Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

States military forces “will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons… in any efforts that may make for their actual freedom.”63

Lacking any means for dealing directly with slavery, Lincoln had assumed from the start that anything he did on the slavery issue must necessarily be on a political track, separate from the military track on which he proposed to win the war and restore the Union. Events had created a new set of circumstances, however. As he told Congress a month later in his annual message, “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.” It was not only the slaves who must be freed, but Lincoln and Congress who must free themselves of thinking about slavery purely as a political problem. “We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”64

LINCOLN AND EMANCIPATION

No other single document, except perhaps the Gettysburg Address, has done so much to fix Lincoln permanently in the constellation of American history as the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln himself believed that “as affairs have turned, it is the central act of my administration, and the great event of the nineteenth century.”65 Yet debate has not ceased to rage since the day of the Proclamation’s preliminary publication over what its meaning was to be, or what Lincoln’s real intentions in issuing it were.

Much of that debate was, and still is, fueled by Lincoln himself. This was, after all, the man who criticized abolitionists for rocking the anti-slavery boat, who in 1858 had affirmed that he had “no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races” because of the “natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people, to the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races.”66 And it was he who had asserted that his paramount intention in the war was always to save the Union, and not to do anything one way or the other about slavery unless the doing of it would assist the federal government in restoring the Union:

I would save the Union. I would do it the shortest way under the Constitution. … My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or 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 that it helps save the Union.67

How are we to understand the Emancipation Proclamation when the president who wrote it held beliefs on race that fly straight in the face of equality? And especially when the words of the Emancipation Proclamation seem suspiciously lacking in the eloquence that produced Lincoln’s other great state papers? “Had the political strategy of the moment called for a momentous human document of the stature of the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln could have risen to the occasion,” snarled Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter in 1948; instead, “the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, had all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.”68

There are actually two questions involved in the debate over the Emancipation Proclamation, one of them about ends and the other about means. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Lincoln’s oft-repeated statement that “I have always thought that all men should be free.” Slavery was “founded in the selfishness of man’s nature,” in his desire to shift the burden of work onto the shoulders of others and appropriating the full value of another’s labor to oneself. “Its ownership betokened not only the possession of wealth but indicated the gentleman of leisure who was above and scorned labour.” The right to freely enjoy the fruits of one’s own labor was as much a matter of liberty as any other natural right, and denying it made slavery “a great & crying injustice, an enormous national crime, and that we could not expect to escape punishment for it.” Lincoln might regard a discussion of the civil rights of the freed slaves after slavery as being in a totally different universe of rights (and in this, nineteenth-century writing on law and rights tended to support him), but there was never any real question about the slave’s natural right to liberty and to whatever happiness his labor could bring him.69

Lincoln’s election to the presidency—and as an anti-slavery candidate who needed no electoral votes from the South to get elected—convinced him that the opportunity to put slavery on the path to extinction was now at hand. Emancipation, wrote his Illinois political ally Isaac Arnold in 1866, was Lincoln’s “deepest, strongest desire of the soul,” and from the time of his election Lincoln “hoped and expected to be the Liberator of the slaves.” Another longtime Illinois political friend, Joseph Gillespie, was convinced that Lincoln “had it in his mind for a long time to war upon slavery until its destruction was effected.”70

If the end was clear in Lincoln’s mind, the means were very much another matter. So long as slavery was a matter of individual state enactments and individual state legalization, there was nothing he could do as a citizen to touch it, and not much more he could do as president. “Some of our northerners seem bewildered and dazzled by the excitement of the hour,” Lincoln remarked, even to the point of thinking “that this war is to result in the entire abolition of slavery.” But presidents are only presidents; they do not have plenary powers to do anything they wish. Announcing an end to slavery purely on his own authority would