Representatives on July 16, 1862. It is also understandable that Delany approved of Lincoln’s colonization proposal to the black delegation.100
Lincoln would soon abandon colonization. He had always thought it impracticable; even in his remarks to the delegation he noted that only twelve thousand American blacks had emigrated during the many decades since colonization had begun. At any rate, his address to the blacks was mainly a sop to conservatives and a stalling tactic. At the end of the address, he told the blacks that the topic was so weighty that it merited careful deliberation. He suggested that they might need at least a month to think it over.
By then, he knew, he could have already announced the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.
For the time being, however, the antislavery press grew frantic over what appeared to be his apostasy. Horace Greeley in the New-York Tribune sent a public letter to Lincoln titled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions.” The president, Greeley insisted, had betrayed his millions of supporters by taking a conservative stance on slavery. Lincoln was merely appeasing the South and kowtowing to the border states, not punishing the Confederate traitors by attacking slavery, as he should be doing.
Lincoln wrote a letter of reply, which was published as widely as Greeley’s letter, in which he said that his chief goal was to save the Union, irrespective of slavery. “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to 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. This letter, of course, was disingenuous. By the time he wrote it many enslaved people had already been liberated through military emancipation, and several antislavery measures were in place. The letter to Greeley was President Blondin showing that he was right in the middle between allowing slavery to exist and banishing it altogether. As a nod to Greeley, he closed his note saying that “I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.”
Some saw Lincoln’s ambiguous letter as merely an attention-grabbing attempt to confuse the self-important Greeley. The Independent called it an example of “the president’s wit,” a “sensation hit” designed for the newspaper war between the Tribune and rival newspapers like the Herald. Showing his “keen eye . . . for the ludicrous,” Lincoln was just toying with Greeley, a favorite target of other papers.102
Others valued what they saw as the moderation of the president’s letter. Frank Leslie’s Weekly commented, “It is proof of Mr. Lincoln’s conservative tendencies that he has never yet been in advance of the nation on any question of public policy.”103
Lincoln also shrewdly utilized his meeting with a group of Chicago ministers who visited him on September 13. The clergymen, from several denominations, came to advise him to issue a proclamation against slavery, which God proclaimed a sin. Lincoln cagily replied that if God intended to communicate such a message, surely He would send it to the president directly. He added, “These are not, however, the days of miracles, and I suppose it will be granted that I am not to expect a direct revelation. I must study the plain physical facts of the case, ascertain what is possible and learn what appears to be wise and right.”104
Was he backing off from the preliminary proclamation of emancipation he had written and was waiting to publish?
Actually, he was inching publicly toward a radical position: slavery must be abolished, not only because of the laws of war but also because it was unjust and immoral. But he didn’t say that directly. He clothed his radical antislavery position in the dress of military necessity:
[A]s commander-in-chief of the army and navy, in time of war, I suppose I have a right to take any measure which may best subdue the enemy. Nor do I urge objections of a moral nature, in view of possible consequences of insurrection and massacre at the South. I view the matter as a practical war measure, to be decided upon according to the advantages or disadvantages it may offer to the suppression of the rebellion.
At the same time, though, he pretended to back off. What good would an emancipation proclamation do? he asked the ministers. How could words from him abolish slavery in the South? They would be as effective, he joked, as a papal bull against a comet—a reference to the legendary story of the medieval Pope Callixtus III, who had excommunicated the “apparition” of Halley’s comet in 1456.
As far as the Chicago ministers knew, he was a hidebound president who was merely continuing the constitutional defense of slavery that he had initiated in his inaugural address. But he was just making a feint in a conservative direction. He was waiting for the right moment to issue his proclamation.
The moment came four days after his equivocal remarks to the ministers. On September 17, George McClellan stopped Robert E. Lee’s northward advance at Antietam Creek in Maryland. One of the bloodiest events in US history, the Battle of Antietam produced more than 22,000 dead, wounded, or missing. This was not the kind of victory Lincoln had hoped for. Lee’s force was badly hurt, but it escaped across the border back into Virginia, thanks to McClellan’s typical dilatoriness (which this time got him fired, although his replacement, Ambrose Burnside, proved to be even more ineffective).
