"Let Me Know If We Are Free"

On August 25, 1864, Annie Davis, an African American woman enslaved in Maryland, sent Abraham Lincoln a letter. She wrote: "It is my Desire to be free, to go see my people on the eastern shore. My mistress won't let me you will please let me know if we are free. and what I can do. I write to you for advice."

Lincoln most likely never responded. He probably never even saw the letter. But Davis' inquiry, coming eighteen months after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, speaks to the uncertainties of a document that raised as many questions as it seemed to address. Why was it issued? Whom did it free? When did it free them? What were the contours of the freedom received?

Annie Davis was not alone in being confused. Ever since September 22, 1862, the date on which Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, the document has been praised, derided, ignored, and continually reevaluated. Even before releasing it, Lincoln provided future historians with one line of interpretation: a proclamation of emancipation, Lincoln said on September 12, would have as much effect as "the Pope's Bull against the Comet."

Richard Hofstadter, for one, agreed, and in his classic The American Political Tradition (1948) he delivered an assessment that still clings to the document: the Emancipation Proclamation, he sneered, had "all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading." When, on the occasion of the centennial, John Hope Franklin, in his gem The Emancipation Proclamation (1963), called it a "great American document of freedom" that had been neglected, he was swimming against a rising historiographic current that expressed grave doubts about Lincoln as the Great Emancipator. To be sure, hundreds if not thousands of books have offered praise of Lincoln, including for his role as emancipator, and some, such as Allen Guelzo's Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (2004) have sought once and for all to reestablish the centrality of the document in the story of freedom. Of course, Guelzo himself was struggling upstream against a torrent of newly discovered documents unearthed by the Freedmen and Southern Society Project that demonstrated the active role that the enslaved played in effecting their own liberation.

Into a debate that now stagnates over the reductionist question of who freed the slaves comes a volume of essays that offers to reconsider Lincoln's proclamation and the process of emancipation. That only three of the eight essays deal directly with the subject of the volume's title suggests that most scholars still have Hofstadter's epitaph hardwired into them. Paul Finkelman, however, is not one of them. In the volume's lead essay he takes on Hofstadter and invites us to reconsider the infamous jibe. Finkelman proclaims Lincoln's strategy on emancipation as "subtle, at times brilliant" (p. 13) and offers four preconditions that had to exist before the President could act: a legal framework for confiscating slave property; political support to oppose slavery; a belief that the border states would remain in the Union; and the hope of military victory. Finkelman argues that once these conditions were met, Lincoln the lawyer wrote a "carefully crafted, narrow document: a bill of lading for the delivery of freedom to some three million slaves" (p. 41). Here he nicely uses Hofstadter's language against him. A bill of lading, Finkelman explains, was an essential legal instrument that guaranteed the delivery of goods between parties far apart and unknown to one another.

If Finkelman tends to see every move of Lincoln's as brilliantly plotted to achieve maximum effect, Mark Neely suggests that the idea that Lincoln sought through colonization to prepare people for emancipation is a myth. Neely returns our attention to the critical period between July 22...