The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views

INTRODUCTION

I N T R O D U C T I O N In 1862, Frederick Douglass greeted the news of AbrahamLincoln'spreliminary EmancipationProclamation by declaring: "Weshout for joythat we live to record this righteous decree." But as Douglass hastened to add with just a touch of bitterness, the president had moved "in his own peculiar, cautious, forbearing and hesitatingway" to reach at last the moment of his "righteous decree," even as "the loyal heart was near breaking with despair." Then Douglass changed course again to acknowledge that, however long delayed, Lincoln'sorder had nonetheless provided genuine "joy and gladness to the friends of freedom and progress."1 Few historians question that the Emancipation Proclamation changed the CivilWar,and changed America. But Frederick Douglass's first editorial comments on Abraham Lincoln's greatest presidential act presaged the complicated, almost schizophrenic, response it has elicited—now, as then—from even the document's and the president's greatest admirers. In its own time, abolitionists likeDouglass reacted to the proclamation with relief, though some complained that it achieved too little too late. Lincoln himself fretted about its political consequences, watching nervously as the stock market plunged and Union troops began deserting in record numbers, unwilling to fight in a war suddenly redefined to embrace not only Union but also black freedom. At the same time, with one eyesurely on his place in history, the long-modest president suddenly made himself availableto artists, photographers , and sculptors who proposed portraying him asa "great emancipator."Meanwhile, in Europe and the South, editorials savagedboth the proclamation and its author, one newspaper inRichmond scorchingly labeling him: "Coward, assassin, savage, murderer ofwomen and babies ... Lincoln the fiend."2 Not surprisingly,the Emancipation Proclamation has traveled—at best—a bumpyhistoriographical road ever since. Controversial at the time, it has become controversial once again for precisely opposite reasons. Adocument that originally struck many critics as radical, divisive, and dangerous, has more recently been assailed by skeptics as timid, conservative, and deceptive. Yet the document that a period artist once called a second Declaration of Independence—"the immaculate conception of Constitutional Liberty"—inspired no full study, remarkably enough, for a hundred years. Not until the document's centennial did historian John Hope Franklin provide the very first full-length book ever devoted exclusivelyto the most epochal document ofthe entire nineteenth century. Forty-three years would pass before the second Emancipation book followed. The discussion remains lively in part because it is so new.3 More recently, editor Lerone Bennett Jr.issued a volume that in manywaysturned Emancipation Proclamation historiography on its ear. Forced into Glory (2000) expanded on the author's longstanding charge that Lincoln's proclamation was nothingbut "aploy designed not to emancipate the slaves but to keep as many slaves as possible in slavery."Lincoln himself, Bennett insisted, "was shockingly indifferent and insensitive to the plight of the slaves in particular and African-Americans in general." He was, in short, no emancipator—but a racist.4 xii Introduction A significant corrective arrived in 2004 with Allen C. Guelzo's exhaustive and original study Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. He dismissed Bennett's "acid skepticism," and countered that "one does not have to make the Emancipation Proclamation scripture, or Lincoln a saint, for it to regain the place" it deserves in American history as "Lincoln'sgreatest document." The followingyear Michael Lind countered that Lerone Bennett's scholarshipwas, in fact, "irrefutable," and thatLincoln was above all a white supremacist for whom emancipation was always supposed to be accompanied by the mass deportation of African Americans.5 Who, if anyone, is correct? In the search for answers to this complex, vexing, and important historical problem, the authors of this book decided to approach the issue in a new way—or, more accurately, new ways. Coming from entirely different training and focus—one of us a professorof American history, another a lawyer-turned-jurist,and the third a specialist in political culture—we thought it might serve Lincolnstudents well to provide a book that offered insights on the Emancipation Proclamation from each of our distinctly different viewpoints. Thus, each of the three chapters, each by a different author, approaches the proclamation from a unique perspective to analyze asaccurately as possible the impact Lincoln's order had on society. None of us expects to offer the definitive, or final, word on the Emancipation Proclamation.We hope, rather, to add to this important, ongoing discussion a new set ofapproaches that haveyet to be considered in the rejuvenated...