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

As with the compensated emancipation proposal, Lincoln’s Proclamation sounded like a good deal less than what the old-line abolitionists wanted. It provided only for the emancipation of slaves still inside Confederate-held territory, leaving untouched slaves in the border states and in areas of the South already occupied by Federal forces. If Lincoln really had the war powers Charles Sumner thought he had, then constitutionally they could apply only to the places where there was a war in progress; since the border states had never been at war with the federal government, no war powers could be asserted there, unless Lincoln wanted to see his Proclamation end up in Roger Taney’s lap. Since it had been Lincoln’s argument all along that secession from the Union was a legal impossibility, the reclaimed occupied districts were not at war, either. If Lincoln wanted his Proclamation to stick, he would have to zone off the border states and the occupied districts—and their slaves.

But the states of the Confederacy—“any state or states, wherein the constitutional authority of the United States shall not then be practically recognized” was how he insisted on describing them—were another matter. Having removed themselves from civil jurisdiction, the Confederate states were now under the jurisdiction of the president as commander in chief of the army and navy of the United States. Under the rubric of those powers, Lincoln was prepared to do what no president under any other circumstances could have done legally, and that was declare general emancipation of all the slaves, without exception, in all rebellious areas; the emancipated slaves were “permanently free, thenceforward, and forever.”

On the advice of his cabinet, Lincoln waited to publish the preliminary Proclamation until the Federal armies had won some significant victories, so that the Proclamation would not appear as a counsel of despair on Lincoln’s part. This delay frustrated abolitionist editors such as the New York Tribune’s Horace Greeley, and Greeley (who had evidently caught up a rumor that Lincoln had some sort of edict ready to hand) wrote his provocative “Prayer of Twenty Millions” in August as an expression of that frustration. Lincoln’s reply that the “paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union” has often been read as a refusal to consider outright emancipation. But given that the Proclamation was already, literally, sitting in a pigeonhole in his desk, the very fact that Lincoln would almost nonchalantly announce that “if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it” was actually a radical statement, bundled into the most diffident possible language. No president in the previous six decades, from Jefferson to Buchanan, would ever have dreamt of suggesting that he might consider “freeing all the slaves,” or any slave at all, under any circumstances.

On September 17, the battle at Antietam gave Lincoln all he needed in the form of a victory, and on September 22, 1862, Lincoln released the text of the Proclamation with the warning that unless Southern resistance ceased before January 1, the terms of the Proclamation would automatically go into effect on that date. The Confederates did little more than rain curses on Lincoln’s head, and on January 1, 1863, the Proclamation became official.

No one found the wait for emancipation more unbearable than the people who longed to be free. “How long! How long! O Lord God of Sabaoth!” Frederick Douglass exclaimed in 1847. Not long, if the outbreak of the war seemed to mean anything. When a Union naval flotilla steamed into South Carolina’s Port Royal Sound in November, 1861, the slaves on the Sea Islands in the sound thought they knew exactly what the rumble of the Federal naval guns meant. “Son, dat ain’t no t’under,” whispered one slave boy’s mother, “dat Yankee come to gib you Freedom.”86 When the preliminary Proclamation was released in September 1862, Frederick Douglass greeted it with a yelp of jubilation: “Ye millions of free and loyal men who have earnestly sought to free your bleeding country from the dreadful ravages of revolution and anarchy, lift up now your voices with joy and thanksgiving for with freedom to the slave will come peace and safety to your country.”

When Lincoln finally signed the Proclamation in midafternoon on January 1, it touched off wild celebrations of rejoicing. In Philadelphia, where a 100-gun salute broke the night’s stillness “in honor of the President’s Proclamation,” Mother Bethel Church “was crowded to overflowing, at least one-fourth of the congregation being whites, who seemed to take a deep interest in the exercises. … until a few minutes of twelve o’clock, when the whole congregation knelt in silent prayer to welcome in the new-born day of liberty.” In Boston’s Tremont Temple, the citadel of the free Massachusetts black community, Douglass, Charles Lenox Redmond, William Wells Brown, and John S. Rock spoke in celebration of the Proclamation. “In the evening when the Proclamation came to hand,” it was read aloud to the audience “who received it with uproarious applause, shouting, tossing up their hats, rapping on the floor with their canes, and singing ‘Blow ye the trumpet, blow.’”87

Thirty years before, white Bostonians “deemed it a duty that they owed to God” to harass abolitionists, but now “things was a-workin.” When the news came over the wires that the Proclamation had indeed been signed, “the joyous enthusiasm manifested was beyond description. Cheers were proposed for the president and for the Proclamation, the whole audience rising to their feet and shouting at the tops of their voices, throwing up their hats and indicating the gratification in every conceivable manner.” Douglass wrote, “The fourth of July was great, but the first of January, when we consider it in all its relations and bearings is incomparably greater. The one respect to the mere political birth to a nation, the last concerns the national life and character, and is to determine whether that life and character shall be radiantly glorious with all high and noble virtues, or infamously blackened,