LINCOLN AND EMANCIPATION
Messrs. Nicolay and Hay, who were Mr. Lincoln's private secretaries
during the time he was President, and afterwards the authors of his
most elaborate biography, say: "The blessings of an enfranchised race
must forever hail him as their liberator."
Says Francis Curtis in his _History of the Republican Party_, in
speaking of the President's Emancipation Proclamation: "On the 1st day
of January, 1863, the final proclamation of freedom was issued, and
every negro slave within the confines of the United States was at last
made free."
Other writers of what is claimed to be history, almost without number,
speak of the President's pronouncement as if it caused the bulwarks of
slavery to fall down very much as the walls of Jericho are said to
have done, at one blast, overwhelming the whole institution and
setting every bondman free. Indeed, there are multitudes of fairly
intelligent people who believe that slaveholding in this country
ceased the very day and hour the proclamation appeared. In a recent
magazine article, so intelligent a man as Booker Washington speaks of
a Kentucky slave family as being emancipated by Mr. Lincoln's
proclamation, when, in fact, the proclamation never applied to
Kentucky at all.
The emancipationists of Missouri were working hard to free their State
from slavery, and they would have been only too glad to have Mr.
Lincoln do the work for them. They appealed to him to extend his edict
to their State, but got no satisfaction. The emancipationists of
Maryland had much the same experience. Both Missouri and Maryland were
left out of the proclamation, as were Tennessee and Kentucky and
Delaware, and parts of Virginia and Louisiana and the Carolinas. (See
Appendix.) The explanation is that the proclamation was not intended
to cover all slaveholding territory. All of it that belonged to States
that had not been in rebellion, or had been subdued, was excluded. The
President's idea was to reach only such sections as were then in
revolt. If the proclamation had been immediately operative, and had
liberated every bondman in the jurisdiction to which it applied, it
would have left over a million slaves in actual thraldom. Indeed, Earl
Russell, the British premier, was quite correct when, in speaking of
the proclamation, he said: "It does not more than profess to
emancipate slaves where the United States authorities cannot make
emancipation a reality, and emancipates no one where the decree can be
carried into effect."
For the failure of the proclamation to cover all slaveholding
territory there was a plausible reason. Freedom under it was not
decreed as a boon, but as a penalty. It was not, in theory at least,
intended to help the slave, but to chastise the master. It was to be
in punishment of treason, and, of course, could not consistently be
made to apply to loyal communities, or to such as were under
government control. The proclamation, it will be recollected, was
issued in two parts separated by one hundred days. The first part gave
the Rebels warning that the second would follow if, in the meanwhile,
they did not give up their rebellion. All they had to do to save
slavery was to cease from their treasonable practices. Had the Rebels
been shrewd enough, within the hundred days, to take the President at
his word, he would have stood pledged to maintain their institution,
and his proclamation, instead of being a charter of freedom, would
have been a license for slaveholding.
The proclamation did not, in fact, whatever it may have otherwise
accomplished at the time it was issued, liberate a single slave. What
is more, slavery as an institution was altogether too securely rooted
in our system to be abolished by proclamation. The talk of such a
thing greatly belittles the magnitude of the task that was performed.
Its removal required a long preliminary work, involving, as is made to
appear in previous chapters of this work, almost incalculable toil and
sacrifice, to be followed by an enormous expenditure of blood and
treasure. Its practical extinguishment was the work of the army, while
its legal extirpation was accomplished by Congress and the
Legislatures of the States in adopting the Thirteenth Amendment to the
Federal Constitution, which forbids all slaveholding. That amendment
was a production of Congress and not of the Executive, whose official
approval was not even required to make it legally effective.
The story of the proclamation, with not a few variations, has often
been told; but the writer fancies that the altogether correct account
has not always been given. It may be presumptuous on his part, but he
will submit his version.
To understand the motive underlying the proclamation we must take into
account its author's feeling toward slavery. Notwithstanding various
unfriendly references of an academic sort to that institution, he was
not at the time the proclamation appeared, and never had been, an
Abolitionist.
Not very long before the time referred to the writer heard Mr.
Lincoln, in his debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Alton, Illinois,
declare--laying unusual emphasis on his words: "I have on all
occasions declared as strongly as Judge Douglas against the
disposition to interfere with the existing institution of slavery."
