Emancipation asterisk
One of the more significant commemorations regarding the War Between the States is President Abraham Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which was signed on this date in 1862.
In history class, you learned that Lincoln issued his proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863. But there’s an asterisk to that fact; the historical record is rarely as clean-cut as the popular folklore propagated about it.
Lincoln’s visage as the Great Emancipator is as chiseled into collective memory as it is into Mount Rushmore’s limestone.
When Irving Berlin wrote the song “Abraham” to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday in the film Holiday Inn, he included this lyric, belted out by a black-faced Bing Crosby:
“When black folks lived in slavery Who was it set the darkie free? Abraham …”
One-dimensional legends may be fine in movies, but real life is never so unitary.
The footnote to Lincoln’s preliminary proclamation is relevant today because we need leadership that isn’t afraid to back down sole-agenda race-baiters spewing puritanical, polarizing judgmentalism.
For true context regarding the document proclaiming emancipation, we need to go back to August of 1862, when New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley raked Lincoln over the coals for being timid about making war on slavery as well as the South. The president responded promptly, famously claiming if he could save the union without freeing any slave, or by freeing all the slaves, or by freeing some and leaving others alone, he would do it.
His “paramount object,” he made clear, was to save the union.
Politically, prioritizing support for abolition in 1862 was risky. White supremacy reigned as rigorously in the north as the south, prompting Lincoln to state as late as March 1862 that, “in my judgment, gradual and not sudden emancipation is better for all.”
Militarily, on the other hand, the South was proving in 1862 to be more formidable in its resolve on the battlefield than anticipated, and the labor of slaves on the home front was a key factor to Southern economic stability.
Emancipation was a sticky issue, and Lincoln openly acknowledged as much. On Sept. 13, 1862, the president met with a Chicago committee of inter-denominational Christian leaders, which petitioned him to declare national emancipation. Published reports of the exchange highlighted his hesitancies.
“The subject is difficult,” he began, “and good men do not agree.”
That’s a sage line for the ages—including ours.
“Would my word free the slaves,” he asked, “when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the rebel states?”
He raised other logistical concerns before the panel of pastors. “There are 50,000 bayonets in the Union armies from the border slave states,” he said. “It would be a serious matter if, in consequence of a proclamation such as you desire, they should go over to the rebels.”
He also reiterated his position as penned to Greeley. “I view this matter as a practical war measure,” he said, “to be decided on according to the advantages or disadvantages it may offer to the suppression of the rebellion.”
Ten days after the meeting in Chicago, Lincoln presented his preliminary proclamation, which was in effect a carrot-and-stick compromise.
In it he gave the rebel states 100 days to return to the Union and keep their slaves, just as the border states had. The “or else” part of his offer was an irrevocable emancipation declaration coming on New Year’s Day for any states still in rebellion.
No Confederate states complied, of course, and on Jan. 1 the official Emancipation Proclamation was issued— and roundly criticized by Lincoln foe and fan alike.
Frothing abolitionists saw the document as toothless since it freed no slaves in Union states. His own secretary of state capably captured the sentiment: “We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.”
In his “Conkling Letter,” read aloud at an Illinois rally Lincoln was unable to attend in August of 1863, the president reproved his partisan backers who thought the move too aggressive, and ineffective in ending the war. “You say you will not fight to free Negroes,” he wrote. “Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but no matter. Fight you, then, exclusively to save the Union. I issued the proclamation on purpose to aid you in saving the Union.”
Vexing issues are by nature multifaceted. Our modern racial challenges are no exception, and as in Lincoln’s time and our own, those who hyperfocus solely on single sides of such issues are blinded to the big picture.
To the religious committee so zealous on achieving national emancipation, Lincoln’s retort reflected the larger perspective: “I think you should admit that we already have an important principle to rally and unite the people, in the fact that constitutional government is at stake.”
Modern race-mongering zealots would have ceaselessly lambasted Lincoln for not freeing the Union’s slaves. And in so doing, they might have unwittingly undone the victory that ensured eventual emancipation for all. Rabid radicals rely on howling, rather than reason, and are habitually wrong.
That’s a stubborn historical lesson to learn. Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.