LINCOLN THE EMANCIPATOR
LINCOLN’S DETERMINATION to guarantee the future of the American experiment—the “cause” that lay behind his willingness to fight the Civil War—did not significantly change during the course of the conflict. Instead, the war steeled his commitment, even when it seemed that the Confederacy might actually win its “freedom” from the Union.
When the war started, Lincoln assumed that preventing the extension of slavery to the western territories would be enough to ensure the extension of the Northern middle-class society to all the states admitted to the Union in the future. He expected that slavery would continue to exist in the Southern states in the immediate future, even if he hoped it would ultimately disappear. Lincoln remained resistant to the abolitionist cause of granting equal rights to African Americans in the North or the South, but he did hope to move toward eventual freedom for Southern slaves through a policy of compensation for slave owners and voluntary colonization for former slaves. In one proposal aimed at bringing about the ultimate extinction of slavery, he suggested providing cash to slaveholders who would free their slaves. But Lincoln did not expect the freed slaves to move north. He continued to envision Northern society as the home of free white men. Indeed, in 1860, 99 percent of the population of the Northern states was white, and the great majority were firmly opposed to equal rights for Negroes or increasing the African American population in their midst.
The evidence suggests that Lincoln sincerely hoped during the first years of the war that the freed slaves would join with free African Americans from the North to form colonies outside the United States in Central America, the Caribbean, or Africa. But conditions on the ground during the war made Lincoln’s compensation and colonization policies increasingly irrelevant. The idea that the war would be over in a short time was shattered by the failure of the Union armies to win decisive victories in 1861 and 1862. In battle after battle, Confederate troops did more than hold their own. If the idea of abolishing slavery did not seem a viable option before the war broke out, it eventually evolved into a potential tool for winning the war and saving the Union.
Lincoln’s most aggressive generals and Republican majorities in the Congress eventually became open to new ideas to weaken the Southern war effort when slaves began to free themselves by crossing over to Union army lines.
The first important initiative in this direction was taken early in the fighting. On May 23, 1861, little more than a month into the Civil War, three young black slaves, pressed into service by the Confederate armed forces, rowed across the James River in Virginia and asked for asylum on the Union side. The next morning they were summoned before General Benjamin Butler, who commanded the Union army headquartered in Fort Monroe, Virginia. A savvy attorney in peacetime, Butler had been lately reading up on his military law. While the Compromise of 1850 required returning “fugitive slaves” to their Confederate owners, Butler also knew that a commander had a right to seize “enemy property” that was being used for hostile purposes.
Butler decided not to return the three fugitives to their Confederate owners. They would be regarded, he declared, as “contraband of war”—or, as the thousands of refugees who followed came to be known, “contrabands.” Within a week more than forty-five fugitive slaves were in Fort Monroe, with more arriving every day. Many were put to work as laborers in support of the Union army. Butler reported the influx to Lincoln, and within days it became a running story in the Northern press. Weeks after the first fugitives arrived at Fort Monroe, slaves were reported flocking to the Union lines, almost everywhere Union lines existed. When Lincoln and his cabinet met to address Butler’s decision, they decided to do and say nothing. At first, the administration gave little guidance to the generals in the field. Without direction from Washington, some followed Butler’s example. By contrast, commanding General George B. McClellan—a Democrat—adopted the opposite policy.
The debate was decided soon enough. In August 1861, facing a war that seemed to have no immediate end in sight, Congress passed and Lincoln signed a law authorizing the seizure of all property, including slaves, being used in aid of the rebellion. On July 16, 1862, Congress passed a second Confiscation Act that went further, authorizing the confiscation of all property belonging to rebels and freeing all slaves held by disloyal citizens. Like the first confiscation law, however, the new legislation relied on the courts for enforcement. The federal judicial system in the South was by then all but nonexistent.
Lincoln contemplated vetoing this second Confiscation Act as going too far. But his most aggressive generals weighed in, arguing that freed slaves would provide a positive resource for the Union armies, or, at the very least, a drain on home-front slave labor in the Confederacy. Eventually, Lincoln concluded that he should not only sign but implement the law. Ever the effective politician, he overcame the constitutional protection of slavery by asserting that it was now a matter of military necessity to deploy his power as commander in chief of the Union armies to free the slaves owned by the supporters of the rebellion.
Lincoln’s change in political tactics was based on military realities that he could not ignore. At the beginning of the war, there had been little substantial support in the North for the immediate abolition of slavery. Moreover, Lincoln had worried that any action he might take on slavery might cause the border slave states still on the Union side to secede and support the Southern proslavery cause. By the end of 1862, that fear had amounted to nothing, and it had also become clear to most Americans—North and South—that the war would not end quickly. It was also clear that Southern slaves could become a substantial asset in support of the Northern armies. Then and only then did Lincoln decide to emancipate all the slaves “owned” by Southerners in the Confederacy and, following the advice of his generals, encourage them to use the freed slaves to support the Union armies in the field. With one stroke of the pen, President Lincoln used his power as commander in chief of American forces to declare more than 80 percent of all the slaves in the United States “then, thenceforward, and forever free.”
Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy faced an entirely different set of challenges. The Confederacy could not ignore the weakening of the Southern economy and its military effort, as an increasing number of slave owners refused to provide slaves to labor in support of the Confederate armies, while an increasing number of slaves continued to emancipate themselves and offer support to the Union armies.
The idea of emancipation entered the Confederate discussion as a military option, too. One farsighted Confederate general, Patrick Cleburne of the Army of Tennessee, went so far as to write to Jefferson Davis in December 1863: “We are waging war with the enemy in the field and an insurrection in the rear.” He went on to assert that the Confederate cause could not be sustained without the support of its slaves (who constituted more than 40 percent of the Southern population). He urged Davis to do what he had to do to earn the slaves’ loyalty for the Confederacy. This, he argued, could be accomplished only by recognizing the slaves’ own political desires and objectives in the war. “We must bind him to our cause by no doubtful bonds and the only bond sufficient is the hope of freedom. . . . It would be preposterous to expect him to fight against it with any degree of enthusiasm. When we make soldiers of them we must make free men of them beyond all questions.”
Needless to say, Jefferson Davis was not responsive to Cleburne’s advice, at least at that point in the conflict. There was no way that a war waged to preserve a permanent slave society was ready to adopt a Confederate Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.
Facing the beginning of the end of his doomed fight for independence in December 1864, Jefferson Davis did belatedly suggest that slaves should be offered freedom as an incentive to fight in the Confederate army. But by then it was too late—either to act on the suggestion or for such an action to make a difference in the outcome of the war.
Davis may have missed his opportunity to make history, but Abraham Lincoln did not. Nonetheless, Lincoln’s leadership in securing emancipation has been viewed through sharply different lenses by different observers at different points in time. That it was immediately viewed as historic and momentous—and to some, outrageous—cannot be denied. The Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation was regarded in its own time with so much trepidation and outright fear that it provoked a Wall Street panic, Union troop desertion, bellicose foreign condemnation, vast racial unease, and severe political rebuke from voters at the polls later in 1862. After the war Lincoln was so celebrated for and closely identified with the achievement of emancipation that many Americans dubbed him “the Great Emancipator.” But that term is now considered by some historians as politically incorrect, and Lincoln’s reputation as an antislavery leader has been called repeatedly into question. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation is viewed by some scholars not as a revolutionary positive step but as delayed, insufficient, and insincere. No wonder revisionists have been debating Lincoln’s intentions, with particular emphasis on the fact that African Americans did not achieve their true “emancipation” until the era of the civil rights movement a century after Lincoln’s death.
Lincoln’s overriding commitment was to establish once and for all that the American government “of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” He did not waver in the belief that slavery was a moral and economic blight that undermined the essential American promise of government by and for its people. But he did not yet believe that immediate and total abolition of slavery should be presented as a principal object of the war. As Lincoln famously said in a letter to Horace Greeley on August 22, 1862: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.” He went on to explain, “I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.”
Modern historians who apply twenty-first-century mores to a nineteenth-century man are not the only ones who have made it difficult to see Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation within the context of its own time. Lincoln himself is responsible for much of the confusion. He so complicated the announcement of his proclamation with continuing public arguments for compensation and colonization that it is little wonder the public had trouble then—and has continued to have problems ever since—in discerning his true motivations.
Interregnum is the archaic word that is most often applied to the four-month secession winter that separated Lincoln’s November 1860 election from his March 1861 inauguration, one of the most perilous periods in American history. But the Union endured a second equally dangerous interregnum just a year later, between July 12, 1862, the day Lincoln first revealed to a small circle of intimates his plan to emancipate slaves owned by rebel slaveholders in the South, and his announcement of the plan to the public two months later, on September 22.
To fully understand the emancipation interregnum requires us to examine not only Lincoln’s own growing sense of destiny but also his specific public relations strategy.
Lincoln believed that public policy could be successful only if it was in tune with the popular mood. He had emphasized this “central idea” in a speech to fellow Republicans in Chicago in 1856 when he said “our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion, can change the government, practically just so much.” Lincoln returned to this central idea in the initial Lincoln-Douglas debate in 1858 when he said, “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.”
During the emancipation interregnum in the summer of 1862, the public seemed entirely focused on the war. It is not surprising, then, that Lincoln spent little time reminding the public of his economic ideas, however important they remained to him. Americans were preoccupied by concerns about soldiers and battles and were confronted almost daily by arguments from the proponents and opponents of immediate abolition. Indeed, it is surprising that Lincoln found any time and space, as he did in the Gettysburg Address, to remind the public that the underlying objective of the war was, to his mind, an economic promise: to ensure that the unique American “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” with all the promise it held for equal opportunity for all Americans, “shall not perish from the earth.”