Judge Douglas was what was then called a "dough-face" by the
Abolitionists--being a Northern man with Southern principles, or
"proclivities," as he called them.
Only a little earlier, and several years after Mr. Lincoln had claimed
to be a Republican, and a leader of the Republicans, he had, in a
speech at Bloomington, Illinois, asserted that, "the conclusion of it
all is that we must restore the Missouri Compromise."
Now the adoption of the Missouri Compromise was the hardest blow ever
inflicted on the cause of free soil in America. It did more to
encourage the supporters of slavery and to discourage its opponents
than anything else that ever happened. Its restoration would
undoubtedly have produced a similar effect. Although he is not to be
credited with any philanthropic motive, Stephen A. Douglas did an
effective work for freedom when he helped to overthrow that measure.
Leading Abolitionists have accorded him that meed of praise.
But there was that proposition which Mr. Lincoln was so fond of
repeating, that the nation could not remain half free and half
slave--"a divided house"--but the remedy he had to propose was not
manumission at any proximate or certain time, but the adoption of a
policy that, to use his own words, would cause "the public mind to
rest in the belief that it [slavery] was in the course of ultimate
extinction." Practically that meant very little or nothing. What the
public mind then needed was not "rest," but properly directed
activity.
But the declarations above quoted were all before Mr. Lincoln had
become President or had probably thought of such a thing. Did the
change of position lead to a change of opinion on his part? We are not
left in uncertainty on this point. His official views were declared in
what might be called a State paper. Soon after his inauguration, his
Secretary of State sent Minister Dayton, at Paris, a dispatch that he
might use with foreign officials, in which, in speaking of the
Rebellion, he said: "The condition of slavery in the several States
will remain just the same whether it succeeds or fails.... It is
hardly necessary to add to this incontrovertible statement the further
fact that the new President has always repudiated all designs,
whenever and wherever imputed to him, of disturbing the system of
slavery as it has existed under the Constitution and laws."
About the same time Mr. Lincoln stated to a party of Southern
Congressmen, who called upon him, that he "recognized the rights of
property that had grown out of it [slavery] and would respect those
rights as fully as he would similar rights in any other property."
No steps were taken by Mr. Lincoln to recall or repudiate the
foregoing announcements. On the contrary, he confirmed them in his
official action. He annulled the freedom proclamations of Frémont and
Hunter. He did not interfere when some of his military officers were
so busy returning fugitive slaves that they had no time to fight the
masters. He approved Hallock's order Number Three excluding fugitives
from the lines. He even permitted the poor old Hutchinsons to be sent
away from the army very much as if they had been colored people, when
trying to rouse "the boys" with their freedom songs. In many ways Mr.
Lincoln showed that in the beginning and throughout the earlier part
of his Administration he hoped to re-establish the Union without
disturbing slavery. In effect he so declared in his introduction to
his freedom proclamation. He gave the rebel slaveholders one hundred
days in which to abandon their rebellion and save their institution.
In view of such things it is no wonder that Henry Wilson, so long a
leading Republican Senator from Massachusetts, in his _Rise and Fall
of the Slave Power_, in speaking of emancipation, said "it was a
policy, indeed, which he [the President] did not personally favor
except in connection with his favorite idea of colonization."
It is needless to say that the President's attitude was a great
surprise and a sore disappointment to the more radical Anti-Slavery
people of the country, who had supported him with much enthusiasm and
high hopes. They felt that they had been deceived. They said so very
plainly, for the Abolitionists were not the sort of people to keep
quiet under provocation. Horace Greeley published his signed attack
(see Appendix) entitled, _The Prayer of Twenty Millions_, which is,
without doubt, the most scathing denunciation in the English language.
Henry Ward Beecher "pounded" Mr. Lincoln, as he expressed it. Wendell
Phillips fairly thundered his denunciations. There was a general
under-swell of indignation.
Now, Mr. Lincoln was not a man who was incapable of reading the signs
of the times. He saw that he was drifting towards an irreparable
breach with an element that had previously furnished his staunchest
supporters. As a politician of great native shrewdness, as well as the
head of the Government, he could not afford to let the quarrel go on
and widen. There was need of conciliation. Something had to be done.
We know what he did. He issued his Emancipation Proclamation.
