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1. The Final Emancipation Proclamation and Military Emancipation
- Southern Illinois University Press
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8 c h a p t e r o n e The Final Emancipation Procl amation and Military Emancipation On January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln declared “as a fit and necessary war measure” that slaves held in Confederate territory “henceforward shall be free.” After imploring the newly freed slaves to “abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence,” the president proclaimed “that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.”1 A month later, three thousand men and women assembled at a meeting in Brooklyn, New York, and gave the president’s military emancipation project a ringing endorsement: “Where ever you see a black man—give him a Gun & tell him to aid in saving the Republic.”2 For all its heady promise in early 1863, however, Lincoln had taken twenty-one months to settle on a policy of military emancipation. Unable to suppress the Confederate insurgents by conventional military means, and after months of prodding politicians to accept various gradual emancipation and compensated emancipation schemes, Lincoln settled on general emancipation as the final weapon with which to crush the slaveholders’ rebellion. To be sure, Lincoln moved prudently, hopeful to keep the Union intact with slavery. When summoning the militia to suppress the rebellion in April 1861, he assured white southerners that “the utmost care will be observed . . . to avoid any devastation, any destruction The Final Emancipation Proclamation | 9 of, or interference with, property, or any disturbance of peaceful citizens in any part of the country.” And when, in May 1861, Frederick Douglass clamored for “‘carrying the war into Africa.’ Let the slaves and free colored people be called into service, and formed into a liberating army,” Lincoln demurred. Like most white northerners, early in the war he defined the conflict, according to the Reverend John G. Fee, a radical abolitionist from Berea, Kentucky, as a “white man’s war,” committed to “let the nigger stay where he is.”3 While African Americans had fought in the American Revolution and the War of 1812, a point that proponents of utilizing black soldiers emphasized repeatedly, since 1792 Federal law prohibited black men from serving in the state militias and the U.S. Army. Outraged by discussions of arming the South’s slaves, late in 1861 the New York Express predicted that should “this be attempted to any extent, the whole world will cry out against our inhumanity, our savagery, and the sympathies of all mankind will be turned against us.” This attitude was common among both northern white civilians and soldiers in the Union army until 1863, when regiments of black troops filled depleted Union armies and proved their fighting ability in combat.4 Lincoln understood the implications for social change that emancipation and the use of black men as soldiers implied. These steps, including the possibility of placing black people on a social and political par with white people, would challenge the nation’s racial status quo—white supremacy. They would fuel the racial phobias of conservative Democrats and Republicans and would discourage white enlistments. Lincoln also worried that emancipation would alienate slaveholders and non-slaveholders alike in the loyal border states and might further work to unify opposition to the Union in the Confederate states. These were legitimate fears. Americans tended to identify bearing arms and citizenship.5 Once white southerners engaged in armed rebellion, however, Lincoln systematically reneged on his promise not to interfere with slaveholders’ private property. To some degree he was forced to do so. The Confederacy’s early military successes depended significantly on slavery. Bondsmen provided the agricultural and industrial labor [3.237.65.102] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:09 GMT) 10 | The Final Emancipation Proclamation that supplied its armies. Slaves constructed fortifications, repaired railroads, and freed up white men to serve in the ranks. In response, Lincoln began a series of deliberate steps that culminated in his emancipating and arming African Americans. In his private and public pronouncements the president used the idea of contingency as a rhetorical device to make his emancipation project palatable to a broad community of white northerners. Ultimately he could not suppress the rebellion without using his “Emancipation lever.” * * * Lincoln launched his emancipation project very early in the war. He proffered no objections when in May 1861 General Benjamin F. Butler, commanding Union troops at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, unilaterally refused to...