The Emancipation Proclamation

Three Views

Harold Holzer, Edna G. Medford, Frank J. Williams

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780807131442
• eBook ISBN: 9780807155493
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

The Emancipation Proclamation is the most important document of arguably the greatest president in U.S. history. Now, Edna Greene Medford, Frank J. Williams, and Harold Holzer -- eminent experts in their fields -- remember, analyze, and interpret the Emancipation Proclamation in three distinct respects: the influence of and impact upon African Americans; the legal, political, and military exigencies; and the role pictorial images played in establishing the document in public memory. The result is a carefully balanced yet provocative study that views the proclamation and its author from the perspective of fellow Republicans, antiwar Democrats, the press, the military, the enslaved, free blacks, and the antislavery white establishment, as well as the artists, publishers, sculptors, and their patrons who sought to enshrine Abraham Lincoln and his decree of freedom in iconography.Medford places African Americans, the people most affected by Lincoln's edict, at the center of the drama rather than at the periphery, as previous studies have done. She argues that blacks interpreted the proclamation much more broadly than Lincoln intended it, and during the postwar years and into the twentieth century they became disillusioned by the broken promise of equality and the realities of discrimination, violence, and economic dependence. Williams points out the obstacles Lincoln overcame in finding a way to confiscate property -- enslaved humans -- without violating the Constitution. He suggests that the president solidified his reputation as a legal and political genius by issuing the proclamation as Commander-in-Chief, thus taking the property under the pretext of military necessity. Holzer explores how it was only after Lincoln's assassination that the Emancipation Proclamation became an acceptable subject for pictorial celebration. Even then, it was the image of the martyr-president as the great emancipator that resonated in public memory, while any reference to those African Americans most affected by the proclamation was stripped away.This multilayered treatment reveals that the proclamation remains a singularly brave and bold act -- brilliantly calculated to maintain the viability of the Union during wartime, deeply dependent on the enlightened voices of Lincoln's contemporaries, and owing a major debt in history to the image-makers who quickly and indelibly preserved it.

IMAGINED PROMISES, BITTER REALITIES

African Americans and the Meaning of the Emancipation Proclamation

EDNA GREENE MEDFORD

INTRODUCTION

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.

—ABRAHAM LINCOLN, January 1, 1863

One month after secessionists bombarded Fort Sumter and plunged the country into a bloody and protracted civil war, three men “held to service” by the Confederate colonel Charles K. Mallory sought asylum at Union-held Fortress Monroe in Virginia.

Believing that they were about to be taken out of Virginia and employed in defense of the purported new nation, Shepard Mallory, Frank Baker, and James Townsend presented themselves to the picket guard. The next morning they stood before the fort’s commander, Maj.-Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, who had just arrived from duty in Maryland, where he had pledged his cooperation “in suppressing most promptly and effectively” any slave revolt.¹ Acting on the belief that he was justified in confiscating “property designed, adapted, and about to be used against the United States,” General Butler declared the three men “contraband-of-war.” Mallory, Baker, and Townsend’s bold bid for freedom set in motion forces that had profound and far-reaching consequences, for in the weeks after their arrival, the slave grapevine alerted other bondsmen and women to the potential for sanctuary at the fort. By August, more than 900 fugitives—many of them women, children, and the infirm (property not quite fitting the contraband-of-war designation)—had sought and gained refuge with the Union forces.²

This and similar occurrences in the opening weeks of the conflict constituted the first waves in the quest for black freedom and presaged the role enslaved African Americans played in their own liberation during the war. While the rest of the nation debated the efficacy of linking preservation of the Union to the demise of slavery (the institution that stood as the root cause of the conflict), black men and women had immediately recognized the opportunities that the struggle between white men afforded them. Hence, they seized upon every chance to achieve freedom. Their efforts received presidential support when on January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

In recent years, scholars pondering the meaning and significance of Lincoln’s proclamation of freedom have focused essentially on the president’s motivations for issuing the document and his actions leading up to that momentous event. As a consequence, a debate has ensued between those who consider the document revolutionary and Lincoln deserving of the title “Great Emancipator,” and others who see his policies as unnecessarily conservative and initially deleterious to black freedom.³ While this debate is important to understanding the meaning of the Emancipation Proclamation, it fails to fully convey the document’s significance to freedom’s beneficiaries.

If popular wisdom and scholarly disquisition have largely credited Abraham Lincoln with black freedom, that attribution was shared by many of the freed people themselves and concurred in by their unfettered brothers and sisters in the North and South. The proclamation engendered Lincoln’s veneration in the African-American community and encouraged the belief that he was the premier white friend of the race. Children, schools, and businesses bore his name; speeches in his honor found expression in annual Emancipation Day programs; and his martyrdom served as inspiration to a struggling people to press on.

