Lincoln’s Illinois, whose black code set the standard for Northern racism, was equally indignant. Its legislature issued a resolution opposing the proclamation as “unwarranted in military as in civil law; a gigantic usurpation, at once converting the war, professedly... for the vindication of the authority of the constitution, into the crusade for the sudden, unconditional and violent liberation of 3,000,000 slaves.”27 The midwestern soldiers who would fill out Sherman’s army—and Sherman himself—were also largely disinterested or hostile to slaves.28 One western officer in Sherman’s army linked blacks with Indians (especially detested on the Midwest frontier) and declared in a vitriolic speech in Columbia, South Carolina, that the Union existed solely for the white man: “the Indian, as well as the Negro had to be ... exterminated.”29
The Confederacy’s concerns with emancipation focused more on the practical and political than on the moral. Not least of these was the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation on England’s recognition of the Confederate cause. From the start of the war, the British press had shamelessly supported the South and advocated recognition of the Confederacy. With a circulation of sixty-five thousand, the Times of London harshly criticized Lincoln and sympathized with the Southern cotton exporters on whom England’s textile economy depended. But all of these influences were rendered moot by the prospect of emancipation. Writing from London, Henry Brooks Adams gloated: “The Emancipation Proclamation has done more for us here than all our former victories and all our diplomacy. It is creating an almost convulsive reaction in our favor all over this country.”30
European—especially British—commentators recognized the politics of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and resigned themselves to the consequences but remained cynical about the morality of Lincoln’s act. In a caustic editorial, the London Spectator declared: “The [moral] principle is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless loyal to the United States.”31 Other English observers echoed the Spectator, searching the document in vain for any principled antislavery statement that would declare the institution of slavery itself everywhere immoral and unjust.
Obviously African Americans, and slaves in particular, felt the greatest impact of the proclamation.32 For the most part, they determined to see the promise of emancipation rather than its limitations. Frederick Douglass recognized Lincoln’s motives: “In a word, in all that he did, or attempted, he made it manifest that the one great and all commanding object with him was the peace and preservation of the Union, and that this was the motive and mainspring of all his measures.”
Yet at the same time Douglass could not constrain his excitement at the prospect of movement forward toward the all-consuming goal and motive of universal and immediate emancipation. In an address delivered in Rochester, New York, on December 28, 1862, Douglass exulted: “We stand to-day in the presence of a glorious prospect.... It is difficult for us who have toiled so long and hard to believe that this event, so stupendous, so far reaching and glorious is even now at the door.”
Later, he recalled the mood when he first saw the news on the wires: The effect of this announcement was startling beyond description, and the scene was wild and grand. Joy and gladness exhausted all forms of expression from shouts of praise, to sobs and tears. My old friend Rue, a colored preacher, a man of wonderful vocal power, expressed the heartfelt emotion of the hour, when he led all voices in the anthem, “Sound the Loud Timbrel O’er Egypt’s Dark Sea, Jehovah Hath Triumphed, His People Are Free.”33
The African Methodist Episcopal Christian Recorder responded to Lincoln’s proclamation with a blistering jeremiad of its own. It began in classic language: “God has a controversy with this nation. He is chastising us severely, by civil war. We have tried to humble ourselves; have fasted and prayed... but his wrath is poured out still.” Why, the writer continued, “does not his anger subside?” The answer: because limited emancipation such as what Lincoln proposed was not enough. The only means to peace is “Universal Emancipation.” With ongoing violence in view, the editorial continued its jeremiad: “God sometimes so leads men, and so hedges up their way, as to make his will most plain—so plain that their refusal to do it he regards as unpardonable obstinacy, which he beats with many stripes, if he does not avenge it with unquenchable anger.”
The war rages on because peace and slavery cannot coexist. God “makes them incongruous, incompatible.” Then, speaking for God, the editorial concluded: “These are my children, made of the same blood with yourselves, they are no longer to be your slaves. They have served you many generations. They have now attained their majority—to a state of manhood. I demand their freedom.”34
For those African Americans who, for the first time in their New World experience, were slaves no more, the effects of Lincoln’s emancipation were electric. In innumerable ways overt and subtle, they had risked all for freedom and finally saw their Day of Jubilee. With news of the Emancipation Proclamation, New Orleans slaves asked General Nathaniel Banks to permit a day of celebration for January I, when the law went into effect. Their letter expresses the intensity of the moment:We The members of Th union association Desir Th & Respectfully ask of you Th privirliges of Salabrating Th first Day of January th 1863 by a Large procesion on that Day & We Wish to pass th Head quarters of th union officers High in a authority that is if it Suit your approbation & We also Wish to Give a Grand union Dinner on the Second Day of Januay that is if it so pleas you and th profit of th Dinner Will Go To th poor people in the Camp th Colour Woman & children. Your Most Homble obedien servant
J M Marshall, th president of th union association.35
The deferential tone of the letter cannot disguise the ecstasy of the moment for these people and their union.
