American Lit

Historians'Forum The Emancipation Proclamation

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION By the President of the United States of America:

A Proclamation.

Whereas, on the twenty-second day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, a proclamation was issued hy the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the fol- lowing, to wit:

"That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.

"Tliat the Executive will, on the first day of January aforesaid, by procla- mation, designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any State, or the people thereof, shall on that day be, in good faith, represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such State shall have participated, shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be

Civil War History, Vol. LIX No. 1 © 2013 by The Kent State University Press

8 Civil War History

deemed conclusive evidence that such State, and the people thereof, are not then in rebellion against the United States."

Now, therefore I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief, of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion, do, on this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and in accordance with my purpose so to do publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days, from the day first above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States, the following, to wit: Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, (except the Parishes of St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James Ascension, Assumption, Terrebonne, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the City of New Orleans) Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia, (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkley, Accomac, Northampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Ann, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth), and which excepted parts, are for the present, left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued.

And by virtue of the power, and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free; and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.

And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence; and I recommend to them that, in all cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.

And I further declare and make known, that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.

And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.

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In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty three, and of the Independence of the United States of America the eighty-seventh. By the President: ABRAHAM LINCOLN WILLIAM H. SEWARD, Secretary of State.

From the moment Abraham Lincoln announced its preliminary version in late

September 1862, the Emancipation Proclamation has been seen as a document

of great import At the time, soldiers and citizens on both sides understood that

the proclamation had initiated a new kind of war. Not only did it clarify the

North's war aim so that a return to the status quo ante bellum was unthinkable,

but it also helped settle a series of practical questions surrounding the status of

slavery and escaped slaves that had alternately inspired, confused, and perplexed

Union army commanders throughout the Confederacy.

For all this, however, it is remarkably easy for many in the rising generation

of graduate students specializing in the study of the American past to sidestep

the Emancipation Proclamation. In large part, this is because the scholarship

has in recent decades dedicated itself to moving away from straightforward

narrative history in favor of broader analytical studies of society and culture.

Consequently, it is fairly easy for an aspiring historian to lose the Emancipation

Proclamation amid the impressive literatures concerning soldier motivations,

slave resistance, the northern political situation, the agency of African Americans

(both free and enslaved. North and South), and attitudes toward race, slavery,

and black Americans in the North, just to name a few. And yet, on the 150th

anniversary of the final Emancipation Proclamation, there are increasing signs

that the emerging literature on the northern home front—a literature that is starting to redress the gross disparity between studies of the South and studies

of the North—is bringing the process of emancipation back into focus. Studies such as Leslie Schwalm's Emancipations Diaspora, Steven Hahns A Nation under Our Feet, and Kate Masur's An Example for All the Land have shown us the potential that surrounds new studies of emancipation but also implicitly

remind us that considerable work remains for historians. As this work proceeds,

the Emancipation Proclamation should remain a lodestar in any discussion of

the coming of freedom (and its limits) to the nations nearly 4 million enslaved

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African Americans. The editors of Civil War History wish to further this discus- sion, both by printing exciting new scholarship (such as Brian Taylor's impressive

look at the debates over enlistment in the African American communities of the

North, which appeared in our last issue) and by convening a panel of leading

historians to discuss the Emancipation Proclamation proper.

Our participants in the forum come to us from a wide variety of scholarly

perspectives:

• Martha S. Jones (MSJ) is an associate professor of history and Afro-American studies and an affiliate of the law school at the University of Michigan, where she directs the Program in Race, Law & History. Her 2007 mono- graph. All Bound Up: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900, explores debates over the status of black women in the nineteenth century. Her current book project is Overturning Dred Scott; Race, Rights, and Citizenship in an Antebellum Courthouse.

• Kate Masur (KM) is the author of an influential 2007 Journal of American History article on the various meanings of the word "contraband," as well as the aforementioned An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle for Equality in Washington, D.C., a 2011 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. She teaches at Northwestern University.

• Louis Masur (LM) is professor of American studies and history at Rutgers University. Formerly editor oí Reviews in American History, he is the author of many works in American cultural history, including 1831: Year of Eclipse, The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph that Shocked the Na-

tion, and The Civil War: A Concise History. His most recent book, Lincoln's Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union,

was published last fall by Harvard University Press. Louis is no relation to Kate Masur.

• James Oakes (JO) teaches at the Graduate Center, City University of New York and has published widely in the fields of slavery, southern history, and antislavery politics. The author of Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South and The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (among other works). Oakes's Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861 to 1865, was just released by W. W. Norton in December 2012.

• Manisha Sinha (MS) is professor of Afro-American studies and history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and editor of the University of Georgia Press's Race and the Atlantic World, 1700-1900, series. From her

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first book. The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebel- lum South Carolina (2000), to her forthcoming The Slave's Cause: Abolition and the Origins of America's Interracial Democracy (Yale University Press), Sinha's research interests have revolved around the history of slavery and abolition, the sectional conñict, and the Civil War and Reconstruction.

