In July Congress enacted a new militia act, the Second Confiscation Act, expanding the legal basis for freeing slaves of all “disloyal” owners. The act effectively freed all fugitive slaves escaping to Union lines from their Confederate owners. The Militia Act, passed the same day, permitted the employment of blacks in any capacity “for which they may be found competent.”
3
Northern soldiers saw in this act the potential to substantially build up their military might, even as Confederates lost theirs.
With some reservations, Lincoln signed both congressional acts.
4
At the same time, he revealed his own ideas on the subject in a meeting with his cabinet. There, on July 22, Lincoln proposed a limited Emancipation Proclamation and read a preliminary draft to the gathering. Limited emancipation was a risky business, virtually certain to raise the stakes of war. It was a risk Lincoln was willing to take. After Lincoln had shared the draft with his cabinet, Secretary of State Seward urged him to wait for a military victory before announcing his policy. Otherwise it might look like a desperation measure to disguise losses on the battlefield.
Both Lincoln and Republicans in Congress realized that by their combined actions, they—the Federal government—were serving notice that the meaning of the war had changed dramatically. No longer would the war be fought just to preserve the Union, and certainly not the “Union as it was.” Henceforth, it would be a much bigger war—one that would reweave the South’s social fabric in a revolutionary way and ensure that postbellum America would be radically different from antebellum America. Both the North and the South would feel the tremors. The slaveholding class would exist no longer, and they would react strongly as they recognized that their very way of life was at issue. With tens of thousands of bodies already in the grave, they would most likely call for total war on all fronts—no matter what the consequences, no surrender. Lincoln was prepared to take this risk because he had already himself determined on a course of total war as the only solution to entrenched Confederate nationalism. In these terms, emancipation decisively furthered the draconian military course he had already set.
As ambiguous a “victory” as Antietam was, it sufficed for Lincoln. Indeed, he perceived it as a providential signal to act.
5
On September 22, 1862, he announced his Emancipation Proclamation, effective January 1, 1863. The message was brief and lacked Lincoln’s customary sense of literary style. But the substance said it all. After establishing the context for his proclamation “as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion,” Lincoln went on to declare, “that all persons held as slaves within said designated [rebellious] States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free; and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.”
6
With that proclamation, the war assumed a double significance for the North as a war for union and a war for freedom. For the South, the proclamation also confirmed a double significance: to protect a sovereign nation’s right to self-defense against an outside invader, and to protect that nation’s white population from slave insurrections and disloyalty
At the same time that Lincoln targeted the rebellious states for emancipation, he also called for congressional approval of gradual, compensated emancipation for slaveholders in the border states. If the border states could be convinced, it might even turn the Confederacy and end the war at a much cheaper price. To prepare the way, he met with a congressional delegation from the border states to persuade them of the wisdom of his plan. In that meeting, he pointed out that antislavery sentiment was growing so strong in the North that he doubted the institution would survive the war. Instead of losing all their value with a constitutional amendment and coerced emancipation, why not gradually free slaves over the next decades with compensation of $400 per slave? To those in the border states, and even more, the free states, who objected to the staggering costs of such compensation, Lincoln replied that it was far cheaper than war and coerced emancipation. Even more important, compensated emancipation saved lives that coerced emancipation wasted.
However logical the argument, Lincoln’s appeal fell on deaf ears. Two days after the meeting, twenty of the border-state congressmen formally rejected Lincoln’s proposal, and a minority of eight approved.
7
Freedom for slaves would not appear on any slaveholder’s agenda until coerced by force of arms or law.
Despite its place in American memory as America’s abolition declaration, the Emancipation Proclamation was hardly an abolitionist document. Nor did it represent any change in Lincoln’s war aims (at least none that he could admit to publicly). But that did not stop either side in the conflict from effectively and intentionally misreading the proclamation as a new and revolutionary document. In that deliberate misreading, Northern abolitionists created a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The proclamation reaffirmed Lincoln’s stated war purpose as the restoration of the Union and reaffirmed his intention still to strive for compensated emancipation. He reiterated that abolition was not a war aim of the North. If the Confederacy came back into the Union before January I, the proclamation provided that the institution of slavery might continue in those states. Yet, as the historian J. G. Randall shrewdly recognized, “[t]he truth of the matter was that the proclamation became a species of slogan or shibboleth; its dramatization in the popular mind was of more effect than its actual provisions.... [I]t came to be pretty generally assumed that in September of 1862 the war somehow took a new turn, and that thenceforward it was being prosecuted as a war against slavery”
8
Whatever the popular interpretation, coercive universal emancipation was not what Lincoln intended by his proclamation. In his annual message to Congress on December 1, 1862, he reiterated his favored solution of a constitutional amendment implementing compensated emancipation through the issue of Federal bonds to be completed by 1900. This would be expensive, but less expensive than war: “The war requires large sums, and requires them at once. The aggregate sum necessary for compensated emancipation, of course, would be large. But it would require no ready cash; nor the bonds even, any faster than the emancipation progresses. This might not, and probably would not, close before the end of the thirty-seven years.” Left unsaid by Lincoln was the fact that in compensated emancipation, abolition would come gradually, not immediately.
Along with this proposal, Lincoln also took the occasion to reiterate his preference for voluntary colonization of freedmen: “I cannot make it better known than it already is, that I strongly favor colonization.” As for Northern freedmen, “I wish to say there is an objection urged against free colored persons remaining in the country, which is largely imaginary, if not sometimes malicious.”
9
The failure of compensated emancipation to win any support from any quarter provides an important insight into the war. Try as he might to popularize a morally acceptable and diplomatically expedient solution to the war and slavery, Lincoln would not be heard. In 1863 hardly anyone was ready to quit the killing. Nevertheless, Lincoln’s efforts to arrange for a compensated emancipation, though unsuccessful, should not be overlooked. They reveal Lincoln to be one of the few principals in the war capable of transcending the prevailing rhetoric of absolute right and wrong.
