Still, Lincoln dreaded unleashing “the weapon of emancipation” as a unilateral military decree. A quarter of a century earlier, he had warned his Lyceum audience against men the likes of an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon who exploited times of chaos to impose order from above. The irony burned deep that to save the Union required suspension of constitutional law upon which the Union had been founded. To rescind his inaugural pledge of noninterference with slavery by a sweeping executive fiat was a resort predicated upon the failure of all other options.
Exhaust all possibility of compromise before imposing unilateral executive power.
Four months earlier, Lincoln had sent a message to Congress calling for federal aid to the four loyal border states—Missouri, Kentucky, Delaware, and Maryland—if they were willing to adopt a plan for the gradual abolition of slavery. In return for voluntarily relinquishing their slaves, slave owners would be compensated at an average price of $400 per head. It was Lincoln’s conviction that nothing would shorten the war faster than compensated emancipation. If the rebels were deprived of hope that the border states might join the Confederacy, they would lose heart. The plan depended upon the approval of the border state legislatures. To the citizens of those states Lincoln appealed directly: “You can not if you would, be blind to the signs of the times—I beg of you a calm and enlarged consideration of them, ranging as it may be, far above personal and partisan politics. The proposal makes common cause for a common object, casting no reproaches upon any. . . . The change it contemplates would come gently as the dews of heaven, not rending or wrecking anything. Will you not embrace it?” The appeal to Congress had foundered on the sweeping and disruptive change that would be unleashed on an economic and social system dependent upon slavery.
In the aftermath of the Peninsula disaster, Lincoln called a meeting of the twenty-eight border state representatives and senators to renew his proffer of compensation. To his great dismay, they once again refused, arguing that “emancipation in any form” would fan the spirit of secession in the loyal border states and would further consolidate the spirit of rebellion in the seceded states, lengthening, not shortening the war.
“I am a patient man,” Lincoln told one of the group, “but it may as well be understood, once for all, that I shall not surrender this game leaving any available card unplayed.” That final card was the unveiling of his first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.
* * *
So the situation stood on July 22, 1862, when the president gathered the cabinet to read his proclamation. As depicted in Francis Carpenter’s famous painting of the occasion, Lincoln is seated in the center. The radicals—Edwin Stanton and Salmon Chase—are to Lincoln’s right. The conservatives—Caleb Smith, Montgomery Blair, and Edward Bates—are grouped on Lincoln’s left. The moderates—Gideon Welles and, seated in the foreground, William Henry Seward—surround Lincoln, who is presented as the nucleus and fulcrum of the composition. Battlefield maps and books are strewn everywhere—tilted against the walls, spread on the floor, rolled in standing racks. It was the young artist’s goal to bestow enduring fame on “that band of men, upon whom the eyes of the world centered as never before.”
Silence prevailed as the president unfolded two lined foolscap sheets from his pocket, adjusted his glasses on his nose, and began to read what amounted to a legal brief for emancipation. He enumerated the various congressional acts regarding confiscation of the property of rebels, repeated his recommendation for compensated emancipation, and reiterated his purpose to preserve the Union. And then he came to the single sentence that would change the course of history:
As a fit and necessary military measure for effecting this object, [preservation 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 1863 all persons held as slaves within any state or states, wherein the constitutional authority of the United States shall not then be practically recognized, submitted to, and maintained shall then, thenceforward and forever, be free.
By setting the effective date for the Proclamation nearly six months hence, Lincoln offered the rebellious states a last chance to end the war and return to the Union before permanently forfeiting their slaves. At a moment when one would have expected an elevated language commensurate with this historical turning point in the narrative of the nation, Lincoln deployed a language that was pedestrian, remarkable for its flat precision, devoid of a single spark of figurative or poetic language. In vain, one searches for a stirring phrase, a moral endorsement of emancipation—not taking into account that the Emancipation Proclamation was not an oration at all, but a legal notice, a document subject to future court examination and ruling. Furthermore, no one knew better than Lincoln that words have consequences. In a world of tinder, he was determined to hold his rhetorical gifts in abeyance in order to reach across factions and avoid a single spark that could set loose an avoidable conflagration.
