by Larry Tagg
* * *
Lincoln’s private triumph, however, gained no public confidence. As the year 1862 dwindled, he suffered from a wave of defeatism that swelled across the North. On New Year’s Eve, a Wisconsin Democrat scribbled a final curse in his diary, writing, “The President of the United States is responsible for the miserable state of things, and for this and many special and arbitrary acts which he committed and authorized to be committed, I solemnly believe that [he] ought to be impeached and legally and constitutionally deposed from the high office of President of the United States.” Samuel Medary of The Crisis also wanted Lincoln impeached, and published his inky reflections in a year-end editorial: “The year 1862 has been a year of blood and plunder, of carnage and conflagration, … of falsehood and corruption, … of bastilles, persecutions and tears, … of despotism, desolation and death.”
The Radicals, meanwhile, gnashed their teeth at the failure of their latest scheme to force the awkward, disheveled, ungrammatical Westerner to bow to their program. Lincoln’s masterful defense of his conservative Secretary of State renewed their doubts about his intention to issue the emancipation announcement. Panicky letters poured in to Charles Sumner from Boston antislavery men. “We feel no reliance that [Lincoln] will [carry out the proclamation] while we see him guided by the baleful councils of Seward & the Border State men,” fretted one. Railroad tycoon J. M. Forbes desponded, “The first of January is near at hand, and we see no signs of any measures for carrying into effect the Proclamation.” Another of Sumner’s friends complained, “Old Abe will do nothing decent till driven to it by a force which would save all the devils in hell.”
Sumner calmed these men with the assurance that, “The President says he would not stop the Proclamation if he could, and he could not if he would,” which had the ring of genuine Lincoln. Literary lion Orestes Brownson would not be cheered, however. He wrote to Sumner as the New Year approached,
I do not believe Mr. Lincoln at all… . He is thick-headed; he is ignorant; he is tricky, somewhat astute in a small way, and obstinate as a mule. My opinion … is that nothing can be done with him … . He would damp the ardor of the bravest … & neutralize the efforts of the ablest … . He is wrong-headed, … the petty politician not the statesman, & … ill-deserving the sobriquet of Honest. I am out of all patience with him.
On December 27, even the moderate, pro-Lincoln New York Times reported a “general air of doubt” about Lincoln’s resolve to issue the Proclamation, given the discouragements at the polls and on the battlefield since his September promise.
As the hours dwindled before proclamation day, George Templeton Strong jotted down in his diary: “Will Lincoln’s backbone carry him through? Nobody knows.”
“Abe’s Last”
Chapter 26
Emancipation Proclaimed
“The lack of respect for the President in all parties is unconcealed.”
Lincoln, mindful of Chase’s complaint that he never consulted his advisors, dutifully convened the Cabinet on December 29 to give a copy of the final Emancipation Proclamation to each Secretary and ask for suggestions. Their comments touched on two things.
The first was Lincoln’s determination to exempt from freedom not only the slaves in the loyal Border States, but also the slaves in the parts of rebellious states that were already behind Union army lines. The exemptions were crucial, Lincoln thought, since his entire argument for the legality of the proclamation depended on the President’s “war power” granted by the Constitution in times of rebellion. The emancipation decree, he reasoned, could therefore legally affect only the parts of the country still at war with the Union. Chase argued that the slaves should be emancipated in entire rebellious states to avoid confusion. Blair and Seward agreed. Lincoln, however, out of concern for the proclamation’s constitutionality, overruled them—the rebellious states and counties that were already occupied would remain exempted, and the slaves there would remain bound.
The second issue was Lincoln’s statement that the government “will do no act … to repress said persons … in suitable efforts they may make for their actual freedom.” It was this sentence that since September had triggered the outrage of those who thought the proclamation encouraged a bloody slave revolt. Bates, Blair, and even Chase asked that it be struck out entirely, and Seward offered a rewriting. In the end, Lincoln agreed and rewrote the clause himself, calling upon the freed slaves to “abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defense” and to “labor faithfully for reasonable wages.”
