The Emancipation Proclamation

The Emancipation Proclamation
By: F. Jack Bowman, Esq.

            Of all the official government documents drafted in the history of the United States of America, only the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States can exceed the Emancipation Proclamation in importance.

            Yet few documents are as misunderstood and subject to as many myths and downright lies as Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

            Look at what the document says about freeing slaves:

On the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.

            A few years ago there was an article in USA Today in which the writer listed some what he called "urban myths" which he felt were appropriate for Black History Month. His Myth No. 1 was: "Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves." The writer went on to say:

The Emancipation Proclamation . . . didn’t free a single slave that Lincoln was in a position to set free. It ordered the release of slaves in "any state or designated part of a state" that was in rebellion against the federal government. The areas covered by Lincoln’s historic order were under the control of the Confederate Army, a fact that made the Emancipation Proclamation virtually unenforceable.

Even worse, Lincoln exempted from his order slaves held in parts of the South that were under the control of the Union Army. He excluded the 48 counties of Virginia that would later become West Virginia. His order also left enslaved blacks in New Orleans and 12 Louisiana parishes, as wells as slaves in Portsmouth and Norfolk, Va., and seven surrounding counties occupied by Union forces.

            In addition to the writer’s down-his-nose tone, which seems to suggest Lincoln did not want to free slaves in any territory the Union Army controlled, he was incorrect when he said the Proclamation "didn’t free a single slave that Lincoln was in a position to set free." Simply stated,  Lincoln was not, to use that writer’s language, “in a position to set free” all slaves everywhere.

            Still, the fact remains that, by its very terms, the Emancipation Proclamation did not set free a single slave on the day it was issued! So just what was going on with this momentous document?

            Well, there are two key points to the proclamation that critics ignore. First, the Proclamation had enormous political impact, at home and abroad, which, in turn, had a huge effect on the outcome of the war. In fact, you can make the argument that the Emancipation Proclamation actually assured the ultimate victory of the Union cause.

            Second, a great many slaves WERE ultimately freed by the Proclamation as the Union Army took control of more and more territory that had been held by the Confederate States of America on January 1, 1863.

            To begin, however, let’s dismiss the idea that Lincoln was somehow favorably disposed toward slavery, as many who do not understand the Emancipation Proclamation seem to imply.

            As Doris Kearns Goodwin put it in her magnificent book, Team of Rivals, , "armies of scholars, meticulously investigating every aspect of his life, have failed to find a single act of racial bigotry on his part." Even if you want to judge him by 21^st Century ideals  and standards – which is unfair – Lincoln was never favorably disposed toward slavery.

            But he made it clear, once he had been elected President, that his task as President was to save the Union, not to destroy slavery. In a famous letter to Horace Greeley, the gadfly editor of the New York TRIBUNE. Lincoln wrote:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union and is not either to save or to 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.

            By the late summer of 1862, however, Lincoln had concluded it was time to take the final step to proclaim freedom for the slaves. Simply put, the war was not being won; indeed it seemed quite possible it would be lost. Union armies were stalled in the West, the attempt to open the Mississippi at Vicksburg was going nowhere, and a strong Confederate army was moving into Kentucky. In the East things were, if anything, worse. The great drive to take Richmond  – known as the Peninsula Campaign – had ended with the Union army being shoved back down the James River to Harrison’s Landing by a much smaller Rebel army. And there had been another defeat in the second Battle of Bull Run. Now Robert E. Lee was at the Potomac , preparing to invade the North. England and France appeared to be on the verge of recognizing the Confederacy, which would very likely have insured its independence.

            But the President did not have the legal authority to issue a proclamation freeing slaves. That would be an interference with the right of property and slaves – as repugnant as we find the idea today – were a species of property. The President – as powerful as he was – could not interfere with the property rights of the citizens of the United States. That was the law of the land. Period.

            Facing this situation, Lincoln recognized two facts:

            First, the strongest and most determined sentiment in favor of going on to victory at any cost was that of the anti-slavery people.

             Second, powers such as England and France – distressed by the cotton blockade, and not very fond of the United States anyway – could intervene in a war that meant nothing more than an attempt by certain states to win their independence. But they could not intervene if that meant supporting a fight to continue slavery and opposing a fight to free the slaves.

            So Lincoln believed he had to make the war into a war to destroy slavery. But how could he, since it was well-accepted as a matter of law that the President could not interfere with the property rights of slave owners? So how did Lincoln manage it?

