On this time in 1862, Abraham Lincoln gave out a preparatory liberation pronouncement introducing that if the conditions of the Confederacy performed certainly not come back to the Association within one hundred times, he will release a last pronouncement relieving the servants in places of defiance. One hundred times later on, along with the Public Battle still roaring, Lincoln performed only that. On January 1, 1863, he authorized the Liberation Notification along with a worn out yet consistent palm (he had actually been actually trembling palms all early morning at a New Year’s function at the White Home). “If my title ever before enters into past it will certainly be actually for this action, as well as my entire heart remains in it,” he stated during that second. Later on, he referred to as the pronouncement “the main process of my management, as well as the best occasion of the 19th century.”
Giving a governmental order finishing enslavement was actually an impressive action. Lower than pair of years previously, Lincoln had actually stated in his Initial First Deal With that he possessed “no reason, straight or even not directly, to hamper the establishment of enslavement in the States where it exists. I think I possess no authorized right to perform therefore, as well as I possess no disposition to perform therefore.” Currently he was actually carrying out exactly what he’d stated he will certainly not as well as can refrain. Just how could he warrant such a major adjustment in plan?
The easy response is actually that the battle warranted a modification. Through mid-1862, Lincoln had actually come to be persuaded that relieving the servants was actually the greatest method to finish off the Confederacy. “This federal government cannot much a lot longer participate in an activity through which it concerns all of, as well as its own adversaries concern nothing at all,” he informed a The big apple Democrat. “Those adversaries need to know that they cannot experiment for ten years trying to destroy the government, and if they fail still come back into the Union unhurt.” Freeing the slaves, in short, would weaken the Confederate war effort and simultaneously punish the rebels for their treason.
In his final proclamation of January 1, 1863, Lincoln defended emancipation as a constitutional war measure – an action that would help him fulfill his oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He took this action, he said, as “President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief, … in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion.” In short, something he had seen as unconstitutional in 1861 became constitutional, as he later explained, “by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the constitution, through the preservation of the nation.”
Over the years, many have doubted that Lincoln truly cared about black freedom. Critics have alleged that he only freed the slaves to win the war. And if saving the Union was his “paramount object,” as he said in August 1862, then perhaps he should certainly not be seen as a “Great Emancipator.”
Yet the evidence is clear that Lincoln pursued emancipation not only to win the war, but also to fulfill his “oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.” This moral motivation for black freedom is evident in many ways, but perhaps most clearly in a meeting he had with Frederick Douglass in August 1864.
The summer of 1864 was an awful time for the Union war effort. In Virginia, Ulysses S. Grant was unable to capture Richmond, as well as in the Western theater, William T. Sherman was stalled outside of Atlanta. So low was Northern morale throughout that hot, dismal summer that Lincoln believed he would lose the upcoming presidential election. Nevertheless, at this critical juncture, Lincoln prioritized the fate of more than three million enslaved people in the Confederacy.
On August 19, 1864, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln met at the White House – at the president’s invitation – to formulate a plan to free as many slaves as possible before the next presidential inauguration, in March 1865. “Douglass, I hate slavery as much as you do, and I want to see it abolished altogether,” Lincoln told his famous guest. Lincoln then explained that the “slaves are not coming [into Union lines] so rapidly and so numerously” as he “hoped” they would after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. So he asked Douglass to devise “some means” of getting slaves to run away from their masters before the next president took the oath of office, because a Democratic president would most certainly rescind the proclamation. Shortly after this meeting, Douglass suggested dispatching “bands of scouts” right into the Confederacy to persuade the slaves to run away while they still had the opportunity with Lincoln as president.
Fortunately, nothing came of this plan. After Sherman captured Atlanta in early September, Northern morale skyrocketed, and Lincoln sailed into reelection in November. But the meeting between Lincoln and Douglass is crucial for understanding how much Lincoln cared about black freedom – that his “whole soul” really was “in it.” Clearing the servants in this way had nothing to do with “military necessity” or “saving the Union.” Lincoln’s sole desire was to bring freedom to as many people as he could before he was out of power. Frederick Douglass recognized this. “What he said on this day showed a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had ever seen before in anything spoken or written by him,” he later wrote.
In our polarized times, Lincoln’s statesmanship on behalf of black equality is something all Americans should be able to admire.
Jonathan W. White is professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University as well as author of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize-winning “A Home Built By Slaves: African United States Website Visitors to the Lincoln White Home” (2022).