Messrs. Nicolay and Hay, who were Mr. Lincoln's private secretaries during the time he was President, and afterwards the authors of his most elaborate biography, say: "The blessings of an enfranchised race must forever hail him as their liberator."
Says Francis Curtis in his History of the Republican Party, in speaking of the President's Emancipation Proclamation: "On the 1st day of January, 1863, the final proclamation of freedom was issued, and every negro slave within the confines of the United States was at last made free."
Other writers of what is claimed to be history, almost without number, speak of the President's pronouncement as if it caused the bulwarks of slavery to fall down very much as the walls of Jericho are said to have done, at one blast, overwhelming the whole institution and setting every bondman free. Indeed, there are multitudes of fairly intelligent people who believe that slaveholding in this country ceased the very day and hour the proclamation appeared. In a recent magazine article, so intelligent a man as Booker Washington speaks of a Kentucky slave family as being emancipated by Mr. Lincoln's proclamation, when, in fact, the proclamation never applied to Kentucky at all.
The emancipationists of Missouri were working hard to free their State from slavery, and they would have been only too glad to have Mr. Lincoln do the work for them. They appealed to him to extend his edict to their State, but got no satisfaction. The emancipationists of Maryland had much the same experience. Both Missouri and Maryland were left out of the proclamation, as were Tennessee and Kentucky and Delaware, and parts of Virginia and Louisiana and the Carolinas. (See Appendix.) The explanation is that the proclamation was not intended to cover all slaveholding territory. All of it that belonged to States that had not been in rebellion, or had been subdued, was excluded. The President's idea was to reach only such sections as were then in revolt. If the proclamation had been immediately operative, and had liberated every bondman in the jurisdiction to which it applied, it would have left over a million slaves in actual thraldom. Indeed, Earl Russell, the British premier, was quite correct when, in speaking of the proclamation, he said: "It does not more than profess to emancipate slaves where the United States authorities cannot make emancipation a reality, and emancipates no one where the decree can be carried into effect."
For the failure of the proclamation to cover all slaveholding territory there was a plausible reason. Freedom under it was not decreed as a boon, but as a penalty. It was not, in theory at least, intended to help the slave, but to chastise the master. It was to be in punishment of treason, and, of course, could not consistently be made to apply to loyal communities, or to such as were under government control. The proclamation, it will be recollected, was issued in two parts separated by one hundred days. The first part gave the Rebels warning that the second would follow if, in the meanwhile, they did not give up their rebellion. All they had to do to save slavery was to cease from their treasonable practices. Had the Rebels been shrewd enough, within the hundred days, to take the President at his word, he would have stood pledged to maintain their institution, and his proclamation, instead of being a charter of freedom, would have been a license for slaveholding.
The proclamation did not, in fact, whatever it may have otherwise accomplished at the time it was issued, liberate a single slave. What is more, slavery as an institution was altogether too securely rooted in our system to be abolished by proclamation. The talk of such a thing greatly belittles the magnitude of the task that was performed. Its removal required a long preliminary work, involving, as is made to appear in previous chapters of this work, almost incalculable toil and sacrifice, to be followed by an enormous expenditure of blood and treasure. Its practical extinguishment was the work of the army, while its legal extirpation was accomplished by Congress and the Legislatures of the States in adopting the Thirteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution, which forbids all slaveholding. That amendment was a production of Congress and not of the Executive, whose official approval was not even required to make it legally effective.
The story of the proclamation, with not a few variations, has often been told; but the writer fancies that the altogether correct account has not always been given. It may be presumptuous on his part, but he will submit his version.
To understand the motive underlying the proclamation we must take into account its author's feeling toward slavery. Notwithstanding various unfriendly references of an academic sort to that institution, he was not at the time the proclamation appeared, and never had been, an Abolitionist.
Not very long before the time referred to the writer heard Mr. Lincoln, in his debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Alton, Illinois, declare—laying unusual emphasis on his words: "I have on all occasions declared as strongly as Judge Douglas against the disposition to interfere with the existing institution of slavery."
Judge Douglas was what was then called a "dough-face" by the Abolitionists—being a Northern man with Southern principles, or "proclivities," as he called them.
