Lincoln (76 page)

But Lincoln was under increasing pressure to act. His call for additional volunteers had met a slow response, and several of the Northern governors bluntly declared that they could not meet their quotas unless the President moved against slavery. The approaching conference of Northern war governors would almost certainly demand an emancipation proclamation. He also had to take seriously the insistent reports that European powers were close to recognizing the Confederacy and would surely act unless the United States government took a stand against slavery.

Always reluctant to be out in front of public opinion, always hesitant to assume positions from which there could be no retreat, Lincoln deliberated long before making a hard choice. Ultimately he chose to leave the decision to a Higher Power. To the Chicago Christians who urged him to issue a proclamation of emancipation, he pledged: “It is my earnest desire to know the will of Providence in this matter.
And if I can learn what it is I will do it!”
Seeking a sign, he closely monitored the news of Lee’s invasion of Maryland and the reports from McClellan’s pursuing army. As he told the cabinet later, he “made a vow, a covenant, that if God gave us the victory in the approaching battle, he would consider it an indication of Divine will, and that it was his duty to move forward in the cause of emancipation.”

On September 17, McClellan’s victory at Antietam, though not the overwhelming success Lincoln had hoped for, gave the President the omen he had sought. Turning back to his long-delayed proclamation of emancipation, Lincoln, as he said, “fixed it up a little” over the weekend, and called the cabinet together on September 22 to hear it. Now that the decision was made, he was more relaxed and at home with himself than he had been for weeks. Partly, no doubt, to break the ice in the cabinet meeting but chiefly because he wanted others to share his good humor, he began by reading a selection titled “High-Handed Outrage at Utica” from a new book the humorist Artemus Ward had sent him. This bit of clownery about “a big burly feller” from that “trooly grate sitty” who saw a display of wax figures of the apostles at the Last Supper and caved in the head of the false apostle to prove “that Judas Iscarrot can’t show hisself in Utiky with impunerty by a
darn site,” the President found very funny, and, except for the irascible Stanton, the other heads of departments also enjoyed it—or pretended to.

The President then turned to business, reminding the cabinet of their earlier discussion of emancipation and of the reasons the proclamation had been delayed. “I think the time has come now,” he told them. “I wish it were a better time. I wish that we were in a better condition.” But now he could redeem the promise he had made to himself and, he said, hesitating a little, to his Maker. He did not seek their advice “about the main matter,” for that, he explained, he had determined for himself, but he was willing to accept criticisms of any expressions used or “any other minor matter.”

The document the President presented for cabinet consideration lacked the memorable rhetoric of his most notable utterances. The proclamation, in the words of the atrabilious Gurowski, was “written in the meanest and the most dry routine style; not a word to evoke a generous thrill, not a word reflecting the warm and lofty... feelings of... the people.” Totally absent was any reference to the barbarism of slavery, nor was morality invoked as a reason for striking it down. Instead, Lincoln cited as his authority for acting against slavery his powers as “President of the United States of America, and Commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy thereof,” and the provisions of both the First and Second Confiscation Acts. His sole announced purpose was “the object of practically restoring the constitutional relation between the United States, and each of the states, and the people thereof.” The President remained reluctant, even at this late hour, to offer unqualified freedom to the slaves. He promised to continue to press for compensated emancipation and for the colonization of African-Americans outside the country. Yet, for all his hesitation, Lincoln announced at the end that on January 1,1863, “all persons held as slaves” within any state or part of a state still in rebellion would be “then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

In presenting the Emancipation Proclamation to the cabinet, Lincoln made it clear that he was as uncertain about its expediency as he was doubtful of its success. He was unsure how his new policy would be received. “I know very well that many others might, in this matter, as in others, do better than I can,” he told the cabinet; “and if I were satisfied that the public confidence was more fully possessed by any one of them than by me, and knew of any Constitutional way in which he could be put in my place, he should have it. I would gladly yield it to him.” But since that was not possible, he concluded, “I must do the best I can, and bear the responsibility of taking the course which I feel I ought to take.”

In the discussion that followed, Seward proposed two minor verbal alterations in the document. Ponderously Chase offered: “The Proclamation does not, indeed, mark out exactly the course I should myself prefer. But I am ready to take it just as it is written, and to stand by it with all my heart.” Only Blair expressed dissent, not because he opposed emancipation but because he feared the proclamation would have a bad influence on the border
states and the army and that it might strengthen the Democrats in the fall congressional elections. Lincoln said that he had considered the first of these dangers and discounted it; as for the second, he said, it “had not much weight with him.” Accordingly the document was handed to the Secretary of State to be copied and officially published.

Two days later, responding to serenaders who came to the White House in celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation, the President revealed that he still felt uncertain about his action. “I can only trust in God I have made no mistake,” he told the crowd. “It is now for the country and the world to pass judgment on it.... I will say no more upon this subject.” He concluded lamely, “In my position I am environed with difficulties.”

A Pumpkin in Each End of My Bag

I
n time, Lincoln came to think of the Emancipation Proclamation as the crowning achievement of his administration. It was, he told his old Kentucky friend Joshua F. Speed, a measure that would ensure his fame by linking “his name with something that would resound to the interest of his fellow man.” But in the months immediately following the preliminary proclamation, he was much less sanguine. The proclamation threatened to break up the tenuous coalition of Republicans, War Democrats, and border-state leaders that he had so carefully been building since the outbreak of the war. At the same time, it strengthened the peace element in the Democratic party, and it seemed likely to provoke a mutiny in the army. During the hundred days after he issued the preliminary proclamation, Lincoln’s leadership was more seriously threatened than at any other time, and it was not clear that his administration could survive the repeated crises that it faced.

