Did Lincoln do the right thing for a not-entirely-right reason?
By Jerald Podair, associate professor of history
Lawrence Today magazine, Summer 2004
January
1, 1863, was a beautiful day in Washington, D.C. — a sunny day,
a cloudless sky, a beautiful day for freedom. On that afternoon, while hosting
a New Year’s reception in the White House, President Abraham Lincoln
went upstairs to his office, took out a pen, and with a visibly shaking hand
(not from nervousness or indecision — he had just shaken a lot of hands)
affixed his signature to the final version of the Emancipation Proclamation
and, with a stroke of that pen, consummated the single greatest act of human
liberation in world history.
Under the terms of the document Lincoln signed that day, over three million
slaves, residing in the portions of the Confederate States of America that
were then in rebellion against the United States of America “are, and
henceforward shall be, free.” As he wrote his name on the Emancipation,
Lincoln said: “I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing
right than I do in signing this paper.”
If Abraham Lincoln is remembered for any one thing, any one action, it is
unquestionably this. Lincoln won the Civil War and he delivered the Gettysburg
Address and
the Second Inaugural Address, but most of all, he was the man who freed the
slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation — which is memorialized in literally
hundreds of books, articles, drawings, songs, poems, and museum
exhibits — was his instrument, a document of human liberation that
is itself immortal and, of course, immortalizes Lincoln.
We have all learned, at one time or another, that the Emancipation Proclamation
symbolizes America and its central values — tolerance, equality,
and, most of all, freedom. Freedom: the right to choose your own life,
your own
path, your own destiny. When men and women are free, they are free of the
past and its shackles, free to start anew, free to start history itself
anew.
The Emancipation Proclamation was epochal in its scope and impact. It not
only set over three million black men and women free, it gave them the
opportunity — eventually — to
experience the true meaning of American freedom, not merely release from bondage
but the control over one’s fate that is the mark of the truly free.
This is the view of the Emancipation Proclamation, and what it accomplished,
that we learned in school, that we hear about from politicians, that we
read about in novels. Further, we learned that the motivations for issuing
the
Emancipation Proclamation were in line with America’s highest ideals
.
Noble ends, mixed motives
Surface appearances can, however, deceive — in life, of course, and
especially in American history. As I constantly tell my students, if you
want to understand
American history, you must understand irony.
Irony is essential, because our nation’s history is replete with instances
in which Americans and American leaders do the right things — moral things — for
morally ambiguous reasons. Noble ends accomplished, to be sure, but from decidedly
mixed motives and little purity of purpose — even, sometimes, from
self-absorbed, even selfish purposes.
If we wish to understand Lincoln’s true motivations in issuing the Emancipation
Proclamation, we can look to a letter he wrote to the newspaper editor Horace
Greeley in August 1862, regarding the possibility of emancipation. Although
he said that, personally, he wished that “all men everywhere could be
free,” that was not his primary motive.
“ My paramount objective in this struggle,” he wrote, “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 is significant about this statement is not merely its downgrading
of the slavery issue’s moral component to secondary, and even tertiary, status
beneath saving the Union and the related aim of destroying the Confederacy’s
war-making capacity, but also its timing. Because, as he wrote these words,
Lincoln had already decided to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. He had
made his mind up over a month earlier, in July, but had delayed making a public
announcement until a Union military victory could make it seem less ineffectual — after
all, the war was not going well for the Union. Even the Battle of Antietam
on September 17, 1862, which did give Lincoln the opening he needed to
issue the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation five days later, was more
of a
tactical draw than a smashing Northern victory.
Lincoln, when he wrote to Greeley, knew that there was eventually going to
be an Emancipation Proclamation and, even so, phrased his justification for
the act of setting millions of human beings free not on any great moral imperative
but on the practical necessity of restoring the Union.
Should it come as a surprise, then, that the actual language of the Emancipation
Proclamation has been described as being so dry that it reads “like a
bill of lading”? Ringing moral pronouncements, Lincoln understood,
would not get the white Northern public, a significant portion of which
viewed blacks
as inferior, violent, subhuman, and, if freed from slavery, potential job
competitors, to support emancipation. Only by telling them that, if they
truly wanted this
bloody war to end, the slaves had to be freed, could Lincoln receive their
backing, and even so, Northern support for the Emancipation Proclamation,
especially among Democrats, was thin and shaky.
Here we see a classic illustration of the mixed motives that I referred
to earlier as undergirding so many great American deeds. A look at Lincoln’s
handling of the slavery — and emancipation — issues in 1861
and 1862 will, I trust, bring this point home.
Actions speaking louder than words
Even before his inauguration in March 1861, Lincoln made it clear that he
intended no interference with slavery where it already existed in the Southern
states
and even went so far as to endorse a proposed constitutional amendment that
would officially and explicitly preserve slavery in the South.
