The Emancipation Proclamation

The Emancipation Proclamation

Michael T. Griffith

2004

@All Rights Reserved

Everyone can agree that slavery needed to be abolished.  However, the Emancipation Proclamation, signed on January 1, 1863, left over 400,000 slaves in bondage.  Let’s take a moment to consider the purpose, nature, and legality of the Emancipation Proclamation.

The proclamation was a war measure, as the document itself states.  The Radical Republicans hoped the proclamation would produce a slave revolt in the South, even if this resulted in the deaths of thousands of women and children on plantations and farms.  (Perhaps it’s an indication of how most slaves were treated that no such revolt ever occurred, even though many plantations and farms were being run by women and children at the time, since most of the men were engaged in the war effort.)

The proclamation did not free a single slave in any of the four Union slave states nor in any of the regions of the South that were then under Union control.  The proclamation excluded the slaves in those areas.  The proclamation only applied to slaves in the Confederate states, where Lincoln had no authority to enforce it.  Slavery continued in the Northern slave states and in the South for the rest of the war and wasn’t abolished until the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in late 1865.  Historians John Blum and Bruce Catton commented on the limited nature of the proclamation:

The Emancipation Proclamation asserted freedom for slaves in those areas that were not under control of the federal government and left slavery untouched in areas where federal control was effective.  It seemed a halting measure of dubious effect and shaky legality, and the Confederates denounced it as a call for a slave revolt. (In Blum and Catton, Edmund Morgan, Arthur Schlesinger, Kenneth Stampp, and C. Vann Woodward, editors, The National Experience: A History of the United States, Second Edition, New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1968, p. 360)

African-American scholar Lerone Bennett documents that Lincoln only issued the proclamation under intense pressure from the Radical Republicans, who were threatening to cut off funds to the army if emancipation wasn’t made a war objective, and that Lincoln only began to seriously consider the Radicals’ demands after Union forces suffered several defeats (Bennett, Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 2000, pp. 23-24, 415-420, 498-504; see also Klingaman, Abraham Lincoln and the Road to Emancipation, pp. 139, 148-149, 200-202).  Bennett also shows that Lincoln sought to undermine the proclamation almost as soon as he issued it.

The proclamation provided no compensation for slaveholders, even though Lincoln himself had said this should be done, and even though most slaveholders treated their slaves humanely (as even many abolitionists had once been willing to admit).  Few Northern abolitionists had ever supported compensated emancipation.  The Radical Republicans certainly weren’t about to support such a plan.  They didn’t care that several Northern states had reaped fantastic profits from the slave trade.  Nor did they care that when most Northern states had abolished slavery they had done so gradually and in a manner that enabled Northern slaveholders to recover the cost of their slaves.

If the Southern states were still actually in the Union, as Lincoln and other Republicans incredibly claimed, then the Emancipation Proclamation was unconstitutional.  Neither Lincoln nor Congress had the right to abolish slavery in any state.  The only legal ways to abolish it would have been by a constitutional amendment or by the states abolishing it on their own.

Of course, the Southern states had in fact left the Union, and everyone knew it.  Lincoln only denied this fact because he knew the federal government had no constitutional right to invade states that had peacefully and democratically separated from the Union.  Since the Southern states were no longer part of the federal compact, the Emancipation Proclamation amounted to an attempt to incite a slave revolt in another country, in spite of the proclamation’s disclaimer to the contrary.  Certainly the Radicals hoped the proclamation would spark a slave revolt, regardless of the cost in human lives.  American leaders reacted angrily when the British tried to incite a slave revolt in the American colonies during the Revolutionary War.  This was a serious threat, since slaves were held in each of the thirteen colonies at the time.  The British offered freedom to American slaves who would fight in the British army, and they encouraged slaves to sabotage the colonial war effort.  Not surprisingly, tens of thousands of slaves flocked to British army encampments.  Fortunately, however, not enough slaves fought for the British to turn the tide against the colonies.  At the end of the war, at least 18,000 former slaves accompanied British troops as they evacuated New York, Charleston, Savannah, and other cities (Hummel, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, p. 10).

If the Emancipation Proclamation had covered all slaves, if it had included compensation for slaveholders, and if it had contained guarantees against a slave revolt, it would have been on solid moral ground.  It still would have been unconstitutional, but it would have been consistent, fair, and moral.  However, the proclamation contained none of these things.  It was intended as a war measure.  It left Northern slaves in bondage.  Its real purpose was to advance the effort to subjugate the South, even if that meant causing the deaths of thousands of women and children.  The Radicals and other Republicans were using Southern slaves as pawns in their effort to conquer the South.