But as freedom’s first generation passed away, its children and grandchildren grew less reverent of the president and more skeptical of his proclamation. Ironically, they came to regard Lincoln with the same restraint they felt for the founding fathers, who had sanctioned holding men as property (indeed, many of whom held human chattel themselves). That shift in sentiment reflected the disillusionment that emanated from the dichotomy between black perceptions of the document’s promise and the realities they experienced in the postwar years and beyond. Despite its restrained tone and limited scope, African Americans had viewed the proclamation as the instrument by which their lives would be radically transformed. Defining freedom in broad terms, they imagined more from the decree than Lincoln, or even many abolitionists, had intended. They believed that the document, and consequently Lincoln as author, had tacitly promised them equality of opportunity and unrestricted citizenship, the chance to claim their birthright after more than two hundred years of denial in America. The proclamation’s significance, hence, must be considered not simply through the lens of its author’s intended meaning or motivations but rather in the context of the aspirations and expectations of a heretofore disinherited people.

THE UNIVERSALITY OF THE PECULIAR INSTITUTION

When southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we; I acknowledge the fact.

—ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 1854

The conflict that altered the lives of nearly four million African Americans began as a struggle over the issue of slavery but did not reflect either side’s desire for black freedom. Despite their avowed love of liberty, white Americans North and South shared complicity in the promulgation of an unfree status for and the degradation of people of African descent. By the eve of the war, slavery had enjoyed more than two centuries of tolerance in America. Beginning early in the colonial period, Americans had codified the practice and tied it to race. Traversing the land until a combination of economic self-interest and revolutionary rhetoric encouraged its overthrow in the North, slavery came to define the southern way of life in the late eighteenth and early-to-mid nineteenth centuries. But even with northern abolition, slavery’s influence extended far beyond the tobacco rows of southside Virginia and the cotton fields of the Deep South.

By their very existence, enslaved laborers elevated the status of all white Americans, even those newly arrived and nearly broken by poverty and ignorance in their homelands. However disadvantaged, whites benefited psychologically and materially from the subordinate position occupied by blacks. The least exceptional and unsophisticated white man considered himself superior to the most refined and distinguished person of color. Both law and custom conspired to confirm that belief in white men and women and to reward them solely on the basis of their skin color.⁴ Racial ostracism made African Americans aliens in their own land and consigned them to the position of interlopers.

Furthermore, the money made from slavery strengthened the American economy north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line. The cotton picked by shackled black hands fueled the textile mills of New England and kept the factory worker employed just as surely as it enriched the southern planter. Although no more than one-fourth of southern families owned slaves, many more hired the time of such laborers and aspired to have slaves of their own. In addition, the slaveocracy shaped and controlled social, political, and economic institutions in the South and wielded considerable influence in national government as well.

Sanctioned by all three branches of the federal government and protected by the Constitution itself, slavery stood in sharp contrast to America’s vaunted democratic institutions and espousal of freedom. Its significance to the newly created United States was reflected in the compromises fashioned by the “founding fathers,” which continued the international trade in human beings until 1808, permitted the counting of enslaved people for purposes of taxation and representation, and granted slaveholders the right to retrieve runaways.⁵ Subsequently, Congress accepted compromise solutions whenever new territory was secured and even strengthened the prerogatives of the slaveholder in the decade before the war. Presidents signed proslavery measures into law, and the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of rights of ownership of enslaved property. Government complicity in the continued enslavement of black people in 1852 prompted Frederick Douglass to ask, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” His answer would underscore the frustration of black men and women who recognized the hypocrisy of American liberty and justice. Douglass judged the American celebration of independence “a day that reveals to [the slave], more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery.”⁶

As human chattel, blacks were denied dominion over themselves and their progeny, were housed and sold alongside livestock at public auction, and were relegated to a status that afforded them few, if any, liberties. In the case Dred Scott v. Sandford, Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney represented the thinking of many white Americans when he delivered the court’s majority opinion that confirmed the prevailing notion that African Americans were “beings of an inferior order… [with] no rights which white men were bound to respect.”⁷ By 1860, nearly four million people of African descent lived and labored under varying conditions that ranged from emasculating paternalism to brutal exploitation and physical abuse.

A militant abolitionism had asserted itself in the decades before the war, fueled in part by a general reform impulse that permeated the first half of the nineteenth century. Men and women in the free African-American community such as Robert and Harriet Forten Purvis, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Henry Highland Garnet, and Harriet Tubman joined the efforts of white abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott, and Wendell Phillips to agitate for the freedom of the enslaved. Few Americans heeded their appeal. Neither proslavery nor problack, most white Americans generally acceded to the South’s claims to the right of ownership of human beings. Often when they did raise their voices against the institution it was not done in support of the enslaved but in defense of the rights of white men who were forced to compete with slave labor. Hence, when the war came, few stood ready to recognize its potential for black freedom, except, of course, black men and women themselves.

LINCOLN’S POSITION ON SLAVERY

I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.

