Emancipating Lincoln

Harold Holzer

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780674068285
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Emancipating Lincoln seeks a new approach to the Emancipation Proclamation, a foundational text of American liberty that in recent years has been subject to woeful misinterpretation. These seventeen hundred words are Lincoln's most important piece of writing, responsible both for his being hailed as the Great Emancipator and for his being pilloried by those who consider his once-radical effort at emancipation insufficient and half-hearted.Harold Holzer, an award-winning Lincoln scholar, invites us to examine the impact of Lincoln's momentous announcement at the moment of its creation, and then as its meaning has changed over time. Using neglected original sources, Holzer uncovers Lincoln's very modern manipulation of the media—from his promulgation of disinformation to the ways he variously withheld, leaked, and promoted the Proclamation—in order to make his society-altering announcement palatable to America. Examining his agonizing revisions, we learn why a peerless prose writer executed what he regarded as his "greatest act" in leaden language. Turning from word to image, we see the complex responses in American sculpture, painting, and illustration across the past century and a half, as artists sought to criticize, lionize, and profit from Lincoln's endeavor.Holzer shows the faults in applying our own standards to Lincoln's efforts, but also demonstrates how Lincoln's obfuscations made it nearly impossible to discern his true motives. As we approach the 150th anniversary of the Proclamation, this concise volume is a vivid depiction of the painfully slow march of all Americans—white and black, leaders and constituents—toward freedom.

1

THE BOW OF PROMISE

The oddly compelling phrase “bow of promise” comes directly from Frederick Douglass—from his second most famous speech about Abraham Lincoln: not the one he delivered on April 14, 1876, in unveiling the Freedmen’s Monument in Washington, but rather the eulogy he offered at the site of the late president’s most famous prewar speech, Cooper Union in New York City, eleven years earlier on June 1, 1865.

In that initial oration, Douglass spoke of Lincoln as “emphatically the black man’s president … the first of the long line to show any respect to the rights of the black man.” In the second he called him “preeminently the white man’s President” (emphasis added) and African Americans “at best only his stepchildren; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity.”1 The second speech has been widely quoted, the first largely forgotten. They cry out to be reexamined and compared, because they help open a window onto the complicated evolution of African American—in fact all American—memory of Lincoln, slavery, and freedom, and because they inform the historical hung jury that continues to deliberate Abraham Lincoln’s claim to the title of emancipator, with no final resolution in sight.

One is unlikely to resolve the case on these pages, but revisiting some of the neglected evidence, authoritative and circumstantial alike, can add meaningfully to the record. This opening chapter considers what might be called the “artillery of silence”—an intentional oxymoron that asks readers to consider the idea of inaction as action, and of intentionally misleading public utterances as purposeful and helpful. And it asks readers to consider as well Douglass’s comment in his 1865 eulogy that, however complex the forces that ended slavery, Lincoln always held the “bow of promise” in his hands—even if he sometimes inexplicably, even maddeningly, withheld his arrows, or occasionally slung them in oddly chosen directions, as he readied the nation for emancipation.

The story begins with the subject of freedom itself—not the overarching theme of human liberty, but rather the thousand-page novel called Freedom, published in 1987 by William Safire. Most Americans remember Safire, if they remember him at all, as the Nixon-era speechwriter who evolved into an early, and longtime, conservative op-ed columnist for the New York Times. But he was also a fiction writer, producing in 1987 what he called “a novel of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War” that, its publicists enthused, “plunges the reader into the reality and drama of the American Civil War.”2

That claim remains open to both literary and historical debate. But while the weighty volume consumed more than 1,000 pages, the novel itself came in at “only” 974 pages. It was followed by a so-called underbook of “Sources and Commentary” that ran another 135 pages in small print—a reflection, its dust jacket proclaimed, of the novelist’s eight years of research. In fact, Safire exposed, but did not quite solve, an important mystery in his underbook: did significant numbers of Americans know, in advance of its public release on September 22, 1862, that Abraham Lincoln was poised to issue the Emancipation Proclamation?3 It was Safire’s claim that emancipation was an open secret in wartime Washington as early as the summer of that year. If he is correct, how did what columnist Safire might have called “information creep” inflect the actions that Lincoln took leading up to its formal publication? And how should the wider issue of broad foreknowledge—admittedly itself an “underbook” to the wider issue of freedom itself, yet one long overdue for investigation and interpretation—impact our understanding of Lincoln’s sincerity as a liberator?

