Lincoln and the Civil War

7. Dealing with Slavery

67 c h a p t e r s e v e n Dealing with Sl avery Antietam represented a crucial turning point in the war, for that quasi-victory enabled Lincoln to announce publicly his intention to issue an Emancipation Proclamation. Shortly after the Peninsula Campaign ended, he had read to the cabinet a document stating that “as a fit and necessary military measure for effecting this object [i.e., restoration of the Union] I, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, do order and declare 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 states, wherein the constitutional authority of the United States shall not then be practically recognized, shall then, thenceforward and forever, be free.”1 Months earlier, Lincoln had asked Congress to appropriate money to compensate slaveholders in any of the loyal Border States (Maryland , Delaware, Missouri, and Kentucky) that agreed to abolish slavery . Over the next several weeks, he repeatedly urged congressmen and senators from those states to support his plan of gradual, compensated emancipation, but they refused, as did their state legislatures. In July 1862, Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act, freeing the slaves of disloyal owners. That impractical statute would have required court proceedings to determine the loyalty of slave owners. Lincoln feared that the law violated the Constitutional ban on bills of attainder and ex post facto laws, so Congress amended the bill to meet his objections. 68 | dealing with slavery Secretary of State William Henry Seward warned that promulgating an emancipation measure just after the defeat of the Peninsula Campaign would seem like an insincere, desperation gesture. Impressed by that argument, Lincoln shelved the document and awaited a Union victory. Five days after the Battle of Antietam, when he was sure that it could in fact be considered a victory, Lincoln publicly declared his intention to issue a proclamation on January 1 that would free slaves in areas that were still in rebellion but not in the loyal Border States or in portions of the Confederacy already in Union hands. Lincoln limited the scope of emancipation because the proclamation could be justified constitutionally only on grounds of military necessity: to free the slaves of rebellious owners would undermine the ability of the Confederacy to wage war. Lincoln stated that “he had power to issue the proclamation only in virtue of his power to strike at the rebellion, and he could not include places within our own lines, because the reason upon which the power depended did not apply to them, and he could not include such places” just because he opposed slavery himself.2 The cold, legalistic language of the proclamation disappointed many Radicals, including Frederick Douglass, who complained that it “touched neither justice nor mercy. Had there been one expression of sound moral feeling against Slavery, one word of regret and shame that this accursed system had remained so long the disgrace and scandal of the Republic, one word of satisfaction in the hope of burying slavery and the rebellion in one common grave, a thrill of joy would have run around the world.”3 Lincoln had employed dry verbiage in the Emancipation Proclamation deliberately, for he did not want to antagonize conservatives, and he wished to give slaves freed by the proclamation a solid legal basis for their freedom in case the proclamation was challenged in court. Lincoln said that he was “strongly pressed” to justify the document “upon high moral grounds, and to introduce into the instrument unequivocal language testifying to the negroes’ right to freedom upon the precise principles expounded by the Emancipationists of both Old and New-England.” He rejected such counsel, for “policy requires that the Proclamation be issued as a war measure, and not a dealing with slavery | 69 measure of morality; and that Law and Justice require that the slaves should be enabled to plead the Proclamation hereafter if necessary to establish judicially their title to freedom. They can do this, the President says, on a proclamation proceeding as a war measure from the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, but not on one issuing from the bosom of philanthropy.”4 In his annual message to Congress in December 1862, Lincoln employed the eloquent rhetoric that critics missed in the Emancipation Proclamation: “The dogmas of...