1. Students who read the Etnancipation Proclamation as a primary source are often surprised by its tone and language—fo many it seems like a cold and legalistic document reliant upon the imperatives of "military necessity" instead of a stirring moral commitment to emancipa- tion. Is that a fair way to read the proclamation, or does such an analysis misinterpret its larger significance?

JO: The Emancipation Proclamation was written as a legal document because it was a legal document. Abolitionism wasn't just red-hot speeches by Wendell Phillips and heart-wrenching stories by Harriet Beecher Stowe. For decades, abolitionist lawyers had been drafting judicial appeals and legal treatises and publishing them as antislavery pamphlets. Abolitionists studied the common law, constitutional law, statute law, the law of na- tions, and the laws of war. The law was central to abolitionism, and they wrote about it at length. That Lincoln wrote the proclamation as a legal text scarcely distinguishes it from one of the most important rhetorical traditions of the antislavery movement.

LM: It is essential to have students read both the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and the final decree and to examine the differences between the two documents. Of course it reads legalistically—it was crafted as a military response warranted by Lincoln's powers as commander in chief, which is not to say that it does not represent a commitment to emancipa- tion. The shift between September 22,1862, and January 1,1863, highlights that commitment: Lincoln abandons colonization, authorizes the enlist- ment of black soldiers, and adds to the text, at Treasury Secretary Chase's behest, the clause "sincerely believed to be an act of justice."

MS: Indeed, Richard Hofstadter famously dismissed the Emancipation Procla- mation as having all "the moral grandeur of a bill of lading" for its legalistic tone.' Subsequently, others have argued that it was simply a war measure

1. Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Knopf, 1948), 131.

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born of military necessity rather than any commitment to black freedom. Arguments that attack the proclamation for its lack of moral sentiment or that portray it merely as an act of military necessity not only miss out on the larger significance of what all, including Lincoln, acknowledged as a historic event and a turning point in the war, but also do not do justice to the language and content of the proclamation itself. First, we need to think of its legal, military, political, and moral causes as interconnected, because that was precisely the way contemporaries viewed it. John Quincy Adams had long predicted that the only way the federal government could con- stitutionally abolish slavery was for the president to evoke his war powers. This was the argument abolitionists like Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass and Radical Republicans like Charles Sumner made at the very start of the Civil War. This argument, encapsulated in William Whitings popular wartime pamphlet, apparently influenced Lincoln. It is why the proclamation freed the slaves only in areas defined as being in rebellion at that moment. It went a bit further than the Second Confiscation Act passed earlier by Congress, which freed slaves of rebellious slaveholders but not all slaves in the Confederacy. But everyone knew that if slavery was abolished in the Deep South, it would not last long in the Unions border slave states, with their far smaller enslaved populations. The significance of the proclamation lies in the fact that it was the death knell of slavery in the United States.

MSJ: The Emancipation Proclamation includes many remarkable phrases that are laden with meaning, such that I would ask any student who remarked to me that it was "cold and legalistic" to read it again. Take the phrase from paragraph 6 "are, and henceforward shall be free"—which conveys a view of emancipation as immediate and irreversible—or the passage "the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons." Here, the proclamation obligates the federal state to honor and defend the freedom of former slaves in a dramatic departure from the terms of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which obligated federal officials to aid in the return of fugitives. Finally, the proclamation recommends to former slaves that "in all cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages." Slavery as a labor regime is upended as the proclama- tion envisions negotiations between former slaves and their employers over the "reasonable" terms of their work.

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JO: As for "military necessity," nearly all abolitionists believed that in peace- time the federal government had no constitutional authority to "interfere" with slavery in the states where it existed but that in times of war the federal government could emancipate slaves under the doctrine of "mili- tary necessity." This was, and was understood to be a "radical" antislavery argument. Slaveholders in the South and Democrats in the North roundly denounced what they viewed as the spurious doctrine of "military neces- sity." They said it was a flimsy justification for a flagrantly unconstitutional assault on slavery. That Lincoln invoked "military necessity" to justify the proclamation demonstrates the triumph, not the failure, of the principles of the antislavery movement.

KM: It can be difficult for students to understand how Lincoln could have hated slavery and, at the same time, believed he had limited power to destroy it. And yet, if they are to understand Lincoln and the course of emancipation during the Civil War, they must consider that distinc- tion. A close and contextualized reading of the proclamation allows for discussion of exactly why Lincoln believed that as commander in chief he had different powers in different places. If we know something about the congressional legislation and presidential policies that preceded the proclamation, we can understand how the phrase "henceforward shall be free" marked an important presidential endorsement of the (at the time) controversial idea that the government could actually transform chattel—however human—into a free person. Lincoln's often unnoticed instructions to emancipated slaves to "abstain from violence" might open a conversation about northern and southern fears of slave uprisings and "race war." And, of course, the proclamation's provision that "persons of suitable condition" whom it "declared to be free" could now be received into the armed services was a major policy departure and the beginning of a strategy that reshaped the war itself.