Simply put, if we shine the spotlight on advance knowledge, we might illuminate precisely what Lincoln meant his proclamation to accomplish: whether he was pushed into issuing it, and whether he was deft or clumsy in the ways he prepared an essentially resistant, if not racist, nation for its society-altering impact. How ardently did he tether emancipation to colonization and to proposals for the compensated emancipation of slaves in Upper South states still loyal to the Union? And finally, how should a better understanding of Lincoln’s tactics in releasing or withholding information about his impending announcement—or perhaps his doing a bit of both simultaneously—affect his admittedly fraying modern reputation as a liberator?

Interregnum is the archaic word that, where Lincoln is concerned, is most often applied to the four-month secession winter that separated his November 1860 election from his March 1861 inauguration—one of the most perilous periods in American history. But the Union endured a second, equally dangerous two-month interregnum just a year later, between the day Lincoln first read a proposed proclamation to his cabinet and the day he issued a revised and expanded version to the public. (In both cases, Lincoln took pains to say little to the public.) The first draft was revealed on July 22, 1862. The second was released sixty days later, on September 22. Midway between those two milestones, on August 22, Lincoln wrote a justly famous letter to New York editor Horace Greeley to defend his seeming inaction on and indifference to slavery. Its candor and purpose have been debated and dissected ever since, but rarely subjected to the question of whether some of the public and press—including Greeley himself—might have known at the time that a proclamation was imminent.

Historian John Stauffer has intriguingly posited that Lincoln chose the twenty-second day of each of these three successive months for these historic initiatives with an eye on channeling the memory of George Washington. Washington was of course born on the twenty-second, 130 Februaries earlier, and Stauffer suggests that Lincoln may have subtly hoped that his declaration of independence for slaves might be received as a second American revolution to complete the unfinished work of the first.4 It is certainly possible. After all, Lincoln, who had once regarded the father of his country as incomparable—“the mightiest name on earth,” he said in 1842—had begun his inaugural journey nineteen years later by claiming that he faced a task “greater than that which rested upon Washington” and asking for the guidance of “that divine being, whoever attended him” (emphasis added). This was an astonishingly audacious claim for the time. Apparently the widening sectional crisis had convinced Lincoln that he shared with Washington a special relationship with both history and heaven.5 The following year, Lincoln ordered Washington’s Birthday to be observed with a “general movement” of all armies and navies and, on the home front, by public readings of Washington’s Farewell Address.6 Both well-intentioned ideas proved disasters. Winter weather not surprisingly kept the troops in camp, and when one overzealous citizen rose in the galleries of Congress to perform an uninvited recitation of the Farewell Address, guards had to forcibly remove him. Lincoln was embarrassed enough to pay his fine, explaining that the man was merely trying to perform his “official duty.” But after that February in the year of emancipation, 1862, the name of Washington vanished from Lincoln’s political vocabulary entirely; he seldom mentioned his name publicly again. Whether Stauffer’s ingenious speculation is consistent with this sudden change in Lincoln’s attitude I will leave for a bit later.

Lincoln declared that he faced a greater task than Washington toward the end of that first interregnum of 1860–1861. To fully understand the emancipation interregnum requires us to examine not only Lincoln’s own growing sense of destiny but also his specific strategy—and in this regard, not only the widely discussed Horace Greeley letter as an indication of his intent but the public’s foreknowledge as well. In addition, it requires us to parse the two other major statements he issued during this tense American summer: comments to a delegation of white men from Chicago, and those to a delegation of black men from the District of Columbia, both of which visited Lincoln at the White House to discuss not only the urgent need for emancipation but also the potential impact of black freedom on white America. Did the widely reported results of these meetings reflect Lincoln’s true views on race, or did they mask the full breadth of his ambitions as a liberator while further lifting the thin veil that prevented confirmation of a policy that many Americans believed imminent anyway? Or did the statements, alternatively timid and cruel, accurately define the limited scope of Lincoln’s philanthropy? Crucially, what other important events at the time may have influenced or at least explained Lincoln’s seemingly inconsistent expressions and tactics, and how did he work to either nurture or deflect public comprehension of these shifts? Finally, what did public silence and selected leaks add to or detract from this complex puzzle?

Any new analysis naturally requires us to discard modern logic whenever discussing the comparatively antiquated approach Lincoln applied to what today we call public relations. While modern chief executives boast White House staffs overflowing with media specialists, Lincoln employed no professional image handlers, no press secretary to issue trial balloons or float well-planned leaks, and certainly no pollsters to gauge public reaction to policy initiatives in advance. The technology did not yet exist to move information nearly as quickly as it races through the World Wide Web today. Lincoln lacked the advantage—or peril—of blogs, tweets, and Facebook posts to invite mass approval or incite mass dissension. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck were not working on a daily basis to demonize Abraham Lincoln as a radical, nor was Rachel Maddow on the tube every night to complain that he was not more so. Lincoln had the comparatively benign anti-abolitionist conservatives Manton Marble of the New York World and James C. Welling of the Washington National Intelligencer to assail him in the press as a closet abolitionist, and abolitionists Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison to paint him as a conservative and a racist.

