The Third Emancipation Proclamation
In the summer of 1862, the Union cause seemed to be going nowhere. Two victories in the west made a hitherto unknown general named Ulysses Grant the hero of the moment. But a Confederate army attacked his army at Shiloh, Tennessee, and came close to inflicting a catastrophic defeat. A staggering 23,741 men were killed, wounded, or missing, making it the bloodiest clash ever fought on American soil. In the east, General George McClellan, commanding an even larger Union army, was mired in mud and equally staggering casualties on the Yorktown Peninsula, still a long way from Richmond. Intimidated by General Robert E. Lee’s aggressive tactics, McClellan would soon retreat to Washington with his demoralized battalions.
Horace Greeley sent President Lincoln a letter, which he published on the front page of the New York Tribune and titled “the Prayer of Twenty Millions.” Claiming he spoke for the entire population of the North, Greeley told the president that he was “strangely and disastrously remiss in the discharge of your official and imperative duty.” What was that duty? To do more to free the South’s slaves. “We have fought wolves with the devices of sheep,” Greeley cried. It was time to start fighting “slavery with liberty.”1
Abraham Lincoln’s reply was succinct and candid. “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery.” If he could save the Union without freeing a single slave, he would do it. If he had to free all the slaves first, he would do that. The preservation of the Union was his official duty, as president. It did not in any way modify his “oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere should be free.”2
Behind these words lay a political no-mans-land that Lincoln had been traversing for a year. Four border states with tens of thousands of slaves Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Delaware—had not seceded from the Union. Their politicians repeatedly warned Lincoln that any attack on slavery would turn their voters into Confederates, making the South too strong to defeat. Lincoln’s native state was especially important. “To lose Kentucky,” he told a friend, “is nearly the same as to lose the whole game.”
Meanwhile, Lincoln refused to relinquish his search for a way to end the bloodshed by negotiation. The president invited politicians from these four border states to the White House and spent hours trying to persuade them to accept compensated emancipation to free their slaves. He told them that this policy would persuade other states with large numbers of Unionist voters such as North Carolina and Virginia to accept the same offer and quit the Confederacy. But the president got nowhere with these timid senators and congressmen. All of them hesitated to change what they called their “social arrangements.” Thomas Jefferson’s race war nightmare still infested their souls.3
Elsewhere, several Union generals had improvised emancipation programs on their own authority. General Benjamin F. Butler of Massachusetts, an ex-Democrat and canny lawyer, decided he had no obligation to return slaves who fled to his protection at Fortress Monroe, the seacoast bastion where Captain Robert E. Lee and his bride had encountered Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831. Butler reasoned that slaves of rebel Virginians were now “contraband of war” and their owners had no claim on them. This clever idea became unworkable when a Maryland runaway took shelter in the camp of an Ohio regiment. When the abolitionist-inclined Midwesterners refused to let his pursuers search their camp, a Maryland congressman warned the president that the state might soon abandon the Union.4
Elsewhere two other Union generals declared martial law and freed the blacks in states where they were in command. General John C. Fremont, the losing Republican candidate in 1856, applied this idea to Missouri, creating consternation in nearby slave-owning Kentucky. General David Hunter, from abolitionist-minded northern New York, issued a similar declaration for all slaves in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, even though he commanded only a few offshore islands and bits of their seacoasts.
