I had intended to write a post about the Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, the anniversary of its issuance by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, but personal matters prevented me. The event should not go unrecognized, however. Here, then, is the story behind that momentous proclamation.  

On July 22, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln met with his cabinet, as he regularly did on Tuesdays. The meeting was not an ordinary one, though. Early in the session, Lincoln read to his cabinet a paper in which he outlined his plan, based on “military necessity,” that, as of January 1, 1863, “all persons held as slaves within any state or states, wherein the constitutional authority of the United States shall not then be practically recognized, submitted to, and maintained, shall then, thenceforward, and forever, be free.” 

It was a revolutionary statement. President Lincoln was freeing the slaves. Well, not all the slaves—he was freeing only those in the Confederate states.   

Lincoln had struggled with the issue of freeing the slaves since taking office in March of 1861, just sixteen months before. Soon after the start of the Civil War, in April of that year, abolitionists in his own Republican Party began pushing hard for him to end slavery. But Lincoln worried that such an action would force four slaveholding border states—Missouri, Kentucky, Delaware, and Maryland—into the Confederacy. That, he feared, would seriously weaken the Union. Also, while he abhorred slavery, Lincoln did believe that he had any legal authority, as president, to abolish it. In addition, Lincoln worried about the attitudes of the people of the North and the men fighting the war. He needed popular support and a resolute army to achieve his paramount goal, restoring the Union. As he weighed the issue, Lincoln constantly felt the pulse of the people and the army, as best he could, to gauge exactly how far they were willing to go. 

From the start of the war, Lincoln had tried to persuade leaders in Congress and in the border states to adopt his favored solution to the slavery problem: gradual emancipation with compensation from the government.* This approach, he believed, would achieve the aim of ending slavery in an orderly and peaceful way. It could even signal an option that Southerners might be willing to accept. But border state leaders stubbornly refused to go along. 

While Lincoln tried to maneuver politicians in the direction he wanted to go, he also fought off the efforts of abolitionist generals to act on their own. When generals declared the slaves in Confederate areas that they controlled to be free, Lincoln immediately rescinded those orders. He wanted a uniform policy, and he wanted to be the one who set it.

That goal of controlling the policy was challenged on another flank. As hopes for an early end to the war dimmed during 1862, even moderates began to support efforts to punish the South and thereby weaken it. Back in August of 1861, Congress had passed a confiscation act, which allowed military commanders to seize any property used for “insurrectionary purposes.” In July of 1862, Congress passed a stiffer measure that authorized the president to free any slaves that came into Union hands and had other tough provisions. Lincoln opposed some aspects of this bill at first, but after some negotiations with Congress and a few changes, he signed it into law on July 17.  

The failure of gradual emancipation meant that only more radical approaches were available. The tougher confiscation act told Lincoln that Congress was moving in that direction. In order to stay ahead of the wave—and maintain control of the emancipation policy—he had to act. That prompted his decision to announce to his cabinet, on July 22, his intention of freeing the slaves. Lincoln did not ask his cabinet to debate the policy: his mind, he said, was made up. He was open to suggestions about the language of the proclamation stating the policy, however. 

After Lincoln read his draft proclamation, the cabinet haltingly began to reply. The most important response came from Secretary of State William H. Seward. Seward was an abolitionist of no uncertain standing. He had contended with Lincoln for the Republican nomination, and was a skilled politician.** It was as a politician that Seward spoke.  The Union armies had just suffered several defeats in battle, and the war did not appear to be going at all well. In such a context, Seward said, a proclamation freeing the slaves would seem like an act of desperation. “It may be viewed,” he said, “as the last measure of an exhausted government” or, as he later put it, as a “last shriek on the retreat.” He suggested that Lincoln delay publication of the message until “you can give it to the country supported by military success.” 

Lincoln was immediately struck by the sagacity of Seward’s suggestion. He agreed to hold the proclamation until a victory came. 

That took a while. A little over a month after the historic cabinet meeting, the Union army suffered a second defeat at Manassas Junction, or Bull Run, a second humiliating loss at the site of the war’s first major battle. Meanwhile, Confederate forces in the west won a victory at Richmond, Kentucky, initiating an invasion of that border state. 

Around the same time, public pressure for emancipation arose once again. Newspaper editor Horace Greeley wrote an open letter to Lincoln in his New York Tribune sharply criticizing the president’s conduct of the war and urging a step for emancipation. Lincoln responded with his own open letter. Lincoln cleverly described two extreme camps—those who would destroy the Union for the sake of preserving slavery and those who would destroy slavery regardless of its effect on preserving the Union. Thus likening radical abolitionists to the Confederates they despised, he charted a more reasonable middle ground for himself: 

“I would save the Union. I would safe it the shortest way under the Constitution. . . . 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.” 

Lincoln closed his letter by clearly indicating where he, himself, sat in the debate on slavery:

“I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty. I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.” 

That fire put out, Lincoln waited, anxiously, for good news. On the eastern front, he waited for any news. After its victory at Second Bull Run, Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had disappeared. Lee had, in fact, boldly decided to invade the North, hoping to give some rest to battle-weary Virginia, to feed his troops on the crops of northern farms, and to win a victory that would ensure aid to the Confederacy from France and Great Britain.  

In the middle of September, Union soldiers fortuitously came upon a campsite recently abandoned by one of Lee’s commanders were they found, miraculously, Lee’s orders wrapped around a pair of cigars. Finally knowing Lee’s plans and the disposition of his troops, Union General George B. McClellan sprang (for him) into action and moved his army into western Maryland.

There, on September 17, 1862, he met Lee’s forces. The two armies fought the terrible battle of Antietam, the bloodiest single day in the war. McClellan’s forces were unable to budge Lee's army despite wave after wave of attacks. The next day, however, Lee withdrew.  

While the Union army had suffered high casualties at Antietam, Lee’s retreat turned the battle into a victory for the North. Lincoln had the success Seward had suggested he wait for. Just five days after the battle, he issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. On January 1, 1863, he released the final proclamation.  In doing so, Lincoln changed the purpose of the war. Now the North had two goals: not only to restore the Union but also to end slavery.  

To make certain that emancipation could withstand any legal challenge of constitutionality—and to extend the policy to all slaves, even those excluded by the Emancipation Proclamation—Lincoln supported the idea of a constitutional amendment banning slavery. In 1864, when such an amendment seemed close, he pushed hard for it, and in January of 1865, when it came up for a revote in the House (after being defeated the year before), Lincoln used all the powers of appointment and reward at his disposal to cajole members of the House to approve the amendment. Though Lincoln did not live to see the Thirteenth Amendment ratified in December of 1865, long after his assassination, he did sign the Act of Congress into law, sending the amendment to the states.

 * Lincoln also tried to promote efforts to colonize emancipated slaves in Central America, which, he though, would be better for both whites and blacks. When that idea was rejected by leading African Americans, he abandoned it.

** Seward had, in the first weeks of the administration, slyly suggested to Lincoln that he would be willing to lead the government, like the prime minister, if Lincoln would be willing to settle for being a mere chief of state. Lincoln managed not only to refrain from kicking Seward out of his office and out of his cabinet, but converted the man into his most trusted advisor.  

Words © 2009 AtHome Pilgrim.

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