That said, politicians and journalists of the mid-nineteenth century surely believed they operated within a thoroughly modern communications culture, too, in which new technologies such as the telegraph made it possible to transmit news within minutes and cause it to be published in the press overnight. Slow as the process seems to those of us who dwell in today’s personal-device generation, the Lincoln-era media’s ability to instigate and spread speculative stories must have seemed equally breathtaking.

Lincoln contributed an abundant personal arsenal of political cunning, a remarkable sense of political timing, a talent for great writing when he believed the occasion called for it, and a dazzling command of the press in an era in which most of the nation’s journals were consistently and openly loyal to one political party or the other. However primitive what we might call today the era’s “media platforms,” Lincoln certainly knew the terrain and how to dominate it. And while he tended to plan in solitary until he was ready to act publicly, he knew how to rally loyal editors and politicians to his side and, conversely, how and when to keep them in the dark. How many he took into his confidence on emancipation, and precisely when he did so, are the questions for today.

The primary challenge to logic here may be the fundamental implausibility of the idea of keeping a secret of any kind—particularly a big secret—in the whirlwind of gossip and speculation, then as well as now, called Washington, D.C. In truth, it was as difficult for official Washington to keep confidences during the Civil War as it has been in modern times in the case of, say, whether or not Hillary Rodham Clinton was to be offered the job of secretary of state in late 2008.

The latter case is actually quite instructive. Many people thought her appointment should happen, while a number of people wanted to prevent it from happening, so ultimately a trial balloon wafted through Washington (and, typical of twenty-first-century leaks, through social media, television, and the blogosphere), long enough to make the appointment of the president-elect’s onetime rival immutable and unsurprising, if not universally popular.

Neither his contemporaries nor his biographers agree on precisely when Abraham Lincoln first shared with others his plan to issue an executive proclamation to strike at slavery. Certainly by the spring and early summer of 1862 he had set the table, commencing to issue a series of veiled albeit mixed messages about his future plans. Biographers tend to skip over the entire interregnum from July to September without exploring how much, if anything, his intimates and the public at large learned during this period. Lincoln in fact labored selectively to define, shroud, or share his intentions during those sixty critical days, not so much amid the news blackout ascribed to it by history as with purposely inconsistent statements and actions designed to broaden support for it. These feints have earned for Lincoln a reputation for cunning, insensitivity, and insecurity.

But Lincoln’s bumpy road to emancipation was likely paved not by political guile alone but also by political weakness, at most uncertainty: fear of disappointing both liberals and conservatives, abolitionists and pro-slavery Unionists, Republicans and Democrats, civilians and soldiers, Northerners and Southerners, the thrones and parliaments of Europe and the Congress and voters of what was left of the United States, and all during a critical election year. Whipsawed by events and contingencies that season, Lincoln had little choice but to send the public mixed messages about administration policy, sharing his secret with those who could help him advance the cause of freedom even if they did not quite know they had become co-conspirators.

Critics often condemn Lincoln for waiting as long as he did to issue his Emancipation Proclamation, but at the beginning of summer 1862 he had good reason to doubt that he possessed either the public or official support, the military power, or the political opportunity to embark on any broad new anti-slavery policy without risking political ruin. Obfuscation became not only a tactic but a life preserver.

On one hand, he had recently accepted the resignation of Major General John C. Frémont, whose own precipitous order confiscating slaves within his military department Lincoln had overturned earlier in the year, claiming that he alone had the power and responsibility to deal with the slavery issue. Yet two weeks later, seeking to redefine the debate, Lincoln called together delegations of Union slave state representatives to push with new urgency a plan for compensated emancipation he had first proposed back in March. (He also signed the long-overdue law ending slavery in the District of Columbia, ending at last the incomprehensible anomaly that permitted slavery to exist in the capital of the United States until the second year of a pro-slavery rebellion against the government.)

That Lincoln believed in the concept of free labor for his entire adult life is beyond dispute. That he acted cautiously on freedom once in power is also undeniable. Both predilections were apparent when he pushed for compensated emancipation in the Union states, believing that adoption would doom slavery in the Confederate states without direct executive action on his part. Though Lincoln is known as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Copyright
• Introduction
• 1. The Bow of Promise
• 2. Emancipator versus Pettifogger
• 3. Sacred Effigies
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index