By Jerald Podair
Associate professor of history
A talk 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.
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 the 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 — including
our own at the Mudd Library here
at Lawrence — 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. In
Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, the great historical novel about
the Battle of Gettysburg and the meaning of the Civil War itself, the Union
war hero Joshua Chamberlain, who saves the battle, and the Union, with a desperate
stand against a Confederate assault on Little Round Top, articulates this idea,
this sense of what “freedom” really means:
“He had grown up believing in America and the individual….
This was the land where no man had to bow. In this place at
last a man could stand up and be free of the past, free of
tradition and blood ties and the curse of royalty and become
what he wished to become. This was the first place on earth
where the man mattered more than the state. True freedom
had begun here….The Frenchman may fight for France, but
the American fights for mankind, for freedom: for the people,
not the land.”
The Emancipation Proclamation, the document that Joshua Chamberlain was fighting
for at Gettysburg, 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 like The Killer Angels. Further, we learn that the motivations
for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation were in line with America’s highest
ideals. Slavery was morally evil, we are told, and so Abraham Lincoln and Northerners,
members of the newly formed Republican Party, opposed it and sought to prevent
its extension into the territories — Kansas, Nebraska, and others. When
the Southern states attempted to expand this evil institution into those territories
and, in 1861, seceded from the Union over this issue, Lincoln and the North fought
the Civil War to eradicate this moral stain on the American conscience. And,
we are told, the Emancipation Proclamation was a product of that aroused moral
outrage, an attempt to live up to America’s stated principles, the most
precious of which was freedom.
This view of Lincoln, and Northerners in general, as being motivated primarily
by moral concerns in opposing slavery, fighting the Civil War, and issuing (and
ultimately enforcing) the Emancipation Proclamation, the one most of us learned
in school, is a comforting one, to be sure. It fits nicely with our own national
self-image, what many of us believe America has been throughout its history and
is today: a generous country, an idealistic country, often a selfless country.
After all, how many times in human history have countries besides the United
States fought to set others free?
This perspective, of course, goes well beyond the events of the Civil War.
Who else but Americans would rebuild the economies and political structures
of countries
they had vanquished in the bloodiest war in history, as they did in Germany
and Japan after World War II? It was Americans who liberated Hitler’s death
camps, after all. And it was Americans, who, during the 20th century, fought,
defeated, and transcended the two great totalitarian threats to individual dignity
and freedom, Nazism and Stalinism, while many in other parts of the world shrugged
their shoulders and said that the struggle wasn’t worth it, that it didn’t
matter. It did matter, and history will show that it mattered, and mattered greatly,
I have no doubts on that score —and, once again, Americans led the way.
From Abraham Lincoln, to Joshua Chamberlain, and on to Franklin Roosevelt, and
Harry Truman, and John Kennedy, and even Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, we
see a pattern. Americans fight for freedom, abroad and at home, for others and
for themselves, because it is right, because it is moral, and because it is just.
That, to return to our topic for tonight, is why Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation
Proclamation.
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.
This is the great irony of American history as a whole, its eternal paradox:
How can the freest nation on earth, the nation Lincoln famously called “the
last, best hope of earth,” the nation that has brought freedom both to
its own people and those beyond its borders, have acted so self-interestedly
in doing so? Why does there always seem to be another agenda, beyond simple morality,
beyond doing the right thing for the right reason? If America bestows the blessings
of freedom through the “back door,” so to speak, does this somehow
diminish the act itself?
These questions, these apparent paradoxes, are as relevant today as they are
to the study of our nation’s past. It is worthwhile to explore them, and
to illustrate them, by examining the circuitous, contradictory, and bumpy road
that Abraham Lincoln — America’s preeminent symbol of freedom — traveled
to sign the Emancipation Proclamation that sunny Washington New Year’s’ Day
in 1863.
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 in divining Lincoln’s true motives
for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation 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 this seem less ineffectual — after
all, the war was not going well for the Union — and even the Battle of
Antietam in Maryland 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.
By August 1862, Lincoln realized that the Civil War was now a total war, a
remorseless war — 6,500 American casualties in one day at Antietam would have told
him all he needed to know on this score if he required any further proof — and
a war in which the destruction of Confederate productive capacity was essential
if victory was to be achieved. This required the destruction of slavery. Whatever
Lincoln’s moral scruples about slavery — and, of course, he had them — he
nonetheless “sold” emancipation and, indeed, was selling it even
before he announced it, as a war measure, an emergency measure, a practical measure — a
way to destroy the Confederacy, win the war, and make America one nation again.
Should it come as a surprise, then, that the actual language of the Emancipation
Proclamation that Lincoln drafted 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 with this, 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.