Though no abolitionist, General Banks did allow former slaves to enjoy their de facto freedom and approved of subsequent celebrations. The observances, he concluded, were wholly salutary:They occupied the streets and the squares the whole day, and not a disorderly act, not an uncivil word was heard; not a white person, as far as I know, received or gave offense, and nothing was witnessed during the day but the most perfect sobriety and order. Orations were delivered in French and English that would have done honor to any assembly.
Banks offered paid employment, in place of unpaid servitude, to all able-bodied former slaves who wished to work and achieve self-sufficiency as well as “education for the young.”
The “experiment” to see if agriculture could exist without slavery proved to be a “complete success.”36 Colonel George Hanks of the Fifteenth Regiment, Corps d’Afrique, issued a formal report to Secretary of War Stanton in which he summarized the results of the experiment in similarly glowing terms:The negroes came in scarred, wounded, and some with iron collars round their necks. I set them at work on abandoned plantations, and on the fortifications. At one time we had 6,500 of them; there was not the slightest difficulty with them. They are more willing to work, and more patient than any set of human beings I ever saw... the negroes willingly accept the condition of labor for their own maintenance, and the musket for their freedom. 37
Despite the capacities of African American freedmen to stand on their own, white Americans posed serious problems, even with emancipation. In a column on “Slavery and the Negro,” a writer for the New York Evangelist pointed out that the challenge of dealing with the “Negro” problem only began with emancipation:It is well therefore, while the public mind is absorbed with the question of slavery, to look ahead to that other question which may soon be upon us, and to consider the magnitude of the work which we have to do—a work which concerns nothing less than the destiny of a whole Race, and which will task all the wisdom and philanthropy of the country for a half century to come.38
That “destiny,” tragically, would not soon be glorious.
CHAPTER 19
LINCOLN, EMANCIPATION, AND TOTAL WAR
How did Lincoln understand his proclamation? Lincoln took a broad view of his const
itutional powers in time of war and saw emancipation in that context. He knew that this idea had been broached before by President John Quincy Adams as a legitimate war measure that could bypass traditional constitutional restraints in the interests of pressing national security.1 Lincoln also appreciated the many practical advantages to be gained by such an act. Preventing England from recognizing the Confederacy was surely one pressing motive in his decision. Maintaining the loyalty or at least the neutrality of the border states was another. But the most important consideration was pragmatic: winning the war.
In fact, Lincoln was no more supportive of slave insurrections than he was of John Brown.2 Both he deemed terrorists attacking noncombatant populations in preemptive acts of war. Lincoln reaffirmed this position in his final proclamation on January 1, 1863, when, in the same codicil, he added: “I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defense.” The opposition of Lincoln, his generals, and his administration to the rhetoric of slave insurrection offers perhaps the strongest confirmation that, contrary to American memory, the Civil War was not at all an abolitionist war, let alone a war for racial equality. Most Northern intellectuals agreed. New York’s Presbyterian pastor William R. Williams asked the rhetorical question: “Do we anticipate or desire the excesses of servile revolt?” His unabashed response: “God forbid! But the very presence of two contending armies, Northern and Southern, will serve as an alarmed police to restrain such excesses, were they otherwise probable.”3
Lincoln was emphatic that his act be seen as a measure of war enacted “by virtue of the power in me vested as commander-in-chief of the army and navy... and as a fit and necessary war measure.” Any other terms would be opposed to the Constitution he was pledged to uphold.4 His proclamation included no pleas for congressional approval or recommendations for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery everywhere. In this sense, his act was more analogous to his orders to blockade the enemy’s coast than it was to England’s emancipation in 1833 or the subsequent constitutional amendments ending slavery in the United States in 1865.5 In 1863 Lincoln’s position coincided with Charles Hodge’s. Limited emancipation was a means to total victory, not a moral end in itself. The moral end remained the Union.
But also like Hodge, Lincoln changed over the last and bloodiest years. Lincoln was an abolitionist at heart in his personal views (“If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong”). He detested the ownership of one human being by another. And with emancipation as a war measure, he could at last bring his personal views more in line with his public executive self. Lincoln was also a pragmatist who wedded emancipation to his other certainty—the resort to total war if necessary to preserve the Constitution and the Union. As a war measure, the Emancipation Proclamation carried the further practical benefit of enlisting black soldiers into Union armies.6 And with black enlistments, Lincoln would never again mention colonization as a solution to the race problem.