LM: Kate's important point about the line instructing slaves to "abstain from violence" marks a significant change from a sentence in the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation that stirred great controversy. In it, Lincoln had written that the government "will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom." Opponents howled that the president was tacitly encouraging slave rebellion and insurrection. In the final proclamation, Lincoln allows for violence only "in necessary self-defence" and calls for the freed slaves.

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as Martha noted earlier, "to labor faithfully for reasonable wages." Here was a hint at some vision of the future of free labor.

JO: This may be a distinction without a difference. Lincoln changed the word- ing for exactly the reason Lou mentions, but did that alter the substance? Lincoln still justified violence in self-defense, which meant that slaves could fight back against masters who commonly used violence to prevent slaves from escaping to Union lines. At the same time, the proclamation invited blacks, for the first time, into "armed" service in the Union army. As far as the slaveholders were concerned, Lincoln could not have made a more explicit call for revolutionary violence. So I'm not sure what changed with the change of wording.

MSJ: Jim Oakes is, of course, correct that the Emancipation Proclamation was a legal document, but it would be a mistake to assume that legal documents are typically or necessarily devoid of language that we think of as political or philosophical. Lincoln was no exception among mid-nineteenth century lawmakers when he framed the Emancipation Proclamation in terms that went well beyond the bounds of his constitutionally prescribed authority; his audience was not constitutional experts. To persuade a broad readership, it ultimately deployed language that surpassed formal, law-bound terms. In this sense, perhaps the most remarkable section is the clause that fully sets out the proclamation's rationale: "And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military neces- sity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God." Yes, there is military necessity. But in this passage the proclamation is more than that. It is also an act of "justice," coming out of the "judgment of mankind" writ large, out of the supreme law of the nation, the Constitution, and finally sanctioned by God. After reading the proclamation, students should understand how military necessity provided a specific legalistic rationale. Recognizing the element of military necessity should not preclude our ability to discern the ñill significance of the ideas expressed therein.

MS: The language of the proclamation, though guided by legal convention and constitutional scruples, does rise to the occasion. Lincoln tried to establish black freedom permanently in emphatic words, "are and hence- forward shall be free," and on Salmon Chase's suggestion, he labeled it an "act of justice" and, like the Declaration of Independence, evoked the "judgment of mankind" and divine favor. Lincoln spent his dying days

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trying to secure the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which would enshrine emancipation in the U.S. Constitution, not susceptible to being overturned by subsequent administrations, and saw it as the "central act" of his administration. As John Hope Franklin, in his slim book on the Emancipation Proclamation published on its centenary, argued, viewed from the longue durée it also seeded the notion of black equality. In calling for black enlistment in the Union army and navy, Lincoln not only acted out of military necessity but also laid out the path for African American male citizenship. As the National Black Convention of 1864 put it, are we good enough for btillets and not the ballot? Ironically, even as Lincoln abjured freed slaves to "abstain from all violence" except in self-defense, he invited them to don the Union uniform and take up arms against their masters. One could argue, then, in response to some of the points made by Kate, Lou, and Jim, that the enlistment of black soldiers legitimized the notion of slaves using violence to free themselves by vesting it with state authority. In the end, the difference between the proclamation and the preliminary draft on this point may not be so significant. This could happen, of course, only in a wartime situation, where slaveholders had taken the first step in defining themselves as enemies of the state. The Emancipation Proclamation allied black freedom with the powers of the federal government and the Union cause.

JO: Is there any doubt that Lincoln had a moral commitment to emancipa- tion? How many times did he have to say he "hated" slavery, that the whole idea of "property" in human beings was immoral, that slavery violated the founding principle of fundamental human equality, before we are ready to take him at his word?

MSJ: An effective approach one might use to help students understand the proclamation in its original context is to show them many of the remark- able broadside reproductions of the Emancipation Proclamation. Through these artifacts, we glimpse how it was that many Americans of the 1860s encountered the text. These were neither reproductions of the original manuscript nor the bare-bones texts that circulated during the war. They are interpretive works that tell us a great deal about the deep meanings that came to be associated with the proclamation. Some artfully use type size and font style to emphasize ideas from freedom to presidential author- ity. Others include the text of the proclamation surrounded by images of African Americans—with the "before" images depicting the horrors of

16 Civil War History

slavery and the "after" images showing the promise of freedom. Lincoln

is frequently featured—sometimes his portrait is modestly situated at

the margins of the frame, and other times his visage literally is the im-

age, such as when artists used the calligraphy "letter picture" technique.

ŝ "̂' ' » t V

While the indusion of the Proclamation's text into contemporary broadsides was fairly com- mon, some memorialists chose to dress up the words with images of important figures, like Abraham Lincoln. Image courtesy of the Clements Library, University of Michigan.

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which adapted the text to render Lincoln's likeness. And in still other broadsides, the proclamation's text is set within a ring of portraits—Lin- coln and his generals and cabinet, and even Lincoln and the abolitionists. We learn something new about how people understood the proclama- tion when we explore how they encountered it. There is nothing cold or legalistic about these broadsides, and students can understand both how the president carefully chose his words when drafting the document and how that document was reinterpreted through visual culture with great and perhaps new effect.