Even when public sentiment on a specific issue was not definitively on his side, Lincoln was prepared—and certainly able—to do the necessary work to maintain general public support for his leadership. He contributed an abundant arsenal of personal sensitivity, a remarkable sense of political timing, an undiminished gift for great writing, and, when he believed the occasion called for it, a dazzling command of the press in an era in which most of the nation’s journals were consistently and openly loyal to one political party or the other. However primitive what we might today call the era’s “media platforms,” Lincoln certainly knew the terrain and how to dominate it. And while he tended to plan in solitary, when he was ready to act publicly he knew how to rally Republican politicians, loyal editors, and public opinion to his side.
Lincoln’s bumpy road to emancipation was paved not only by political guile but also by political weakness—the fear of disappointing both liberals and conservatives, abolitionists and proslavery Unionists, Republicans and Democrats, civilians and soldiers, Northerners and Southerners, the thrones and parliaments of Europe, and the Congress and voters of the United States. To make things more difficult, the drama unfolded during a critical election year for Congress in 1862. When Lincoln read his first emancipation draft to his cabinet in July, his advisers urged him to table the initiative until the army could win a morale-boosting victory on the battlefield. Postmaster General Montgomery Blair left no doubt as to why he counseled delay: as Lincoln remembered it, Blair “deprecated the policy, on the ground that it would cost the Administration the fall elections.” Whipsawed by military events and political contingencies, Lincoln believed he had little choice but to send the public mixed messages about his policy, sharing his unannounced plan for emancipation only with those who could help him, even if they did not quite know they had become coconspirators.
Modern critics—indeed, many abolitionists in his own time—condemned Lincoln for waiting as long as he did to act on emancipation. But direct and immediate action was not likely to produce the desired result. Lincoln had good reason to doubt, in the summer of 1862, that he possessed either the public or official support, the military power, or the political opportunity to embark on a new, broad antislavery policy without risking political ruin and, with it, the fall of the Union. Obfuscation became not only a tactic but a life preserver.
That Lincoln believed in the concept of free labor for his entire adult life is beyond dispute. That he acted cautiously on freedom for the slaves once in power is also undeniable. Both predilections were apparent when, on July 12, he had urged border-state senators and congressmen to push for compensated emancipation in the slave states still in the Union. Though Lincoln is known as a master of rhetoric, he frequently chose to present unwelcome policies in a practical and uninspiring lawyerly fashion, to avoid emotional or philosophic arguments that were not likely to be accepted by public opinion. When, for example, one of his most dependable allies in the press, Henry Raymond, editor of the New York Times, fretted that paying for compensated emancipation would bankrupt the country, Lincoln used economic logic, not humanitarian zeal, to win over the rather conservative journalist. “Have you noticed the facts,” he wrote Raymond on March 9, “that less than one half-day’s cost of this war would pay for all [slaves] in Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, Kentucky, and Missouri at the same price?” Here was the language of the lawyer proposing compensated emancipation of all the slaves in the border states with the precision of an accountant, not the enthusiasm of a liberator. “Please look at these things,” he implored Raymond, “and consider whether there should not be another article in the Times.”
Confident that his compensated emancipation policy made economic as well as moral sense, Lincoln summoned the congressional delegations from the slaveholding “border” states still in the Union, plus Tennessee and western Virginia, to the White House on July 12 and read a formal statement pressing the point. “I do not speak of emancipation at once,” he pointed out, “but of a decision at once to emancipate gradually.” Acknowledging—in the form of a warning—the growing power of the forces for freedom, he added, “The pressure, in this direction, is still upon me, and is increasing. By conceding what I now ask, you can relieve me, and much more, can relieve the country, in this important point.”
His appeal fell on profoundly deaf ears. Following a “stormy” caucus on July 12, 1862, the delegates of the “border” slave states still in the Union voted twenty to nine to reject Lincoln’s proposal for compensated emancipation, dismissing it as economically, socially, and militarily unacceptable. Any form of emancipation, the majority insisted, would not shorten the war, as Lincoln argued, but actually lengthen it, since the military would neither support nor enforce it. Not for five months more would Lincoln attempt again to use eloquence of any kind to sway Congress to support compensated emancipation.
General George McClellan, the commanding general of the Army of the Potomac, represented a particularly formidable impediment to the idea of emancipation. Whenever Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner pressed Lincoln on emancipation, the president confided, “I would do it if I were not afraid that half the officers would fling down their arms and four more states would rise.” Now the most prominent of all such officers handed the president, his commander in chief, a peremptory, almost insubordinate letter, proclaiming that “military power should not be allowed to interfere with the relations of servitude” and warning that “a declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our present Armies.” The letter clearly contained the threat that McClellan, a Democrat in politics and already rumored a likely candidate for president in 1864, would use his army only to restore federal authority, not to free slaves.
The very next morning, the president made a bold and deft decision that laid bare his feelings on the matter of freeing slaves. He eliminated McClellan as a potential obstacle to emancipation by appointing Henry Halleck as general in chief of all land armies of the United States, with McClellan now his subordinate. A few days later, on July 13, 1862, Lincoln shared a confidence with Secretary of State William H. Seward and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, which even the inscrutable Seward confessed seemed “momentous.” Describing himself as “earnest in the conviction that something must be done” to counter “the reverses before Richmond, and the formidable power and dimensions of the insurrection,” Lincoln proposed that the time had finally come for “extraordinary measures to preserve the national existence.” It was then, Welles remembered, that Lincoln “first mentioned to Mr. Seward and myself,” and, he believed, “to any one . . .” “the subject of emancipating the slaves by proclamation.” For the record, both Seward and Welles reacted by expressing misgivings, the conservative navy secretary particularly shocked that such a policy could be proposed by a president who “had been prompt and emphatic in denouncing any interference by the General Government” on slavery.
To put this revelation in chronological perspective within a calendar crowded with incident: July 13 was three days after Lincoln’s return from his visit to McClellan, one day after he had appealed to the border-state officials to support compensated emancipation, and one day before they would turn him down. Those who saw Lincoln during those tense days understandably found him, as did his old Illinois friend Senator Orville H. Browning, “weary, care-worn and troubled.”
McClellan remained bogged down on the Virginia peninsula in his ill-fated campaign to take Richmond, and General John Pope was about to lose the Second Battle of Bull Run. But frustration over military failure was not the only force propelling Lincoln forward. He was also taking advantage of a singular opportunity presented to him by lawmakers. An ever more aggressively antislavery Congress had just passed and sent to him for his approval the sweeping new second Confiscation Act, giving military officers the right to seize slave property as they advanced into the Confederacy. Lincoln hesitated about approving the bill. His friend Orville Browning, for one, ominously advised that “it was a violation of the Constitution and ought to be vetoed,” adding that the president’s decision “was to determine whether he was to control the abolitionists and radicals, or whether they were to control him.” But Lincoln decided to take the first step, moving forward in the direction of the abolitionists and the radical Republicans to emancipate the slaves.
On July 17 the pro-administration New York Times advised its readers: “It seems not improbable that the President considers the time near at hand when slavery must go to the wall.” But Lincoln remained inscrutable. That day the exhausted president traveled up to Capitol Hill, as was customary for presidents on the last day of congressional sessions. There he infuriated both conservatives and liberals alike (and further confused the public about his own intentions) by signing the landmark confiscation bill while at the same time submitting a lengthy commentary objecting to what he called the “startling” idea “that congress can free a slave within a state.” The emancipation power remained a privilege that Lincoln intended to reserve exclusively to himself.
Lincoln was in fact preparing to deflect Congress and to move boldly on his own. He would “not conserve slavery much longer,” his secretary John Hay confided to a prominent antislavery activist on July 20. “When next he speaks in relation to this defiant and ungrateful villainy it will be with no uncertain sound.” The very next day, Lincoln prepared to unleash that sound with a force he knew would be heard around the world.
On July 22, 1862, with Congress safely in recess, Lincoln decided to act on his own—just as he had after the Sumter attack in 1861. The president convened a cabinet meeting to announce his intention to invoke his power as commander in chief to free slaves in rebel territory as a military measure. As cabinet members Seward, Stanton, Chase, and the others listened, the president read aloud the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation based almost entirely on the recently signed Confiscation Act. Congress had already laid the groundwork for him, but the next step was entirely Lincoln’s. The draft ended with the clear promise that “as a fit and necessary military measure . . . on the first day of January in the year of Our Lord one thousand, eight hundred and sixty[-]three, all persons held as slaves within any state or states, wherein the constitutional authority of the United States shall not then be practically recognized, submitted to, and maintained, shall then thenceforward, and forever, be free.” Thus was born the Emancipation Proclamation that would, when implemented, free hundreds of thousands of enslaved people years before the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery permanently and everywhere.
Lincoln did not follow custom that day by asking his ministers’ assent. As he remembered it, “I said to the Cabinet that I had resolved upon this step, and had not called them together to ask their advice, but to lay the subject-matter of a proclamation before them.”
July 22, 1862, might have been remembered as the epochal day of commitment to emancipation except for what happened next. Not only did the conservative attorney general, Edward Bates of slaveholding Missouri, object strenuously on legal grounds, but he also brought up the political risk. Even the abolitionist secretary of the treasury, Salmon Chase, objected, declaring that he preferred simply giving generals in the field the power to “organize and arm the slaves” themselves.”
