Upon the Altar of the Nation (33 page)

Yet at the same time Douglass could not constrain his excitement at the prospect of movement forward toward the all-consuming goal and motive of universal and immediate emancipation. In an address delivered in Rochester, New York, on December 28, 1862, Douglass exulted: “We stand to-day in the presence of a glorious prospect.... It is difficult for us who have toiled so long and hard to believe that this event, so stupendous, so far reaching and glorious is even now at the door.”

Later, he recalled the mood when he first saw the news on the wires:

The African Methodist Episcopal Christian Recorder responded to Lincoln’s proclamation with a blistering jeremiad of its own. It began in classic language: “God has a controversy with this nation. He is chastising us severely, by civil war. We have tried to humble ourselves; have fasted and prayed... but his wrath is poured out still.” Why, the writer continued, “does not his anger subside?” The answer: because limited emancipation such as what Lincoln proposed was not enough. The only means to peace is “Universal Emancipation.” With ongoing violence in view, the editorial continued its jeremiad: “God sometimes so leads men, and so hedges up their way, as to make his will most plain—so plain that their refusal to do it he regards as unpardonable obstinacy, which he beats with many stripes, if he does not avenge it with unquenchable anger.”

The war rages on because peace and slavery cannot coexist. God “makes them incongruous, incompatible.” Then, speaking for God, the editorial concluded: “These are my children, made of the same blood with yourselves, they are no longer to be your slaves. They have served you many generations. They have now attained their majority—to a state of manhood. I demand their freedom.”
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For those African Americans who, for the first time in their New World experience, were slaves no more, the effects of Lincoln’s emancipation were electric. In innumerable ways overt and subtle, they had risked all for freedom and finally saw their Day of Jubilee. With news of the Emancipation Proclamation, New Orleans slaves asked General Nathaniel Banks to permit a day of celebration for January I, when the law went into effect. Their letter expresses the intensity of the moment:

The deferential tone of the letter cannot disguise the ecstasy of the moment for these people and their union.

Though no abolitionist, General Banks did allow former slaves to enjoy their de facto freedom and approved of subsequent celebrations. The observances, he concluded, were wholly salutary:

Banks offered paid employment, in place of unpaid servitude, to all able-bodied former slaves who wished to work and achieve self-sufficiency as well as “education for the young.”

The “experiment” to see if agriculture could exist without slavery proved to be a “complete success.”
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Colonel George Hanks of the Fifteenth Regiment, Corps d’Afrique, issued a formal report to Secretary of War Stanton in which he summarized the results of the experiment in similarly glowing terms:

Despite the capacities of African American freedmen to stand on their own, white Americans posed serious problems, even with emancipation. In a column on “Slavery and the Negro,” a writer for the New York Evangelist pointed out that the challenge of dealing with the “Negro” problem only began with emancipation:

That “destiny,” tragically, would not soon be glorious.

H
ow did Lincoln understand his proclamation? Lincoln took a broad view of his constitutional powers in time of war and saw emancipation in that context. He knew that this idea had been broached before by President John Quincy Adams as a legitimate war measure that could bypass traditional constitutional restraints in the interests of pressing national security.
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Lincoln also appreciated the many practical advantages to be gained by such an act. Preventing England from recognizing the Confederacy was surely one pressing motive in his decision. Maintaining the loyalty or at least the neutrality of the border states was another. But the most important consideration was pragmatic: winning the war.

