Lincoln's Hundred Days

Louis P. Masur

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780674071339
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

"The time has come now, " Abraham Lincoln told his cabinet as he presented the preliminary draft of a "Proclamation of Emancipation." Lincoln's effort to end slavery has been controversial from its inception-when it was denounced by some as an unconstitutional usurpation and by others as an inadequate half-measure-up to the present, as historians have discounted its import and impact. At the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, Louis Masur seeks to restore the document's reputation by exploring its evolution. Lincoln's Hundred Days is the first book to tell the full story of the critical period between September 22, 1862, when Lincoln issued his preliminary Proclamation, and January 1, 1863, when he signed the final, significantly altered, decree. In those tumultuous hundred days, as battlefield deaths mounted, debate raged. Masur commands vast primary sources to portray the daily struggles and enormous consequences of the president's efforts as Lincoln led a nation through war and toward emancipation. With his deadline looming, Lincoln hesitated and calculated, frustrating friends and foes alike, as he reckoned with the anxieties and expectations of millions. We hear these concerns, from poets, cabinet members and foreign officials, from enlisted men on the front and free blacks as well as slaves.Masur presents a fresh portrait of Lincoln as a complex figure who worried about, listened to, debated, prayed for, and even joked with his country, and then followed his conviction in directing America toward a terrifying and thrilling unknown.

One Hundred Days

It was a somewhat remarkable fact . . . that there were just one hundred days between the dates of the two proclamations, issued upon the 22nd of September and the 1st of January. I had not made the calculation at the time.

—Abraham Lincoln, quoted in Francis B. Carpenter,

Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln (1866)

5

Judgments

Handbills appeared all over town: citizens in Washington had organized a serenade for 9 p.m., on September 24, 1862, to honor the president at the Executive Mansion. Gideon Welles reported that the Emancipation Proclamation “has been in the main well received, but there is some violent opposition, and the friends of the measure have made this demonstration to show their approval.” When the music came to an end, Lincoln came out to speak. He pretended not to know what had occasioned the spontaneous celebration, and then he admitted, “I suppose I understand it.” The crowd laughed, yelling back, “That you do!” and “You thoroughly understand it!”

“What I did,” Lincoln said, “I did after very full deliberation, and under a very heavy and solemn sense of responsibility. . . . I can only trust in God I have made no mistake.”

“No mistake,” responded the serenaders. “Go ahead, you’re right.”

“I shall make no attempt on this occasion to sustain what I have done or said by any comment.”

“That’s unnecessary; we understand it.”

“It is now for the country and the world to pass judgment on it.”¹

Whitelaw Reid, a young writer and editor from Ohio who contributed dispatches to the Cincinnati Gazette under the pen name “Agate,” was among “the surging crowd.” He thought,

It is a scene well worth remembering—one that History will treasure up forever: the President of a great Republic—great even in its misery and shame—standing at his window, amid the clouds and gloom with which his decree of Universal Emancipation is ushered in, receiving the congratulations of his People for his bold word for Freedom and the Right, as against all constituted guarantees of Wrong, hesitating as he thanks them, doubting even amid the ringing cheers of the populace, trusting in God he has made no mistake, tremulously (so tremulously this utterance seems choked by his agitation) awaiting the judgment of the Country and the World.²

Reid captured something essential about Lincoln’s character: his humility. Other politicians might have trumpeted how momentous their actions were, but not Lincoln. He worked methodically, carefully, deliberately; but still, when he made a decision, he understood that it might prove to be ineffectual or even wrong. He realized that intentions did not guarantee outcomes. There was no guidebook for him to follow. And so he stated his determination to act in one hundred days, and then paid close attention to the myriad responses.

From the White House, the serenade moved on to treasury secretary Salmon Chase’s residence, where a number of Republican politicians and generals had gathered. They all chirped with joy. John Hay, Lincoln’s secretary, noted: “They gleefully and merrily called each other and themselves abolitionists, and seemed to enjoy the novel sensation of appropriating that horrible name. . . . They all seemed to feel a sort of new and exhilarated life; they breathed freer; the Prest. Procn. had freed them as well as the slaves.”

It was an astute observation. For a long time, many who detested slavery felt they could not act on their convictions, because the slaveholder had a legal right to his property and the nonslaveholder was obligated to respect that right. This was the point of Lincoln’s remarkable letter to Joshua Speed, written in August 1855: “I bite my lip and keep quiet. The great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the Constitution and the Union.” The preliminary Emancipation Proclamation freed from the cross those who, like Lincoln, were “naturally antislavery,” and at last allowed their feelings to unite with their thoughts.