First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation was A. H. Ritchie’s wildly popular 1866 engraving of the 1864 painting by White House artist in residence Francis Bicknell Carpenter. Even though Lincoln actually tabled the proclamation after reading a draft to his cabinet on the day portrayed, July 22, 1862, Carpenter chose this occasion for his picture because he considered it nothing less than the launching of a “new epoch in the history of Liberty.”
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Secretary of State William Seward was wary, too. He warned that so radical a step in the wake of recent military reverses would “be viewed as the last measure of an exhausted government, a cry for help . . . our last shriek, on the retreat.” It was “an aspect of the case,” Lincoln later admitted, that he had “entirely overlooked.” In response, as he later told an artist, “I put the draft of the proclamation aside, as you do your sketch for a picture, waiting for a victory.” Lincoln, in other words, would issue a proclamation only on the heels of a Union victory, when no one could attribute the move to weakness or desperation.
It proved a longer wait than Lincoln had feared in his worst nightmares, with emancipation now hinged irrevocably to a military triumph that might never come. In the short term, Lincoln instead would endure yet another defeat—the unmitigated Union disaster at the Second Battle of Bull Run at the end of August, a setback that might have tempted a less determined liberator to shelve the emancipation initiative altogether. Instead, it propelled Lincoln to continue what had become an elaborate outpouring of deceptive rhetoric. He sought to embolden emancipation expectations among the antislavery abolitionists in his party without igniting potentially fatal opposition from conservative Northern Democrats and, worse, disunion among proslavery border states. That such a balancing act could have succeeded, without collapsing of its own weight, constitutes perhaps the most amazing backstory of all. What Lincoln allowed the public to know and when helped, however fitfully and imperfectly, to prepare the country’s white majority for black freedom, even as it has served since to challenge Lincoln’s reputation as a dedicated emancipator.
Lincoln’s White House secretaries understood that, however “persistently misconstrued” their boss’s words at this time were, they were meant to accomplish but one goal: “to curb and restrain the impatience of zealots from either faction.” Lincoln was acting on his long-term understanding that “with public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.”
The true test, then, was still to come. Lincoln knew he had to take substantial steps to move public sentiment forward without challenging directly the prejudiced view of most white Americans of his time. On August 14, 1862, in one of his first steps to that end, Lincoln invited a “Deputation of Free Negroes” to the White House. All but lost to history now is the fact that no American president had ever before invited a group of African Americans to confer with him officially. As to the substance of the conference, Lincoln launched into a frosty, patronizing lecture to the stunned delegation, conceding that while “your race suffer very greatly . . . many of them by living among us,” he added, “ours suffer from your presence.” Lincoln’s words were harsh and stinging: “In a word we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason at least why we should be separated. . . . The aspiration of men is to enjoy equality with the best when free, but on this broad continent, not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours. Go where you are treated the best. . . . It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”
Lincoln suggested that his well-situated African American visitors, all established free residents of the capital, should “sacrifice something of your present comfort for the purpose of being as grand in that respect as the white people.”
The president said his preferred solution to the problem was still compensation and emancipation together with voluntary colonization to Liberia or perhaps, in a concession that black people might want to “remain within reach of the country of your nativity,” to the Isthmus of Panama. Lincoln persisted that this policy was worth what he called a “try” and offered to “spend some of the money intrusted to me.” He said the administration had a budget of six hundred thousand dollars with which to begin evacuation and relocation, though he acknowledged that political affairs in Central America were admittedly chaotic.
Two weeks earlier, abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass had told an Independence Day audience that Lincoln’s actions to date had been “calculated in a marked and decided way to shield and protect slavery.” Now, Lincoln seemed to be doing just that, and Douglass reacted to the publication of White House lecture with fury. He charged the president with illogically and unfairly using “the language and arguments of an itinerant Colonization lecturer, showing all his inconsistencies, his pride of race and blood, his contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy.” Douglass fumed that Lincoln, with his ill-chosen words, had furnished “a weapon to all the ignorant and base, who need only the countenance of men in authority to commit all kinds of violence and outrage upon the colored people of the country.” As Douglass pointed out, slavery had caused the war, not slaves: “Mr. President, it is not the innocent horse that makes the horse thief, not the traveler’s purse that makes the highway robber, and it is not the presence of the Negro that causes this foul and unnatural war, but the cruel and brutal cupidity of those who wish to possess horses, money and Negroes by means of theft, robbery, and rebellion.”
Historian Eric Foner has aptly pointed out that a “heedless” Lincoln failed to appreciate that his words might fuel a wave of violent racism in the country aimed at African Americans. But for better or for worse, at that moment Lincoln had little interest in what the insignificant African American press, or, for that matter, the small number of free African Americans in the North, thought of his words. That was because those words had been aimed at precisely the audience he had not invited to the White House that day: not free and aspiring blacks but the larger constituency of free and fearful voting whites. While some critics have claimed that Lincoln’s heartless words revealed his continuing personal interest in colonization and his purported racism, we should remember that his primary goal with this lecture was to sway a public that might otherwise be resistant to emancipation.
Lincoln may have drafted an actual emancipation proclamation and read it to his cabinet, but he sincerely believed that, unless he avoided any appearance of advocating equal rights for the soon to be freed blacks, he would lose so much white support by his action in favor of emancipation that his administration, and with it the Union, would fall.
After Lincoln’s cold lecture, Salmon P. Chase spoke for many disappointed abolitionists when he recorded his disillusionment in his diary: “How much better would be a manly protest against prejudice against color!” Excluding profreedom whites—and even long-suffering blacks themselves—from the discussion, Lincoln had directly appealed for support for emancipation to the prejudiced instincts of his larger white constituency in the North.
Lincoln understood that the great majority of his Northern constituency were not willing to live side by side with former slaves and definitely unwilling to grant them equal rights. The free states of the North were not only free of slaves but almost completely free of African Americans. Not only Illinois but a majority of the Northern states had enacted laws that restricted the rights of free Negroes. Differences in social status between whites and blacks were generally considered legitimate—the normal way of life in the North, just as it was in the South.
Lincoln meant for his White House performance at the meeting with the Deputation of Free Negroes to remind Northern whites that he was no friend of black people—that he would not act to secure the potential amalgamation of millions of slaves into white society in the North. Nor did he see the Emancipation Proclamation as an immediate proclamation of equal rights for blacks in the South or in the North. Lincoln tried to persuade the American public that his present and future actions in the days to come would be aimed solely at securing victory in the war and restoration of the Union. The Emancipation Proclamation, after all, had been framed “as a fit and necessary military measure” intended to do just that—and nothing more.
A stain on Lincoln’s record as a liberator? Perhaps. But with fall congressional elections looming, Union sentiment in the North fading in the wake of military defeats, border states now on record as hostile to freedom for their slaves, and the press maddeningly divided on all of the above, Lincoln believed he had no choice. The bitter pill of prejudice, along with the impractical and inhumane concept of colonization, was his continuing choice of emetic for a body politic he believed needed purging in preparation for the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation. That is why, sensing military victory, Lincoln made sure his harsh speech against equal rights for Negroes in the United States did not just leak but poured. There is no question that he wanted this message publicized: he had invited journalists to the White House to record his every word in order to guarantee its wide circulation. He was not disappointed then, even if the episode may disappoint us now.
But victory on the battlefield remained elusive. The following week, with the military situation still murky, Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune struck a counterblow for freedom, putting the administration on the defensive and testing Lincoln’s public relations skills further. In an editorial entitled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions,” Greeley charged that the president had been “strangely and disastrously remiss” on the slavery issue and “unduly influenced” by “fossil politicians” from the border states. Greeley bluntly warned that “all attempts to put down the Rebellion and at the same time uphold its inciting cause,” slavery, “were preposterous and futile.”
In his famous reply, Lincoln subsumed his long-expressed opposition to slavery to his more urgent goal of reunion—or so he wanted it to appear. As he put it:
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.
Lincoln intended to issue the emancipation document exclusively as a military order, to diminish the size of the anticipated backlash from Northern Democrats and border-state loyalists as well as the antifreedom legislators in Congress who had rejected earlier emancipation initiatives. There were reasons for Lincoln to be guardedly hopeful about the success of his public relations strategy. Union general John Pope was in the midst of a major offensive in Virginia, and Lincoln imagined a decisive victory might occur soon so he could finally unsheathe the proclamation.
Union and Confederate armies met at Antietam Creek on Wednesday, September 17, 1862. Federal forces claimed victory when the Confederate army retreated back into Virginia. Lincoln finally had his military victory. Quickly, the president went to work crafting a final proclamation, using the weekend after Antietam to refine his document. On Monday, September 22, he called the cabinet back into session. While Lincoln conceded the continued risk of placing “in greater jeopardy the patriotic element in the border states,” he insisted that there was no turning back. As Gideon Welles remembered, “His mind was fixed. . . . [H]e had made a vow, a covenant, that if God gave us the victory in the approaching battle, he would consider it an indication of Divine will.” Now, Lincoln concluded, “God had decided this question in favor of the slaves.”
In his Annual Message to Congress on December 1, 1862, Lincoln continued his efforts to calm the fears of his Northern white audience by emphasizing his impractical commitment to voluntary colonization. As if speaking beyond Congress to white America, he insisted:
I cannot make it better known than it already is, that I strongly favor colonization. . . . Reduce the supply of black labor, by colonizing the black laborer out of the country, and, by precisely so much, you increase the demand for, and wages of, white labor. . . . But why should emancipation south, send the free people north? People, of any color, seldom run, unless there be something to run from. Heretofore colored people, to some extent, have fled north from bondage; and now, perhaps, from both bondage and destitution. But if gradual emancipation and deportation be adopted, they will have neither to flee from.