2. What factor do you think proved the most signiñcant in the formulation of the Emancipa- tion Proclamation: The evolution of Abraham Lincoln's personal beliefs? The actms of slaves themselves? The ad hoc policies worked out by local Union commanders like Butler and Fremont that forced the administration toconfrontthestatus of enslaved African Americans? Northern public opinion? The course of the war through the summer of 1862? Or, do you regard some other factor not listed above as the primary motivation behind the proclamation?

KM: The most immediate catalyst for Lincoln's decision to issue a proclama- tion of emancipation was the failure of the Peninsula campaign. Once it became clear in early July 1862 that McClellan's push for a decisive vic- tory in Virginia had come to nothing, Lincoln looked for other ways of prosecuting the war. He would remove McClellan after the fall's midterm elections. In the meantime, faced with a significant military defeat, Lin- coln came around to the position that abolitionists had long held: the war could not be won without a direct attack on slavery. A policy of liberation would better enable Union forces to mobilize southern African Americans to their side and, at the same time, help deprive the Confederacy of the coerced labor of its enslaved population. It was Lincoln's determination to find a winning military strategy that pushed him to decide, in late July 1862, to issue a proclamation of emancipation.

JO: In one sense, the answer to this question is deceptively simple. The Second Confiscation Act required a presidential proclamation specifying the areas in rebellion and empowering the president to emancipate the slaves of all rebels in those areas. There was never any question that Lincoln would issue such proclamation. The only question was when. But I think you're asking something else. You're asking who the primary agents of eman- cipation were, and the only reasonable answer to that question is: "All of

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the above." Why insist on a mono-causal explanation for emancipation? Lincoln was indispensible; so were Union soldiers; so were slaves; so were congressional Republicans. They were all "agents" of emancipation.

MS: We need to think of emancipation as a process that involved many his- torical actors rather than a singular event made possible by the stroke of a pen. Like all important historical events, emancipation was a multi- causal phenomenon. It is of course more difficult to assign an order of importance to all the factors you list, because during different times in the war, distinct forces assumed significance. However, the individuals who set in motion the process of emancipation during the Civil War were the slaves who fled to Union army lines in large numbers, creating a logistical problem for the army (and a legal one for the Lincoln administration), and forcing Gen. Benjamin Butler to come up with his "contraband" policy. I argue in my forthcoming book on abolition that the roots of this flight lay among fugitive slaves before the war and that sectional controversies over fugitive slave rendition contributed significantly to its onset. Though in his first inaugural address Lincoln promised to uphold the Fugitive Slave Law, Congress eventually repealed it. This change in Union policy showcases how the slaves themselves helped make the war for the Union into a war against slavery. Steven Hahn calls the flight of slaves to the Union army the largest unknown slave rebellion in American history. In fact, if slaves fleeing for freedom had not seized the initiative, the process of emancipation during the Civil War would not have unfolded precisely in the manner that it did.

KM: Looking for one single "factor" that influenced Lincoln's decision to is- sue the proclamation prevents us from seeing the broader set of forces that brought the president to that point and that shaped the course of emancipation, both before and after January l, 1863. Emancipation was, in fact, a process. Slavery began to crumble in the earliest days of the war as slaveowners departed for service in the Confederacy and slaves themselves sought freedom within Union lines. As Ira Berlin explained in a terrific 1997 essay (which is rarely cited in recent literature on this topic), escaping slaves—by their very presence—demanded that Union soldiers weigh in on the freighted issue of slavery. The fugitives showed doubting Union officials that they could be crucial sources of information and manpower, and as the war dragged on, their service became increasingly indispensible. As Glenn Brasher demonstrates in The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity

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of Emancipation, Lincoln decided to issue the proclamation amid these complex and consequential dynamics.

MS: Yes, as Kate points out it is important to uncover the broad historical context of emancipation. I would add two more factors in the coming of emancipation to those mentioned in your question. One is the call for immediate, uncompensated emancipation and repudiation of coloniza- tion by abolitionists black and white. I would disagree a bit with Jim here. While some abolitionists conceded that the federal government could not interfere constitutionally with slavery in the southern states, most still called for the immediate and complete abolition of southern slavery Two, there were international forces and diplomatic pressure, the demise of the "second serfdom" in Russia and Eastern Europe, which like modern racial slavery was born with the expansion of early capitalism, and the abolitionist examples of western European countries, starting with Britain. By making emancipation a war aim, the Lincoln administration nipped in the bud all talk of recognition of the Confederacy by these nations.

JO: Your question also assumes that the Emancipation Proclamation was the beginning, middle, and end of wartime antislavery policy. In fact, the federal government had been freeing slaves for more than a year by the time Lincoln issued the proclamation, and within a year after he issued it Republicans realized that it was not enough to destroy slavery completely.