The initial Northern responses to the Emancipation Proclamation were predictable. Antislavery men were jubilant. “God bless Abraham Lincoln,” exclaimed Horace Greeley’s
New York Tribune.
The President, announced Joseph Medill’s
Chicago Tribune,
had promulgated “the grandest proclamation ever issued by man.” In every major city throughout the North there were huge rallies to celebrate the proclamation, marked by bonfires, parades with torches and transparencies, and, inevitably, fountains of oratory.

Scores of letters of commendation poured into the President’s office.
“God bless you for the word you have spoken!” wrote three correspondents from Erie, Pennsylvania. “All good men upon the earth will glorify you, and all the angels in Heaven will hold jubilee.” “The virtuous, the reflecting, the intelligently patriotic ... as one man hail your edict with delight,” the veteran Pennsylvania abolitionist J. M. McKim told the President, “and [they] bless and thank God that he put it in your heart to issue it.” A Baltimorean took an odd way of showing his enthusiasm for the proclamation by sending the President half a dozen hams.

Nearly every notable man of letters, especially those from New England, voiced approval of the proclamation. John Greenleaf Whittier, William Cullen Bryant, and James Russell Lowell all wrote eloquently in its praise. Hitherto cool toward Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson was now prepared to forget “all that we thought shortcomings, every mistake, every delay,” because the President had “been permitted to do more for America than any other American man.”

For the moment, Lincoln’s critics within his own party were silenced. Thaddeus Stevens and Benjamin F. Wade, both of whom had scathingly attacked Lincoln for his incompetence and for his slowness to move against slavery, had nothing to say. Charles Sumner, locked in a close contest in Massachusetts for reelection to the Senate, saw that the proclamation would help erase the doubts that his abolitionist supporters continued to feel toward Lincoln and jubilantly announced that he stood “with the loyal multitudes of the North, firmly and sincerely by the side of the President.” The governors of the Northern states who gathered at Altoona in the hope of pushing Lincoln to prosecute the war more vigorously, found that the President had preempted their ground, and somewhat lamely their leaders trooped down to Washington to congratulate the President on his proclamation “as a measure of justice and sound policy.”

No doubt such tributes were gratifying to a President who had hitherto received little public praise, but Lincoln was too much of a realist to overestimate their importance. “Commendation in newspapers and by distinguished individuals is all that a vain man could wish,” he reported to Hannibal Hamlin, but he noted that subscriptions to government securities had fallen off and volunteering had dropped. “The North responds to the proclamation sufficiently in breath,” he told the Vice President, “but breath alone kills no rebels.”

In the South, so far as the President could determine, the reaction to the Emancipation Proclamation was altogether negative. Jefferson Davis denounced it as an attempt to stir up servile insurrection and called it a further reason why the Confederacy must fight for its independence. On Southern Unionism the proclamation had a chilling effect. In Tennessee, Emerson Etheridge discovered in Lincoln’s proclamation “treachery to the Union men of the South,” and Thomas A. R. Nelson, one of the most vigorous opponents of secession in eastern Tennessee, attacked “the atrocity and barbarism of Mr. Lincoln’s proclamation.” Lincoln could learn little of its impact on
African-Americans in the South; not until the war was over did they dare admit that they had learned of impending emancipation through the grapevine and were preparing to escape to freedom at the first opportunity.

Even more disappointing was the initial foreign reaction to the proclamation, for one of Lincoln’s purposes had been to forestall threatened moves by Great Britain and France toward the recognition of the Confederacy. Eventually, immense throngs in London, Birmingham, and other British cities would rally to celebrate Lincoln’s declaration of freedom and an outraged public opinion would make it impossible for any British government to intervene on behalf of the slaveholding Confederacy, but the immediate foreign response was negative. Many were sure that the proclamation would be ineffective, since it applied only to slaves beyond the reach of Union arms while doing nothing to free those behind Union lines. Others anticipated that it would incite a servile war; Lord John Russell, the British foreign minister, predicted “acts of plunder, of incendiarism, and of revenge.” As Seward had warned, many Europeans feared that emancipation might interfere with the cotton supply so necessary for British and French mills.

Even in the North, once the initial euphoria had abated, the Emancipation Proclamation came under skeptical scrutiny. Abolitionists noted that Lincoln had only made a promise of freedom and that, apart from being conditional, his promise could be withdrawn before January 1. A few even claimed that the proclamation postponed emancipation as required by the Second Confiscation Act. Recovering from his initial enthusiasm, Greeley lamented that Lincoln exempted from his decree most of Louisiana and Tennessee, two states which had “more than One Hundred Thousand of their citizens in arms to destroy the Union.” Similarly, William Lloyd Garrison regretted that the proclamation left “slavery, as a system ..., still to exist in all the so-called loyal Slave States.”

More troubling to the President was the disaffection the proclamation caused his moderate supporters. Some border-state Unionists believed that his action would undermine the loyalty of Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. Conservative Republicans thought the proclamation unconstitutional and unwise. Orville H. Browning, one of Lincoln’s oldest friends and one of the few in Washington in whom he had hitherto confided freely, was so offended by it that he avoided discussing public issues with the President. Even some of the President’s cabinet advisers regretted his proclamation. Seward loyally supported the President once he had made his decision, but he continued to think that the emancipation decree was both unnecessary and ineffective. Montgomery Blair muffled his criticisms, but his sister accurately captured the feelings of the Blair clan when she called the proclamation “a mistake ... a paper pronunciamento and of no practical result.” Less significant was the muted opposition of Secretary of the Interior Caleb B. Smith, whose unhappiness with Lincoln’s policies, together with ill health, caused him to resign in November.