Lincoln had already made other critical changes. No longer were compensation and colonization recommended. Also, he had added a call for former slaves to take up arms and join the Union army. Since by long tradition military service was linked to citizenship, this was a signal that the Proclamation would ultimately bestow all the benefits of citizenship over and above freedom.
When the Cabinet met again on December 31, Secretary Chase suggested one more change. This was a felicitous closing sentence, one that invoked not only the constitutional requirement of military necessity, but also justice, the judgment of mankind (an echo of the Declaration of Independence), and God’s favor. This was exactly the kind of thing Lincoln had purposely kept out of the Emancipation Proclamation. The reason he had maintained a dry, lawyerly tone so scrupulously throughout the document was his fear that it would not stand up in court, and that the intrusion of any moral note would cause racists in the North—still repulsed by abolitionist sentiment—to reject it. Lincoln, however, surrendered to Chase, the man whose resentments had almost brought down the administration only a week earlier, and added the Secretary’s final sentence: “And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.”
Lincoln wrote the sentence into his final version of the Emancipation Proclamation on New Year’s Day morning. When he was finished, Lincoln summoned a clerk to take the draft to the State Department to be copied and engrossed. While he waited for the official copy to be returned for his signature, Lincoln received his first heckling about the Proclamation from his Kentuckian wife Mary, who was very much opposed to it. “Well, what do you intend doing?” she asked sharply. Lincoln looked heavenward and replied, “I am a man under orders, I cannot do otherwise.”
When the official copy returned from the State Department, however, there was a snag. Lincoln, with his lawyer’s eye, noticed that the copyist had inserted a wrong word in the State Department’s closing subscription, and the botched document had to be sent back for recopying. Meanwhile, he was due at the traditional New Year’s reception downstairs—open, in those days, to anyone who cared to shake hands with the President—and the signing would have to wait until afterwards. He went down to the reception room, and the raucous, teeming visitors entered, pushing and shoving, through the front double doors, which were opened at intervals to admit the mob that pressed noisily against the front of the building. The visitors were then funneled into a line to shake hands with the First Family, after which they were herded onto a ramp of wooden planks that led out through an open bay window. This lasted from noon to two o’clock, and required that Lincoln shake hands in his pump-handle style for two solid hours.
After the last of the guests had been shooed up the ramp and out the window, Seward returned with the corrected copy of the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln took it upstairs, and—without ceremony, with fewer than a dozen witnesses on hand, and with a right hand still unsteady from the exhaustion of two hours of handshaking—affixed his name to the greatest document of the century.
No text of the decree had been sent out in advance for the nation’s morning papers. New Year’s Day dawned on Northern cities and towns in suspense— would emancipation be proclaimed? At the Music Hall in Boston the intelligentsia were gathered, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Lloyd Garrison, Ralph W
aldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., with the expectation that the blessed announcement would sing across the wires at noon. Noon, however, came and went; then the afternoon; then the evening, and still no word. Onstage, poems were recited and music played. Meanwhile, the audience watched the clock. Doubts increased. Anxiety became agony. Finally, at ten o’clock at night, Josiah Quincy burst through the doors and rushed to the platform with the joyous news: Abraham Lincoln has signed the Emancipation Proclamation! The Music Hall erupted, and there was pandemonium as the nation’s most dignified ladies and gentlemen screamed, cried, jumped up and down, threw their hands in the air, and waved their silk handkerchiefs.
A few blocks away at the Tremont Temple, Frederick Douglass and the elite of black abolitionism heard the news at the same time, and there too the whole crowd leaped up, stomped their feet, shouted at the tops of their lungs, and shed tears of joy as they took up the hymn, “Sound the loud timbrel of Egypt’s dark sea/ Jehovah hath triumphed, his people are free!”
The next morning the headline of The Liberator covered most of the page:
THE PROCLAMATION.
THREE MILLION OF SLAVES SET FREE!
GLORY HALLELUJAH!
Everywhere among those who had faithfully awaited such a consummation there was a free flowing ecstasy. “All trials were swallowed up in the great deep joy”; they had come from “midnight darkness to the bright noon of day”; there was “a bewilderment of joy,” “a perfect furor of acclamation”—these were all notes in the symphony of enthusiasm from radicals and blacks.