KM: That's right, and what we're seeing in recent (and forthcoming) scholarship is more emphasis on the roles of Congress, the armed forces, the abolitionist movement, and, of course, slaves themselves in the process of emancipa- tion. New lines of inquiry tend to represent Lincoln as one among many actors responsible for emancipation and tend to see emancipation not as a single magical moment but a long and contested process. This is not to say that historians now see Lincoln as unimportant. To the contrary, they continue to be fascinated by how he made decisions and to parse the fac- tors that brought him to the Emancipation Proclamation and, ultimately, to tentative support for equal political rights for African Americans. But the array of actors has expanded dramatically in recent years.

LM: Lincoln was a thoughtful, cautious person, and it took time for him to become persuaded that he could apply the doctrine of military necessity to emancipation and that no matter how hard he tried the border states would not move against slavery. He was always antislavery, that didn't change. But not until July 1862 did he accept the idea that he could act

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under his presidential war powers, that if he acted he would not lose the border states, and that failure to act would only strengthen the Confeder- ates who were making use of the slave population to help sustain their cause. He also came to see that he had been mistaken in his hopes that unionists, in at least some of the rebel states, would exert themselves to end the rebellion and that McClellan's failure on the Peninsula would extend the war—sterner measures would be required for the Union to prevail. These beliefs, along with other shifts in attitude that emerged in the criti- cal hundred days between the preliminary and final proclamations, led to emancipation and made the final decree even stronger.

3. In The Union War, Gary Goliagher energetically maintains that Union, not emancipation, defined the northern cause. Do you find this argument persuasive? How are we to understand the proclamation in light of Gallagher's argument?

MS: Gallagher's argument stems from an old historical conundrum: How do we explain the average northern white citizen's motives in a war fought to end slavery, when only a minority of the northern population were abolitionists or committed to black freedom and rights? Although it should also be noted that most northerners were Free Soilers by the eve of the Civil War.

JO: Among Republicans, including Lincoln, there was never an either/or choice between a war for the Union and a war over slavery. It was always both, from beginning to end: "Liberty AND Union."

KM: Gallagher splits Union and emancipation in a way that may have more to do with his quarrels with certain historians than with how northerners actually understood what they were fighting for. Why did so many north- erners believe the Union was worth saving? Gallagher's own sources tell us that many believed they were fighting for a national experiment of world- historical importance: a nation formed on republican, not monarchical, principles, one in which common people were entitled to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Such ideals implied a rejection of slavery as an institution of aristocratic pretensions, one more characteristic of a European world of birthright and hierarchy than of the new world of self-government and upward mobility. The causes of Union and human liberty were thus intertwined from the beginning.

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MS: Posing Union and antislavery or emancipation as competing principles or motives, I think, is a false start; instead historians should perhaps explore the complicated relationship between them. The antislavery Free Soil majority in the North that elected Lincoln in i860, and the men who bore arms in defense of the Union and voted overwhelmingly for him in 1864 saw the two as inextricably linked after emancipation became the official policy of the U.S. government. In fact, northerners overwhelmingly rejected the badly defeated Constitutional Union Bell-Everett ticket of i860, with its platform of allegiance to the Union, and the 1864 Democratic presidential candidate, George McClellan, whose election slogan, "Union without emancipation," did not gain much traction.

JO: Republican lawmakers started from the assumption that the Constitution did not allow them to prosecute a war for any "purpose" other than the restoration of the Union. But they also started from the assumption that slavery was the cause of the war and emancipation a legitimate means of suppressing the rebellion. Long before he was elected in i860, Lincoln said that slavery was the "only" thing that had ever threatened to destroy the Union. The proclamation reflects that conviction: we are faced with a rebel- lion caused by slavery, and by freeing the slaves we suppress the rebellion.

LM: Gallagher's position does not seem controversial to me. The issue appears always to have been how a war that began as a war to preserve the union became transformed into a war to abolish slavery, both as a means of ac- complishing that goal and for the purpose of eradicating an evil institution.

KM: If most white northerners did not go into the war hoping to abolish slav- ery, they did have big problems with slaveholders, and they proved willing to hit slavery as hard as necessary—to the point of destroying it—if that's what was required to vanquish the Confederacy. If there is a historical question here, perhaps it is precisely this: How—among northerners who were not already abolitionists—did support for Union and disgust with the "slave power" shade into support of immediate freedom for slaves? This is not a question Gallagher's book answers, in part because it starts with the premise that Union and emancipation were two completely separate principles.

MSJ: My point of reflection on The Union War is somewhat different in that I want to point up what readers will not learn from The Union War. They will not learn what motivated African American northerners to devote

22 Civil War History

themselves to the war effort, which they did by the tens of thousands. I say that we cannot learn this from the book because, as Gallagher forthrightly explains, African Americans in the Union states did not fall within the purview of his study. Their numbers were small, he reasons, such that black Americans on the home front and on the battlefield can be bracketed out of an analysis of "the North" and its commitment to preserving the Union. Gallagher's choice in this instance represents a missed opportunity to tell us something more ambitious about the nature of northern motivations for supporting the Civil War.

LM: As to who embraced a doctrine of emancipation and for what reasons, who opposed it and how they expressed that opposition, and how at- titudes changed over time, that is the multivalent story that continues to emerge. The key, as far as the proclamation goes, is how Lincoln's thinking developed, in response to what discussions, texts, and events and how his changing understanding made the union war into an abolition war.

