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  • Lincoln's Proclamation: Emancipation Reconsidered
  • Lucas E. Morel
Lincoln's Proclamation: Emancipation Reconsidered. Edited by William A. Blair and Karen Fisher Younger. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-8078-3316-2, 248 pp., cloth, $30.00.

The Lincoln bicentennial and Civil War sesquicentennial have elicited a panoply of books, conferences, and exhibits that evaluate Lincoln's legacy. Regarding what Lincoln called "the central act of my administration and the great event of the nineteenth century," the editors of Lincoln's Proclamation argue that their book sides with those who "consider emancipation as a product of many hands" (6–7). Thus, all but one of the essays shift the spotlight from the Great Emancipator to other actors in the American drama of freedom.

Paul Finkelman explains that a presidential decree of freedom "required the convergence of four preconditions" to make emancipation both legitimate and effectual as a wartime measure: namely, a constitutional rationale, popular support, border slave-state loyalty, and military success (18–20). Instead of advancing the discussion of emancipation with new revelations, Finkelman's [End Page 188] incisive primer on the proclamation conveys the essential history of the decree, thereby serving as a de facto introduction to the essays that follow.

Where Finkelman situates the proclamation as part of "Lincoln's careful and complicated strategy" to promote liberty for all, Mark E. Neely Jr. is considerably less impressed (41). He rejects the view that Lincoln's promotion of black colonization was a shrewd concession to white American bigotry to smooth the path to emancipation. Neely maintains that with scant interest in colonization among northern whites, and with most black Americans scornful of the invitation to leave their native land, Lincoln's frank colonization address of August 14, 1862, amounted to "political ineptitude" (53). Neely concludes that with no real audience for colonization, "Lincoln had no elaborate or systematic political plan for easing fears about emancipation" (65).

But Neely fails to appreciate that the pervasive white supremacy in the North was precisely why Lincoln had endorsed colonization to help maintain a national commitment to emancipation while preserving the American union. Paying short shrift to Lincoln's thought experiment about colonization in "an otherwise stirring speech" in Peoria in 1854, Neely misses Lincoln's desire to get his audience to think out loud about the impracticality of black colonization while maintaining their commitment to the eventual freedom of blacks on American soil (59).

Richard Carwardine provides a close look at a seldom explored September 13 meeting Lincoln had with Chicago ministers, who lobbied the president to pursue emancipation in 1862. Contrary to Lincoln observers ranging from his personal secretaries to modern-day biographers, Carwardine argues that Lincoln's meeting with the ministers showed "a man still tussling with a fundamental decision yet to be taken" rather than one committed to emancipation but awaiting an opportune time for its issuance (76–77). But given the president's endorsement of abolition in the nation's capital on April 16, and then throughout all federal territories on June 19, coupled with public statements sketching the relevant constitutional and military considerations, the evidence suggests the die was cast when Lincoln presented a draft of an emancipation proclamation at the pivotal July 22 cabinet meeting.

Steven Hahn's essay asks, "But What Did the Slaves Think of Lincoln?" In lieu of an answer, he argues that American slaves be understood "as the political actors they surely were" and calls for further study of slave initiative and action during the Civil War (112). Likewise, Stephanie McCurry invites a more expansive look at the response of black women to Lincoln's Proclamation. She [End Page 189] argues that in contrast with slave men, who fled to Union lines to support the war effort in hopes of gaining their freedom, slave women "waged their own kind of war against the slaveholder's state" (124). Both essays, however, present hypotheses to be established by further research rather than well-documented advances in the study of emancipation.

Michael Vorenberg explores the meaning of citizenship for the freedmen (whose liberation from bondage few interpreted as conferring first-class citizenship), while Louis Gerteis looks at the...

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