Lincoln issued the final Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Continuing his program to treat the proclamation as a necessity of war, the document was couched in his “dry as dust” legal style rather than the commanding emotional rhetoric that we associate with the Gettysburg Address and his other memorable speeches.
For months, Lincoln had waited. By means of a sometimes baffling web of public relations feints, he had made it seem like freedom had finally fallen into the nation’s lap thanks to military victory. After a summer-long onslaught of statements that variously confused, dismayed, or heartened Americans of all political persuasions, official silence and selected revelations had emerged as Abraham Lincoln’s chief weapons in presenting his decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863.
With the formal issuance of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln and his more aggressive generals encouraged the “newly freed slaves” to join the Union armies, first as support personnel and later as actual combatants. With these first steps, Lincoln moved the nation forward to achieve his moral objective of abolishing slavery in the United States and his military objective of obtaining a significant new resource (former African American slaves) to fight for the Union. By the end of the war, there were 166 regiments of black troops enlisted in the Union armies. Records show that they suffered higher casualty rates than their white counterparts.
Throughout the first years of his presidency, Lincoln had maintained distance from the abolitionist wing of the party. During this period, the leaders of the abolitionist movement mounted withering criticisms of his failure to act directly to abolish slavery. In the end, of course, Lincoln made his peace with the abolitionists—and them with him—and ultimately he became the nation’s leading abolitionist. But not quickly, and not without much criticism from their leaders.
The rapprochement took time. Frederick Douglass had only reluctantly supported the Republican ticket in 1860. Like Lincoln, however, Douglass was a political realist. If he could not have immediate change, he certainly was not averse to slow change. Legislative abolition of slavery in Washington, DC, which Lincoln signed into law in 1862, followed by announcement of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation later that year helped heal the breach between the president and the civil rights advocate. “It is true that the President lays down his propositions with many qualifications, some of which to my thinking, are unnecessary, unjust and wholly unwise,” Douglass declared in an 1862 speech in Rochester, but a “blind man can see where the President’s heart is.”
An overjoyed Frederick Douglass exulted at the end of that historic American summer that this “slow, but we hope sure” president had, “while the loyal heart was near breaking with despair, proclaimed and declared . . . Thenceforward and forever free.” “Read the proclamation,” he urged his abolitionist subscribers, “for it is the most important of any to which the President of the United States has ever signed his name.”
After January 1, 1863, the two men met several times in the White House. At Lincoln’s request, Douglass worked on a plan to recruit African Americans for the Union army. Such service, Lincoln believed, would help defeat the Confederacy and ensure that his Emancipation Proclamation would succeed in ending slavery and charting a path for African Americans to join the free labor force in the future. Not quite satisfied, Douglass tried to win equal pay for African American soldiers (a reform Lincoln initially resisted as stubbornly as he had resisted abolition—arguing that the white majority was not ready for such parity).
Later, when Lincoln began to fear that he would lose his quest for a second term and that his Democratic opponent would take office and take action to countermand emancipation, he turned again to Douglass, enlisting him in a plan to spread word of their emancipation to as many newly freed slaves as possible. Here was proof that Lincoln genuinely wanted enslaved people out of bondage and at last part of the free labor force questing for self-improvement. Douglass replied with a detailed memorandum suggesting that the administration set up a mini-army of “twenty or twenty five good men, having the cause at heart.” These sessions convinced Douglass that Lincoln was sincere, a genuine antislavery man after all. Their plan, of course, never had to be implemented. Lincoln won a second term in November 1864, and enforcement of the proclamation continued uninterrupted wherever Union soldiers marched in the South.
The success of the Union armies in the last months of 1864 encouraged Lincoln in his new effort to secure passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The amendment would validate and secure the notable moral achievement of abolishing slavery throughout the United States for all time. Lincoln dedicated himself to the effort, believing this would be an important step to fulfill his dream of an American society released from the moral, political, and economic burden of slavery.
For all his early reluctance, Lincoln was now in the forefront of the struggle to secure the permanent abolition of slavery in the United States. Largely through Lincoln’s efforts, public opinion now tilted in favor of the abolition of slavery. But it was clearly not in favor of equal rights for African Americans in the North as well as the South. And Lincoln chose not to add his voice to support abolitionist efforts to provide equal rights to the newly freed slaves. Ever the believer that public opinion was the ultimate driver of political progress, Lincoln did not challenge directly the supremacist views of the majority of white Americans. Rather, he emphasized that “in giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve.” African Americans were to escape bondage and enter the promised land; their liberation would ensure that a free America would long endure.
