LINCOLN AND THE PROCLAMATION

...There may be some truth in this...

...At the time and afterward, critics said the Proclamation really freed few if any slaves...

...Early in 1862 he proposed to Congress a plan of his own...

...Grateful Negroes gave thanks to Lincoln and to God...

...Pray tell us," one of them wrote to the President, "is our right to a home in this country less than your own...

...In all my interviews with Mr...

...Lincoln never had spoken as an abolitionist, always had feared the consequences of sudden emancipation, and finally had been pushed, against his will, to the point of issuing his famous decree...

...It already had them, potentially, among the large body of middle-class Englishmen opposed to slavery, but these people could get up little enthusiasm for the Union cause so long as it was not also an anti-slavery cause...

...But there is a double irony involved...

...Historically, then, the Emancipation Proclamation is highly important as a symbol, the symbol of a turning in the life of Lincoln himself and in the life of the nation...

...It is important not as an end but as a beginning, not because of what, in itself, it accomplished, but because of the end to which it led, and to which it is still leading...

...From then on, the image of the Great Emancipator grew—the image of the kindly, careworn man sitting at his desk and, with a few strokes of the Presidential pen, striking the shackles from millions of bondsmen...

...He hesitated because, among other things, he doubted that either the President or the Congress had constitutional power to act...

...Congress indicated its willingness to go along, but few Negro leaders approved...

...My paramount object," he said, "is to save the Union, and is riot either to save or to destroy slavery...

...Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln . . . do order and declare that all persons held as slaves . . . are, and henceforward shall be, free...

...In it he had little to say about the forthcoming proclamation but much to say about his earlier plan...

...He justified it as a war measure, one coming within his constitutional powers as commander-in-chief of the Army and the Navy...

...On September 22, Lincoln issued his preliminary proclamation, which warned of a final one to come the next January 1, unless the rebels should give up their rebellion before that time...

...Indispensable though they are, laws and constitutional amendments cannot, by themselves, confer full freedom upon a people—as we now know only too well...

...Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history," he said...

...After two years, when the war was drawing to a close, Lincoln estimated that some 200,000 slaves had gained their freedom in consequence of his proclamation...

...A war against slavery would not only punish rebels but also suppress rebellion...

...In his first inaugural address, Lincoln repeated his desire to secure the rights of slaveowners to their property at home...

...In his reply to Greeley's "prayer," he re-emphasized his "personal wish that all men everywhere could be free...

...Containment meant eventual extinction, for slavery had to expand in order to survive...

...Lincoln set an example which, if more Americans had followed it, would have made emancipation more meaningful than it was...

...This provided for the liberation of slaves belonging to anyone who supported the rebellion...

...Lincoln persisted with it, but Republicans increased their demands for immediate and forthright action...

...Strangely enough, Lincoln deserves his fame as the Great Emancipator, and his Proclamation is rightly remembered as a conspicuous milestone on the long road from slavery to freedom...

...True, like most members of his Party, he had been a restrictionist and not an abolitionist...

...An emancipation proclamation would serve military as well as political and diplomatic ends...

...If, somehow, the loyalty and the labor of colored men could be transferred, even in small part, from the Confederacy to the Union, this might bring nearer the day of ultimate victory for the North...

...They did not assert that all slaves, everywhere, "are, and henceforward shall be, free," but only those slaves in areas still actively rebellious...

...To put the plan into operation, Lincoln needed the approval of Congress, the Negro community, and one or more of the slave states...

...It has been suggested that the preliminary proclamation was intended at least partly as a stalling device...

...Lincoln," "The Lincoln Nobody Knows," and "Last Full Measure," which won the Bancroft Prize in 1956...

...It sounded like a legal document...

...In this regard, too, Lincoln made his contribution...

...Already the Radical Republicans in Congress had been putting their anti-slavery spirit into law...

...The supposition is that, having put off his anti-slavery critics for a couple of months, Lincoln could use those months for bringing Congress and the country to accept his own plan of gradual, compensated emancipation, with the resettlement of freedmen outside the country...

...In the light of all this, it might seem ironic to celebrate, a hundred years later, either the Proclamation or its author...