* * *
Unfortunately for Abraham Lincoln, the wildly cheering friends of William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass were the most despised set in the Northern heartland, especially among the Democratic masses who had so recently reclaimed the electoral majority from Illinois to New York. The jubilation in Boston was soon drowned out by the same angry jangle of condemnation that had followed the earlier promise of emancipation in September.
The press was particularly hostile in the Northwest. The Chicago Times called the Emancipation Proclamation “a wicked, atrocious and revolting deed,” which had perverted the war’s purpose from a constitutional one into a struggle “for the liberation of three million negro barbarians and their enfranchisement as citizens.” The Dubuque Herald called the proclamation the “crowning act of Lincoln’s folly” and Lincoln “a brainless tyrant,” “a perjured public servant,” “a blundering partisan,” “a buffoon President.” The Chatfield (Minn.) Democrat dismissed it as “the most foolish joke ever got off by the sixfoot- four Commander-in-Chief.” In Ohio, editor Samuel Medary of The Crisis whipped himself into a three-column froth in which he called Lincoln “a halfwitted Usurper, who, in an evil hour, was elected … under the whip and spur of a set of fanatical and sectional politicians.” He declared that the proclamation created “a Dictatorship at Washington,” and denounced it as a “monstrous, impudent and heinous Abolition proceeding … impudent and insulting to God as to man, for it declares those ‘equal’ whom god created unequal.” The Crisis published a “Political Alphabet” whose twenty-six astringent stanzas began with this barbed rhyme:
“A” stands for Old Abe, who has made up his mind
To yield to the pressure that crowds him behind;
And to aid the malignants in splitting the nation,
Has issued his mandate of Emancipation.
The pro-slavery New York journals were also cruel. The New York Herald flayed Lincoln’s act as “a dead letter,” “unwise and ill-timed, impracticable, and outside of the constitution.” The New York World called the Emancipation Proclamation “miserable balderdash,” “not merely futile, but ridiculous.” The New York Evening Express suggested its own modest proposal: “The best thing that can be done is for Mr. Lincoln to resign, and go home to Springfield, with Mr. Hamlin to follow him. These resignations would be worth twenty victories, and would reestablish public confidence.”
The Catholic Church, representing the swelling Irish American contingent, was particularly critical of Lincoln’s act. Bishop Hughes of New York City, through his organ the Metropolitan Record, raged against the perversion of the war from an attempt to restore the Union into an emancipation crusade. The “vile and infamous” Proclamation, it warned, would bring “massacre and rapine and outrage into the homes on Southern plantations, sprinkling their hearths with the blood of gentle women, helpless age, and innocent childhood… . Never was a blacker crime sought to be committed against nature, against humanity, against the holy precepts of Christianity.” The Harrisburg Patriot and Union, too, branded it a “cold-blooded invitation to insurrection and butchery.”
The newly-elected Democratic leaders across the loyal states climbed onto platforms and turned their inaugurals into anti-Proclamation circuses. On January 7, all eyes were on New York’s Horatio Seymour as he mounted the dais. Seymour, aware of his instant eminence as a Democratic spokesman, issued a stinging condemnation of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, calling it a “bloody, barbarous, revolutionary, and unconstitutional scheme.” Democratic newspapers across the continent enthusiastically reprinted Seymour’s speech, and it blew new wind into the sails of Lincoln’s opponents.
Lincoln looked uneasily toward Kentucky. The Louisville Daily Democrat summed up the sentiment there: “We scarcely know how to express our indignation at this flagrant outrage of all constitutional law, all human justice, all Christian feeling.” Governor James F. Robinson denounced the Proclamation in a message to the Kentucky legislature, and the legislature responded with its own denunciation of Lincoln’s decree. There was talk in the state of recalling Kentucky troops from the Union army. In February, Kentucky Democrats held a state convention for the purpose of “preparing the Kentucky Mind for revolt against the Union,” which had to be dispersed by Federal troops.
