Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation

According to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of President Abraham Lincoln, the man who became immortal as “The Great Emancipator” did not mention his intention to end American slavery until early morning on Sunday, July 13, 1862.

By then, the Southern secessionist states had been at war with the Northern states for more than a year; the Rebel army had scored important victories, and the very fate of the United States seemed to be in question.

Riding in the presidential carriage together with Secretary of State William Seward and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, Lincoln (as Welles recorded in his diary) mentioned, apparently out of the blue, that he was “considering” emancipating the slaves by proclamation (because) “it was a military necessity absolutely essential for the salvation of the Union, that we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.”

The news was so startling that only Seward responded, saying that the “subject involved consequences so vast and momentous that [he] wanted to bestow on it mature reflection” before expressing his opinion.

The next time the issue was raised was July 21, when Lincoln called a special meeting to inform of his intention the whole cabinet. When the discussion ran too long, he scheduled another meeting for the next day. On that occasion, he assured his top aides that he understood [their] “differences… on the slavery question,” but added that he wanted them to know that he “had resolved upon this step, and had not called them together to ask their advice.”

Lincoln then read for them his preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation announcing that as of January 1, 1863, “all slaves within states still in rebellion against the Union” would “as a fit and necessary war measure” be declared “free thenceforward, and forever.”

Although the document did not cover about 425,000 slaves in the border states that remained loyal to the Union, it was historic in scope.

It released from involuntary servitude more than 3.5 million blacks — almost half of the population of the South — who were a key pillar of the military effort and economic system of the 11 Confederate states. It thereby delivered a crushing blow to Southern lifestyle and culture going back about two hundred years. And Lincoln made a special point that this momentous measure was his alone: whatever its consequences, he was solely responsible.

A similar act of probity and courage would be hard to find in the annals of American politics. It confirmed that the 16th President of the United States was a giant, an extraordinary man, and leader, in more ways than physical (which he was also, at 6 feet 4 inches and 185 pounds).

Born dirt-poor in a primitive one-room cabin in Kentucky, Lincoln taught himself to read and write; studied law by reading Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England; and was a successful — and, eventually, wealthy — lawyer by the time he ran for the White House.

He was an astute politician, and served four terms in the Illinois legislature and one term in the U.S. House of Representatives before gaining a nation-wide prominence in seven debates with Senator Stephen Douglas. Lincoln lost that 1858 race for the U.S. Senate, but two years later defeated three candidates for the White House. He won a solid electoral majority (and popular vote plurality) despite fierce opposition in the South, where he carried only two of the 996 counties.

Lincoln was a strong and self-confident president who did not hesitate to make the maximum use of his constitutional powers. After the Rebels fired at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, Lincoln almost immediately called out state militias; expanded the Union’s Army and Navy; blockaded southern ports; closed post offices to treasonable mail; and ordered the arrest and military detention of suspected traitors. The precedents he set strengthened the role of the presidency in relation to Congress and the courts.

And Lincoln was a progress-minded president who was determined to strengthen the national economy by advancing the development of the American West. On July 1, 1862, while the Union’s resources were stretched thin by the costly war, he signed the Pacific Railway Act that committed the federal government to subside the construction of the transcontinental railroad.

One of the greatest engineering projects of the 19th Century, the new coast-to-coast link did what Lincoln hoped it would do; it dramatically speeded up continent-wide trade, transportation, and settlement.

And on top of these strengths, Lincoln had a quality that’s not common among leaders: the courage to change his mind.

Lincoln’s Attitude Towards Slavery

In his book What Lincoln Believed, Michael Lind lists several key principles that moved Lincoln at the start of the Civil War:

He was determined, above all, to carry out his oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” As he wrote in April 1862 to Horace Greeley, the publisher of The Chicago Tribune, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union… 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.”

Lincoln believed, as did most contemporary Americans, that whites were “superior to blacks,” and even after emancipating the slaves he was hesitant about treating all of them as equal citizens. Four days before he was assassinated, he said that he would “prefer to confer [the right to vote] on the [blacks who are] very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.”

And until he started drafting the Emancipation Proclamation, he wanted to be the president of “a white-only American republic.” As most politicians of his era, he believed that the slaves should be encouraged to “voluntarily” leave the United States and establish their own colony abroad — perhaps in Africa or the Caribbean.

But Lincoln was also deeply opposed to slavery. He was convinced that “all men are created equal” and “passionately rejected the idea that whites had the right to rule blacks.”

This ambivalence was best shown in the two drafts of the Emancipation Proclamation: the “preliminary” version Lincoln read to his cabinet on July 21, 1862, and the final document he issued on January 1, 1863.

The first version called for the continuation of “the effort to colonize persons of African descent, with their consent, upon this continent, or elsewhere.”

That provision was emphatically rejected by a group of freed slaves that Lincoln briefed on this subject on August 14, 1862, and it provoked a blistering personal attack on the president by Frederick Douglass, a newspaper publisher and the foremost black leader of the Civil War era.

Three-and-a-half months later, not a word about colonization appeared in the final document.

Instead, the 1863 proclamation announced Lincoln’s readiness to take an unprecedented step toward making blacks American citizens. The document pledged that the freed slaves who volunteer “will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.”

This was complete reversal of the president’s colonization policy, but it was not the first sign of his rejection of involuntary servitude. Lincoln had tried to free at least some of the slaves as far back as 1848 when, as a young congressman, he proposed a bill to emancipate the slaves living in Washington, D.C., the federal District of Columbia. The proposal was turned down, but as president, Lincoln repeatedly returned to the slavery issue.

For example, he signed an act stipulating that all slaves who had fought for the Confederacy could be confiscated by the Union’s army from their owners and freed. The act also prohibited the Union army and navy from returning fugitive slaves to their owners, and in effect revoked an 1850 law under which the Northern states were obligated to return fugitive slaves to their Southern owners.

Lincoln justified his Emancipation Proclamation with the need to weaken the Confederacy and save the Union. The Emancipation accomplished that, and more.

It resulted in the Union’s enlistment of 180,000 freed blacks who speeded up the defeat of the Confederacy and paid for their freedom by fighting and dying in the war.

It turned popular opinion in Britain, France and other anti-slavery countries in favor of the Union, and ended the Confederacy’s hopes of gaining international legitimacy as an independent state.

It ended all attempts to expatriate the freed blacks; only 168 of them left for Africa during the Civil War, and fewer than 2,500 followed over the next five years.

Frederick Douglass became an enthusiastic supporter of Lincoln, who repeatedly consulted with him in the White House — an honor that was without precedent and remained unique until 1901, when President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington for dinner.

And the Northern attitude toward the blacks changed so completely that a little over a year after he issued the Proclamation, Lincoln was reelected on a platform that called for a Constitutional Amendment to make the emancipation nationwide and permanent.

On April 15, 1865, just over a month after the Confederacy surrendered, the president took yet another long step forward to strengthen American democracy. He called for an Amendment that would give black American voting rights — a proposal that may have triggered John Wilkes Booth’s murderous rage.

Students of history agree that no American president ever faced a greater crisis, or handled an emergency as well as Lincoln. In 1982, forty-nine historians and political scientists were asked by the Chicago Tribune to rate all the U.S. presidents through Jimmy Carter in five categories: leadership qualities, accomplishments/crisis management, political skills, appointments, and character/integrity.

Abraham Lincoln won the top rating in all five categories.