Nevertheless, slavery and emancipation did not bring out Lincoln’s rhetorical genius during the war in the way the Union did. Lincoln knew that total war would demand even more blood on the fields and far more suffering in the civilian homesteads, and this realization incarnated in him a growing mystical reverence for the Union as itself something sacred and worthy of sacrificial worship. Lincoln’s sacralized interpretation of the Union’s meaning led to a level of humility not seen in most of the Northern and Southern moralists. Lincoln’s God would not be bound by self-righteous claims to moral superiority by one side or the other. God, in other words, could not be contained in human rhetorical traps. And, almost alone in the war, neither could Lincoln.
Still, Lincoln’s hatred of slavery fell far short of guarantees Garrisonians and black abolitionists demanded on the subject of racial equality. On September 18, 1862, in a meeting with a large delegation of Northern clergymen from Chicago, Lincoln had hidden his intention to issue a proclamation. In response to the clergy’s plea that he transform the war into an abolition war, Lincoln had made plain that whatever he might do or not do about slavery in the Confederate states would be in response not to moral imperatives or personal opinions but to the exigencies of war.7 As reported by The Liberator, Lincoln informed the delegation: “I view the matter [of emancipation] as a practical war measure, to be decided upon according to the advantages or disadvantages it may offer to the suppression of the rebellion.”
In the same spirit, he sent a public letter to Horace Greeley, printed first in the New York Tribune on August 22, 1862, and widely reprinted thereafter:My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.... I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personad wish that all men every where could be free.8
It is important also to remember that his proclamation did not include slaves in the loyal border states. Furthermore, hatred of slavery did not translate into the higher moral imperative of hatred of racism, though all abolitionists recognized it was a necessary starting point. Frederick Douglass recognized this tragic limitation even as he praised emancipation. As long as the Union was the nation’s ultimate priority and not abolition and racial equality, racism would endure:The law and the sword cannot abolish the malignant slaveholding sentiment which has kept the slave system alive in this country during two centuries. Pride of race, prejudice against color, will raise their hateful clamor for oppression of the negro as heretofore. The slave having ceased to be the abject slave of a single master, his enemies will endeavor to make him the slave of society at large.9
Speaking to his white congregation in Plainville, Connecticut, the Reverend Moses Smith issued a bold and parallel judgment on race in the North:[A]s to the black man, he is as really, and I have sometimes believed more terribly, enslaved at the North than at the South. He knows that he is a slave there, and expects a slave’s reward. But here he is tantalized with the name of freedom, but denied its privileges.... Do what he will and be what he will, he is hated everywhere at the North, banished from society, denied often so much as a seat in the cars.... We talk of liberty? Of all galling bondage, this bondage to social feelings, this servitude to caste, this being a “nigger” in society, and “a nigger” at the communion table is probably the most heartless and unrelenting slavery beneath the skies. It may not shackle the body, but it crushes the mind and kills the heart.10
Douglass and Smith saw the future.11
Lincoln could escape the rhetorical trap of the self-righteous jeremiad and see his way to a newly sacralized republic. But he could not escape the culture of racism and white supremacy of which he was a product. Besides favoring colonization of slaves before emancipation, he expressed no abhorrence about the racist laws in his native Illinois, nor condemned their even more racist denunciations of Indians. When, in August, Lincoln convened a delegation of African American leaders to discuss his interests in colonization, he was disappointed at the stridency of their opposition. “This is our country as much as it is yours, and we will not leave it,” an outraged delegate from Philadelphia wrote. 12
In like fashion, the African American bishop Daniel A. Payne wrote a note for the Weekly Anglo-African questioning “the opinions of the government [that] are based upon the ideas, that white men and colored men cannot live together as equals in the same country.”13 To a person the delegation made plain that they were, after all, fully and equally American—a fact that Lincoln’s buoyant but racist nationalism could not embrace. An angry editorial in The Liberator castigated Lincoln’s words and behavior at the August meetin
g: “What could be more undeserved, or what more insulting, than the remark of President Lincoln to the committee whom he was addressing, ‘But for your race among us, there could not be a war... it is better for us both therefore, to be separated.’ ”14
If the Emancipation Proclamation did not render Lincoln the “Great Emancipator” in any immediate sense, what was his motive? Emancipation legitimated—and promoted—an escalation of the war on the battlefields and the Southern home fronts like no other action could do. Just as Southern secession cannot be understood without understanding its symbiotic connection to slavery, neither can Lincoln’s Northern Emancipation Proclamation be understood without understanding its symbiotic connection to a commitment to total war as the only means to preserve the Union. In moral terms, Lincoln repeatedly made it quite clear that he did not need emancipation to fight a just defensive war.15 But in practical terms, emancipation was necessary as a means to total war.
When Democrats (and some Republicans) accused Lincoln of shifting a war for Union into a war for abolition, Lincoln denied the charge, but then, in a telling concession, explained that emancipation was his “lever” for a total war that would engage freed black soldiers. The war, Lincoln explained, was not “for the sole purpose of abolition. It is ... for the sole purpose of restoring the Union. But no human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done.”16
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