The Emancipation Proclamation: Lincoln’s Many Second Thoughts

M.T.G. Downey and E.D. Metcalf, United States History: In the Course of Human Events (St. Paul, MN: West Publishing, 1997), 461–462.

Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004). For similar claims, see, among others, Carl F. Wieck, Lincoln’s Quest for Equality: The Road to Gettysburg (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002); Richard Striner, Father Abraham: Lincoln’s Relentless Struggle to End Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Thomas L Krannawitter, Vindicating Lincoln: Defending the Politics of Our Greatest President (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008); James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012).

Gary Gallagher, The Union War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Prior to the American civil rights movement, the unionist perspective was conventional and rarely questioned. See Carl Sandburg on The War Years, James G. Randall and his “revisionist” followers (including David Donald) on Lincoln’s presidential experience, Richard Hofstadter’s leftist view of Lincoln’s policies, Michael Lind on his presidential beliefs, and Gore Vidal’s historical fiction. African American writers, from Carter Woodson to Lerone Bennett, have been, as a group, the most critical of Lincoln’s views on slavery.

“The judgment that, if a single historical fact is conceived of as absent from or modified in a complex of historical conditions, it would condition a course of historical events in a way which would be different in certain historically important respects, seems to be of considerable value for the determination of the ‘historical significance’ of those facts. . . .Without an appraisal of those possibilities. . ., a statement regarding its significance would be impossible.“ (Emphasis added.) Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: The Free Press, [1905] 1949), 166, 172.

Victor Vifquain, The 1862 Plot to Kidnap Jefferson Davis, ed. Jeffrey H. Smith and Phillip Tucker (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 2005); Eric J. Wittenberg, Like a Meteor Blazing Brightly: The Short but Controversial Life of Ulric Dahlgren (Roseville, MI: Edinborough Press, 2009).

Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, 164–188.

Even these and other states’ rights titans failed to weaken Davis and move the South in the direction of peace. To make matters worse, the typical member of the Confederate Congress voted for or against one issue at a time, precluding a persistent minority opposition comparable to that of the Northern Democrats. See Thomas B. Alexander and Richard E. Beringer, The Anatomy of the Confederate Congress: A Study of the Influences of Member Characteristics on Legislative Voting Behavior, 1861–1865 (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1972); Frank L. Owsley, States Rights in the Confederacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925); James Z. Rabun, “Alexander H. Stephens and Jefferson Davis,” American Historical Review 58 (January, 1953): 308; N.W. Stephenson, “A Theory of Jefferson Davis,” American Historical Review 21 (October, 1915): 81. See also David D. Scarboro, “The Weakness of States’ Rights during the Civil War,” The North Carolina Historical Review 56 (April, 1979), 133–149.

Abraham Lincoln, “To Benjamin Butler,” October 11, 1862, in Collected Works, 5: 445; Abraham Lincoln, “To Ulysses Grant,” October 21, 1862, in Collected Works 5: 462; Abraham Lincoln, “To Frederick Steele,” October 18, 1862, in Collected Works, 5: 470; Abraham Lincoln “To John A. Dix,” October 23, 1862, in Collected Works, 5: 476.

Lincoln’s emancipation plan was well conceived. The population, he said, would grow between 1862 and 1900, spreading the financial burden of compensation and colonization, and by 1900 most of the planters who decided to hold their slaves would be dead. A 40-year old planter in 1863 had a 67-year life expectancy, which means he would die by 1890—ten years ahead of the emancipation deadline—and his heirs would be compensated.

H.W. Brands, The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace (New York: Knopf-Doubleday, 2013), 318.

Orville Hickman Browning, “The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning,” vol. 1 (1850–1864). Collections of the Illinois State Historical Library, edited by Theordore C. Pease and James G. Randall (Springfield, IL: Illinois State Historical Library, 1925), 20: 694, 699. Singleton, an Illinois Peace Democrat, was elated over Lincoln's words. He wrote his sister that the president “will go as far ‘as any man in America to restore peace on the basis of the Union.’ He declares that he never has and never will present any other ultimatum--that he is misunderstood on the subject of slavery--that it shall not stand in the way of peace” (Ludwell H. Johnson, “Lincoln’s Solution to the Problem of Peace Terms, 1864–1865,” Journal of Southern History 5: 579).

