1863: Lincoln's Pivotal Year

Appendix A: The Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address

179 Appendix A: The Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address The Emancipation Proclamation The text of Abraham Lincoln’s most important piece of writing boasts none of the narrative brilliance for which his other famous manuscripts are celebrated. In fact, the deadening legalese of the Emancipation Proclamation has been subjected to much criticism by generations of historians —not to mention antislavery leaders of Lincoln’s own time—some of whom have insisted that its numbing tone revealed its author’s indifference to black freedom. Frederick Douglass, for example, who had yearned for such a proclamation for years, conceded when it was finally issued, “It was not a proclamation of ‘liberty throughout the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof,’ such as we had hoped it would be, but was one marked by discrimination and reservation.” And from Europe, Karl Marx admitted that the document reminded him of “the trite summonses that one lawyer sends to an opposing lawyer.” In more recent times, scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. acknowledged that the document was crafted with only “the precision of a constitutional legal brief.” Lerone Bennett Jr. complained that it boasted “no new-birthof -freedom swagger, no perish-from-the-earth pizzazz.” And Richard Hofstadter famously derided the Proclamation with the devastating observation that it boasted “all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.” What many observers, then and now, have failed to comprehend is that Lincoln intentionally chose a legal, rather than a moral, proclamation for very practical reasons: He dearly wanted the document to withstand any potential future court challenges—immediately and ever after. He hoped to persuade conservative, war Democrats to support it by couching it as a military necessity, not an act of philanthropy. And to avoid constitutional doubt, he based his order on his powers as a commander in chief in times of war, not as one with a quest to liberate. Eventually, Lincoln did, in fact, provide the poetic rhetoric to adorn this prose thunderbolt—in speeches like the Gettysburg Address, which he delivered eleven months later. In a sense, the Emancipation Proclamation was so unprecedented and so revolutionary that it did not need the help of Lincoln’s literary skills to assure its monumentality. As the president himself noted the day he signed this document, “If my name ever goes into history, it will be for this act.” In this regard, even critics of its spare and formal literary style have never disagreed. 180 Appendix A The Emancipation Proclamation January 1, 1863 By the President of the United States of America: A Proclamation. Whereas, on the twentysecond day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty two, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, towit: “That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom. “That the Executive will, on the first day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any State, or the people thereof, shall on that day be, in good faith, represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such State shall have participated, shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such State, and the people thereof, are not then in rebellion against the United States.” Now, therefore I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief, of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion, do, on this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand...