During the emancipation interregnum in the summer of 1862, the public seemed entirely focused on the war. It is not surprising, then, that Lincoln spent little time reminding the public of his economic ideas, however important they remained to him. Americans were preoccupied by concerns about soldiers and battles and were confronted almost daily by arguments from the proponents and opponents of immediate abolition. Indeed, it is surprising that Lincoln found any time and space, as he did in the Gettysburg Address, to remind the public that the underlying objective of the war was, to his mind, an economic promise: to ensure that the unique American “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” with all the promise it held for equal opportunity for all Americans, “shall not perish from the earth.”
Even when public sentiment on a specific issue was not definitively on his side, Lincoln was prepared—and certainly able—to do the necessary work to maintain general public support for his leadership. He contributed an abundant arsenal of personal sensitivity, a remarkable sense of political timing, an undiminished gift for great writing, and, when he believed the occasion called for it, a dazzling command of the press in an era in which most of the nation’s journals were consistently and openly loyal to one political party or the other. However primitive what we might today call the era’s “media platforms,” Lincoln certainly knew the terrain and how to dominate it. And while he tended to plan in solitary, when he was ready to act publicly he knew how to rally Republican politicians, loyal editors, and public opinion to his side.
Lincoln’s bumpy road to emancipation was paved not only by political guile but also by political weakness—the fear of disappointing both liberals and conservatives, abolitionists and proslavery Unionists, Republicans and Democrats, civilians and soldiers, Northerners and Southerners, the thrones and parliaments of Europe, and the Congress and voters of the United States. To make things more difficult, the drama unfolded during a critical election year for Congress in 1862. When Lincoln read his first emancipation draft to his cabinet in July, his advisers urged him to table the initiative until the army could win a morale-boosting victory on the battlefield. Postmaster General Montgomery Blair left no doubt as to why he counseled delay: as Lincoln remembered it, Blair “deprecated the policy, on the ground that it would cost the Administration the fall elections.” Whipsawed by military events and political contingencies, Lincoln believed he had little choice but to send the public mixed messages about his policy, sharing his unannounced plan for emancipation only with those who could help him, even if they did not quite know they had become coconspirators.
Modern critics—indeed, many abolitionists in his own time—condemned Lincoln for waiting as long as he did to act on emancipation. But direct and immediate action was not likely to produce the desired result. Lincoln had good reason to doubt, in the summer of 1862, that he possessed either the public or official support, the military power, or the political opportunity to embark on a new, broad antislavery policy without risking political ruin and, with it, the fall of the Union. Obfuscation became not only a tactic but a life preserver.
That Lincoln believed in the concept of free labor for his entire adult life is beyond dispute. That he acted cautiously on freedom for the slaves once in power is also undeniable. Both predilections were apparent when, on July 12, he had urged border-state senators and congressmen to push for compensated emancipation in the slave states still in the Union. Though Lincoln is known as a master of rhetoric, he frequently chose to present unwelcome policies in a practical and uninspiring lawyerly fashion, to avoid emotional or philosophic arguments that were not likely to be accepted by public opinion. When, for example, one of his most dependable allies in the press, Henry Raymond, editor of the New York Times, fretted that paying for compensated emancipation would bankrupt the country, Lincoln used economic logic, not humanitarian zeal, to win over the rather conservative journalist. “Have you noticed the facts,” he wrote Raymond on March 9, “that less than one half-day’s cost of this war would pay for all [slaves] in Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, Kentucky, and Missouri at the same price?” Here was the language of the lawyer proposing compensated emancipation of all the slaves in the border states with the precision of an accountant, not the enthusiasm of a liberator. “Please look at these things,” he implored Raymond, “and consider whether there should not be another article in the Times.”
Confident that his compensated emancipation policy made economic as well as moral sense, Lincoln summoned the congressional delegations from the slaveholding “border” states still in the Union, plus Tennessee and western Virginia, to the White House on July 12 and read a formal statement pressing the point. “I do not speak of emancipation at once,” he pointed out, “but of a decision at once to emancipate gradually.” Acknowledging—in the form of a warning—the growing power of the forces for freedom, he added, “The pressure, in this direction, is still upon me, and is increasing. By conceding what I now ask, you can relieve me, and much more, can relieve the country, in this important point.”
His appeal fell on profoundly deaf ears. Following a “stormy” caucus on July 12, 1862, the delegates of the “border” slave states still in the Union voted twenty to nine to reject Lincoln’s proposal for compensated emancipation, dismissing it as economically, socially, and militarily unacceptable. Any form of emancipation, the majority insisted, would not shorten the war, as Lincoln argued, but actually lengthen it, since the military would neither support nor enforce it. Not for five months more would Lincoln attempt again to use eloquence of any kind to sway Congress to support compensated emancipation.