As far as freeing any slaves was concerned, he knew it amounted to
very little, if anything. He said so. Less than two weeks before the
preliminary section of the proclamation appeared, Mr. Lincoln was
waited on by a delegation of over one hundred Chicago clergymen, who
urged him to issue a proclamation of freedom for the slaves. "What
good would a proclamation from me do, especially as we are now
situated?" asked Mr. Lincoln by way of reply. "I do not want to issue
a document that the whole world would see must necessarily be
inoperative, like the Pope's bull against the comet. Would my word
free the slaves, when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the
rebel States?"
In contemplating a proclamation applicable to the rebel States, it is
hardly to be supposed that Mr. Lincoln did not understand the
situation two weeks earlier quite as well as when the document
appeared.
If Mr. Lincoln had been told, when he entered on the Presidency, that
before his term of office would expire he would be hailed as "The
Great Emancipator," he would have treated the statement as equal to
one of his own best jokes. Slavery was a thing he did not then want to
have disturbed. He discountenanced all radical agitators of the
subject, and especially in the border slave States, where he was able
to hold them pretty well in check, except in Missouri. There they
stood up and fought him, and in the end beat him. One of the rather
curious results of this condition of things was that, when the States
came to action on the Thirteenth Constitutional Amendment, the one
absolutely abolishing slavery, the three border slave States of
Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware, over which the President's influence
was practically supreme, gave an adverse vote of four to one, while
Missouri, with whose radical emancipationists he had continuously been
at loggerheads, ratified the amendment by a legislative vote of one
hundred and eleven ayes to forty nays.
Nevertheless, notwithstanding the President, at the beginning of his
official term, opposed Anti-Slavery agitation and Anti-Slavery action
with all his might, he promptly faced about as soon as he discovered
that the subject was one that would not "down." No one ever worked
harder to find a solution of a difficult problem than he did of the
slavery question. He began to formulate plans to that end, the most
distinguishing feature, however, being the spirit of compromise by
which they were pervaded. All of them stopped before an ultimatum was
reached. Besides his proclamation, which, as we have seen, applied to
only a part of the slaves, he devised a measure that would have been
applicable to all of them. In his special message of December, 1863,
he proposed to Congress the submission of a constitutional amendment
that would work universal liberation. There were conditions, however.
One was that the slaves should be paid for by the Government; another
that the masters might retain their uncompensated services until
January 1, 1900; that is, for a period of thirty-seven years, unless
they were sooner emancipated by the grave, as the most of them would
be. (See Appendix.)
The President's somewhat fantastic proposition was not claimed by him
to be for the bondman's benefit. He urged it as a measure of public
economy, holding that, as slavery was the admitted cause of the
Rebellion, the quickest and surest way to remove that cause would be
by purchase of all the slaves, which, he insisted, "would shorten the
war, and thus lessen the expenditure of money and blood."
The public did not take to the President's plan at all, especially the
Abolitionists did not. They no more favored the buying of men by the
Government than by anybody else. They held that if the master had no
right to the person of his bondman, he had no right to payment for
him. And as for an arrangement that might prolong slaveholding for
thirty-seven years, they saw in it not only a measure of injustice to
the men, women, and children then in servitude, the most of whom would
be doomed to bondage for the rest of their natural lives, but a
possible plan for side-tracking a genuine freedom movement.
In the proposition just considered we have not only the core of the
President's policy during much of his official tenure, but an
explanation of his mental operations. He was sentimentally opposed to
slavery, but he was afraid of freedom. He dreaded its effect on both
races. He was opposed to slavery more because it was a public nuisance
than because of its injustice to the oppressed black man, whose
condition, he did not believe, would be greatly, if at all, benefited
by freedom. Hence he wanted manumission put off as long as possible.
It was "ultimate extinction" he wanted, to be attended with payment to
the master for his lost property. Another thing he favored--and which
he seems to have thought entirely practicable--as a condition to
liberation, was the black man's removal to a place or places out of
contact with our white population.
But in entire fairness to Mr. Lincoln, it should be said that,
although his proclamation was inoperative for the immediate release of
any slaves, it was by no means wholly ineffectual. Its moral influence
was considerable. It helped to hasten a movement that had, however, by
that time become practically irresistible. Its political results were
far more marked and important. If it did not fully restore cordiality
between the President and the Abolition leaders, it prevented an open
rupture. It served as a bridge between them. Although they never took
Mr. Lincoln fully into their confidence again, the Abolitionists
interpreted his proclamation as a concession and an abandonment of his
previous policy, which it was much more in appearance than actually.