A demonstration of how far Lincoln’s reputation had evolved within the abolitionist community arrived on the president’s desk in July 1864 in the form of a handsome commemorative gift from no less a freedom icon than William Lloyd Garrison, the longtime editor of the leading abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator. The gift was, as the presenter proudly described it, “an admirable painting” entitled Watch Night—or, Waiting for the Hour. It showed, Garrison wrote, “a group of negro men, women and children waiting . . . for the midnight hour of December 31, 1862 to pass, and the introduction of that new year which was to make them forever free.” As Garrison proudly said, “It was my advice that it was presented to you as the most fitting person in the world to receive it.”
Lincoln failed to acknowledge the gift with his usual sensitivity. Perhaps Lincoln’s reluctance to adopt the mantle of abolitionist helps explain why it took six months for him to offer thanks for the antislavery picture Garrison had sent him. Was its subject too toxic for him still? We cannot know for sure, but a few months later Lincoln welcomed to the White House the African American abolitionist crusader and one-woman Underground Railroad, Sojourner Truth. Even then, when the “Moses” of her people tried thanking Lincoln for his help in ending slavery, the president inhospitably replied, “I’m not an abolitionist; I wouldn’t free the slaves if I could save the Union in any other way. I’m obliged to do it.”
The president finally responded to the painting after Garrison wrote him again to ask if the gift was ever received. Only then did the embarrassed president dispatch the sole letter he ever wrote to the living symbol of a movement he had not embraced until late in his life. “When I received the spirited and admirable painting ‘Waiting for the Hour,’” he now apologized, “I directed my Secretary not to acknowledge its arrival at once, preferring to make my personal acknowledgment of the thoughtful kindness of the donors; and waiting for some leisure hour, I have committed the discourtesy of not replying at all. I hope you will believe that my thanks though late, are most cordial, and I request that you will convey them to those associated with you in this flattering and generous gift.”
By then Lincoln had in turn extended to his onetime abolitionist adversaries the most important gift of all: a congressional resolution, passed just days before he wrote to Garrison, sending to the states a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery everywhere in the nation. At last, abolition was to be a reality. Demonstrating beyond question that his heart was in the task, Lincoln signed the resolution and marked it “approved”—even though presidential endorsements were not required for constitutional amendments. Lincoln probably did not even mind when the Senate passed another resolution chiding the president for signing the document.
For Lincoln, such minor condemnation was a small price to pay. By then he knew that the abolition of slavery was a transcendent moment that history would remember—and the man who had been so reluctant to embrace the cause for so long wanted his name on it for all to see for all time to come. Lincoln had finally become the abolitionist in chief.
Today, the imposing heroic statues that ring the public gardens alongside Boston Common pay tribute to the abolitionist pioneers who braved scorn and sometimes violence to demand an immediate end to slavery in America. Sculptures of Charles Sumner, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and William Ellery Channing hold pride of place there. Just a few blocks away, at Park Plaza, Boston placed Thomas Ball’s Emancipation Memorial, a replica of the statue of Lincoln Frederick Douglass had dedicated a year earlier in Washington. That day, another abolitionist hero, John Greenleaf Whittier, offered a poem to consecrate the unveiling and cement Lincoln’s reputation for all time as an abolition hero worthy of celebration in the city that had nurtured the movement for so long:
O symbol of God’s will on earth
As it is done above!
Bear witness to the cost and worth
Of justice and love.
Emancipation, a politically audacious 1865 lithograph by J. L. Magee of Philadelphia, shows Lincoln using his Emancipation Proclamation to usher in “freedom to all, both black and white!”—as well as “education to all classes.” Note the background scenes contrasting a slave whipping to school attendance. The print all but illustrated Lincoln’s famous 1862 vow that “in giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free.”
STERN COLLECTION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Frederick Douglass wrote that in all his meetings with Lincoln, “I was impressed with his entire freedom from popular prejudice against the colored race. He was the first great man that I talked to in the United States freely, who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color, and I thought that all the more remarkable because he came from a State where there were black laws” that restricted the rights of “free” African Americans. Douglass concluded that the Southern-born Lincoln seemed devoid of racial prejudice precisely because he had spent his early days in poverty, yearning for advancement, even as Douglass, born a slave, yearned for liberty and advancement. “I account partially for his kindness to me,” Douglass explained, “because of the similarity with which I had fought my way up, we both starting at the lowest round of the ladder.”
Well before Lincoln became an abolitionist, he had preached that the common goal of giving Americans the opportunity to work their way up “the ladder” applied to black as well as white men. Douglass said in an 1876 speech, “Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”
Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom” was to be an economic as well as political liberation for all citizens, both African Americans and white Americans. It was a new essential element in sustaining the exceptionalist middle-class society envisioned by the founding fathers. Lincoln was confident that passage of the Thirteenth Amendment would contribute to the perpetuation of the just, antiaristocratic middle-class society that he expected to emerge from the chaos of the Civil War.