-
5. “Sublime in Its Magnitude”: The Emancipation Proclamation
- Southern Illinois University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
65 “Sublime in Its Magnitude”: The Emancipation Proclamation Allen C. Guelzo 8hich would you rather memorize? This sentence: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent , a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Or this: Whereas, on the twenty-second 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, to wit: “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.” allen c. guelzo 66 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 eight hundred and sixty-three, and in accordance with my purpose so to do publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days, from the day first above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States, the following, to wit . . . Both passages are by the same author—Abraham Lincoln—and were written in the same year—1863. But no explaining is needed to conclude that they couldn’t be more different. The first sentence, from the Gettysburg Address, is arresting and eloquent, and it begins an appeal that soars to the very top of American political rhetoric; the other, the opening of the Emancipation Proclamation , is so pedestrian as almost to make the word boring fail on the lips. And thereby hangs a tale of contradictions: the Gettysburg Address was, after all, only a few simple words uttered at the dedication of a national cemetery, while the proclamation was a long-awaited, headline-bursting emancipation of more than three million slaves, based on a highly contentious, thin-ice reading of the presidential war powers. Lincoln’s own estimate (if we can believe Ward Hill Lamon) of the Gettysburg Address was that it “fell on the audience like a wet blanket” and was a “flat failure” that “wouldn’t scour.”1 But he thought the Emancipation Proclamation was “the central act of my administration, and the great event of the nineteenth century.”2 So, shouldn’t the proclamation be more dramatic, its language more powerful, and its effect more electric than a mere cemetery dedication? And what should people conclude when instead the proclamation sounds, as Karl Marx unfeelingly put it, like “ordinary summonses sent by one lawyer to another on the opposing side.”3 The puzzlement that results from the contrast between Lincoln the Eloquent and Lincoln the Emancipator has, over the years, generated three suspicions: 1. The blandness of the proclamation’s language is so thoroughly out-ofcharacter that it must be revelatory of Lincoln’s personal intentions, and that in turn must mean that he was not in earnest when he wrote it. If he had been, he could have been...