Restrained language aside, the scope of the Proclamation was stunning. For the first time, the president yoked Union and slavery into a single, transformative, moral force. Some three and a half million blacks in the South who had lived enslaved for generations were promised freedom. Eighty words in one sentence would supplant legislation on property rights and slavery that had governed policy in the House and Senate for nearly three-quarters of a century. To the confusion of some, the executive order did not cover the nearly half a million slaves in the loyal border states. Since these states had not joined in the insurrection, the president’s war powers could not be used to liberate their slaves. Yet, if emancipation posed no immediate threat to the border states, it concealed a latent warning of a legally impending mandate should they choose, in the future, to join the rebel Confederacy.
Anticipate contending viewpoints.
Though Lincoln had signaled that his mind was already made up before reading the Proclamation, he welcomed reactions from his cabinet, whether for or against. So clearly did he know each of the members, so thoroughly had he anticipated their responses, that he was prepared to answer whatever objections they might raise. He had deliberately built a team of men who represented the major geographical, political, and ideological factions of the Union. For months past, he had listened intently as they wrestled among themselves about how best to preserve this Union. At various junctures, diverse members had assailed Lincoln as too radical, too conservative, brazenly dictatorial, or dangerously feckless. He had welcomed the wide range of opinions they provided as he turned the subject over in his mind, debating “first the one side and then the other of every question arising,” until, through hard mental work, his own position had emerged. His process of decision making, born of his characteristic ability to entertain a full carousel of vantage points at a single time, seemed to some painfully slow, but once he had finally come to a determination to act, it was no longer a question of WHAT—only WHEN.
Like bookends seated at opposite ends of the council chamber, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and Attorney General Edward Bates—the most radical and the most conservative of Lincoln’s family—were the only two who expressed strong support for the Proclamation. That Stanton recommended its “immediate promulgation” was understandable. More intimately aware than any of his colleagues of the condition of the hard-pressed Army, he instantly grasped the massive military boost emancipation would confer. As for the constitutionalist Bates, though portrayed in Carpenter’s rendering in a pose of resistance, warding off Lincoln’s reading with folded arms and fixed expression, he unexpectedly and wholeheartedly concurred—albeit with the condition that a deportment plan be put in place for all the emancipated Negroes.
Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, his curly wig perched on his head, kept silent, later admitting that the Proclamation’s “magnitude and its uncertain results,” its “solemnity and weight,” mightily oppressed him. Not only did it seem “an extreme exercise of War powers,” but he feared that “despera
tion on the part of the slave-owners” would likely lengthen the war and raise the struggle to new heights of ferocity. Standing behind Welles, Interior Secretary Caleb Smith, a conservative Whig from Indiana, remained silent as well, though he later confided to his assistant secretary that should Lincoln actually issue the Proclamation, he would summarily “resign and go home and attack the Administration.”
Late-arriving Montgomery Blair, the postmaster general, forcefully opposed the Proclamation. As a spokesman for the border states (he had practiced law in Missouri before moving to Maryland), Blair predicted that emancipation would push loyal Union supporters in those states to the secessionists’ side. Furthermore, it would cause such an outcry among conservatives throughout the North that Republicans would lose the upcoming fall elections. Lincoln had considered every aspect of Blair’s objections but had concluded that the importance of the slavery issue far exceeded party politics. He reminded Blair of his persistent and multiple efforts to find a compromise. He would, however, willingly allow Blair to lodge written objections.