In fact, Lincoln was no more supportive of slave insurrections than he was of John Brown.
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Both he deemed terrorists attacking noncombatant populations in preemptive acts of war. Lincoln reaffirmed this position in his final proclamation on January 1, 1863, when, in the same codicil, he added: “I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defense.” The opposition of Lincoln, his generals, and his administration to the rhetoric of slave insurrection offers perhaps the strongest confirmation that, contrary to American memory, the Civil War was not at all an abolitionist war, let alone a war for racial equality. Most Northern intellectuals agreed. New York’s Presbyterian pastor William R. Williams asked the rhetorical question: “Do we anticipate or desire the excesses of servile revolt?” His unabashed response: “God forbid! But the very presence of two contending armies, Northern and Southern, will serve as an alarmed police to restrain such excesses, were they otherwise probable.”
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Lincoln was emphatic that his act be seen as a measure of war enacted “by virtue of the power in me vested as commander-in-chief of the army and navy... and as a fit and necessary war measure.” Any other terms would be opposed to the Constitution he was pledged to uphold.
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His proclamation included no pleas for congressional approval or recommendations for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery everywhere. In this sense, his act was more analogous to his orders to blockade the enemy’s coast than it was to England’s emancipation in 1833 or the subsequent constitutional amendments ending slavery in the United States in 1865.
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In 1863 Lincoln’s position coincided with Charles Hodge’s. Limited emancipation was a means to total victory, not a moral end in itself. The moral end remained the Union.

But also like Hodge, Lincoln changed over the last and bloodiest years. Lincoln was an abolitionist at heart in his personal views (“If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong”). He detested the ownership of one human being by another. And with emancipation as a war measure, he could at last bring his personal views more in line with his public executive self. Lincoln was also a pragmatist who wedded emancipation to his other certainty—the resort to total war if necessary to preserve the Constitution and the Union. As a war measure, the Emancipation Proclamation carried the further practical benefit of enlisting black soldiers into Union armies.
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And with black enlistments, Lincoln would never again mention colonization as a solution to the race problem.

Nevertheless, slavery and emancipation did not bring out Lincoln’s rhetorical genius during the war in the way the Union did. Lincoln knew that total war would demand even more blood on the fields and far more suffering in the civilian homesteads, and this realization incarnated in him a growing mystical reverence for the Union as itself something sacred and worthy of sacrificial worship. Lincoln’s sacralized interpretation of the Union’s meaning led to a level of humility not seen in most of the Northern and Southern moralists. Lincoln’s God would not be bound by self-righteous claims to moral superiority by one side or the other. God, in other words, could not be contained in human rhetorical traps. And, almost alone in the war, neither could Lincoln.

Still, Lincoln’s hatred of slavery fell far short of guarantees Garrisonians and black abolitionists demanded on the subject of racial equality. On September 18, 1862, in a meeting with a large delegation of Northern clergymen from Chicago, Lincoln had hidden his intention to issue a proclamation. In response to the clergy’s plea that he transform the war into an abolition war, Lincoln had made plain that whatever he might do or not do about slavery in the Confederate states would be in response not to moral imperatives or personal opinions but to the exigencies of war.
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As reported by
The Liberator,
Lincoln informed the delegation: “I view the matter [of emancipation] as a practical war measure, to be decided upon according to the advantages or disadvantages it may offer to the suppression of the rebellion.”

In the same spirit, he sent a public letter to Horace Greeley, printed first in the New York Tribune on August 22, 1862, and widely reprinted thereafter:

It is important also to remember that his proclamation did not include slaves in the loyal border states. Furthermore, hatred of slavery did not translate into the higher moral imperative of hatred of racism, though all abolitionists recognized it was a necessary starting point. Frederick Douglass recognized this tragic limitation even as he praised emancipation. As long as the Union was the nation’s ultimate priority and not abolition and racial equality, racism would endure:

Speaking to his white congregation in Plainville, Connecticut, the Reverend Moses Smith issued a bold and parallel judgment on race in the North:

Douglass and Smith saw the future.
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Lincoln could escape the rhetorical trap of the self-righteous jeremiad and see his way to a newly sacralized republic. But he could not escape the culture of racism and white supremacy of which he was a product. Besides favoring colonization of slaves before emancipation, he expressed no abhorrence about the racist laws in his native Illinois, nor condemned their even more racist denunciations of Indians. When, in August, Lincoln convened a delegation of African American leaders to discuss his interests in colonization, he was disappointed at the stridency of their opposition. “This is our country as much as it is yours, and we will not leave it,” an outraged delegate from Philadelphia wrote.
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