However, Antietam was close enough to a win for Lincoln to use emancipation as a weapon against the South and a way of preventing Europe’s involvement in the war. The Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, issued on September 22, 1862, offered the rebel states a few months to weigh Lincoln’s offer of a plan of gradual, compensated emancipation, to be paid for by federal funds. If the rebel states did not accept this offer, their enslaved people would be declared free, by executive order, in a final Emancipation Proclamation that would be issued on January 1, 1863. Always concerned about losing the border states, Lincoln left slavery alone there as long as they remained loyal to the Union.
The Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation shook Lincoln’s tightrope more strongly than ever. Passionate responses to the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation came from both sides.
The strong reactions were justified. Lincoln’s document said that “all persons held as slaves” in any state still in rebellion against the United States as of January 1, 1863, “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”
The key word here was “forever.” The question of whether or not enslaved persons seized in war became forever free or were only emancipated for the duration of military necessity had been a complex one during the Revolution and the War of 1812, and it remained so early in the Civil War. Congressional decisions of 1861 and 1862—especially the two Confiscation Acts and the 1862 bill forbidding military personnel from returning fugitives to their owners—purported to resolve the issue. Lincoln would support the Lieber Code of 1863, which would forever emancipate black fugitives who arrived behind Union lines. In 1863 and ’64, he would continue to try to promote emancipation in the border states. But he knew that only a constitutional amendment that abolished slavery would be, in his words, “a King’s cure for all the evils.”105
The Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation was an important step toward that amendment. For a president to proclaim permanent emancipation in some states was a tremendously inspirational gesture.106 Emerson called the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation one of the rare “jets of thoughts into affairs,” a huge “step in the history of political liberty,” promising “a day which most of us dared not hope to see, an event worth the dreadful war, worth its costs and uncertainties.” All doubts about Lincoln’s virtuous goals, Emerson insisted, must now be dropped. With this proclamation, “He has been permitted to do more for America than any other American man.”107
Many antislavery Northerners heaped similar praise on the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. The Independent asserted, “There can be no state paper imagined more noble than one which carries substantial liberty to millions of slaves. It is that very moral grandeur and sublime importance which makes us jealous of anything which threatens its certainty or diminishes its moral power.”108 The Chicago Tribune raved: “So splendid a vision has hardly shone upon the world since the day of the Messiah.” William Lloyd Garrison held that while the proclamation did not go far enough, it was “an act of immense historic importance, and justified the almost universal gladness of expression and warm congratulation which it has simultaneously elicited in every part of the free states.” Horace Greeley, who weeks before had attacked Lincoln as a lackey of the South, wrote of the proclamation: “It places our government distinctly, unequivocally, on the side of freedom as against slavery.”
Greeley’s perennial foe, James Gordon Bennett at the Herald, poked fun at Greeley for his about-face. “It is enough for us to dance with joy,” Bennett wrote, to see Greeley’s Tribune, “which has been cursing and abusing the President for some time past, indicting him for malfeasance in office, . . . accusing him of not executing the laws, . . . [saying] that it was the prayer of twenty million that he should resign,” now “indulges in a wiggle-waggle, and exclaims, ‘God bless Abraham Lincoln.’” After all, Greeley had said, “God do the other thing to Abraham Lincoln, a short while ago.”109
But the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation was no laughing matter for conservatives. “Mr. Lincoln has yielded to the radical pressure,” the Journal of Commerce stated. “We have only anticipations of evil from it, and we regard it, as will an immense majority of the people of the North, with profound regret.”110 The New York Express declared that Lincoln’s one aim now was “to execute the programme that Puritan abolitionism of New England demands of him.”111
The New York World remarked angrily, “The president has swung loose from the constitutional moorings of his Inaugural address and . . . is fully adrift on the current of radical fanaticism. . . . This
proclamation is made in pursuance of that higher law—that is to say, that open defiance of law—which distinguished the tribe of pestilent abolition agitators from the beginning.”112
Adrift on a radical current. Given over to the higher law. Actually, Lincoln, like other Republicans, had long thought that the Constitution contained the higher law, since it embodied the egalitarian principles of the Declaration of Independence. But the war had pulled him from his initial position of protecting slavery where it existed. He was now prepared to challenge slavery by fiat. The war had opened up new possibilities for the nation.
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