by James Oakes
But the forgetting began long before John Eaton sat down to write his memoirs in 1907. It was already under way when Grant appointed him in November of 1862. In the preceding months, as Americans waited for Lincoln to enforce the Second Confiscation Act, the mythology of the Emancipation Proclamation was born. The waiting itself led people to wonder whether Lincoln would issue a proclamation at all, and they began to speculate about what was taking him so long. Already in August of 1862, the Springfield Republican noted the “insinuation . . . so persistently reiterated in some quarters, that the president will not enforce the confiscation-emancipation act.”49 Everything Lincoln said was scrutinized, like tea leaves, for signs of his intention. The suspense built up all through the summer.
Despite the elation with which the opponents of slavery greeted the Preliminary Proclamation, it did not end the anxiety of anticipation. Universal emancipation had still not been proclaimed, and the prospect of another hundred days of waiting quickly overshadowed the immediate impact of Lincoln’s September announcement. During the closing months of 1862 the speculation became more intense than ever. Republicans lost heavily in the November elections. Would that make Lincoln shrink from issuing the final proclamation? “We have every reason to believe that President Lincoln will never issue his Emancipation Proclamation,” one Ohio paper declared shortly after the election returns came in. In December, the Union army suffered a disastrous defeat at Fredericksburg. Would the president have second thoughts about his proclamation? Supporters of emancipation tried to discount the “lingering apprehensions that the policy of Emancipation may not be sternly enforced and persisted in.” By the time Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the feverish anticipation of it, the shear suspense of the wait, had elevated its significance to mythic proportions and begun to erase the memory of the thousands of slaves already emancipated in the Union-occupied areas of the Confederacy.50
The collective memory lapse seems to have begun with the shift to a much more aggressive policy of universal emancipation during the early months of 1862. On March 6, Lincoln sent his special message to Congress, proposing federal expenditures to promote abolition in the Border States. A week later Congress made it a criminal offense for anyone in the U.S. military to enforce the fugitive slave clause. Over the next few months the federal government abolished slavery in Washington, banned it from the western territories, endorsed the slave-trade treaty, required West Virginia to abolish slavery as a condition for admission to the Union, emancipated all the slaves in Union-occupied territory, and authorized the president to proclaim universal emancipation in the seceded states. Unable to stop the antislavery juggernaut, Democrats charged that these policies, both individually and collectively, proved that hatred for slavery was and had always been the driving force of the Republican Party. What the Republicans were doing in the first half of 1862, Democrats charged, is exactly what they had always intended to do. We told you so, Democrats shouted.
But you were wrong when you said so, Republicans answered. A year ago we could never have imagined that an attack on slavery could have proceeded this far. By the middle of 1862, Republicans commonly claimed to be astonished by the extraordinary transformation of the public mind, as well as their own minds, regarding slavery. “Gradually, very gradually, as this contest proceeded,” Robert Dale Owen wrote, he had come to the conclusion that the only way to guarantee the security of the Union was by “the emancipation of negro slaves throughout this continent.” Nor was he alone. With each passing month, Owen noticed, the war was “converting hundreds of thousands of moderate and conservative and peace-loving men” to support for a “General Emancipation.”51 From all across the North—in newspapers and magazines, public speeches and private letters—came similar expressions of astonishment at the dramatic change of heart supposedly taking place among northerners on the subject of emancipation.