The reasons behind Davis’s and other Confederate leaders’ desire for independence is subject to debate. According to one line of argument, Southerners’ knew their Congressional power was gradually evaporating as a result of non-Southern population growth and hostility to their region. Culturally and politically, the industrializing North and agricultural South differed more than ever. There would be no longer be a “marriage of iron and rye” to ally Northern and Southern commerce, for the industrialists of the Northeast and Midwestern farmers had made a fateful compromise: free soil in exchange for tariff support. Considered alone, however, such issues cannot explain Davis and company’s obsession with independence. The other major source of the independence movement was a great wave of nationalism which swept through the South during the mid-nineteenth century. For detail on all these matters, see James Oakes, The Scorpion’s Sting: Anti-Slavery and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014); Barrington Moore, “The Last Capitalist Revolution,” in Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston, MA: Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 111–158; Emory Thomas, The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience (Englwood Cliffs, NJ, 1970 and The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865 (Harper and Row, 1979).

John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln, A History (New York: The Century Company, 1890), 9: 220–221.

Orville Hickman Browning, “The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning,” vol.1 (1850–1864), Collections of the Illinois State Historical Library , 20: 694, 699.

John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History (New York: The Century Co., 1890), 10: 123–124; 125–128. Stephens writes, perhaps mistakenly, that reunion would allow Lincoln to delay implementation of the Thirteenth Amendment for five years after ratification.

Alexander H. Stephens produced the longest account of the Hampton Roads Conference, and most references to it derive from his report in A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States (Philadelphia, PA: National Publishing Company, 1870) 2: 599–619. Robert M. T. Hunter’s report appears in “The Peace Commission of 1865,” Southern Historical State Papers 4 (October 1917), 45–52; Judge John D. Campbell’s, in “Jefferson Davis: Constitutionalist,” Edited by Dunbar Rowland (Jackson, MS: Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1923) 8: 133–136.

After the president’s death, the public learned from his old law partner, William Herndon, the details about Lincoln’s boyhood aversion to cruelty and bloodshed, his kindness to animals, instanced in his going out of his way to save them from prolonged pain and death, his paralyzing grief over the death of his mother Nancy and, later, his sweetheart Ann Rutledge.

David Donald, Lincoln, 514. Max Lerner may have been thinking of these words when, at the cusp of World War II, he wrote of Lincoln: “The fatality of it, that he, with his tenderness for everything living, should become the instrument of death for tens of thousands.” (“Lincoln in the Civil War,” in Ideas for the Ice Age: Studies in a Revolutionary Era (New York: Viking Press, 1941), 395.

William C. Davis, Lincoln’s Men: How Abraham Lincoln Became Father to an Army and a Nation (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1999), 115. Lamon was always sympathetic toward the South, but he never ceased to be Lincoln’s trustworthy associate and friend.

Georg Simmel, The Problems of the Philosophy of History: An Epistemological Essay. Edited and Translated by Guy Oakes (New York: The Free Press, [1905] 1977), 39–40.

The full significance of the present essay is best captured by what is arguably the most representative of twenty-first century work on Lincoln and slavery, namely, James Oake’s Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States. Oakes, like Guelzo and others, claims that Lincoln and his Party were determined from the very beginning to preserve the Union and to abolish slavery. Indeed, they never differentiated the two goals, on each of which, Oakes says, there was a solid consensus. Oakes’s problem is that he asks his reader to take Lincoln and Republican Party leaders at their word when they assert their shared intention of ending slavery but interpret their insistence of the priority of Union as a mere political maneuver. Oakes does the same whenever conflicts among conservative, moderate, and radical Republicans are manifest, as they were in the 1860 convention which rejected the more radical Seward in favor of the moderate Lincoln. Northern leaders’ own claim that reunion was the aim of the war; emancipation, a secondary, instrumental, or even collateral, benefit, is simply ignored. Minimizing disagreements within parties, government agencies, and the executive branch, Oakes portrays a veritable juggernaut against the Confederacy and against slavery. Lincoln was but its executor. Even if Oakes is given the benefit of every doubt, his conception of a Republican government engaging in a full-court press against slavery ignores the imperatives, contingencies, and ambivalence of men at war. The irresistible force which Oakes attributed to the Lincoln-Republican movement was, as shown above, continually subject to decisive counter-forces.

In this connection, Drew Gilpin Faust believes that Union victory and abolition were not inevitable. With a less than decisive outcome to the war--a compromise--whatever its conditions, slavery might have been reformed and newly named, but it would remain slavery (The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South [Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1988], 80).

Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, 3–4.

Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010).