by H. W. Brands
Even in this hideaway the war intruded. Couriers brought messages and carried messages away. Another distraction was less weighty. An extensive spiderweb filled part of the interstice between one set of the double-paned windows. Eckert had informally enlisted the builders. “Lincoln commented on the web and I told him that my lieutenants would soon report and pay their respects to the president,” he recounted. “Not long after, a big spider appeared at the crossroads and tapped several times on the strands, whereupon five or six others came out from different directions. Then what seemed to be a great confab took place, after which they separated, each on a separate strand of the web.”
The president returned to his writing, yet didn’t appear to accomplish much. “On the first day Lincoln did not cover one sheet of his special writing paper,” Eckert recalled. “When ready to leave, he asked me to take charge of what he had written and not allow anyone to see it.” Eckert said he certainly would.
Lincoln returned the next day, and nearly every day for weeks. “Sometimes he would not write more than a line or two, and once I observed that he had put question marks on the margin of what he had written. He would read over each day all the matter he had previously written and revise it, studying carefully each sentence.”
Eckert’s curiosity rose with each presidential visit. But he resisted the temptation to read Lincoln’s draft, and his curiosity wasn’t assuaged until Lincoln put down his pen with an air of finality. “For the first time he told me that he had been writing an order giving freedom to the slaves in the South, for the purpose of hastening the end of the war,” Eckert said.
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LINCOLN WAS FAR from sure his idea would work. “Things had gone from bad to worse, until I felt that we had reached the end of our rope on the plan of operations we had been pursuing; that we had about played our last card, and must change our tactics or lose the game,” Lincoln later explained to Francis Carpenter, a portrait painter for whom Lincoln was then sitting. “I now determined upon the adoption of the emancipation policy; and without consultation with or the knowledge of the cabinet, I prepared the original draft of the proclamation, and after much anxious thought called a cabinet meeting upon the subject.”
The meeting went about as Lincoln anticipated. “I said to the cabinet that I had resolved upon this step, and had not called them together to seek their advice but to lay the subject matter of a proclamation before them.” He read the proclamation and asked for comments. He heard nothing he hadn’t already thought of—the proclamation might disturb the congressional elections; it should say something about arming the slaves who came to Union lines—until William Seward spoke up. “Mr. President,” said Seward, “I approve of the proclamation, but I question the expediency of its issue at this juncture. The depression of the public mind, consequent upon our repeated reverses, is so great that I fear the effect of so important a step. It may be viewed as the last measure of an exhausted government, a cry for help—the government stretching forth its hands to Ethiopia instead of Ethiopia stretching forth her hands to the government.” Lincoln afterward summarized Seward’s view: “It would be considered our last shriek in the retreat.” Seward recommended holding off until Union forces won an important victory.
“The wisdom of the view of the secretary of state struck me with very great force,” Lincoln recounted. “It was an aspect of the case that in all my thought upon the subject I had entirely overlooked.” The president agreed to put the proclamation aside, awaiting a battlefield turn for the better.
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BUT THINGS GOT WORSE. In the last days of August a Union army under John Pope attempted to regain the honor lost at Bull Run the previous summer, in the same locale. The second Battle of Bull Run proved even more disastrous than the first as the Confederates under Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jackson—now called Stonewall for his stout resistance at Bull Run the year before—routed the Federals and sent them running again.
Lincoln took the news hard. “The President was in deep distress,” wrote Edward Bates, the attorney general, following a cabinet meeting after the battle. “He seemed wrung by the bitterest anguish—said he felt almost ready to hang himself.”
“Things looked darker than ever,” Lincoln himself recalled, according to Francis Carpenter. The president wasn’t sure if he’d ever get the victory he needed to release his emancipation proclamation. Lee followed his victory at Bull Run with a strike into Maryland. Congressional elections were approaching, and Lee hoped, by carrying the war into Union territory and threatening the Union capital, to shake the confidence of Northern voters in Lincoln.
It was a risky move. Union commander George McClellan, whose reluctance to fight had frustrated Lincoln so far, now had no choice. And he had nearly twice as many troops as Lee, with the advantages of interior lines of supply and communication. The battle could go either way, with the war perhaps in the balance.
The contest, fought on the banks of Antietam Creek, proved a bloodbath. The two sides together suffered more than twenty thousand casualties, about equally divided. It was the most savage day in American military history, before or after. Because the invaders required a victory to maintain their momentum, the draw amounted to a defeat, and Lee was forced to head back to Virginia. Lincoln hoped for news that McClellan was pursuing Lee to seal the victory and crush the rebellion.
He meanwhile decided the time had come. “I determined to wait no longer,” he recalled. He made a few final corrections to his draft and regathered the cabinet. He read his proclamation and published it two days later. Citing his authority as president of the United States and, conspicuously, as “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy thereof,” Lincoln reiterated that his primary goal remained the preservation of the Union. He said he would again urge Congress to approve a program for compensated emancipation. He would continue to encourage colonization of American blacks abroad.
And then the crucial part: “On the 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, all persons held as slaves within any state or designated part of state the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and 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.”