Lincoln fired the defiant Fremont and declared Hunter’s decree “altogether void.” The president told abolitionist leaning Salmon Chase, the secretary of the Treasury, who favored Hunter’s move, “No commanding general shall do such a thing, upon my responsibility, without consulting me.” In the tradition of George Washington, he was determined to protect his presidential powers from cooption and trivialization.5
The abolitionists in Congress were infuriated. Since the war began, Senator Charles Sumner had been urging fellow senators to press upon Lincoln “the duty of emancipation.” Senators Wade of Ohio and Chandler of Michigan boasted that they were often in the White House until midnight reminding Lincoln of this obligation. They had created a Committee on the Conduct of the War, which interrogated and rebuked generals such as McClellan who they thought insufficiently aggressive on the battlefield. They repeatedly expressed their contempt for West Pointers and their military science, which they considered synonymous with cowardice.6
• • •
Neither Horace Greeley nor Senator Sumner knew that a month before the editor hurled his rebuke at the president, Lincoln had summoned two of his cabinet members to the White House and read to them the draft of a proclamation freeing all the slaves in the seceded states. A week later, he read it to his entire cabinet. Some approved, others were dubious. Secretary of State William Seward warned the president that if he issued it now, it would be regarded as “the last shriek” of an exhausted government. It would be wiser to wait until he could announce it when it was backed by a “military success.”
The words were scarcely out of Seward’s mouth when news of another Union army catastrophe inflicted by General Robert E. Lee reached the White House—the Second Battle of Bull Run. A weary president decided Seward was right and put the proclamation away to hope for better days. That was why there was no mention of it in the president’s response to Horace Greeley.7
Meanwhile, abolitionist attacks on Lincoln grew more ferocious. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher declared that there was not a line in any of Lincoln’s messages that might not have been written by the Czar of Russia, Emperor Louis Napoleon of France, or Jefferson Davis. “Lincoln would like to have God on his side but he must have Kentucky,” sneered another abolitionist. Wendell Phillips called the president a mere “county court advocate” whose antislavery principles were invisible. Among the many abolitionists Lincoln disliked, Phillips was at the top of the list. “I don’t see how God lets him live!” the president once exclaimed to a White House visitor after hearing about one of the Boston aristocrat’s denunciations.8
• • •
Abraham Lincoln was not an overtly religious man. He never joined an established church. But he was a reader of the Bible from boyhood and came to believe that Americans were “an almost chosen people” whose rise held out “a great hope to all the people of the world.” In his first inaugural address, that belief had been the source of his plea to the South to have a “patient confidence” in the eventual wisdom of the people and return to the Union, trusting in God’s guidance.
When Jefferson Davis decided to fire on Fort Sumter and the war began, Lincoln’s relationship with God entered a new dimension. To his friend Noah Brooks, a reporter for the Sacramento Daily Union, he confessed that he was “driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.” As the bloodshed multiplied and the corpses became a towering mountain in his anguished mind, Lincoln repeatedly turned to God, seeking strength to endure the seesaw struggle and wisdom to choose the right path through the slaughter.
Again and again, Lincoln told people he prayed not to get God on his side but to get his presidency on God’s side. He urged people to make this the central theme of their prayers for him. To the end of his life, Congressman James F. Wilson of Iowa remembered the day a delegation of abolitionist clergymen admonished the president to take a more resolute stand on slavery. They warned him that if he did not “do right,” the nation was doomed.
Lincoln’s face, Wilson said, “came aglow like the face of a prophet.” He rose to his full six feet four height and stretched out his arm. “My faith is greater than yours,” he said. “I believe He will compel us to do right in order that He may do these things, not because we desire them, but because they accord with His plans for this nation.”9
During a talk with two other antislavery clergymen, Lincoln urged them to understand that they were part of a movement, which meant they talked mostly to each other. As president, he heard opinions from many sorts of people throughout the nation and “it appears to me the great masses of the country care comparatively little about the Negro.” He urged them to go home and try to bring more people to their views. They could say anything they pleased about him, if it would help, he added wryly.
Abruptly, he became serious. “When the hour comes for dealing with slavery,” he said. “I trust I will be willing to do my duty, though it cost me my life.”10
• • •
Not long after General Lee’s victory at the Second Battle of Bull Run, he invaded the North, hoping to end the war. The Union army met him in a tremendous battle at Antietam, Maryland. On the eve of this clash, Lincoln made a solemn vow to God. If the Union army defeated Lee, he would issue the proclamation. After another bloodletting on a par with Shiloh, Lee retreated to Virginia. The president decided Antietam looked enough like a Union victory to publish the Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862.
