Abraham Lincoln's Program of Black Resettlement Part 9

This is a series of posts from the cited paper, I will try to divide it into many parts, put titles, and some illustration to fit in blogger and this Blog.

                                            From The Journal of Historical Review, Sept.-Oct. 1993 (Vol. 13, No. 5), pages 4-25.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     By Robert Morgan

The Emancipation Proclamation

During the winter and spring 1861-1862, public support grew rapidly for the view that slavery must be abolished everywhere. Lincoln did not ignore the ever louder calls for decisive action.

On June 19, he signed a law abolishing slavery in all the federal territories. At the same time, he was quietly preparing an even more dramatic measure.

At a cabinet meeting on July 22, Lincoln read out the draft text of a document he had prepared -- a proclamation that would give the Confederate states a hundred days to stop their "rebellion" upon threat of declaring all slaves in those states to be free.

The President told his cabinet that he did not want advice on the merits of the proclamation itself -- he had made up his mind about that, he said -- but he would welcome suggestions about how best to implement the edict. For two days cabinet members debated the draft. Only two -- Secretary of State William Seward and Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase, abolitionists who had challenged Lincoln for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination -- agreed even in part with the proclamation's contents. Seward persuaded the President not to issue it until after a Union military victory (of which so far there had been few), or otherwise, it would appear "the last measure of an exhausted government, a cry for help."

Emancipation/Colonization: First war for freedom in American history.

Union General McClellan's success on September 17 in holding off the forces of General Lee at Antietam provided a federal victory of sorts, and the waited-for opportunity. Five days later, Lincoln issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which included a favorable reference to colonization:

I, Abraham Lincoln ... do hereby proclaim and declare that hereafter, as heretofore, the war will be prosecuted for the object of practically restoring the constitutional relation between the United States, and each of the states, and the people thereof ...

That it is my purpose, upon the next meeting of Congress to again recommend the adoption of a practical measure tendering pecuniary aid to the free acceptance or rejection of all slave-states, so called, the people whereof may not be then be in rebellion against the United States, and which states, may then have voluntarily adopted, or thereafter may voluntarily adopt, immediate, or gradual abolishment of slavery within their respective limits; and that the effort to colonize persons of African descent, with their consent, upon this continent, or elsewhere, with the previously obtained consent of the Governments existing there, will be continued.

Lincoln then went on to state that on January 1, 1863,

all persons held as slaves within any state, or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever, free ...

The edict then cited the law passed by Congress on March 13, 1862, which prohibited military personnel from returning escaped slaves, and the second Confiscation Act of July 1862.

Proclamation Limitations

On New Year's Day, 1863, Lincoln issued the final Emancipation Proclamation. Contrary to what its title suggests, however, the presidential edict did not immediately free a single slave. It "freed" only slaves who were under Confederate control, and explicitly exempted slaves in Union-controlled territories, including federal-occupied areas of the Confederacy, West Virginia, and the four slave-holding states that remained in the Union.

The Proclamation, Secretary Seward wryly commented, emancipated slaves where it could not reach them, and left them in bondage where it could have set them free. 

Moreover, because it was issued as a war measure, the Proclamation's long-term validity was uncertain. Apparently, any future President could simply revoke it. "The popular picture of Lincoln using a stroke of the pen to lift the shackles from the limbs of four million slaves is ludicrously false," historian Allan Nevins has noted.

'Military Necessity'

Lincoln himself specifically cited "military necessity" as his reason for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. After more than a year of combat, and in spite of its great advantages in industrial might and numbers, federal forces had still not succeeded in breaking the South. 

At this critical juncture of the war, the President apparently now hoped, a formal edict abolishing slavery in the Confederate states would strike a blow at the Confederacy's ability to wage war by encouraging dissension, escapes, and possibly revolt among its large slave labor force.

As the war progressed, black labor had become ever more critical in the hard-pressed Confederacy. Blacks planted, cultivated and harvested the food that they then transported to the Confederate armies. Blacks raised and butchered the beef, pigs and chicken used to feed the Confederate troops. They wove the cloth and knitted the socks to clothe the grey-uniformed soldiers. As Union armies invaded the South, tearing up railroads and demolishing bridges, free blacks and slaves repaired them. They toiled in the South's factories, shipping yards, and mines. In 1862, the famous Tredegar ironworks advertised for 1,000 slaves. In 1864, there were 4,301 blacks and 2,518 whites in the iron mines of the Confederate states east of the Mississippi.

Blacks also served with the Confederate military forces as mechanics, teamsters, and common laborers. They cared for the sick and scrubbed the wounded in Confederate hospitals. Nearly all of the South's military fortifications were constructed by black laborers. Most of the cooks in the Confederate army were slaves. Of the 400 workers at the Naval Arsenal in Selma, Alabama, in 1865, 310 were blacks. Blacks served with crews of Confederate blockade-runners and stoked the firerooms of the South's warships.

Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the legendary cavalry commander, said in a postwar interview: "When I entered the army I took 47 Negroes into the army with me, and 45 of them were surrendered with me ... These boys stayed with me, drove my teams, and better Confederates did not live."

Slavery: The bedrock of the Union.

On several occasions, Lincoln explained his reasons for issuing the Proclamation. On September 13, 1862, the day after the preliminary proclamation was issued, Lincoln met with a delegation of pro-abolitionist Christian ministers, and told them bluntly: "Understand, I raise no objections against it [slavery] on legal or constitutional grounds ... I view the matter [emancipation] as a practical war measure, to be decided upon according to the advantages or disadvantages it may offer to the suppression of the rebellion."

To Salmon Chase, his Treasury Secretary, the President justified the Proclamations' limits: "The original [preliminary] proclamation has no constitutional or legal justification, except as a military measure," he explained. "The exceptions were made because the military necessity did not apply to the exempted localities. Nor does that pressure apply to them now any more than it did then."

Horace Greeley, editor of the influential New York Tribune, called upon the President to immediately and totally abolish slavery in an emphatic and prominently displayed editorial published August 20, 1862. Lincoln responded in a widely-quoted letter:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union ...

Concern about growing sentiment in the North to end slavery, along with sharp criticism from prominent abolitionists, was apparently another motivating factor for the President. (Abolitionists even feared that the Confederate states might give up their struggle for independence before the January first deadline, and thus preserve the institution of slavery.)

Lincoln assured Edward Stanly, a pro-slavery Southerner he had appointed as military governor of the occupied North Carolina coast, that "the proclamation had become a civil necessity to prevent the radicals from openly embarrassing the government in the conduct of the war."