Curiously, even those who had been predicting the downfall of slavery since the secession crisis now claimed to have undergone a remarkable conversion. In mid-1862 Benjamin Wade stood up in Congress and declared that universal emancipation had been unimaginable to him a year earlier—even though a year earlier just about every radical Republican had predicted it. Shortly after Lincoln was elected, Salmon Chase declared that the Slave Power had been overthrown, fulfilling the dream of his lifetime. A month later, when the slave states began to secede, Chase bluntly declared that disunion meant “abolition, and abolition through civil and servile war.” Charged with overseeing the occupied areas along the southern Atlantic coast and later the lower Mississippi Valley, Chase had made sure that emancipation accompanied the invading Union forces beginning in late 1861. Yet only six months later, as Congress was putting the finishing touches on its universal emancipation bill, Chase seemingly forgot all that he had recently said and done about slavery. “Until long after Sumter,” he wrote, “I clung to my old ideas of non-interference with Slavery. . . . It was my hope and belief that the rebellion might be suppressed & Slavery left to the free disposition of the States within which it existed.” The states, Chase claimed to have believed, would gradually abolish slavery, “without shock or disturbance or injury, but peacefully and beneficially.” Forgotten were all those secession winter predictions of slavery’s violent and bloody death.52
As they waited impatiently for the president to issue an emancipation proclamation, anxious observers began asking the question, What was taking Lincoln so long? When Horace Greeley took it upon himself to answer that question in his “Prayer of Twenty Millions,” he was trying to explain something fairly specific—a one-month delay, since the passage of the Second Confiscation Act, in the release of the proclamation required to enforce it. To explain the delay, Greeley went back over Lincoln’s year-and-a-half-old presidency and discerned a pattern of reluctance when it came to emancipation: Lincoln should have threatened the rebels with emancipation in his inaugural address. He was “unduly influenced” by the Border States. He had “annulled” Frémont’s proclamation and Hunter’s order while he let stand Halleck’s “unmilitary” and “inhuman” Orders No. 3. Lincoln “seems never to interfere” with soldiers who return escaping slaves to their owners.53
This was the myth of Lincoln the “Reluctant Emancipator.” He took so long to issue the Emancipation Proclamation because he never wanted to issue it, and when he finally did issue it, he did so not for lofty moral reasons, not because slavery was wrong, but because the destruction of slavery had become what Lincoln called a “military necessity.” To this day skeptics recite the same litany Greeley recited, use the same reasoning, and come to the same conclusion. It took twenty months to issue the proclamation because Lincoln, like the North he represented, was reluctant to make emancipation a legitimate goal of the war, and finally did so only when it became clear that there was no other choice.
On September 22, one month after Greeley published his “Prayer of Twenty Millions,” Lincoln issued the orders to “execute the law” and announced that he would publish the Emancipation Proclamation one hundred days later. The Preliminary Proclamation provoked a rush of commentary, including an extraordinary debate among some of the most prominent constitutional scholars in the United States, disagreeing over whether Lincoln had any constitutional authority to free slaves by means of a presidential proclamation. One of the more remarkable commentaries on the Preliminary Proclamation appeared in the November issue of the Atlantic Monthly magazine, written by none other than Ralph Waldo Emerson. Think of Emerson’s essay as another answer to Greeley’s “Prayer of Twenty Millions.” Emerson offered an alternative explanation for the timing of the president’s proclamation, an explanation that reflected glory rather than disgrace on Lincoln. Where Greeley gave us the myth of the Reluctant Emancipator, Emerson gave us the myth of Lincoln the “Great Emancipator.”