Still hoping for a negotiated peace, Lincoln announced he would wait until January 1, 1863, to make the proclamation official. The public reaction in the North was not encouraging. “While commendation in newspapers and by distinguished individuals is all that a vain man could wish,” Lincoln wrote to Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, “the stocks have declined and troops come forward more slowly than ever.”
Worse, the Republican Party took a drubbing in the November midterm elections. Kentucky was carried for the Union using totally desperate tactics. At each polling place, there were detachments of Union troops. When a Democrat arrived to vote, the officer in command warned him that he could not guarantee his safety on his return to his home. Most of the time, the man decided not to vote. Kentucky’s fraudulently elected delegation enabled the Republicans to retain control of the House of Representatives. If the Democrats had won, they would have had the power to cut off funding for the war.11
The South’s reaction to the proclamation was vitriol. “What shall we call him?” raged the Richmond Enquirer. “Coward, assassin, savage, murderer of women and babies? Or shall we consider them all as embodied in the word fiend, and call him Lincoln the Fiend?” The murderous language reinforced Lincoln’s suspicion that doing his duty about slavery might cost him his life. It was also dolorous proof that Thomas Jefferson’s dread of a race war continued to permeate the southern public mind.12
From abroad came better news. England was no longer tilting toward recognition of the Confederacy. The ruling class’s favorite magazine, Punch, portrayed Lincoln in dozens of grotesque and uncomplimentary ways. But the preliminary proclamation had stirred a surge of approval among the middle and lower classes. This was doubly amazing because a shortage of southern cotton had put 500,000 men and women out of work in Britain’s textile mills. The antislavery seed John Woolman had planted was flowering again to rescue his agonized country.13
As January 1 approached, Lincoln made another attempt at a negotiated peace. In his annual message to Congress, the president asked the lawmakers to consider a constitutional amendment that would guarantee compensated emancipation to any state, including those in rebellion, that would agree to abolish slavery gradually by 1900. He added a long, carefully reasoned argument in support of this idea, and closed it with one of his most effective phrases: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.”
The abolitionists exploded in almost insane fury. William Lloyd Garrison declared, “The president is demented—or else a veritable Rip Van Winkle.” His proposal “borders upon hopeless lunacy” and stirred thoughts of impeachment. Wendell Phillips said the president “had no mind whatever” and compared him to a tortoise. “He may be honest [but] nobody cares whether the tortoise is honest or not.” As hatred-inflamed as ever, the abolitionists were blind to the way their rage poisoned Lincoln’s peace proposal for the South.14
• • •
From our distance of a century and a half, there are two clauses in the proclamation that have become hugely important in our evolving comprehension of the Civil War. The first dealt directly with the fear of a race war. And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self defence; and I recommend to them, in all cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages. The slaves’ response to this exhortation suggested that Thomas Jefferson’s race war nightmare was created by the special circumstances of the struggle for freedom in Haiti. Not even in the southern counties where blacks heavily outnumbered whites was there any explosion of the bloodshed that Jefferson had dreaded and John Brown envisioned in his tormented soul.
The second clause was even more important for the future self-respect of the freed slaves. And I further declare and make known, that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed services of the United States to garrison forts, stations and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.