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FOR A STATEMENT so eagerly awaited by so many, Lincoln’s proclamation was off-puttingly dry, scarcely befitting the momentous decision it announced. Readers would hardly guess at the hours Lincoln had spent in its drafting.
Yet that dryness hadn’t come easily; aridity was the aim of the effort expended. Lincoln characterized emancipation as a technical matter, a matter of military necessity. He understood that his words freed few slaves at once, for it exempted slaves in places not in rebellion, where his power matched his authority. Even saying as much as he did, in the operative paragraph, came hard. “When I finished reading this paragraph,” he told Francis Carpenter, referring to the pre-proclamation cabinet meeting, “Mr. Seward stopped me and said, ‘I think, Mr. President, that you should insert after the word “recognize,” in that sentence, the words “and maintain.” ’ I replied that I had already fully considered the import of that expression in this connection, but I had not introduced it, because it was not my way to promise what I was not entirely sure that I could perform, and I was not prepared to say that I thought we were exactly able to ‘maintain’ this. But Seward insisted that we ought to take this ground, and the words finally went in.”
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FREDERICK DOUGLASS AT LAST had something to praise Lincoln for. “We shout for joy that we live to record this righteous decree,” he declared. “ ‘Free forever’ oh! long enslaved millions, whose cries have so v
exed the air and sky, suffer on a few more days in sorrow, the hour of your great deliverance draws nigh! oh! ye millions of free and loyal men who have earnestly sought to free your bleeding country from the dreadful ravages of revolution and anarchy, lift up now your voices with joy and thanksgivings for with freedom to the slave will come peace and safety to your country.”
Douglass appreciated the problems ahead. “Opinions will widely differ as to the practical effect of this measure upon the war. All that class at the North who have not lost their affection for slavery will regard the measure as the very worst that could be devised, and as likely to lead to endless mischief. All their plans for the future have been projected with a view to a reconstruction of the American government upon the basis of compromise between slaveholding and non-slaveholding states.” They would urge Lincoln to retract the proclamation or at least ignore its implications.
Douglass hadn’t lost his distrust of Lincoln, but he thought the president would resist such pressure. “Abraham Lincoln may be slow, Abraham Lincoln may desire peace even at the price of leaving our terrible national sore untouched to fester on for generations, but Abraham Lincoln is not the man to reconsider, retract and contradict words and purposes solemnly proclaimed over his official signature.”
Emancipation brought the world to the Union side, Douglass declared. “The effect of this paper upon the disposition of Europe will be great and increasing. It changes the character of the war in European eyes and gives it an important principle as an object, instead of national pride and interest. It recognizes, and declares the real nature of the contest, and places the North on the side of justice and civilization, and the rebels on the side of robbery and barbarism. It will disarm all purpose on the part of European Government to intervene in favor of the rebels and thus cast off at a blow one source of rebel power.”
Whether the proclamation actually abolished slavery depended on two things, Douglass said. “The first is that the slave states shall be in rebellion on and after the first day of January 1863, and the second is we must have the ability to put down that rebellion.” The Confederates could still frustrate emancipation by suspending military operations. Douglass hoped they would not, and didn’t think they would. “The South is thoroughly in earnest and confident. It has staked everything upon the rebellion. Its experience thus far in the field has rather increased its hopes of final success than diminished them. Its armies now hold us at bay at all points, and the war is confined to the border states, slave and free.” This wouldn’t change in the next few months. “Whoever therefore, lives to see the first day of next January, should Abraham Lincoln be then alive and president of the United States, may confidently look in the morning papers for the final proclamation, granting freedom, and freedom forever, to all slaves within the rebel states.”
As to the ability of the Union to defeat the rebellion, Douglass was even more confident, now that the North had right on its side. “We have full power to put down the rebellion. Unless one man is more than a match for four, unless the South breeds braver and better men than the North, unless slavery is more precious than liberty, unless a just cause kindles a feebler enthusiasm than a wicked and villainous one, the men of the loyal states will put down this rebellion and slavery, and all the sooner will they put down that rebellion by coupling slavery with that object. Tenderness towards slavery has been the loyal weakness during the war. Fighting the slaveholders with one hand and holding the slaves with the other has been fairly tried and has failed. We have now inaugurated a wiser and better policy, a policy which is better for the loyal cause than an hundred thousand armed men.”
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LINCOLN’S PROCLAMATION BROUGHT a crowd of celebrants to the White House. They gathered beneath his window and shouted hurrahs for the proclamation and its author. Lincoln had never liked to speak extemporaneously, and he didn’t want to speak now, but the throng wouldn’t leave until he made at least a modest statement. “I appear before you to do little more than acknowledge the courtesy you pay me, and to thank you for it,” he said. “I have not been distinctly informed why it is this occasion you appear to do me this honor, though I suppose it is because of the proclamation.”
Loud applause and shouts confirmed his supposition.
“What I did, I did after very full deliberation, and under a very heavy and solemn sense of responsibility,” Lincoln continued.
More cheers, and shouts of “Good! God bless you!”
“I can only trust in God I have made no mistake.”