General George McClellan, the commanding general of the Army of the Potomac, represented a particularly formidable impediment to the idea of emancipation. Whenever Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner pressed Lincoln on emancipation, the president confided, “I would do it if I were not afraid that half the officers would fling down their arms and four more states would rise.” Now the most prominent of all such officers handed the president, his commander in chief, a peremptory, almost insubordinate letter, proclaiming that “military power should not be allowed to interfere with the relations of servitude” and warning that “a declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our present Armies.” The letter clearly contained the threat that McClellan, a Democrat in politics and already rumored a likely candidate for president in 1864, would use his army only to restore federal authority, not to free slaves.
The very next morning, the president made a bold and deft decision that laid bare his feelings on the matter of freeing slaves. He eliminated McClellan as a potential obstacle to emancipation by appointing Henry Halleck as general in chief of all land armies of the United States, with McClellan now his subordinate. A few days later, on July 13, 1862, Lincoln shared a confidence with Secretary of State William H. Seward and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, which even the inscrutable Seward confessed seemed “momentous.” Describing himself as “earnest in the conviction that something must be done” to counter “the reverses before Richmond, and the formidable power and dimensions of the insurrection,” Lincoln proposed that the time had finally come for “extraordinary measures to preserve the national existence.” It was then, Welles remembered, that Lincoln “first mentioned to Mr. Seward and myself,” and, he believed, “to any one . . .” “the subject of emancipating the slaves by proclamation.” For the record, both Seward and Welles reacted by expressing misgivings, the conservative navy secretary particularly shocked that such a policy could be proposed by a president who “had been prompt and emphatic in denouncing any interference by the General Government” on slavery.
To put this revelation in chronological perspective within a calendar crowded with incident: July 13 was three days after Lincoln’s return from his visit to McClellan, one day after he had appealed to the border-state officials to support compensated emancipation, and one day before they would turn him down. Those who saw Lin
coln during those tense days understandably found him, as did his old Illinois friend Senator Orville H. Browning, “weary, care-worn and troubled.”
McClellan remained bogged down on the Virginia peninsula in his ill-fated campaign to take Richmond, and General John Pope was about to lose the Second Battle of Bull Run. But frustration over military failure was not the only force propelling Lincoln forward. He was also taking advantage of a singular opportunity presented to him by lawmakers. An ever more aggressively antislavery Congress had just passed and sent to him for his approval the sweeping new second Confiscation Act, giving military officers the right to seize slave property as they advanced into the Confederacy. Lincoln hesitated about approving the bill. His friend Orville Browning, for one, ominously advised that “it was a violation of the Constitution and ought to be vetoed,” adding that the president’s decision “was to determine whether he was to control the abolitionists and radicals, or whether they were to control him.” But Lincoln decided to take the first step, moving forward in the direction of the abolitionists and the radical Republicans to emancipate the slaves.
On July 17 the pro-administration New York Times advised its readers: “It seems not improbable that the President considers the time near at hand when slavery must go to the wall.” But Lincoln remained inscrutable. That day the exhausted president traveled up to Capitol Hill, as was customary for presidents on the last day of congressional sessions. There he infuriated both conservatives and liberals alike (and further confused the public about his own intentions) by signing the landmark confiscation bill while at the same time submitting a lengthy commentary objecting to what he called the “startling” idea “that congress can free a slave within a state.” The emancipation power remained a privilege that Lincoln intended to reserve exclusively to himself.
Lincoln was in fact preparing to deflect Congress and to move boldly on his own. He would “not conserve slavery much longer,” his secretary John Hay confided to a prominent antislavery activist on July 20. “When next he speaks in relation to this defiant and ungrateful villainy it will be with no uncertain sound.” The very next day, Lincoln prepared to unleash that sound with a force he knew would be heard around the world.
On July 22, 1862, with Congress safely in recess, Lincoln decided to act on his own—just as he had after the Sumter attack in 1861. The president convened a cabinet meeting to announce his intention to invoke his power as commander in chief to free slaves in rebel territory as a military measure. As cabinet members Seward, Stanton, Chase, and the others listened, the president read aloud the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation based almost entirely on the recently signed Confiscation Act. Congress had already laid the groundwork for him, but the next step was entirely Lincoln’s. The draft ended with the clear promise that “as a fit and necessary military measure . . . 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, submitted to, and maintained, shall then thenceforward, and forever, be free.” Thus was born the Emancipation Proclamation that would, when implemented, free hundreds of thousands of enslaved people years before the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery permanently and everywhere.
Lincoln did not follow custom that day by asking his ministers’ assent. As he remembered it, “I said to the Cabinet that I had resolved upon this step, and had not called them together to ask their advice, but to lay the subject-matter of a proclamation before them.”
July 22, 1862, might have been remembered as the epochal day of commitment to emancipation except for what happened next. Not only did the conservative attorney general, Edward Bates of slaveholding Missouri, object strenuously on legal grounds, but he also brought up the political risk. Even the abolitionist secretary of the treasury, Salmon Chase, objected, declaring that he preferred simply giving generals in the field the power to “organize and arm the slaves” themselves.”