KM: Gallagher's book did not change how I see the Emancipation Proclamation, but Stephanie McCurry's Confederate Reckoning did. Her book compellingly reveals what difference the proclamation made not just for empowering the enslaved to seek out Union lines but also for shaping Confederate policy. By providing for the enlistment of black men as soldiers, the proclamation recognized that black men's national loyalty mattered and worked to cement their allegiance to the Union. This, in turn, helped pressure Confederate of- ficials to rethink slaves' relationship to their nation. McCurry thus reframes the war's final years as, in large part, a contest between the Union and the Confederacy for the loyalty and manpower of southern slaves, an insight that helps us understand, among other things, the timing and rationale for the Confederate push to enlist black men as soldiers.

MSJ: Gallagher's failure to explain African American thinking about the Union rests on the assumption, it seems, that there is nothing to explain. In this view, the reasons for African American support of the war effort are obvi- ous. Not so fast. Were black northerners always motivated by emancipa- tion and never by Union? Did their ideas shift over time? Did Union and emancipation exist as companion objectives? To what extent did black and white citizen-soldiers share ideas about the war's purpose? To what extent did they disagree? Gallagher does not aim to answer these questions. Nonetheless, the answers to these questions are neither obvious nor simple to arrive at. In this short space, I'll merely suggest that incorporating the

Historians'Forum 23

view of black Americans into our thinking may enrich our insight into the war in the North. No group of northerners expended more effort to win entrée into military service, and no group risked more than black men who faced enslavement and execution in the field. And when we look closely at how African Americans debated the war across time, we learn something about the alchemy of "northern" thought. It was not merely framed by either Union or emancipation. It is worth recalling, for example, that early in the war some black northerners were motivated neither by emancipating the slaves nor preserving the Union. They objected altogether to military service, arguing that no nation that had refused to honor their citizenship should be defended at the risk to young black men's lives. Objections to black military service gave way to arguments that posited military service as an avenue to citizenship rights for free black northerners. And this view never receded—black northerners were motivated by their longstanding claims to equal rights in the northern states. They were at the same time patriots, who claimed a sort of hyper-loyalty to the Union that only those who had been so long dispossessed could manifest. And they were deeply emancipationist. Their fates, black northerners believed, were tied to those of their millions of enslaved "brethren." Theirs was no simple motivation. They fought for civil rights, they fought for Union, and they fought for southerners—enslaved southerners and their emancipation.

MS: While there is no question that African Americans fought for their own liberation, as Ira Berlin's Freedom series has also shown, the scarred backs and harrowing stories of, not to mention the military intelligence brought by, "contrabands" made an abolitionist of many an Iowa farm boy. Some historians, like Chandra Manning, have gone so far as to claim that the average northern soldier fought against slavery I think she and Gallagher represent opposite poles in this debate and both miss out on what David Potter showed a long time ago, how antislavery and the Union go from being competing to complementary values for most northerners during the war. Southern secessionists had long argued that Union meant abolition and the slaveholding minority who hoped the Union would protect slavery proved to be hopelessly ViTong. The old understanding ofthe Union, built on constitutional compromises over slavery and legal protections for human bondage, lay dead in the battlefields. The new understanding ofthe Union was one that even Garrisonian abolitionists, whose antebellum motto was "No Union with Slaveholders," could fervently support. Emancipation gave

24 Civil War History

meaning and purpose to the Civil War as a war for only the Union never

could. The Emancipation Proclamation as Lincoln, Frederick Douglass,

and even the proslavery ideologue George Fitzhugh argued was a defining

event of not just the war but of the nineteenth century.

4. What directions would you like to see future researchers pursue in terms of the Emancipation Proclamation and emancipation more generally?

LM: In my recent work, I have returned the discussion to Lincoln. We have had provocative and revealing explorations over the past twenty years of the role of the enslaved in driving the issue of emancipation. We have had studies of soldiers and civilians. What we need is to assemble the pieces and put the disparate parts in conversation with one another. We need especially to write with an eye toward the history of experience: Once it came, how did freedmen experience emancipation; how did whites in the border states react to the fact of emancipation; how did military strategy, beyond the enlistment of black soldiers, change with emancipation; what did the abolitionists now do with their time? Emancipation began long before January l, 1863, and continued long after that date. I think we now understand the moment pretty well, but we need more and deeper work on the problem of effects.

JO: We still know much more about the aftermath than the origins of emanci- pation. We don't really understand how the proclamation fit into the broad sweep of federal antislavery policy during the war, nor do we appreciate the role of Congress in the formulation of those policies. And though it's shocking when you think about it, no historian that I know of has ever in- vestigated precisely how the Emancipation Proclamation was implemented on the ground in the Confederate States. When you hear someone say "the proclamation freed all the slaves" or "the proclamation didn't free a single slave," the plain fact is that person does not know what he or she is talking about, because nobody has ever done the kind of research that would en- able us to say just what the proclamation actually did. They're just drawing inferences from the text of the document.