Conservative Republicans, opposed to the Proclamation from the beginning and dismayed by the brawny Democratic giant the document had awakened, drooped in discouragement. Illinois Senator Orville Browning had been permanently disaffected—“I am despondent, and have but little hope left for the Republic,” he wrote in his diary as he prepared to leave office at the end of January. Browning met with Seward, who agreed that the Proclamation was “useless” and “mischievous.” It was merely symbolic, Seward said. In one of his world-weary musings, he told reporter Donn Piatt that it was “a puff of wind over an accomplished fact,” that “The Emancipation Proclamation was uttered in the first gun fired at Sumter and we have been the last to hear it. As it is, we show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.” Browning’s and Seward’s discontent was shared by Senator Doolittle of Wisconsin and old Thomas Ewing of Ohio, who met with Browning on January 12. “We all agreed that we were upon the brink of ruin,” Browning wrote, “and could see no hope of an amendment in affairs unless the President would change his policy, and withdraw or greatly modify his proclamation.”
That same week, Judge Davis of Illinois, after seeing the intense anti- Proclamation feeling at home, begged Lincoln to alter his policy “as the only means of saving the Country.” Seward’s conservative crony, New York party boss Thurlow Weed, complained bitterly in a letter to the U.S. consul in Paris that “there was a strong attachment to the Constitution in many of the seceded states… . But [it] was entirely dispelled by the Proclamation of Emancipation.” A few frantic conservatives revived talk of “sloughing off the secession sympathizers from the Dem[ocratic] party, of the ultras from the Rep[ublican party], and [forming] a new organization for 1864,” headed by Seward. It came to nothing, however. Seward had become too loyal to Lincoln to lead a breakaway conservative faction now.
Other thoughtful Republicans swerved from Lincoln out of doubt about the Emancipation Proclamation’s constitutionality. Benjamin R. Curtis, the former Supreme Court Justice who had written the dissenting opinion in the Dred Scott
decision, now dissented from the Proclamation. “I know of no man of sense here,” he wrote from Washington on New Year’s Day, “who has any hope for the restoration of the union. I have seen a good many prominent men today … &I have not seen one who does not say the country is ruined &that its ruin is attributable largely to the utter incompetence of the Prest… . He is shattered, dazed, & utterly foolish.” Curtis published a pamphlet titled Executive Power, in which he damned the Emancipation Proclamation as an executive decree that illegally proposed to “repeal and annul valid State laws which regulate the domestic relations of their people.” Curtis rejected the idea that the President had any “war powers” over and above his rank as Commander-in- Chief of the army and navy. As an executive, asserted Curtis, “He cannot make a law. He cannot repeal one.” The powers Lincoln claimed in the Proclamation, Curtis continued, were only those of a “usurper.” If it stood, what would keep him from using the war power “to disregard each and every provision of the Constitution?”
Other former friends of Lincoln fell in behind Curtis. Massachusetts Republican Judge Joel Parker wrote that the power to issue the Emancipation Proclamation was tantamount to “a power to change Constitutional rights … at the pleasure of the President in time of war.” Robert Winthrop, Boston royalty and former Senator from Massachusetts, condemned the Proclamation as “undoubtedly one of the most startling exercises of the one-man power—which the history of human government, free or despotic, has ever witnessed.” If it persisted, he warned, “we shall find ourselves plunged irretrievably into the fearful and fathomless abyss.”
“Writing the Emancipation Proclamation.” Lincoln writes the Emancipation Proclamation in a demonic setting, with his foot on the Constitution.
As for the Radicals, some had never shared in the New Year’s Day rapture. Horace Greeley, for example, scolded Lincoln in the New York Tribune for not liberating all slaves in Tennessee and Louisiana—two states, he pointed out, which “have more than One Hundred Thousand of their citizens in arms to destroy the Union.” Radical anti-Lincoln grumblings reached the ears of the Democratic newspapers, who delighted in publishing them, such as the New York Journal of Commerce—“The proclamation of the President is not acceptable to the Radicals. They argue that it is not universal, and is therefore not up to the mark”—and the Illinois State Register—“[He] has made no friends among [the Radicals], for the reason that he has not done everything in their particular way, and at their designated moment.”