When, after the serenade, Hay spoke to Lincoln about the newspaper editorials on the Proclamation, the president said “he had studied the matter so long that he knew more about it than they did.”³

Those judgments came quickly, and from all quarters: radicals, moderates, and conservatives, Confederates and Europeans, soldiers and slaves. An anonymous correspondent to Forney’s War Press in Philadelphia stated at September’s close: “As I write millions are discussing it in every section that is traversed by the telegraphic wires. It will be greeted by many differences of opinion. It will startle the weak, confirm the conscientious, and for a brief period supply a new weapon to the sympathizers with the common enemy.”⁴

Newspapers seemed to compete with one another for the boldest claims. “The country is electrified this morning,” wrote a correspondent to San Francisco’s Daily Evening Bulletin. The New York Tribune declared: “It is the beginning of the end of the rebellion; the beginning of the new life of the nation. God bless Abraham Lincoln.” The Lowell Daily Citizen deemed the Proclamation “a paper which marks an epoch in the history of this nation and the world. . . . [Lincoln] has written his name in history in letters of light.” The Albany Evening Journal called it “the most solemn and momentous declaration the world ever witnessed,” and the New York Times stated, “There has been no more far reaching document ever issued since the foundation of this government.” Said the New York Evening Post: “The 22d of September in this year will hereafter be a day to be commemorated with peculiar honor. . . . On that day, it will be recorded, the chains of bondage were struck from the limbs of three millions of human beings.” And according to the Philadelphia Press, it was a “second Declaration of Independence from slavery, which is certain to awaken more excitement than the first, and, if possible, to lead to results more novel and wide reaching.”⁵

“The axe is laid to the root of the tree”: this was a popular metaphor. A cartoon in Harper’s Weekly showed Lincoln swinging an axe at a withered tree labeled “Slavery,” and warning a rebel cowering in the top branch: “Now, if you don’t come down, I’ll cut the Tree from under you.” And a popular print showed Jefferson Davis displaying the “Great Southern Gyascutis,” a monstrous-looking dog with fangs and talons. The print depicted various Union officials trying to break the backbone of the beast; a dejected man sitting with head in hand, holding a tiny hammer labeled “Compromise”; Generals Halleck and McClellan wielding hammers representing “Skill” and “Strategy”; Secretary of War Stanton preparing to strike with the “Draft”; and Lincoln, with an axe labeled “Emancipation Proclamation,” telling Stanton: “You can try him with that, but I’m afraid this axe of mine is the only thing that will fetch him.”⁶

Lincoln’s mail bag filled with expressions of gratitude. “May God bless & prosper Abraham Lincoln for his great & sublime act of justice & humanity,” wrote the editor of the Christian Inquirer. An abolitionist declared that “the People are jubilant over your emancipation message as a measure alike Military & Philanthropic.” “It is the noblest act of the age on this continent,” averred one correspondent. Others claimed that “the cloud is lifted from our country’s future—our cause receives an inspiration unknown before; and having now won God to our side, and established our policy upon Eternal Justice, the Nation cannot die.” One writer, unable to find the right words, sent the President a barrel containing half a dozen hams.⁷

The vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, who had been kept pretty much out of the decision-making process, predicted that the Emancipation Proclamation “will stand as the great act of the age.” Lincoln wrote back to Hamlin: “While I hope something from the proclamation, my expectations are not as sanguine as are those of some friends. . . . It is six days old, and while commendation in newspapers and by distinguished individuals is all that a vain man could wish, the stocks have declined, and troops come forward more slowly than ever. This, looked soberly in the face, is not very satisfactory. . . . The North responds to the proclamation sufficiently in breath, but breath alone kills no rebels.”⁸

For some, the Proclamation restored faith and cleared the air. Jane Stuart Woolsey, a nurse in New York and Virginia, wrote:

There was a time,—I confess it because it is past, when your correspondent turned rather cold and sick and said “It is enough!” and when my sister Abby . . . went about declaiming out of Isaiah “To what purpose is the multitude of yours: your country is desolate, strangers devour it in your presence.” We came out of that phase, however, at any rate I did, and concluded that despondency was but a weak sort of treason: and then with the first cool weather came the Proclamation, like a “Loud wind, strong wind, blowing from the mountain,” and we felt a little invigorated and thanked God and took courage.⁹

Charles Eliot Norton also spoke of God’s glory. He wrote to his dear friend George W. Curtis:

I can hardly see to write,—for when I think of this great act of Freedom, and all it implies, my heart and my eyes overflow with the deepest, most serious gladness. I rejoice with you. Let us rejoice together, and with all the lovers of liberty, and with all the enslaved and oppressed everywhere. I think to-day this world is glorified by the spirit of Christ. How beautiful it is to be able to read the sacred words under this new light. “He hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.” The war is paid for.¹⁰

In a sermon delivered on September 28 at the First Congregational Unitarian Church in Philadelphia, the Reverend William Furness declared that the Proclamation gave meaning to the “dear and honorable lives . . . sacrificed” at Antietam, and that it moved citizens from a state of private sorrow to public blessing. “The Proclamation of the President,” stated Furness, “is a Proclamation of Emancipation to us. We, the white race of the North, who have been under the galling chain of obligation that bound us to connive at oppression and to hurl back into the hell of bondage the fugitive grasping for his sacred and God-given freedom,—it is we, whose emancipation this great act of the President announces.”¹¹