MS: It has become fashionable of late to see death and dying, at least since the publication of Drew Faust's This Republic of Suffering, rather than eman- cipation and black freedom as the central meaning and legacy of the Civil War. A recent article in this journal has dramatically revised the casualties

Historians'Forum 25

in the war upward, from around 620,000 to 750,000, making this point moot. New work by Jim Downs on black mortality during the war and by others on black refugees (though we commonly associate "refugeeing" of slaves with slaveholders forcibly removing them from the path of the Union army) have drawn attention to immense black suffering at the mo- ment of freedom. I am frankly worried at the neo-revisionist tone of this trend in Civil War historiography, which I hope will not come to resemble that of the Haitian Revolution, where generations of historians dwelt on the bloodbath at the cost of the tremendous achievement of slaves and free people of color in defeating the best European armies of the day and establishing the first modern black republic in the west. As Vincent Brown shows in The Reaper's Garden on Caribbean slavery, enslavement rather than emancipation is associated with the metaphor of death in black his- tory and memory. I would argue that this holds even in areas of the United States that witnessed a natural growth in the slave population and high mortality during the war.

KM: I think we have only begun to explore the connections between what are commonly called the "first" and "second" emancipations. The gradual end of slavery in the antebellum North created a vast and uneven border zone where the status of free, fugitive, and enslaved people was complicated and where most of the era's central battles over slavery and citizenship occurred. Work that challenges a simple—and arguably ahistorical—North/South divide for the antebellum period has begun to open new ways of thinking about race, slavery, borders, and the nation as a whole. As I realized while researching my book, antebeütxm debates over emancipation and black citizenship in the North served as points of reference for northerners involved in the contest over how to implement and manage the end of southern slavery. In the context of state-based abolition, northerners had already debated many of the questions about civil rights and the limits of equality that came to the fore on the national level during Reconstruction. The major difference—and one whose implications should also be explored further—was that during and after the Civil War, the federal government played an unprecedented role in debating, establishing, and enforcing policy.

JO: I agree with Kate that emancipation has a "long contested history," but I don't see the collapse of a "simple" North/South divide as a recent develop- ment, much less an entirely welcome one. Nearly fifty years have passed since Leon Litwack introduced North of Slavery with the statement that

26 Civil War History

"the Mason-Dixon hne is a convenient but often misleading geographical division." Ever since then, there's been a strong tendency to collapse the distinction between slavery—which I understand to be "property in man"— and racial discrimination. I call this the U. B. Phillips move: redefine slavery as a system of "racial adjustment," and suddenly the North/South divide disappears and the Civil War looks pointless not only because there was no meaningful difference between the two sections but also because the only thing the war accomplished was the replacement of one system of "racial adjustment" with another. More recently, this has become the standard neo- revisionist formulation: "The South had slavery, but the North was racist too." What we need, I think, is precisely the long-term perspective that Kate calls for, but one that does not erase the fact that the North and South went to war over slavery, not racial discrimination. As James Huston showed in Calculating the Value of the Union, the political and ideological struggle over slavery was most often framed as a debate over the legitimacy of property rights in human beings. If we lose sight of slavery as a distinctive form of subordination, we can't possibly understand the Civil War.

KM: I agree that it's crucial to distinguish between arguments over slavery itself and arguments over racial equality. Indeed, I think Gallagher and other historians—perhaps these are the "neo-revisionists" Jim is talking about—get it wrong when they interpret northern racism as evidence that white northerners were not really fighting to end slavery. In the nineteenth century, it was relatively easy for a person to oppose slavery (even on moral grounds) but also to oppose equal rights for blacks and whites. It's also the case, though, that the abolition of slavery—whether in the northern states before the Civil War or in the South during the war itself—spurred crucial debates about rights and equality. Were newly freed former slaves entitled to the same rights (and responsible for the same obligations) as white people? Would government attempt to obliterate the racial order that had undergirded slavery, or would they allow it to continue, even after slavery itself was gone? Although these questions are not about slavery as such, they flowed inevitably from slavery's abolition, particularly in a nation that talked so much about the equal rights of individuals

MS: I think Jim makes a valuable point on not letting ideas of "race" flatten out important sectional differences over slavery. But we could also look at the coming of emancipation beyond a national perspective. Transna- tional approaches to history, much in vogue currently, might bear fruit

Historians'Forum 27

here. A recent book by Mahatma Gandhi's grandson Rajmohun Gandhi compares the war with the Great Revolt of 1857 in India, and Stephen Platt, my colleague at the University of Massachusetts, is working on a comparative history of the Taiping rebellion in China and the Civil War. An internationalist take on the Civil War might well illuminate the world historical significance of the demise of racial slavery and emancipation in ways historians of the United States have not yet considered. I also think that the tendency to view emancipation as just a war measure has obscured the role of abolitionists, black and white, men and women, in the coming of emancipation. Except for a couple of historians of abolition, abolition- ists have gotten short shrift in the history of emancipation. But social movements, especially those that encompass the disfranchised, always expand political possibilities. I hope future historians of emancipation will study its long-contested history, starting with gradual emancipation in the North, rather than view it as an emergency measure born only because of the fortunes of war.