            Earlier in 1862 he had read William Whiting’s The War Powers of the President in which Whiting had pointed out that the President's war powers are almost unlimited. The President, as Commander-In-Chief of the Army and Navy, subject to ratification by Congress, Whiting argued, can do just about anything he thinks needs to be done to win a war. Lincoln concluded, then, that he could proclaim freedom for the slaves as a war measure. In fact the very language of the Proclamation on this point is: “this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution upon military necessity.”

            It is this idea of the Proclamation as a war measure that accounts for the odd shape the document took. It proclaimed freedom for the slaves in precisely those areas where the government could not – at that moment – enforce freedom; that is, the Deep South, where the armies of the Union had not yet obtained control.

            In the border slave states – Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland – which had remained with the Union, the Emancipation Proclamation specifically had no effect. In such states as Tennessee and Virginia the Proclamation applied only to the areas still in rebellion, and not to the areas that had been pacified. (Thus, for example, the Emancipation Proclamation had no effect in what is now West Virginia! ) To have taken away citizens’ slaves in those areas would have been to interfere with the right of property and – those areas not being under Confederate control ­­ – the President could not call on his war powers to justify such a seizure of private property.

            But . . . in those states and parts of states where the Confederacy still held control, freeing the slaves – or, more properly, promising that slaves would be free as soon as the Federal Government gained control – could have enormous impact.

            So, with the Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln confronted four million black slaves and –  with however many provisos and qualifications – went on to say these people would be "then, thenceforward, and forever free."

            The slaves took him very seriously. They did not have access to newspapers, and most of them couldn’t have read them if they had. They were locked away, far behind the army, and yet they knew almost instantaneously that the President of the United States was saying they were going . . . to . . . be . . . free! From that moment on, slavery was doomed.

            The Proclamation had changed the whole character of the war and, more than any other single thing, doomed the Confederacy to defeat.

            The Northern government was now committed to a broader cause, with deep, mystic overtones; it was fighting for union and for human freedom, and the very nature of the Union for which it was fighting would be permanently deepened and enriched. Northerners who had wondered whether the war was quite worth its terrible cost heard, at last, what Bruce Catton would call “the faint, haunting echo of democracy’s trumpets.”

            And in Europe the American Civil War had become something in which no western government dared to intervene. No government that had to pay the least attention to the sentiment of its own people could take sides against a government which was trying to destroy slavery.

            The Emancipation Proclamation had locked the Confederates in an anachronism which could not survive in the modern world.

            One other point: The Proclamation contained this paragraph:

I further declare and make known that such persons of suitable condition [that is, former slaves] 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 meant former slaves would be taken into the Union Army and Navy, not just as servants, but as soldiers and sailors. Once this had happened and these men fought for the Union, there could be no turning back.

            General William Tecumseh Sherman, who was far from being an Abolitionist, remarked in 1863: “the whole army of the United States could not restore the institution of slavery in the South; they can’t get back their slaves, any more than they can get back their dead grandfathers; it is dead.” And Sherman was right.

            From a purely military perspective, stating that slaves freed by the Proclamation “will be received into the armed service of the United States,” was significant. Ultimately it would bring 180,000 African-Americans into the ranks. Black troops would provide roughly 9 percent of the two million total Union armies enlistments, and their actual contribution was significantly greater, since these enlistments were concentrated in the last two years of the war, when the total strength of the Union armies varied between 700,000 and one million men.

            Something else about the Proclamation was quite radical. It enjoined Blacks freed by the act “to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defense.” This was intended to mollify those in the North, as well as in England, who feared general emancipation would be the signal for a slave uprising.

            But, by suggesting Blacks could use violence for self-defense, the Proclamation attacked the fundamental principle of plantation law and discipline, which not only forbade the slave to resist punishment or even abuse by a legal master, but also prohibited an appeal to either the civil or the criminal court.

            By conferring a right of self-defense on the slave, Lincoln had negated the fundamental law of slavery.       

            It is true, then, that the Emancipation Proclamation did not free a single slave on the day it was issued. But it drove the final nail into the coffin of the institution of slavery. It led directly to the 13^th Amendment to the United States Constitution and the TOTAL elimination of human slavery in the United States.

            Abraham Lincoln, described by Elton Trueblood as the “Theologian of American Anguish,” was also a very savvy prairie politician. In issuing the Emancipation Proclamation his savvy political instincts and his deep sense of humanity came into play.

            Free people everywhere are still in his debt.