Here Lincoln was reaching back to that early emancipator, George Washington, and his decision to give black Americans the right to fight for the independence of the United States from 1775 to 1783. Thanks to this clause in the proclamation, 200,000 black Americans served in the Union army, displaying heroic courage on some of the war’s bloodiest battlefields.15
• • •
On December 13, another battle cast the darkest shadow yet over the proclamation. Big-bellied Ambrose Burnside of Rhode Island, arguably the worst general of the war, was now in command of the Union army. He attacked Robert E. Lee’s army of 78,500 men, entrenched on the south side of the Rappahannock River at Fredericksburg, Virginia. Burnside ordered his 106,000 men to cross the icy stream and hurl themselves at Lee’s men in a series of suicidal frontal assaults that piled Union dead in heaps at various points along the ten-thousand-yard front. The Union army finally retreated with 12,700 men killed or wounded. In an explosion of frustration they looted and wrecked most of the town of Fredericksburg. It was the most humiliating defeat of the war. Burnside had attacked because the abolitionists in Congress had warned him that he would be hauled before the Committee on the Conduct of the War if he did not become more aggressive.16
• • •
Some people wondered if Lincoln might abandon the Emancipation Proclamation after this catastrophe. Wouldn’t it now seem to be what Secretary of State Seward had warned against—the last cry of a collapsing federal government? If Lincoln confronted this possibility, he mentioned it to no one. He went ahead with the January 1, 1863, announcement, as planned.
On December 31, Lincoln revised the proclamation’s text one more time, working far into the night. The next morning, he sent his handwritten copy over to the State Department for “engrossing” in the heavy type of an official document. A servant brought him his usual light breakfast. As he ate, his wife Mary appeared in the doorway. Three of her Kentucky brothers were fighting for the Confederacy. She had repeatedly tried to convince him not to issue the proclamation. “Well,” she said. “What do you intend doing?”
“I am a man under orders,” the president said. “I cannot do otherwise.”
At 11:15 Mary joined him, and they descended the wide White House staircase to spend the next three hours smiling and shaking hands in the traditional New Year’s Day White House reception for the diplomatic corps, the army’s generals and the navy’s admirals, the judges of the Supreme Court, and other government officials. At noon, the doors were opened to admit a huge crowd of average citizens. Noah Brooks told his newspaper that the president seemed “in fine spirits and cracked an occasional joke with intimate friends.”
That afternoon, Secretary of State Seward and his son Fred arrived with the engraved copy of the proclamation. Lincoln read it carefully one more time and picked up a pen. As he leaned forward to sign it, his hand and then his whole forearm started trembling violently. He put down the pen, rubbed the arm and hand and tried again. The same thing happened. Fearing he would splatter ink on the document, he pushed back his chair.
A wave of dread swept Lincoln’s mind and body. Was this a terrible mistake, as Mary had been telling him? Were these tremors a warning that he was about to perpetrate a disaster? Would the proclamation, coming on the heels of the bloody defeat at Fredericksburg, destroy order and harmony in the North as well as sow additional rage and fear in the South?
As the tremors slowed, Lincoln decided they had been caused by the three hours of handshaking at the White House reception. These sessions always left his hand bruised and his arm muscles stretched to the snapping point. He glanced at the two Sewards, who were staring at him with puzzlement and apprehension on their earnest faces. “I never in my life was more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper,” he said.
These were the words of a man who had achieved this certainty on his knees, in communion with his God. Later Lincoln told a friend that as January 1 approached, he had asked God “to let this cup pass from me.” Clearly he knew he was risking his own life, and he feared until these very last moments that he was risking the survival of the Union. But he had decided that the Union was in equal danger if he did not issue it. The abolitionists in Congress were threatening to throw the country into chaos by refusing further funds for the war. Those final resolute words were spoken not only to the Sewards but to himself, affirming his conviction that this document was God’s intention far more than his own.
The Sewards nodded encouragingly. Lincoln said he hoped his signature would not waver. “They will say I had some compunctions.”
He gazed at the proclamation and said, again more to himself than to his witnesses, “Anyway it is going to be done.” Slowly, carefully, he signed his full name: Abraham Lincoln.
Then he sat back in his chair and laughed briefly—again mostly to himself, banishing the last fragments of fear. “That will do,” he said.
The war had become a struggle for the Union—and a new birth of freedom. Lincoln had rescued the noble side of the abolitionists’ crusade, their hatred of slavery, and separated it from its ruinous side, their hatred of southern white men. That left him free to deal with the defeated South on his terms.17