Only a little earlier, and several years after Mr. Lincoln had claimed to be a Republican, and a leader of the Republicans, he had, in a speech at Bloomington, Illinois, asserted that, "the conclusion of it all is that we must restore the Missouri Compromise."
Now the adoption of the Missouri Compromise was the hardest blow ever inflicted on the cause of free soil in America. It did more to encourage the supporters of slavery and to discourage its opponents than anything else that ever happened. Its restoration would undoubtedly have produced a similar effect. Although he is not to be credited with any philanthropic motive, Stephen A. Douglas did an effective work for freedom when he helped to overthrow that measure. Leading Abolitionists have accorded him that meed of praise.
But there was that proposition which Mr. Lincoln was so fond of repeating, that the nation could not remain half free and half slave—"a divided house"—but the remedy he had to propose was not manumission at any proximate or certain time, but the adoption of a policy that, to use his own words, would cause "the public mind to rest in the belief that it [slavery] was in the course of ultimate extinction." Practically that meant very little or nothing. What the public mind then needed was not "rest," but properly directed activity.
But the declarations above quoted were all before Mr. Lincoln had become President or had probably thought of such a thing. Did the change of position lead to a change of opinion on his part? We are not left in uncertainty on this point. His official views were declared in what might be called a State paper. Soon after his inauguration, his Secretary of State sent Minister Dayton, at Paris, a dispatch that he might use with foreign officials, in which, in speaking of the Rebellion, he said: "The condition of slavery in the several States will remain just the same whether it succeeds or fails.... It is hardly necessary to add to this incontrovertible statement the further fact that the new President has always repudiated all designs, whenever and wherever imputed to him, of disturbing the system of slavery as it has existed under the Constitution and laws."
About the same time Mr. Lincoln stated to a party of Southern Congressmen, who called upon him, that he "recognized the rights of property that had grown out of it [slavery] and would respect those rights as fully as he would similar rights in any other property."
No steps were taken by Mr. Lincoln to recall or repudiate the foregoing announcements. On the contrary, he confirmed them in his official action. He annulled the freedom proclamations of Frémont and Hunter. He did not interfere when some of his military officers were so busy returning fugitive slaves that they had no time to fight the masters. He approved Hallock's order Number Three excluding fugitives from the lines. He even permitted the poor old Hutchinsons to be sent away from the army very much as if they had been colored people, when trying to rouse "the boys" with their freedom songs. In many ways Mr. Lincoln showed that in the beginning and throughout the earlier part of his Administration he hoped to re-establish the union without disturbing slavery. In effect he so declared in his introduction to his freedom proclamation. He gave the rebel slaveholders one hundred days in which to abandon their rebellion and save their institution. In view of such things it is no wonder that Henry Wilson, so long a leading Republican Senator from Massachusetts, in his Rise and Fall of the Slave Power, in speaking of emancipation, said "it was a policy, indeed, which he [the President] did not personally favor except in connection with his favorite idea of colonization."
It is needless to say that the President's attitude was a great surprise and a sore disappointment to the more radical Anti-Slavery people of the country, who had supported him with much enthusiasm and high hopes. They felt that they had been deceived. They said so very plainly, for the Abolitionists were not the sort of people to keep quiet under provocation. Horace Greeley published his signed attack (see Appendix) entitled, The Prayer of Twenty Millions, which is, without doubt, the most scathing denunciation in the English language. Henry Ward Beecher "pounded" Mr. Lincoln, as he expressed it. Wendell Phillips fairly thundered his denunciations. There was a general under-swell of indignation.
Now, Mr. Lincoln was not a man who was incapable of reading the signs of the times. He saw that he was drifting towards an irreparable breach with an element that had previously furnished his staunchest supporters. As a politician of great native shrewdness, as well as the head of the Government, he could not afford to let the quarrel go on and widen. There was need of conciliation. Something had to be done. We know what he did. He issued his Emancipation Proclamation.
As far as freeing any slaves was concerned, he knew it amounted to very little, if anything. He said so. Less than two weeks before the preliminary s............