“No mistake!…Go ahead, you’re right!”
“I shall make no attempt on this occasion to sustain what I have done or said by any comment,” Lincoln said.
“That’s unnecessary; we understand it!”
“It is now for the country and the world to pass judgment on it, and, maybe, to take action on it.”
“That’s so!”
Lincoln segued to praise the soldiers who waged the battles that made the proclamation possible. “I only ask you, at the conclusion of these few remarks, to give three hearty cheers to all good and brave officers and men who fought those successful battles.”
Three cheers echoed off the walls of the White House and into the city.
Lincoln wished the revelers good night and ducked back inside.
The crowd then marched to the nearby home of Salmon Chase, the treasury secretary, who came out to second their support for the president. “It is the dawn of a new era,” Chase said. “The latest generations will celebrate it. The world will pay homage to the man who has performed it.”
Tremendous applause from the crowd.
Cassius Clay, a Kentucky kinsman of Henry Clay and an ardent supporter of the proclamation, was with Chase that evening. He joined the praise for Lincoln and the proclamation, which he called “the great act which will make Abraham Lincoln immortal among men.” He added, “The issue between liberty and slavery, thanks be to God, has come at last.”
Loud applause from the crowd.
Clay shouted a question: “Does anyone fear the result?”
“No! No!”
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LINCOLN TOOK the hosannas with a grain of salt. “While I hope something from the proclamation, my expectations are not as sanguine as are those of some friends,” he confided to Hannibal Hamlin a short while later. “It is six days old, and while commendation in newspapers and by distinguished individuals is all that a vain man could wish, the stocks”—corporate shares—“have declined, and troops come forward more slowly than ever. This, looked soberly in the face, is not very satisfactory. We have fewer troops in the field at the end of six days than we had at the beginning, the attrition among the old outnumbering the addition by the new. The North responds to the proclamation sufficiently in breath, but breath alone kills no rebels.”
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HE HOPED NOT to have to kill many more rebels. The carnage of Antietam shocked even those who thought they had become inured to what modern weapons could do to mortal flesh. Lincoln appreciated irony, the mischief life plays on human designs; doubtless he noted the irony that increasingly tied him to John Brown. The Kansas slayer and Harpers Ferry raider had embraced violence in the struggle against slavery, while Lincoln had condemned it. Lincoln chose instead the peaceful path of democratic politics. But Lincoln’s path had by now led to slaughter a thousand times greater than anything John Brown ever committed. And unless the South experienced a sudden change of heart, the slaughter would only continue.
Desperate to ease the mayhem, Lincoln once more appealed to Congress to fund his program of compensated emancipation. His annual message in December 1862 reiterated his conviction that the free Union and a slave Confederacy could never coexist. “There is no line, straight or crooked, suitable for a national boundary upon which to divide,” he said. “Trace through, from east to west, upon the line
between the free and slave country, and we shall find a little more than one-third of its length are rivers, easy to be crossed, and populated, or soon to be populated, thickly upon both sides; while nearly all its remaining length are merely surveyors’ lines, over which people may walk back and forth without any consciousness of their presence.” Inhabitants of the heartland of North America, of the valleys of the Mississippi, Ohio and Missouri Rivers, would never allow themselves to be separated from their natural sea outlets, which must happen if the Confederacy survived. “Separate our common country into two nations, as designed by the present rebellion, and every man of this great interior region is thereby cut off.” Suppose the war somehow ended with the Confederacy intact. The peace would not last; the geography of North America would compel a resumption of hostilities. “It demands union and abhors separation,” Lincoln said. “It would ere long force reunion, however much of blood and treasure the separation might have cost.”
Lincoln offered more detail about his proposal than on previous occasions. He recommended that every state be given until January 1, 1900, to abolish slavery. Those that did so before then would be eligible for compensation from the federal government proportional to the number of slaves freed, in amounts to be determined by Congress. Lincoln’s plan exempted slaves freed by “the chances of war” during the current rebellion; their owners would not receive compensation. Meanwhile, Congress would provide new funds for colonizing free blacks on foreign soil.
“Without slavery the rebellion could never have existed; without slavery it could not continue,” Lincoln said. He observed that even on the Union side there was a great diversity of views on slavery and black people. “Some would perpetuate slavery; some would abolish it suddenly and without compensation; some would abolish it gradually and with compensation: some would remove the freed people from us, and some would retain them with us.” He acknowledged that different people would fault different aspects of his plan. Yet the plan had answers to their objections. “The emancipation will be unsatisfactory to the advocates of perpetual slavery, but the length of time should greatly mitigate their dissatisfaction. The time spares both races from the evils of sudden derangement—in fact, from the necessity of any derangement—while most of those whose habitual course of thought will be disturbed by the measure will have passed away before its consummation. They will never see it. Another class will hail the prospect of emancipation, but will deprecate the length of time. They will feel that it gives too little to the now living slaves. But it really gives them much. It saves them from the vagrant destitution which must largely attend immediate emancipation in localities where their numbers are very great, and it gives the inspiring assurance that their posterity shall be free forever.”