That Salmon Chase, the most ardent abolitionist in the cabinet, recoiled from the president’s initiative was irksome. “It went beyond anything I have recommended,” Chase admitted, but he feared that wholesale emancipation would lead to “massacre on the one hand and support for the insurrection on the other.” Far better to deal with the dangerous issue piecemeal, in the incremental fashion General David Hunter had employed earlier that spring when he issued an order freeing the slaves within the territory of his command, which encompassed South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Although Chase and his fellow abolitionists had been sorely tried when Lincoln summarily annulled Hunter’s order, Lincoln had held firm: “No commanding general shall do such a thing, upon my responsibility,” he had said. He would not “feel justified” in leaving such a complex issue “to the decision of commanders in the field.” A comprehensive policy was precisely what executive leadership entailed.
Secretary of State Seward had an internationalist perspective and, consequently, transatlantic worries. If the proclamation provoked a racial war interrupting the production of cotton, the ruling classes in England and France, dependent on American cotton to feed their textile mills, might intervene on behalf of the Confederacy. Lincoln had also weighed the force of this argument, but he believed that the masses in England and France, who had earlier pressured their governments to abolish slavery, would never be maneuvered into supporting the Confederacy once the Union truly committed itself to emancipation.
Despite the cacophony of ideas and contending voices, Lincoln remained fixed upon his course of action. Before the meeting came to an end, Seward raised the sensitive question of timing. “The depression of the public mind, consequent upon our repeated reversals is so great,” Seward argued, that the Proclamation might be seen as “our last shriek, on the retreat.” Far preferable to wait “until the eagle of victory takes its flight,” and then “hang your Proclamation around its neck.”
“It was an aspect of the case that, in all my thought upon the subject, I had entirely overlooked,” Lincoln told Carpenter afterward. “The result was that I put the draft of the proclamation aside, as you do your sketch for a picture, waiting for a victory. From time to time I added or changed a line, touching it up here and there, anxiously watching the progress of events.”
* * *
For two months, Lincoln bided his time, awaiting word from the battlefield that the “eagle of victory” had taken flight. At last the tide turned with the retreat of Lee’s army from Maryland and Pennsylvania. This battle at Antietam, with some 23,000 dead, was “the bloodiest single day of combat in American history.” Overwhelming carnage left both sides in a paralytic stupor. This nightmare was not the resounding victory Lincoln had hoped and prayed for, but proved sufficient to set his plan in motion. No sooner had the news of Antietam reached Lincoln at the Soldiers’ Home than he revised the preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation and, only five days after the “victory,” once again summoned the cabinet to convene on Monday, September 22.
Tension in the room could not have been more tautly drawn, yet, unaccountably, to the disapproval of the grimly serious Stanton, Lincoln commenced with an Artemus Ward anecdote, a ludicrous tale of how a wax representation of Judas had been dragged from a diorama of the Last Supper, beaten and broken by a Utica, New York, resident, a battery resulting in “arson in the third degree.” Ward’s silly legalese briefly lanced tension for Lincoln, as humorous stories and pointed jokes often eased and distracted him. Except for Stanton, the members chuckled and smiled along with Lincoln’s boisterous laughter, the darkly playful moment letting off pressure as they stood on the verge of a moment from which there was no return.
Assume full responsibility for a pivotal decision.
The time for taking the action he had postponed in July had come. “I wish it were a better time,” he said, abruptly launching into the grave matter of emancipation. “I wish that we were in a better condition.” However, he divulged, as witnessed by Chase and recorded in his diary, “I made the promise to myself and (hesitating a little) to my Maker” that if Lee’s army were “driven out” of Maryland, the Proclamation would be issued. The decision was “fixed and unalterable,” Lincoln declared. “The act and all its responsibilities were his alone.” He had “pondered over it for weeks, and been more confirmed in the rectitude of the measure as time passed on.” That clearly established, he read his slightly amended version of the proclamation.
After making a “very emphatic speech sustaining the measure,” Stanton suggested that “the act was so important, and involved consequences so vast that he hoped each member would give distinctly and unequivocally his own individual opinion.” The response to the reading of the first draft had been very troubling. In the subsequent two months, however, Lincoln had talked individually with each member of his cabinet. His views were not subject to change; emancipation, he was certain, was indispensable to victory in the war.