—ABRAHAM LINCOLN, April 4, 1864

For most of his public life, Abraham Lincoln’s stance on the issue of slavery was more demonstrative than that of most white Americans, but his views fell short of the abolitionist creed. While he had acknowledged early in his political career the inhumanity of the institution, his reverence for the constitutional guarantees of protection of private property and his adherence to the laws of the land placed him at odds with the abolitionists. This commitment to the Constitution allowed him to represent the slaveholder Robert Matson, who in the fall of 1847 sued for the return of his fugitive property. The owner of plantations in Kentucky and Illinois, Matson circumvented the laws of the latter, which prohibited slavery, by keeping his enslaved laborers in the state for only a few months at a time. He became legally entangled when he kept one slave family in Illinois for two years. When the family fled its bondage and secured the support of an abolitionist, Matson sought their return. Lincoln defended the slaveholder, arguing that since Matson had not intended to domicile his laborers in Illinois permanently, he was within his rights to recover his property. The court decided in favor of the defendants, and eventually the family left the country and settled in Liberia.⁸

Lincoln’s personal views of enslaved people, in particular, and of African Americans, in general, made him a somewhat improbable champion of the unfree. He exhibited a propensity for recounting racially insensitive jokes and held less than complimentary opinions on the mental and moral capacity of people of color. Apologists insist that his storytelling and racial views mirrored the attitudes and customs of his day. Indeed, Lincoln’s willingness to employ racially offensive language in the 1858 Illinois senatorial debates with his bigoted opponent Stephen A. Douglas only added to the future president’s acceptability as a politician. And his yarns found willing listeners in the gathering places at home in Springfield as well as in the halls of official Washington.

But in many ways, Lincoln was an atypical nineteenth-century American. The nation in his day was rife with bigotry and intolerance and awash with racial hatred. Even some of the most ardent abolitionists held biased views of black men and women, considering them inherently inferior, unprepared for freedom, and unable to discern what was in their best interest.⁹ Although Lincoln generally subscribed to these views, to his credit he also believed in the fundamental right of all people to enjoy equality of opportunity. He recognized that as long as slavery prevailed in any part of the nation, as long as freedom was denied to any, the promise of the Declaration of Independence—the right of all people to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—would remain unrealized.

Despite these seeming contradictions, most scholars agree that when he took office in March 1861, the new president brought with him a long-standing aversion to slavery. Whether or not one accepts William H. Herndon’s assertion that Lincoln once quipped, “If ever I get a chance to hit that thing, I’ll hit it hard,”¹⁰ there can be little doubt concerning his views on the South’s preeminent institution. Since the 1830s, Lincoln had in myriad ways publicly communicated his position on slavery. While a member* of the Illinois legislature in 1836–37, he had joined with fellow legislator Dan Stone to declare that the institution was “founded on both injustice and bad policy.”¹¹ While serving in Congress more than a decade later, he proposed (but never formally introduced) a bill calling for abolition in the federal city. In 1848 (the year before he proposed the bill), seventy-seven enslaved Washingtonians made an unsuccessful attempt to escape their bondage by absconding on the schooner Pearl.¹² The incident had illuminated slavery in the nation’s capital and, perhaps, had encouraged Lincoln to take action. In any case, for the next several years, he solidified his antislavery position. In eloquent and impassioned speeches, he opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which nullified the Missouri Compromise of 1820, thus reopening federal territory to the institution. In 1857, he spoke out against the Dred Scott decision, which suggested that a slave owner could take his human property wherever he wished—as residence in a free state or territory did not make one free—and that African Americans were not citizens. And in his senatorial race against Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln argued against slavery on moral and economic grounds and asserted that it violated the principles of the Declaration of Independence. “Certainly, the negro is not our equal in color,” he argued, but “in the right to put into his mouth the bread that his own hands have earned, he is the equal of every other man, white or black. In pointing out that more has been given you, you can not be justified in taking away the little which has been given him. All I ask for the negro is that if you do not like him, let him alone. If God gave him but little, that little let him enjoy.”¹³ Lincoln’s words failed to garner sufficient support to win the senate race, but the campaign increased his national stature.

Despite such statements, Lincoln was no abolitionist. He believed that states had the right to control their own domestic institutions and that the Constitution prevented any meddling in this regard. Wedded as he was to this “sacred” document, he was left with little alternative but to embrace the idea of containment, or prohibiting the extension of slavery into the territories. Absent the ability to expand, he presumed, the institution would die a natural death.

In a speech delivered at the Cooper Union in New York i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Forword by John Hope Franklin
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• EDNA GREENE MEDFORD: Imagined Promises, Bitter Realities: African Americans and the Meaning of the Emancipation Proclamation
• FRANK J. WILLIAMS: “Doing Less” and “Doing More”: The President and the Proclamation—Legally, Militarily, and Politically
• HAROLD HOLZER: Picturing Freedom: The Emancipation Proclamation in Art, Iconography, and Memory
• APPENDIX: The First and Second Confiscation Acts
• Notes
• Index