For any kind of compromise to work, both sides had to be able to see ways in which guilt resided on all sides. Northern abolitionists could countenance this no sooner than could Southern fire-eaters. From the abolitionists’ stance of moral superiority and absolute identification of God with His Northern New Israel, the slaveholding sinner should not be compensated for his sin, even if it saved lives and ultimately cost less. Why? Because the North was utterly right and the South utterly wrong. Such moral high ground was, as Lincoln recognized, sheer hypocrisy that ignored the utter complicity of Northern traders and consumers in the “peculiar institution.”
Reverend Moses Smith of Connecticut agreed: “We invented the machinery and opened the [slave] markets. We took mortgages on southern property, and became
owners
of men.
We fitted out the ships and became the slave traders of the land. Northern men voted in the Fugitive Slave Bill.”
10
Both Lincoln and Smith were correct. It was not morality that blocked the acceptance of compromise of any sort, but rather a self-interested rewriting of history.
The proclamation came as no surprise to the Confederates. A writer for the Richmond Daily Dispatch insisted “Lincoln’s proclamation changes nothing; this has been an abolitionist war from the beginning.”
11
But they howled at a codicil that declared that “the Executive Government of the United States ... will do no act... to repress such persons... in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.” Confederates interpreted these words as an incitement to servile insurrection, dubbing Lincoln’s proclamation the “Insurrection Proclamation.”
Southern reactions to the Emancipation Proclamation were generally flat except for the implied call to slave insurrection, which they read into it. Confederates had assumed from the very start of hostilities that the war of “Northern aggression” was a thinly disguised, New England-driven abolitionist war.
President Davis’s first inclination (never implemented) was to hand over all Union officer prisoners to state civil authorities so that they would be tried and executed according to capital laws covering incitement to servile insurrection. Later, Davis insisted that the proclamation “affords to our whole people the complete and crowning proof of the true nature of the designs of the party which elevated to power the present occupant of the Presidential chair at Washington and which sought to conceal its purpose by every variety of artful device.”
12
On October 9, the Richmond Religious Herald echoed Davis’s outrage in a column titled “The Proclamation of Abolition.” In it, the editor pointed to the revolutionary effects of this document, if implemented: “The sudden revolution would break the whole fabric of society in pieces, and slaveholders and non-slaveholders, of the present generation at least, would struggle hopelessly to extricate themselves from the universal wreck of financial interests and domestic institutions.... If successful, it would create a new Pariah race to curse the world, and to be itself accursed of God and man.”
Others were less offended and downplayed the proclamation. The
Southern Illustrated News
saw in Lincoln’s proclamation “a state of desperation” that had little immediate effect on anyone, while the
Augusta Weekly
Constitutionalist
likened the futility of Lincoln’s aspirations for the South to “the Pope’s Bull against the Comet.”
13
In fact, the South had promulgated the myth that the Civil War was waged solely for emancipation so vigorously that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation did not have quite the symbolic effect on them that it did in the North. But it did mean an all-or-nothing war.
Confederate fears of widespread slave insurrections diminished as it became clear that life for most slaves went on as usual. Occupied places, such as New Orleans or Port Royal, South Carolina, where slaves ran to freedom, were the exception. In 1863, with no Federal troops yet in view, slaves continued to work the plantations and armories and to support the army from behind the lines. The buying and selling of slaves remained as robust as ever, with prices ranging from $3,000 to $5,000.
14
In the North, African Americans recognized the futility of insurrection once the war began. In an editorial for the African Methodist Episcopal Christian Recorder, the writer wrote that no Northern statesmen counseled insurrection before the war. Now, the writer continued:
[T]hat same people want the slaves to rise up and fight for their liberty. Rise against what?—powder, cannon, ball and grape-shot? Not a bit of it. They have got too much good sense. Since you have waited till every man, boy, woman and child in the so-called Southern Confederacy has been armed to the teeth, tis folly and mockery for you now to say to the poor, bleeding and downtrodden sons of Africa, “Arise and fight for your liberty!”
15
If Lincoln employed emancipation as a ground for total war, Southern voices employed emancipation as a ground for attacking the group they hated most: evangelical clergy. Southern observers exposed the utter captivity of the Northern churches to the patriotic cause and to the lawyer-politicians who orchestrated it. In a column printed in the
Southern Illustrated News
on “Odium Theologicum,” the Richmond-based editors focused on the Northern church as the embodiment of “servile” political preaching:
And when we say “the Church,” we use the term in no restricted or sectarian sense... but as embracing all who acknowledge the Christian faith, in any manner, Trinitarians or Unitarians, Protestants or followers of Rome, from the disciples of Theodore Parker to the brethren of the Pennsylvania Conference bordering on the Pan-Handle, and from the applauding audience that attends the performances of Beecher to the devout flock that awaits the benediction of Archbishop Hughes. Not only are the religionists of the North unanimous in their support of the war, but they far outstrip the politicians in the rancor and hatred they exhibit.
If the same warlike sentiments appeared in the Southern pulpits, which they certainly did, that did not mark hypocrisy, the editors argued, because the South’s cause was utterly just. And because secession was just, the Southern cause was purely self-defense:
If it be said that it is natural that the feelings of Christians should be with their country in time of war, that patriotism is a high Christian duty, and that our own clergymen are actively engaged in the cause of the Confederate States, many of them being in military command, we could answer that there is all the difference conceivable between an offensive and defensive war. The Southern people have never desired hostilities. They have only taken up arms to protect their altars and fire-sides.
16