It was a measure too sweeping to be the act of any individual; rather, it was an act of destiny. “This proclamation of the President is the decree of fate rather than the utterance of any man,” declared an editorial in the North American. “The storm is not over, but it is no longer gathering. We can now see that there is to be an end, and we know the end is to be favorable to the future unity and prosperity of this great nation.”¹²

Other commentators, however, played down the Proclamation’s significance. The New York World, the country’s leading Democratic paper, asserted: “This new proclamation really amounts to little. The President proclaims in substance that on the first of next January he will issue still another proclamation, putting in force the main provisions of the confiscation act.” The Boston Post agreed: “There is nothing strikingly new in the measures advocated in the proclamation. . . . The declaration that slaves are free where our armies cannot penetrate, of course, is a nullity, and will excite the ridicule that follows impotency.” “It is on the whole a curious document,” concluded the Journal of Commerce. ¹³

One writer, who opposed Lincoln’s action, suggested to readers that “emancipation is not abolition,” and that even if by virtue of the Proclamation all the existing slaves in South Carolina are emancipated, the right to hold slaves still remains, and may be exercised by the people of South Carolina whenever the State is again in the Union. The Proclamation merely takes from them the slaves they now own.”¹⁴

Not all conservatives were so temperate in their reaction. Democratic opponents denounced the Emancipation Proclamation as the triumph of “Greeley, Sumner & Co.” in an administration “fully adrift on the current of radical fanaticism.” The New York Herald, while not a strict Democratic Party paper, warned that the Proclamation would inaugurate a “social revolution.” Another editor railed that it was “an outrage upon the humanity and good sense of the country, to say nothing of its gross unconstitutionality”; it would lead blacks to “massacre white men, women and children till their hands are smeared and their appetites glutted with blood.” The Louisville Journal opposed the measure as “wholly unauthorized and wholly pernicious. . . . Kentucky cannot and will not acquiesce in this measure. Never!” The Springfield Register, in Lincoln’s hometown, warned of “the setting aside of our national Constitution, and, in all human probability, the permanent disruption of the republic, a permanent standing army, endless civil war, the Africanization of the Southern States, anarchy in the North, to end in despotism.”¹⁵

Opponents of the Proclamation predicted so many diverse consequences that the Liberator mocked the divergent claims made by the Democratic press:

It will destroy the Union.

It is harmless and impotent.

It will excite slave insurrections.

The slaves will never hear of it.

It will excite the South to desperation.

The rebels will laugh it to scorn.¹⁶

Whether supportive or opposed, newspaper writers speculated wildly about “the mystery of how and why the Emancipation Proclamation was issued.” Indeed, one correspondent reported that conjectures “are so multitudinous and various, and, I may add, so irreconcilable, that people know just less than nothing at all about the why and wherefore and the circumstances of the issue.” Some said that Edward Bates, Montgomery Blair, Caleb Smith, and William Seward had opposed the measure, that Lincoln decided to issue it anyhow, and that Seward was going to resign, to be replaced by Massachusetts politician Edward Everett. Some said that Bates, Blair, and Smith had given in, but that “Mr. Blair continued to make very wry faces up to the last minute.” A few even suggested that it had been agreed to and “received with great applause” by a unanimous cabinet. Another report speculated that Chase had led the movement to issue the Proclamation. Gideon Welles was following the press reports, and remarked in his diary that “the speculations as to the sentiments and opinions of the Cabinet in regard to this measure are ridiculously wild and strange.”¹⁷

One writer offered a cogent analysis of the timing of the Proclamation. C. C. Hazewell, editor of the Boston Traveller and a frequent contributor to the Atlantic, thought Lincoln had chosen September 22 for three reasons:

(1), that the American mind had been brought up to the point of emancipation under certain well-defined conditions, and that, if he should not avail himself of the state of opinion, the opportunity afforded him might pass away, never to return with equal force; (2), that foreign nations might base acknowledgment of the Confederacy on the defeats experienced by our armies in the last days of August, on the danger of Washington, and on the advance of Rebel armies to the Ohio, and he was determined that they should, if admitting the Confederacy to national rank, place themselves in the position of supporters of slavery; and (3), that the successes won by our army in Maryland, considering the disgraceful business of Harper’s Ferry, were not of that pronounced character which entitles us to assert any supremacy over the enemy as soldiers.¹⁸

Other explanations of the timing were more far-fetched. Some thought Lincoln had issued the Proclamation so as to act before the Confederacy did. One writer predicted in the New York Times that “the rebels intended, when pressed to the wall, as they will be, to issue a proclamation freeing all the negroes themselves, as a last des...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue: September 22, 1862: Lincoln Tells a Story
• The Path to the Preliminary Proclamation
• One Hundred Days
• The Proclamation and Beyond
• Epilogue April 4, 1865: Lincoln Visits Richmond
• Appendix Texts of the Emancipation Proclamation
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index