Emancipating Lincoln: The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory by Harold Holzer (review)

Harold Holzer’s latest book offers three detailed perspectives on one of the most crucial and contested artifacts of the Lincoln canon. A “historical hung jury” accompanies the Emancipation Proclamation, Holzer notes, and continues to weigh the merits of text and author alike (10). This study—which is derived primarily from the Nathan I. Huggins Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 2010—provides intricate insight into the political strategy and public legacy of this embattled document. As former co-chair of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and source of numerous studies on the sixteenth president, Holzer knows better than to offer readers a final answer to the controversy. Instead, he frames the book as an attempt to “stimulate further conversation” on a rich historical text (8). Specifically, the study examines Lincoln’s “convoluted route” to revealing his decision to emancipate slaves, the dominant factors influencing the formal prose of the text, and the “evolution of Lincoln’s own resulting reputation as liberator” in artistic renderings following the text’s release (4).

The first chapter attempts to disabuse readers of the notion that Lincoln pushed for emancipation reluctantly. Using a range of private and public messages to support his case, Holzer sketches an impressive chronology of events from late 1862 to the issuance of the proclamation, imagining Lincoln as the preeminent political strategist. Accepting this account requires one to believe “the idea of inaction as action, and of intentionally misleading public utterances as purposeful and helpful” (10). Holzer argues that even when Lincoln seemed neutral or hesitant he was, in fact, gauging the viability of emancipation and going to great lengths to prepare a hesitant nation for the impending policy. Readers are invited to take renewed stock of three public messages in particular: Lincoln’s meeting with the “Deputation of Free Negroes” in which he proposed self-colonization of slaves, Lincoln’s message that maintaining the Union was his “paramount concern” of the Civil War, and his meeting with a religious delegation from Chicago wherein he affirmed his concern to carry out God’s will. By reexamining events in political and social context, Holzer finds Lincoln’s uncertain reputation as emancipator the result of imperfect methods by which he made “freedom palatable for whites and possible for blacks” (71).

Beyond Lincoln’s skill at manipulating the political landscape, Holzer confronts the complex craft and early public reaction to Lincoln’s decree. The second chapter attempts to reconcile the “twin, concurrent, and disparate reputations” of the text “as both a freedom icon and rhetorical failure,” themes that have echoed public discussion since the proclamation was signed (86–87). Holzer posits that lack of sentiment in the text is a virtue, not a vice. Fearing military “insubordination,” the withdrawal of border states from the Union, and the prospect of European countries recognizing “the Confederacy as a separate nation,” Lincoln forged discursive reticence in the preliminary and final emancipation texts (92). The final result was a text exceptional for being unexceptional: a product that was “rhetorically bland enough to hold critics in check, legally sound enough to survive threat of court challenges, and militarily strong enough in promising the under-achieving Union army a new infusion of manpower” (94). This chapter illustrates Holzer’s skill in weaving together an array of historical artifacts that help readers imagine the influences and social thought guiding Lincoln’s strategy. Especially insightful is a correspondence between Lincoln and Henry J. Raymond, editor of the New York Times. It was Raymond who insisted that freedom without Union victory would be fruitless for the country. The problem with issuing emancipation as a military order would be limited, he suggested, to those who prioritize “the mode of more importance than the result itself ” (103).

The final chapter shifts attention from the strategies bound in the proclamation to its enduring life in artistic display. For such a momentous policy change, the text was signed in private, denying journalists an “emancipation...