...And yet, in the pre-war debates about the territories, the future of the institution in the states was definitely at stake...

...Otherwise, it might seem like a desperation move, a "last shriek" of the retreat...

...Moreover, the document itself, upon examination, turns out to be extremely cautious and restrictive in its wording...

...There were no such moving passages in the Proclamation that he finally signed, on January 1. This Was no ringing call to freedom...

...The Radicals in Congress were clamoring for action not only to liberate the slaves but also to enlist them, and the free Negroes too, as Union troops...

...I now do no more," he wrote in 1855, "than oppose the extension of slavery...

...Once the fighting had begun, Lincoln soon became convinced that, sooner or later, slavery would be eliminated "by mere friction and abrasion —by the mere incidents of war...

...But there was, and is, a quite different view of the event...

...And to make certain they would not be, he moved ahead to the position of advocating that the Constitution be amended so as to prohibit slavery outright...

...Nor did he do much for the Negroes in the North, already free...

...In 1860, when he was being talked of as a Presidential contender, he emphasized that he and other Republicans proposed only that slavery be contained...

...He said that Negroes in America would not be really free so long as they were kept down by the "foul spirit of caste," the spirit of race prejudice...

...Its terms, in themselves, were as uninspiring as its tone...

...But he refused to consider an amendment for dividing the territories between slave land and free soil...

...Lincoln himself doubted the constitutionality of his edict, except as a temporary war measure...

...It was through his efforts that the Thirteenth Amendment, which throughout the United States finally brought about the end of man as property, was approved by Congress and submitted for ratification in 1865...

...After his inauguration and the beginning of the Civil War, Lincoln was slow to change his stand Other Republicans, who previously had agreed with him, now began to think that war canceled old pledges and called for new policies...

...Certainly the record shows that RICHARD N. CURRENT, one of the nation's foremost authorities on "the Civil War period, is co-author with J. G. Randall of "Lincoln the President," and the author of "Mr...

...Meanwhile he pondered alternative ways of dealing with slavery—ways that would neither offend the border slaveholders nor infringe upon states rights nor, for that matter, leave a legacy of racial friction...

...And the slaves, once freed, would, with their consent, be shipped abroad...

...On September 17, at Antietam, General McClellan checked the invading forces of General R. E. Lee, who withdrew from Maryland back into Virginia...

...Foreign policy as well as domestic politics seemed to require an anti-slavery step...

...That is, the states themselves would pass emancipation laws and would reimburse slaveowners, but the Federal government would assist by granting long-term loans to the states...

...Thinking thus, Republicans throughout the North applauded when, in the summer of 1861, the flamboyant General John C. Fremont issued his own emancipation proclamation for the state of Missouri...

...And even those 200,000 could not be sure that their freedom would be permanent...

...These people, he insisted, must not be re-enslaved...

...When he read it to his cabinet, Secretary of State William H. Seward suggested that he delay making it public until better news had come from the battlefronts...

...Lincoln signed the measure reluctantly and enforced it less than half-heartedly...

...So did the pro-slavery leaders of the South...

...One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended," he explained, "while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended...

...Like Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay, and other men of good will before him, Lincoln shuddered at the prospect of freeing Negroes and then mixing them with a mass of implacably hostile whites...

...His final Emancipation Proclamation, whatever he may have intended by it, made him more than ever determined that slavery must end with the war...

...For instance, slaves flocked into the lines of General U. S. Grant, in Tennessee...

...In the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley published his "prayer of twenty millions" (there were, roughly, twenty million people in the North) that the President enforce the laws already on the statute books, particularly the Second Confiscation Act, and thus free the slaves...

...As a Presidential candidate, he ran on a platform that called for free soil in the West but not for freedom in the South...

...It was a glorious, radiant day, a day of deliverance, for many thousands throughout the land...

...It trembled a bit as he took up the ceremonial gold pen in his office to sign the Proclamation...

...That was only about one in twenty of all the slaves, who at the start of the war had numbered nearly four million...

...Lincoln replied that he would free all, or some, or none of them, as the preservation of the Union might require...

...That was owing to his, and their, regard for the Constitution, which gave the Federal government no power to deal with slavery within the states...