At all events, it was splendid politics. The somewhat theatrical
manner in which it was worked up and promulgated in installments, thus
arousing in advance a widespread interest and curiosity, showed no
little strategic ability. No more skillful move is recorded in the
history of our parties and partisans than this act of Mr. Lincoln, by
which he disarmed his Anti-Slavery critics without giving them any
material advantage or changing the actual situation. I am not now
speaking of the motive underlying the proclamation of the President,
but of its effect. Without it he could not have been renominated and
re-elected.
Another observation, in order to be entirely just to Mr. Lincoln,
after what has been stated, would at this point seem to be called for.
There is no doubt that from the first he was at heart an Anti-Slavery
man, which is saying a good deal for one born in Kentucky, raised in
southern Indiana and southern Illinois, and who was naturally of a
conservative turn of mind. Nevertheless, he was never an Abolitionist.
He was opposed to immediate--what he called "sudden"--emancipation. He
recognized the "right"--his own word--of the slave-owner to his pound
of flesh, either in the person of his bondman or a cash equivalent. He
was strongly prejudiced against the negro. Of that fact we have the
evidence in his colonization ideas. He favored the banishment of our
American-born black people from their native land. It was a cruel
proposition. True, the President did move from his first position,
which, as we have seen, was far from that occupied by the
Abolitionists, but from first to last he was more of a follower than
leader in the procession.
And here the author wishes to add, in justice to himself, that if, by
reason of anything he has said in this chapter, or elsewhere in this
work, in criticism of Mr. Lincoln's dealings with the slavery issue,
he should be accused of unfriendliness toward the great martyr
President, he enters a full and strong denial. He holds that, in view
of all the difficulties besetting him, Mr. Lincoln did well, although
he might have done better. Much allowance, must be made to one
situated as he was. He undoubtedly deserves the most of the encomiums
that have been lavished upon him. At the same time, the conclusion is
inevitable that his fame as a statesman will ultimately depend less
upon his treatment of the slavery issue than upon any other part of
his public administration. The fact will always appear that it was
the policy of Salmon P. Chase, Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens,
Horace Greeley, Henry Ward Beecher, and other advocates of the radical
cure, with whom the President was in constant opposition, that
prevailed in the end, and with a decisiveness that proves it to have
been feasible and sound from the beginning. Mr. Lincoln's most ultra
prescription--his Emancipation Proclamation--was ineffective. If it
was intended to eradicate slavery altogether, it was too narrow; if to
free the slaves of Rebels only, it was too broad. So with his other
propositions. His thirty-seven-year-liberation scheme, his "tinkering
off" policy (as he called it) for Missouri, his reconstruction
proposals, and his colonization projects, all failed. Indeed, if we
take his official action from first to last, it is a question whether
the President, owing to his extreme conservatism, was not more of an
obstructionist than a promoter of the Anti-Slavery cause.
Not that any change of opinion on the point just stated will
materially affect the general estimate in which Mr. Lincoln is held.
Although his popularity, due, in part at least, to the extravagance of
over-zealous admirers, has without much doubt already passed its
perihelion, it can never disappear or greatly diminish. His untiring
and exhaustive labors for the Union, the many lovable traits of his
unique personality, his unquestionable honesty, his courage, his
patriotism, and, above all, his tragic taking off, have unalterably
determined his place in the regard of his countrymen. Indeed, so
strong is the admiration in which he is held, that it would be vain to
attempt to disabuse many, by any amount of proof and argument, of the
opinion that African slavery in this country was actually and
exclusively killed by a presidential edict. So firmly fixed in the
popular belief is that historical myth that it will undoubtedly live
for many years, if not generations, although history in the end will
right it like all other misunderstandings.
Mr. Lincoln had his weaknesses and limitations, like other men. All
must admit that his treatment of the slavery question was not without
its mistakes. It has always seemed to the writer that his most ardent
admirers seriously blunder in claiming superlativeness for him in that
regard, and more especially in giving him credit for results that were
due to the efforts of other men. His fame is secure without such
misappropriation. He would not ask it if living, and it will in due
time be condemned by history.