First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation was A. H. Ritchie’s wildly popular 1866 engraving of the 1864 painting by White House artist in residence Francis Bicknell Carpenter. Even though Lincoln actually tabled the proclamation after reading a draft to his cabinet on the day portrayed, July 22, 1862, Carpenter chose this occasion for his picture because he considered it nothing less than the launching of a “new epoch in the history of Liberty.”
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Secretary of State William Seward was wary, too. He warned that so radical a step in the wake of recent military reverses would “be viewed as the last measure of an exhausted government, a cry for help . . . our last shriek, on the retreat.” It was “an aspect of the case,” Lincoln later admitted, that he had “entirely overlooked.” In response, as he later told an artist, “I put the draft of the proclamation aside, as you do your sketch for a picture, waiting for a victory.” Lincoln, in other words, would issue a proclamation only on the heels of a Union victory, when no one could attribute the move to weakness or desperation.
It proved a longer wait than Lincoln had feared in his worst nightmares, with emancipation now hinged irrevocably to a military triumph that might never come. In the short term, Lincoln instead would endure yet another defeat—the unmitigated Union disaster at the Second Battle of Bull Run at the end of August, a setback that might have tempted a less determined liberator to shelve the emancipation initiative altogether. Instead, it propelled Lincoln to continue what had become an elaborate outpouring of deceptive rhetoric. He sought to embolden emancipation expectations among the antislavery abolitionists in his party without igniting potentially fatal opposition from conservative Northern Democrats and, worse, disunion among proslavery border states. That such a balancing act could have succeeded, without collapsing of its own weight, constitutes perhaps the most amazing backstory of all. What Lincoln allowed the public to know and when helped, however fitfully and imperfectly, to prepare the country’s white majority for black freedom, even as it has served since to challenge Lincoln’s reputation as a dedicated emancipator.
Lincoln’s White House secretaries understood that, however “persistently misconstrued” their boss’s words at this time were, they were meant to accomplish but one goal: “to curb and restrain the impatience of zealots from either faction.” Lincoln was acting on his long-term understanding that “with public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.”
The true test, then, was still to come. Lincoln knew he had to take substantial steps to move public sentiment forward without challenging directly the prejudiced view of most white Americans of his time. On August 14, 1862, in one of his first steps to that end, Lincoln invited a “Deputation of Free Negroes” to the White House. All but lost to history now is the fact that no American president had ever before invited a group of African Americans to confer with him officially. As to the substance of the conference, Lincoln launched into a frosty, patronizing lecture to the stunned delegation, conceding that while “your race suffer very greatly . . . many of them by living among us,” he added, “ours suffer from your presence.” Lincoln’s words were harsh and stinging: “In a word we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason at least why we should be separated. . . . The aspiration of men is to enjoy equality with the best when free, but on this broad continent, not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours. Go where you are treated the best. . . . It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”
Lincoln suggested that his well-situated African American visitors, all established free residents of the capital, should “sacrifice something of your present comfort for the purpose of being as grand in that respect as the white people.”
The president said his preferred solution to the problem was still compensation and emancipation together with voluntary colonization to Liberia or perhaps, in a concession that black people might want to “remain within re
ach of the country of your nativity,” to the Isthmus of Panama. Lincoln persisted that this policy was worth what he called a “try” and offered to “spend some of the money intrusted to me.” He said the administration had a budget of six hundred thousand dollars with which to begin evacuation and relocation, though he acknowledged that political affairs in Central America were admittedly chaotic.
Two weeks earlier, abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass had told an Independence Day audience that Lincoln’s actions to date had been “calculated in a marked and decided way to shield and protect slavery.” Now, Lincoln seemed to be doing just that, and Douglass reacted to the publication of White House lecture with fury. He charged the president with illogically and unfairly using “the language and arguments of an itinerant Colonization lecturer, showing all his inconsistencies, his pride of race and blood, his contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy.” Douglass fumed that Lincoln, with his ill-chosen words, had furnished “a weapon to all the ignorant and base, who need only the countenance of men in authority to commit all kinds of violence and outrage upon the colored people of the country.” As Douglass pointed out, slavery had caused the war, not slaves: “Mr. President, it is not the innocent horse that makes the horse thief, not the traveler’s purse that makes the highway robber, and it is not the presence of the Negro that causes this foul and unnatural war, but the cruel and brutal cupidity of those who wish to possess horses, money and Negroes by means of theft, robbery, and rebellion.”
Historian Eric Foner has aptly pointed out that a “heedless” Lincoln failed to appreciate that his words might fuel a wave of violent racism in the country aimed at African Americans. But for better or for worse, at that moment Lincoln had little interest in what the insignificant African American press, or, for that matter, the small number of free African Americans in the North, thought of his words. That was because those words had been aimed at precisely the audience he had not invited to the White House that day: not free and aspiring blacks but the larger constituency of free and fearful voting whites. While some critics have claimed that Lincoln’s heartless words revealed his continuing personal interest in colonization and his purported racism, we should remember that his primary goal with this lecture was to sway a public that might otherwise be resistant to emancipation.
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