...If it were not wrong, nothing was wrong, he thought...

...And none of the border states gave serious consideration to the scheme...

...During the 1850's, as Lincoln rose to prominence, he urged that slavery be kept out of the Western territories but not that it be eliminated in the Southern states...

...He now had a commitment, to himself, to the nation, and to those Negroes emancipated under his edict...

...So Lincoln turned to drafting a proclamation...

...As President-elect, when Congress was considering compromises to check secession and avert a war, he approved amending the Constitution to guarantee slavery where it already existed...

...It was intended primarily to achieve certain results in war, diplomacy, and politics...

...Even more, he feared the effect upon the slaveholding border states, especially Kentucky...

...Premature steps toward forcible emancipation might drive these states out of the Union and into the Confederacy...

...He went on to say that if and when emancipation came, the slaves should be released by "slow degrees," and immediately deported...

...For all he cared (in 1860-1861), the Thirteenth Amendment might have been one protecting the practice of involuntary servitude rather than a law, as it was in fact to be, prohibiting it...

...The war was going badly for the Union, what with General George B. McClellan's failure to take Richmond, in June and July, and General John Pope's disastrous defeat at the second battle of Bull Run, in August...

...Before the summer's end in 1862 it had begun to appear that, in order to save the Union, some gesture of emancipation might be necessary...

...In doing so, he reached one of his high peaks of eloquence...

...They said it was not even intended to free many of them...

...For three hours the President shook hands with them, and by the time the last one had gone, his right hand was tired and swollen...

...The abolitionist Henry Wilson realized this in 1865...

...To forestall this, the Union needed influential friends in England...

...Both times the anti-slavery people were disappointed, for both times the President overruled the generals...

...One of them was the escaped slave and abolitionist orator, Frederick Douglass...

...and Grant, who previously had been anti-abolition, now decided he must hold and use the fugitives, for military reasons, rather than deal with them as private property to be returned to their owners...

...Born in the slave state of Kentucky, long resident in the Jim Crow state of Illinois, he freed himself from the conditioning of his past...

...The question of slavery in the South, as distinguished from slavery in the West, was thus removed from national politics...

...The last of them would not leave their bondage—and their homeland—until about 1900...

...Hence secession, and hence the Civil War...

...Lincoln," Douglass afterwards wrote, "I was impressed with his entire freedom from popular prejudice against the colored race...

...The British government was beginning to consider intervention to end the American war, and such intervention would probably mean independence for the Confederacy...

...it was about as emotional as a bill of sale...

...On December 1, just one month before the final proclamation was due, Lincoln presented his annual message to Congress...

...need for positive anti-slavery measures than he might otherwise have been...

...They rejoiced again when, the following spring, General David Hunter did the same for Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina...

...He now pleaded, again in vain, for a constitutional amendment to authorize it...

...In the summer of 1862 they passed the Second Confiscation Act...

...I am not, nor ever have been," he declared in 1858, in one of his debates with Stephen A. Douglas, "in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races...

...Lincoln knew this...

...He treated them, without self-consciousness, as friends and human beings...

...Contemporaries commented, both at home and abroad, that Lincoln was declaring the slaves free only in the places where, at the moment, he had no real power to free them...

...Indeed, it promised there would be no interference with the "domestic institutions" of the states...

...Some of the Radicals hinted that, if the President continued to hold back, they might withhold appropriations for war supplies...

...Certainly, by 1862, the war was having that effect...

...To Lincoln, slavery had always seemed an evil, as far back as he could remember...

...During his last two years in the White House, he entertained colored visitors as no President had done before...

...Excluded were the slaves of the border states, which had remained in the Union, and the slaves of the conquered and occupied South—embracing most of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee, and large parts of other Southern states...

...The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation...

...This is the only substantial dispute...

...It provided for gradual, compensated emancipation, by state action, with Federal aid, and with "colonization...

...Confident as Lincoln was that the war itself, willy nilly, would in time wear slavery away, he was less concerned about the...

...Slavery, many of the Radicals were saying, had caused the bloodshed, and slaves di- rectly or indirectly were helping the enemy to prolong it...