One hundred forty-nine years ago, Abraham Lincoln met with his cabinet to explain that he was about to release a presidential proclamation that would turn their world upside down. The Emancipation Proclamation would unilaterally, and without compensation, free every slave held within the territory of the rebel Confederate States, and pledge the U.S. military to assist any of those slaves in achieving their “actual freedom.” It would be, he predicted, “the central act of my administration.”
Lincoln had been sending frequent signals that he was contemplating such a measure, so the substance of the proclamation came as no surprise. It was the method that was new. With the gloom of a failing war hanging over his head, Lincoln cast emancipation in the form of a “war powers” proclamation, issued on the strength of his constitutional designation (in Article 2, section 2) as “Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States.”
The chief legal problem was that, in 1862, no one really knew what it meant to be a “Commander-in-Chief,” much less whether any “war powers” came with the job. And then there was the consideration raised by Secretary of State William H. Seward: What would a military proclamation of emancipation look like when the president’s military forces were at that moment reeling from defeat to defeat? Wait, he counseled, until the military victory has been won, and then send the proclamation forth from strength rather than from weakness.
Two months later, Lincoln had the victory Seward wanted, as the Union army pounded Robert E. Lee’s Confederate forces into retreat at Antietam, on Sept. 17, 1862, and so Lincoln prepared to release the proclamation. But Lincoln had something more to add. As he told his astonished cabinet, he had made a vow “to my Maker” that if the rebel army was beaten and “driven out,” he would send the proclamation after them, “and I am going to fulfil that promise.”
Abraham Lincoln was not normally a very self-revealing sort, especially on the subject of religion. But now, in what remains the most socially revolutionary document written by any American president, Lincoln threw aside his self-imposed restraint and proceeded to justify his proclamation and the freedom it bestowed on 3.9 million black slaves in terms of a private covenant he had made with God.
It is a peculiar moment — this uncommonly private man with so little personal religion of his own, presiding over a secular and enlightened democracy, and yet appealing to “the favor of Almighty God” as the rationale for what he called “the great event of the nineteenth century.”
But Abraham Lincoln was certainly no holy fool. In Lincoln, and in the Emancipation Proclamation, there is the glimmering of a fundamental truth at the bedrock of the American experience — that the scaffolding of our democratic politics may be religionless, and free from the fear of the likeliest forms of intolerance, but at the same time, the entire system is infused with a religious sensitivity to issues of right and wrong. A purely religious government becomes the theocracy of the mullahs; a purely secular democracy becomes the insipid play toy of power. The American experiment would be neither.
In this greatest of presidential state papers, Abraham Lincoln captured both the scaffolding and the spirit. The result was freedom.
What a treasure Lincoln was!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseRight, Lincoln freed the slaves in parts of the country he had no control over and left them as human property everywhere else. Note the exceptions contained in Paragraph 5:
"Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, (except the Parishes of St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James Ascension, Assumption, Terrebonne, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the City of New Orleans) Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia, (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkley, Accomac, Northampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Ann, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth[)], and which excepted parts, are for the present, left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued."
As stated by a Canadian friend who never actually read it until I pointed it out to him, "So, Lincoln only freed slaves in parts of the country that were p*ing him off?"
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseBeautiful
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseLincoln's brand of religiosity has intrigued me for some time. I'll have to read more about this episode. It's one that everyone seems to learn about on the most superficial level--a fact to be memorized for a test on the Civil War--belying the immensity of the thought that went into it, and the full import of the act. Thanks for sharing this.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSince Lincoln 'freed' slaves only in Confederate or depending on your view, Rebel lands, the proclamation did not free a single slave. For instance, in Louisiana, Lincoln had to go Parish by Parish to make sure he did not free any slaves in Union held territory. It was a political act, not a moral one on his part, probably meant to keep Great Britian out of the war on the side of the Confederacy. GB was suffering from the lack of cotton and they wanted to get it going again and had the navy to do it. In US Federal held Southern territory, slaves were labeled 'Contrabands', as a material of war and were confiscated by Union forces for their use.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt was September 22. You're right. Odd that almost no one knows that date and to reflect on it every year, as we should. I thank you for this eloquent and soulful reminder.
The Emancipation Proclamation was an act of such profound import that even now one's understanding of it must be almost mystical.