Lincoln was willing to offer such concessions because he desperately wanted
to keep the South in the Union. His heartfelt, eloquent plea to his Southern
brethren in his First Inaugural Address, in which he appealed to “the
better angels of our nature,” is yet more testimony to this unrealized
hope.
In his July 1861 message to Congress, in which he laid out his plans for
ending the rebellion, Lincoln stated that he had “no purpose, directly
or indirectly, to interfere with slavery in the states where it exists.”
As late as July 1862, Lincoln was pleading in vain with representatives
of the border slaveholding states to accept a plan calling for gradual,
compensated
emancipation over a period of 40 years (until — and this date sounds
almost ludicrous to our modern ears — the year 1900).
It was only after that plea was rejected that Lincoln resolved to issue
the Emancipation Proclamation, even here, as we have seen, taking care
to couch
it in the morally neutral garb of military necessity and also, it should
be noted, limiting its scope to slaves in areas of the Confederacy still
in rebellion
as of January 1, 1863, and exempting the loyal slave states and even areas
in the Confederacy — parts of Tennessee, Louisiana, and Virginia, which
were then under Union control. Thus, Lincoln refused at this time to free the
slaves he had the power to free — those in Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland,
and Union-occupied sectors of the South — and freed, on paper only, those
he had no actual power to free — those in the rebellious Confederacy,
opening himself up to charges of hypocrisy or, at the very least, ineffectual
grandstanding.
But Lincoln was neither a hypocrite nor a grandstander. The limited scope,
dry language, and war power-based rationale of the Emancipation Proclamation
were all deliberate efforts to place his actions within a framework of freeing
the slaves to save the Union, just as he had said in his letter to Horace
Greeley. This the majority of his constituents in the North could understand
and accept:
the classic moral deed as product of morally ambiguous motives.
Yet, Lincoln’s deed does, in fact, speak for itself. We are all familiar
with the truisms that actions speak louder than words, and that men are judged
ultimately not on what they say, but what they do. Judged by these standards,
the Emancipation Proclamation was, in the words of one of Lincoln’s contemporaries, “a
poor document, but a mighty act.” In any case,
it would be unfair – and
unduly cynical – to judge the Emancipation Proclamation solely as
an exercise in pragmatism, because, however Lincoln sought to bury the
idealism
and humanity inherent in his action under a thicket of military legalisms,
that idealism and humanity were there as well and had been there, however
muted, all along.
In 1861 and 1862, even while overruling some of his subordinates for moving
with what he considered undue haste on the emancipation question, Lincoln
was advancing slowly, along with Congress and some of his other subordinates,
down
the path that would eventually lead to emancipation. His pace was incremental,
step-by-step, related to the goal of hurting the Confederate war effort,
but also increasingly aware that the United States would never realize
its democratic
promise — the promise of human freedom articulated in the Declaration
of Independence — as long as some Americans were slaves. We can see
this in the actions of Congress, Union military leaders, and Lincoln himself,
during
this time.
Ultimately, Lincoln decided to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, as
a war measure aimed at the Confederacy’s heart, yes, but also because Lincoln
had come to the realization that there could be no going back to the Union,
or the Constitution, or the nation as they were before the war. Lincoln knew
by July 1862 that a corner had been turned in American history and that the
question of slavery — and of freedom — that had wracked America,
had divided it, and had mocked it from its founding moments had to be decided
by his generation of Americans.
Beginning in 1776, every generation had put off the final reckoning with
the slavery issue — avoided it, elided it, compromised it, passed
it forward so that other Americans would have to confront it with finality.
“
Fellow citizens,” Lincoln told Congress on December 1, 1862, “we
cannot escape history. We….will be remembered in spite of ourselves….The
dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present…As our
case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.…”
And so, driven by history, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation
one month later, to cripple the Confederacy but also to articulate a vision
of
human freedom that would now animate both the war effort and the American
nation itself in the decades and centuries beyond, a vision he expressed
in political
terms in the Gettysburg Address later in 1863 and in spiritual and theological
terms in his Second Inaugural Address in March 1865. Thanks to Lincoln,
after January 1, 1863, the pragmatic and the ideal melded, and absorbed
each other — and
the idea of Union became inseparable from the ideal of freedom.
Jerald Podair, a member of the Lawrence faculty since 1998, specializes
in American history, including the history of American race relations, and
is
the author of The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the
Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis (Yale University Press, 2002). This article
is excerpted from “Back Door to Freedom: The Paradoxes of the Emancipation
Proclamation,” a
talk he presented in connection with the traveling exhibit “Forever
Free: Abraham Lincoln’s Journey to Emancipation,” which was
on view in the Seeley G. Mudd Library from January to March 2004 (see
sidebar). To
read the full text of that talk, go here.