Understanding Lincoln
“Propaganda,” historian Richard Hofstadter called it, dismissing the Emancipation Proclamation as having “all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.”
“A great beacon light of hope to millions,” Martin Luther King, Jr. called it in his “I Have a Dream” speech. “It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity.”
Which was right?
On the surface, Hofstadter—but only on the surface.
Lincoln signed his Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, after a wearying morning shaking hands in a traditional New Year’s meet-and-great at the White House. So conscious was he of the significance of the occasion that at one point he set down his pen to wait for his throbbing hand to stop quivering: “If my hand trembles when I sign the Proclamation,” he said, “all who examine the document hereafter will say, ‘he hesitated.’”
And yet, as Hofstadter and other critics have noted, the Emancipation Proclamation did not actually free any slaves when it was first issued.
The proclamation was a military measure issued under Lincoln’s authority as commander in chief, not a law passed by Congress, and it was directed at the Confederacy—not the states loyal to the Union. Slaves in the border states of Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Tennessee, therefore, remained enslaved. And slaves in states where it did apply (“the states then in rebellion”) could not yet be freed because Lincoln had no authority to free anybody in those rebellious states!
However—and this is a massive ‘however’—because of that proclamation, and only because of that proclamation, slaves were set free wherever Union troops reestablished Union control in Confederate territory (including, for example, slaves from the Mississippi plantation of Confederate President Jefferson Davis during General Grant’s march on Vicksburg).
In that way, some four million slaves would be freed before the end of the war. Without the proclamation, those slaves would have remained slaves until the passage of the 13th amendment after the war was over.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was right. Lincoln’s “beacon of hope” shone brightly indeed—for a time. Unfortunately, the rest of King’s comments during his “I Have a Dream” speech also applied: “But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.”
“The Great Emancipator” was, for Abraham Lincoln, a well-earned sobriquet even if the promise of his legacy was not continued by those who came after. What made Lincoln, well, Lincoln?
Read on!
(Abraham Lincoln and his son Tad, photograph by Alexander Gardner, courtesy of the Library of Congress)