“Liberty is a slow fruit,” Emerson wrote near the beginning, gearing up for an explanation of why it took Lincoln some time to issue his proclamation: the fruit of lib
erty does not ripen quickly. The public was not yet ready, Emerson explained, the audience for the proclamation had to be created—“an audience hitherto passive and unconcerned,” now at last so “kindled that they come forward.” Public indifference to slavery had been so ingrained, hostility to emancipation so deep, that Lincoln had to wait, to educate the people up to the justice of the cause, before he could act. And so Lincoln waited, with infinite patience, until the “public sentiment of the country” was at last “unmistakably pronounced.” When we consider “the immense opposition” to emancipation that Lincoln faced, Emerson declared, “one can hardly say the deliberation took too long. Against all timorous counsels he had the courage to seize the moment.” This was greatness, and since it’s Emerson talking, we might as well call it transcendental greatness. Lincoln was so fair-minded, so patient, and yet so modest—that we can only marvel at that “capacity and virtue which Divine Providence has made an instrument of benefit so vast.” In the grand scheme of things, Lincoln really had “no choice” but to issue his proclamation. It was his destiny. He was put here, at this time and in this place, to do what had to be done, to fulfill the momentous task ordained for him. Lincoln, Emerson wrote, “has been permitted to do more for America than any other American man.” And just what was it that Lincoln did? He removed the “blot” of slavery “from our national honor,” lifted the “heavy load . . . of the national heart.” He freed the slaves, but he also redeemed the nation.54
Here were two competing explanations for the timing of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, both of them more or less fully formed even before the Proclamation was issued on January 1, 1863. Greeley’s Lincoln was the Reluctant Emancipator; Emerson’s was the Great Emancipator. They can’t both be right, but they can both be wrong. Though Emerson’s effusions were more ethereal than Greeley’s bill of particulars, both displayed a less-than-firm grip on reality. If Greeley seemed unaware that the Lincoln administration had been emancipating slaves for over a year, Emerson was oblivious to the pressure Lincoln had long felt to move more aggressively against slavery. But these differences of detail hardly matter because the real problem—with both Greeley and Emerson—was the false premise of the question both of them were asking: What took Lincoln so long? That question assumes that emancipation could not begin in earnest until the day Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863. Both answers erased the history of emancipation before the proclamation.
And both fed the emerging mythology that the freedom of all the slaves depended on the singular act of a single man. In demanding that Lincoln “execute the law,” Greeley at least acknowledged that Congress had passed an important statute, but it hardly seemed to matter because Greeley went on to declare that Lincoln should have emancipated all the slaves in the rebel states on the day he was inaugurated, without so much as a nod of approval from Congress. By further insisting that Lincoln had repeatedly and single-handedly thwarted emancipation at every turn, Greeley made Lincoln and Lincoln alone responsible for the success or failure of emancipation. Emerson made the same mistake in reverse. The Emancipation Proclamation was called for in the law Congress had passed in July, and the Preliminary Proclamation included extensive quotations from that law. But in Emerson’s analysis there is no one but Abraham Lincoln, acting out the destiny assigned to him not by Congress but by “Divine Providence.” The myth of the Great Emancipator had no room in it for the Senate Judiciary Committee or the Republican Party, never mind the escaping slaves.
Some of this singular focus on Lincoln was unavoidable. Because emancipation had to be “military emancipation,” because only the commander in chief could legitimately proclaim emancipation in areas not yet occupied by the Union army, the focus of public attention naturally gravitated almost exclusively to the president. This was clear by the end of July in 1862, when people were already telling Lincoln that by proclaiming freedom “throughout the land” he would go down in history as the Great Emancipator. A Pennsylvania editor wrote to Lincoln reassuring him that “a decree of general Emancipation by you now would be hailed as the greatest stroke of policy that any Government ever practiced.”55 “You can give freedom to 4.000.000 of human Beings,” one Illinoisan wrote. “You can make yourself the greatest benefactor, of the human race, that God ever permitted to walk the earth.”56 It did not take much for such sentiments to blossom into the myth that in affixing his signature to the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln freed all the slaves “with the stroke of his pen.”
Myths beget countermyths, and in the months before January 1, 1863, skeptics were already declaring that an emancipation proclamation would be an empty gesture. “The negro can not be emancipated by proclamation,” James Speed wrote his friend Lincoln in late July.57 It was widely understood that the proclamation would extend emancipation into unoccupied areas of the Confederacy where, almost by definition, Union authorities would be helpless to enforce it. The president promises, one New York paper remarked, “that on the first of next January he will issue still another proclamation” freeing the slaves “in territory of which a powerful foe disputes the jurisdiction” of the federal government. That promise, contained in the Preliminary Proclamation, “really amounts to very little,” for how could it possibly free any slaves? “The whole world will laugh at the impotence of this mere Paper Thunder,” declared the New York Express. An emancipation proclamation can have “no practical effects,” the Journal of Commerce predicted. Mr. Lincoln might just as well “order the north wind to blow continuously over the Southern fields.”58 Call this the anti-myth of the Emancipation Proclamation—the claim that it did not free a single slave.