JO: It's important to be very clear about the relationships among race, slavery, and antislavery: to warn against collapsing the distinction between slavery and racial discrimination is not the same as saying race was irrelevant to the either proslavery or antislavery politics. The irreconcilable conflict over slavery that led to the Civil War came down to a fundamental difference over the right and wrong of "property in man," not the right and wrong of racial discrimination. This is why historians who define slavery as an extreme form of racial discrimination, what I call "racial consensus his- tory," inadvertently obscure the issue that led to the Civil War, by making blanket assertions about American or northern racism that render murky the very real conflicts over race that erupted periodically in the republic's history before the Civil War.

By casually assuming that all Americans shared in the same basic racial prejudices, by focusing almost exclusively on the limits of racial egalitarianism among Republicans, we too easily blind ourselves to the immense conflict over race raging in the middle of the nineteenth century We make everything Republicans actually did about race during and after the war into the byproduct of the war itself, when, in fact. Republicans warned openly all through the secession winter that secession meant war and war meant immediate, uncompensated emancipation. They offered peaceful, gradual abolition as the alternative to war and a brutal military

Some designers created a powerful narrative arc for the story of emancipation by including illustrations of important episodes in the lives of slaves, as well as depictions of watershed events during the war itself. Image courtesy ofthe Clements Library, University of Michigan.

Historians'Forum 29

emancipation, but the secessionists rejected that alternative. Republicans said all of this as clearly and unambiguously as it was possible for them to say it. Yet Gallagher and others repeatedly claim that when the war began "nobody" was talking about slavery's destruction. In fact, everybody was.

MSJ: I hope future research will help us better understand the memory of the Emancipation Proclamation, particularly its endurance as a cultural touchstone into the twenty-first century. In June 2011 at The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, the Emancipation Proclamation was on display for thirty-six hours, in cooperation with the National Archives. From a Monday evening at six o'clock to a Wednesday morning at seven o'clock, thousands upon thousands of visitors lined up to see it for them- selves such that at its peak the wait time was eight hours. Attendance records were shattered as just over twenty-one thousand visitors streamed through the exhibit. When the doors finally closed, hundreds were still in line and had to be turned away. Visitors—old, young, black, white, famihes, and dignitaries—all came to witness the document. These were not naïve guests. They had not come pay homage to Lincoln as the "great emancipator." Nor did they misunderstand the proclamation to have wholly abolished slavery. Why then were they there? Future scholarship may help us explain the near-sacred quality of the Emancipation Proclamation. Perhaps it is one key to better understanding the roles that slavery and its abolition play in our contemporary identities as Americans.

30 Civil War History

Works Cited

Berlin, Ira. "Who Freed the Slaves? Emancipation and Its Meaning." In Union and Emancipation: Essays on Politics and Race in the Civil War Era, edited by David W. Blight and Brooks D. Simpson. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997.

Berlin, Ira et ai., eds. Ereedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867. 5 vois. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, and Chapei Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985-2008.

Brasher, Glenn David. The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation: African Americans and the Eight for Ereedom. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

Brown, Vincent. 77ie Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the Worid of Atlantic Slavery. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Downs, Jim. Sick from Ereedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Faust, Drew Gilpin. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Knopf, 2008.

Franklin, John Hope. The Emancipation Proclamation. Garden City, N.Y: Douhleday, 1963.

Gandhi, Rajmohun. A Tale of Two Revolts: India 1857 and the American Civil War. New Delhi: Penguin India, 2009.

Hacker, J. David. "A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead." Civil War History 57 (December 2011): 307-48.

Hahn, Steven. A Nation under Our Eeet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Creat Migration. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003.

. The Political Worlds of Slavery and Ereedom. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Huston, James L. Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War. Chapei HiU: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Jones, Martha S. All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900. Chapei Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Litwack, Leon F. North of Slavery: The Negro in the Eree States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.

Manning, Chandra. What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War. New York: Knopf, 2007

Masur, Kate. An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle for Equal- ity in Washington, D.C. Chapel HiU: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Masur, Louis P. Lincoln's Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012.

McCurry, Stephanie. Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Universitär Press, 2010.

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Oakes, James. Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012.

. "Natural Rights, Citizenship Rights, States' Rights, and Black Rights: Another Look at Lincoln and Race." In Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, edited by Eric Foner. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.

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-. Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South. New York Knopf, 1990. Potter, David. The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. Schwalm, Leslie. Fmancipation's Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper

Midwest. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Sinha, Manisha. "Allies for Emancipation? Lincoln and Black Abolitionists." In Our

Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, edited by Eric Foner. New York: Norton, 2008.

. The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

-. "Did the Abolitionists Cause the Civil War?" In The Abolitionist Imagination, edited by Andrew Delbanco. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Taylor, Brian. "A Politics of Service: Black Northerners' Debates over Enlistments in the American Civil War." Civil War History 58 (December 2012): 451-80.

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