerate the emancipation policy he was soon to announce. For those people a strong statement of support for colonization—especially if framed as a condescending lecture to a group of black leaders—might make emancipation more palatable. It would be a mistake to say that Lincoln’s meeting with the black delegation was “purely” or “merely” strategic—he really did believe that the voluntary emigration of blacks was the best thing for everybody—but it would be equally mistaken to ignore the strong element of political calculation that haunted the meeting.
Whatever his motives for ensuring that his remarks to the black delegation were widely publicized, Lincoln succeeded only in heightening the speculation as to whether he intended to issue an emancipation proclamation. No doubt Lincoln�
��s proposal tapped into currents of support for emigration among African Americans, but most black leaders reacted with outrage at news of the meeting.16 No one was more upset than Frederick Douglass, who had been waiting more impatiently than most for Lincoln to issue an emancipation proclamation. Douglass wrote that the president’s address to the delegation of blacks “leaves us less ground to hope for anti-slavery action at his hands than any of his previous utterances.”17
Less than a week later, Douglass’s suspicions mounted when he read the exchange between Lincoln and Horace Greeley, the influential publisher of the arch-Republican New York Tribune. Waiting for the proclamation that had yet to be issued, Greeley had exploded in frustration on August 20 with a lengthy public appeal called “The Prayer of Twenty Millions.” The title was meant to suggest that the entire northern population, for which Greeley presumed to speak, was on the edge of its seat waiting for Lincoln to make his move. The people were exasperated by the president’s refusal to “EXECUTE THE LAWS,” Greeley declared. Lincoln was “strangely and disastrously remiss” in failing to implement “the emancipating provisions of the new Confiscation Act.”18 Greeley then launched into a protracted series of inferences suggesting that Lincoln’s four-week delay was part of a broader pattern of reluctance to emancipate.