Even before his inauguration as America’s 16th president in March 1861,
Lincoln made it clear that he intended no interference with slavery where it
already existed in the Southern states and that he intended no change in the
United States Constitution that endorsed slavery — indirectly and obliquely,
to be sure, but an endorsement nonetheless — and even went so far as to
endorse a proposed constitutional amendment that would officially and explicitly
preserve slavery in the South. This, incidentally, would have been the 13th Amendment,
had it been adopted; it was not, since secession intervened , and four years
later, in 1865, another 13th Amendment was adopted, ending slavery, in the South
and everywhere else in the United States, forever. I’ve always found the
historical symmetry here intriguing: During the secession crisis of 1860 and
1861, the South’s leaders, much like some leaders today, never missed
an opportunity to miss an opportunity, as the saying goes.
Lincoln was willing to offer these 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 March 1861, in which he appealed
to “the
better angels of our nature” (incidentally, still the best single phrase
ever composed by an American, for my money), is yet more testimony to this
unrealized hope.
In April 1861, Lincoln attempted to supply beleaguered Fort Sumter in the
harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, an act that led to a Confederate attack
on the
fort and the beginning of the Civil War, not because he sought to end slavery
in that state but because he felt compelled to assert the federal government’s
sovereignty there against the claims of a Confederate government that he
did not recognize and that was engaged in an illegal rebellion. From that
moment
forward, as the war became more violent, more bitter, and more consuming
than even he imagined it would be, Lincoln worked first and foremost to win
that
war and restore the Union, even if it was a Union with slavery.
In a practical political sense — and Lincoln was a very practical, very
political man — winning the war meant, in the context of April 1861, keeping
the border states of Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky, all of which were slave
states but had not yet joined the Confederacy, in the Union. All one had to do
was look at a map to see how strategically important these states were to the
Union cause. To offer an obvious illustration, what would the federal government
in Washington do if Maryland, which bordered it on three sides (and the fourth
border, directly across the Potomac River, was Confederate Virginia), seceded?
Without Kentucky, the Union would lose uncontested control of the crucial Ohio
River, as well as a critical staging point for an invasion of the South. “I
hope to have God on my side,” Lincoln was said to have remarked during
this early stage of the war, “but I must have Kentucky.”
It is small wonder, then, that Lincoln opposed precipitous action to free
any slaves in 1861 and the early part of 1862, even at the risk of enraging
his
more radical Republican supporters, for fear of driving Maryland, Kentucky,
and Missouri
out of the Union. This fear, and this desire to restore the Union even without
emancipation, comes through loud and clear during the first year of Lincoln’s
presidency. Consider:
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.”
A few weeks later, he gave tacit approval to the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution
(“Johnson,” incidentally, was Andrew Johnson, who would be Lincoln’s
successor in the White House), which passed Congress and contained a statement
that the war was not being fought for “overthrowing or interfering with
the rights or established institutions” of the South but only to restore
the Union as it existed before the war began.
The next month, in August, a Union general in bitterly contested Missouri,
John Fremont, ordered the emancipation of the slaves of all Confederate sympathizers.
Surely, one would think, Lincoln would approve of this. But he did not; he
countermanded
Fremont’s order and later removed him from his post.
In December 1861, Lincoln’s then-Secretary of War, Simon Cameron, issued
a report calling for the freeing and arming of the slaves. Lincoln overruled
him (and soon after, fired him, although the fact that Cameron was a crooked
as a three-dollar bill didn’t help here), stating that he did not want
the war to turn into a “remorseless revolutionary struggle.”
In May 1862, when Union General David Hunter attempted to free slaves in Georgia,
Florida, and even the very epicenter of the rebellion, South Carolina, Lincoln
overruled him.
Even 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 this rejection (talk about missing an opportunity to miss
an opportunity!) 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 that 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, 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:
In May 1861, Union General Benjamin Butler ordered slaves escaping to his
lines in Virginia “confiscated” as “contraband of war” and
not returned to their owners — not emancipated but not sent back into
slavery either. Lincoln let this order stand
In August 1861, with Lincoln’s support, Congress passed a Confiscation
Act authorizing the seizure of property, including slaves, used directly
in the Confederate war effort. No emancipation here either, but once again,
slaves
taken
from their masters.
By December 1861, the House of Representatives was pointedly refusing to reaffirm
the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution of the previous July, which had averred that
the Northern war aim was not to end slavery, but only to restore the Union.
By March 1862, Union officers were being prohibited from returning fugitive slaves
to their masters.
By June, Congress had outlawed slavery in the territories, fulfilling the
major aim of the Republican party platform — this was the issue that
had gestated the Republican party and brought Lincoln himself out of political
retirement
in the 1850s.
Finally, in July 1862, Congress, with Lincoln’s approval, went as far
as it could go towards freeing slaves in the Confederacy without explicitly
saying
so, passing a Second Confiscation Act which authorized the seizure of all
property, including slaves, of those in rebellion against the United States
and provided
that, if those slaves came within Union lines, they would be set free.