While Chase considered graduated emancipation by the generals a safer course, he was now “fully” satisfied, he told the president, “that you have given to every proposition which has been made, a kind and candid consideration. And you have now expressed the conclusion to which you have arrived, clearly and distinctly.” Therefore, “I am ready to take it just as it is written, and to stand by it with all my heart.” Welles remained vexed that the Proclamation was “an arbitrary and despotic measure,” even if promulgated in “the cause of freedom.” If the president was ready to take the full weight of responsibility for the decision, however, then Welles, too, was ready “to assent most unequivocally to the measure.” In like manner, Caleb Smith gave his approval. He abandoned his earlier threat to attack the administration if the Proclamation were issued. In December, after the judge of the U.S. District Court of Indiana died, Lincoln granted Smith’s long-held wish for a federal judgeship.
Montgomery Blair acknowledged he remained “afraid of the influence of the Proclamation on the Border States and on the army.” Lincoln agreed that danger lay in this direction, “but the difficulty was as great not to act as to act”; a “forward movement” had to be made. Blair once again asked to file his dissent and Lincoln once more gave his approval; but in the end, Blair never lodged his filing. His loyalty to the administration was freely given, neither imposed nor coerced.
As for Seward, such was his dogged allegiance to the president that he had no thought of opposing a decision so categorically made. He had but one substantive proposal. Wouldn’t it be more powerful, he asked, if Lincoln deleted his reference to sustaining emancipation during his incumbency, and instead pledged all future executive governments “to recognize and to maintain” the freedom of slaves. This way the government itself rather than this particular administration would be the guarantor of the pledge. Lincoln hesitated to make a promise he himself could not fulfill, but in the end, he embraced the importance of Seward’s suggested alteration.
When the proclamation appeared in newspapers the following day the entire cabinet, unlikely as it had first appeared, had banded behind the president. If the members of this most unusual team—a microcosm of the disparate factions within the Union itself—had not coalesced at this critical juncture, there was small chance of holding together the country at large.
How had Lincoln been able to lead these inordinately prideful, ambitious, quarrelsome, jealous, supremely gifted men to support a fundamental shift in the purpose of the war? The best answer can be found in what we identify today as Lincoln’s emotional intelligence: his empathy, humility, consistency, self-awareness, self-discipline, and generosity of spirit. “So long as I have been here,” Lincoln maintained, “I have not willingly planted a thorn in any man’s bosom.” In his everyday interactions with the team, there was no room for mean-spirited behavior, for grudges or personal resentments. He welcomed arguments within the cabinet, but would be “greatly pained,” he warned them, if he found his colleagues attacking one another in public. Such sniping “would be a wrong to me; and much worse, a wrong to the country.” The standards of decorum he demanded were based on the understanding that they were all involved together in a challenge “too vast for malicious dealing.” It was this sense of common purpose that had originally guided the formation of the cabinet and would now sustain its survival. What can be learned from Lincoln’s success in keeping this disparate team together?
Understand the emotional needs of each member of the team.
An ongoing attentiveness to the multiple needs of the complex individuals in his cabinet shaped Lincoln’s team leadership. From the start, Lincoln recognized that Seward’s commanding national and international reputation warranted the preeminent position of secretary of state and required special treatment from the president. Not only attracted by Seward’s cosmopolitan glamour and the pleasure of his sophisticated company, but also sensitive to his colleague’s hurt pride in losing a nomination widely expected to be his, Lincoln frequently crossed the street to pay a visit to Seward’s townhouse at Lafayette Park. There, the two men spent long evenings together before a blazing fire, talking, laughing, telling stories, developing a mutually bolstering camaraderie. An equally intimate though less convivial bond was formed with the high-strung, abrasive Stanton. “The pressure on him is immeasurable,” Lincoln said of “Mars,” his affectionate nickname given to his war secretary. Lincoln was willing to do anything he could to assuage that stress, if only sitting by Stanton’s side in the telegraph office, holding hands as they anxiously awaited bulletins from the battlefield.
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