No one contributed more to the mythology of Lincoln’s proclamation than Lincoln himself. “When the war began, three years ago,” he wrote in April of 1864, nobody expected the fighting to last so long. “Neither did any anticipate that domestic slavery would be much affected by the war.” Lincoln repeated the claim on several occasions, most famously in his second inaugural address. Despite the fact that the North and the South had gone to war over slavery, he said, neither “anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease.” This was nonsense. When Lincoln was inaugurated, it was hard to find anyone who did not anticipate that slavery would be very much “affected” by the war. Lincoln’s own actions belie his memory. Within weeks of the South’s capture of Fort Sumter, his cabinet approved the policy of refusing to return fugitive slaves in the seceded states, and by early July, Lincoln was already saying—what he would repeat on several occasions—that slaves who escaped to Union lines would never be returned to slavery. He signed the First Confiscation Act in full awareness of its emancipation clause, and two days later his War Department issued the instructions for implementing it, thus initiating military emancipation on August 8, 1861. Before the year was out, Lincoln was publicly announcing, in his first annual message to Congress, that under the terms of the First Confiscation Act “numerous slaves” had already been “liberated.” In 1862, Lincoln personally ordered the transition to a free labor system in Louisiana, and by means of his Preliminary Proclamation he likewise ordered his generals in the Mississippi Valley to begin emancipating the thousands of slaves already within their lines. All of this and more had happened prior to his issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, yet by 1864 Lincoln had forgotten that history and instead offered his own explanation of why he had taken so long to begin freeing slaves. When General Frémont “attempted military emancipation,” Lincoln wrote more than two years later, “I forbade it.” In fact, he had ordered Frémont to implement the First Confiscation Act. “When, still later, General Hunter attempted military emancipation, I again forbade it.” In fact, he had allowed Hunter’s military emancipation order to stand, revoking only the general’s edict abolishing slavery in three states.59
Lincoln’s memory lapse—like the collective amnesia that overcame Republicans in mid-1862—was likely driven by the partisan at
mosphere of the moment. It was April in 1864. After several contentious months the Republicans had finally settled on a new antislavery policy: a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, which was soon to become the central plank in the party platform. Once again Democrats were shouting, We told you so. This is what Republicans had in mind all along. They will keep the country at war until they get what they always wanted, the complete abolition of slavery. And because he was running for reelection, Lincoln responded the same way his fellow Republicans had been responding for two years: Who could ever have imagined the destruction of slavery four years ago when this war started! This was the moment when Lincoln made his famous, and famously misleading, declaration of passivity. “I claim not to have controlled events,” Lincoln said, “but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”60 Eventually the political conditions that led him to disavow his earlier role in implementing military emancipation would be forgotten, leaving us instead with Lincoln’s own mythic account of why he waited so long to begin freeing slaves.
By taking such retrospective accounts at face value, by continuing to ask what took Lincoln so long, generations of writers have perpetuated the myth that there was no emancipation prior to the Emancipation Proclamation. By formulating such extreme answers—that Lincoln was either the Great Emancipator or the Reluctant Emancipator—the long and complex history of emancipation was reduced to a singular act by a single individual. Extravagant predictions of what an emancipation proclamation would do, paired off against cynical claims that it would do nothing at all, made it all but impossible to evaluate its actual significance. By the time the Emancipation Proclamation was issued on January 1, 1863, it was already difficult to cut through the mythology to understand what it was supposed to do, what it actually did, and what it could not do. Lincoln’s assassination in 1865 only made things worse. He was instantly proclaimed a martyr, not only to the cause of the Union but also to the cause of emancipation. Ever since then we have careered back and forth between extreme interpretations—of Lincoln the Reluctant Emancipator whose proclamation did nothing and of Lincoln the Great Emancipator who freed all the slaves on a single day. One hundred and fifty years after it was issued, we still can’t answer the basic question: What did the Emancipation Proclamation actually do?