At almost the same time, Lincoln decided to issue the Emancipation Proclamation
itself, 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, 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. This had occurred
in 1787, when the Constitution was drafted; in 1820, when the Missouri Compromise
was reached; in 1832, during the Nullification Crisis; and again in the Compromise
of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Now, Lincoln realized, the moment
was at hand, and his generation, not a future one, would have to resolve this
issue and decide what “freedom” in America ultimately would mean.
"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.
We still are left, however, with the paradox that I described at the beginning
of this talk, that of mixed motives producing laudable results in American history.
There are many more examples of this paradox in that history besides the Emancipation
Proclamation.
The 14th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified after the Civil War and
one of our nation’s great bedrocks of individual freedom, guaranteeing
equal protection of the laws to all American citizens, was a product, at
least in
part, of the Radical Republican desire to punish the South for secession,
motivated as much by an impulse for revenge as by a desire to protect the
civil rights
of newly freed African Americans.
In the 20th century, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was an effort to create
an efficiently operating capitalist system — to save capitalism, really — as
much as it was to help unemployed Americans weather the Depression.
Our involvement in World War II — along with the Civil War the American
war most clothed with moral purpose — was at least partially a result
of traditional geopolitical maneuvering, especially in the Pacific, and not
solely
humanitarian concerns.
It could even be argued plausibly that Cold War considerations played a major
role in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the most important piece
of legislation in American race relations since the 14th Amendment and the vehicle
through which the gains of the modern civil rights movement were institutionalized,
because racial discrimination had become an embarrassment to the United States
as it sought the allegiance of unaligned Third World nations in its battle with
the Soviet Union for world supremacy. Lyndon Johnson and the legislators who
passed this Act desired racial justice, of course, but they also wanted to win
the Cold War, and their mixed motives produced a historic advance in the cause
of human freedom.
What are we to make of this, then? Should America proceed from pure — or,
at least, purer — motives? Is its history tainted because of this apparent
paradox? Does the Emancipation Proclamation become any less noble? The 14th
Amendment? The Civil Rights Act? The liberated death camps, even?
There are some who would say yes, that self-interested, even cynical motives
matter and that the good works of American history should not have to appear
as happy, inexplicable accidents — that noble aims produce noble results,
that this is logical and how history should work.
But history is not just logic, it is experience as well, and experience has
taught us that even the purest of intentions are no guarantee of justice,
of equality,
and of freedom. The best illustration of this, I think, comes from totalitarianism
and the totalitarian mind, in which good intentions, and a pure, undivided
heart, explain everything and excuse everything, including thought control,
dictatorship,
and mass murder, and where ends — laudable, just ends, pursued with selflessness
and personal sacrifice — justify the basest means.
The examples of Stalinism and Nazism are too well-known, and perhaps even
too unique, to serve as illustrations here, but to my mind the first “totalitarian” in
world history was neither Hitler nor Stalin but the architect of the French Revolution’s
Reign of Terror, Maxmillien de Robespierre.
Robespierre was known as “the incorruptible,” with good reason. He
apparently had little or no personal ambition. His only goal was advancing the
Revolution and helping the French people. He had no vices, no material desires,
and did not seek money or power for its own sake. In modern psychological parlance,
we would say he had no ego. Robespierre’s motives were completely pure.
He wanted nothing for himself personally, just the success of the Revolution
and its ideals — liberty, equality, fraternity — ideals as lofty
as those of the American Revolution that had inspired him. Yet, in the service
of these goals, the pure-of-heart Robespierre became a totalitarian: a controller
of thought, a despoiler of personal liberties, an invader of privacy, a man to
whom the individual — and the rights of the individual — meant
nothing, because the only role the individual could play in this early version
of a totalitarian
society was to serve the state, the government, and the Revolution. Ultimately,
through the Reign of Terror, Robespierre, the pure, the incorruptible, became
a mass murderer, a sponsor of gross injustice through the best of motives.
This, of course, does not imply that the pure of heart necessarily wreak
destruction on the world — I obviously do not mean this. But there
is a danger, I believe, in purporting to see the world through crystal-clear
moral lenses,
because it
blinds the eye to the flaws, the imperfections, and perhaps most importantly,
the complications of human beings and of history. Lincoln, above all, but
other great American leaders as well, understood the human frailty, the self-protective
impulses, and thus the decidedly mixed motives that drive people and history
and accepted them, hoping for better, of course, but unwilling to take the
colossal gamble that seeking to purify human motivations would entail, the
grievous cost
in individual dignity and freedom that this would exact.
We may have to console ourselves with the knowledge that even if Roosevelt
and Johnson, and the men who drafted the 14th Amendment, and Lincoln, the
man who
drafted the Emancipation Proclamation, did the right things for the wrong
reasons, this is infinitely preferable to the reverse. It may well be that
this nation’s
peculiar genius is its ability to produce leaders, like Lincoln, who understood
that the pragmatism and self-interestedness that lie at the heart of American
history are not paradoxes at all.
Jerald
Podair, a member of the Lawrence University 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).