I, for one, recoil at the prospect of the Federal government wantonly obliterating citizens' property rights, rights which had been more-than-implicitly accepted in the Founding. I am descended from people who were that property, and also from their owners. Surely there must have been another way, I wish, but no - the War, the Proclamation, it had to be so. Aeschylus would have understood that.
But that's it - up to here, no further. When Washington comes for any other kind of our property, I would hope that our resistance would be no less fierce than that of the Confederates.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhat you are saying is that the US has an essentially liberal (along with a conservative) character in the modern sense of the word. Fairness is the basis of modern liberalism. Why did you chose this forum for this particular message?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseCWCW, you're 180 degrees off the mark here. PERCEIVED fairness, not actual fairness, is the basis of modern liberal. A truly fair, "liberal" society would take zero notice of a persons' sex, age, race, origins, religion, all the etcs that modern liberals so love to parse; only his accomplishments.
Perceived fairness always favors those groups most endeared to the modern liberal.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseNo cwcw, though the left talks about fairness, it believes that politics is just a matter of choosing who the victims will be. Conservatives, who are the heirs and the classical liberalism that led to our founding, believe there should be none victimized by government. That is genuine fairness.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIndeed, I wish these Lincoln cultists would engage in some critical thinking and understand the tyrant Lincoln was the beginning of the end of our American republic...and the rise of imperialism and big government!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseLincoln saved the Union and liberated the slaves. With the exception of George Washington our greatest President ever, God bless his him in heaven. Cordially, Bill
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSerious question: Was freeing the slaves a taking of property without compensation? Does the US government owe reparations, not to slaves, but to slave owners?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseC'mon, I refuse to believe your serious. Cordially, Bill
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseRead the Constitution. Human and Civil Rights are inalienable and protected. No man has the right to put another in servitude. Even the British at the time were ahead of the U.S. in the battle against slavery. All Lincoln did was enforce the Constitution and Bill of Rights, which still protect you - by the way.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYour modern reading of the Constitution is a post-thirteenth Amendment view. The Bill of Rights stopped at Amendment ten at the time in question.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseCorrect. That is why the Congress paid the DC slave owners for their human property in 1862 and thee Lincoln administration administered it in good faith.
No other slaves were legally freed in the USA until after the death of Lincoln and the adoption of the 13th Amendment in 1865, where no compensation was granted and all involuntary servitude, except that imposed by government, was eliminated.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThis man presided over a country torn asunder...on his watch...and then through force of arms and subjugation he pieces it back together...
So he breaks it (my view, putting his own political ambition above country) and then "fixes" it and for that he is equivalent to George Washington??
Give me a break...
He led an invasion of sovereign states and that makes him a great man??
No chance...
And the proclamation in my view was a sham...just a military measure...
Border slave states were not cited, nor were other Southern territories occupied by his invading armies...
He HAD the power to free those people, but didn't...
Tells you all you need to know...
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAnyone who argues that Lincoln's Proclamation was a "political" act rather than a "moral" act forget that the EP was neither. It was a legal act. Lincoln went "parish-by-parish," enumerating exceptions to the EP in Louisiana and Virginia because the EP was a war-powers proclamation, issued on his authority as Commander-in-Chief; it could not apply to those areas of Virginia and Louisiana which had returned to US loyalty and where the civil courts were open and functioning. Hence, they had to be exempted; otherwise, the EP would have become the occasion for a federal court challenge, and that challenge would have ended up in the lap of (guess who?) Roger Taney, who was rumored to have already prepared beforehand an opinion striking down any emancipation move the president might make. For those who plead that Lincoln tyrannically seized private property: that "private property" consisted of slaves, and slavery is no better than kidnapping. No civil law can undo the natural right to liberty. Otherwise, we would be told by kidnappers that we have no business meddling in their "property." But even if we conceded that slaves were legal "property," it is also true that in time of war, enemy property (especially that which supports the enemy war effort) may be seized as contraband of war. Since the slaveholdes ahd always insisted that slaves were "property," there should be no difficulty in seizing as contraband a species of property so important to the rebellion's war effort. Finally: far from the EP being issued to solicit British or foreign sympathy, the EP actually made foreign intervention more likely. Conversations within Viscount Palmerston's cabinet expressed deep worry that the EP would destroy the transatlantic cotton trade beyond all hope of recovery, and thus require a British intervention to force a negotiated peace.
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