HISTORY

EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION

       On September 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, issued the first, or preliminary, Emancipation Proclamation. In that document he warned that unless the states of the Confederacy returned to the Union by January 1, 1863, he would declare their slaves to be "forever free." The proclamation did not apply to slaves in certain parts of Louisiana and Virginia that were then held by Union troops.

      Lincoln had taken a long time to act. Not only did he believe he had no legal right to free slaves, but he had no desire to do so. In 1858, in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, he had said that he did not intend to interfere with slavery where it existed. He repeated this when he took office on March 4, 1861.

       After war broke out on April 12, 1861, Lincoln stated that he would wage the war to restore the Union and not to destroy slavery. Most of the people of the North felt this way too. When on August 30, 1861, General John C. Fremont tried to free the slaves held by disloyal Missourians, Lincoln stopped him. On May 19, 1862, he stopped a similar order by General David Hunter, then in Georgia.

Lincoln Changes His Mind

       By the summer of 1862 Lincoln was ready to change his policy. The war had been going badly for the North. A great Union drive against Richmond, costing thousands of lives, had failed. In the West the Union forces had slowed down after early victories. Long stretches of the Mississippi River were still in Confederate hands. Only a trickle of men answered the calls for volunteers.

       If freedom could be offered to the slaves, thousands might desert their masters. The South would then have trouble raising food and producing the tools of war. The freed slaves could be brought into the Union armies to make up for the shortage of volunteers in the North. In Europe, particularly in England and France, a proclamation of freedom might help the Union cause. Many of the common people of England and France believed in freedom and democracy. They would not permit their governments to aid a nation that stood for slavery rather than liberty.

       Before taking action, Lincoln tried to persuade the slave states that had remained loyal to the Union to free their slaves. On April 16, 1862, Congress pointed the way by ending slavery in the District of Columbia and paying owners $300 for each slave. On July 12, 1862, the President urged the slave-holding loyal states--Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware--to free their slaves. He promised them grants of money if they did so. They refused. So Lincoln decided to make use of the broad powers of the president to act on his own in wartime.

       On July 22, 1862, Lincoln called the members of his cabinet together and read them a proclamation of emancipation that he had written. The most serious objection came from Secretary of State William H. Seward. Seward feared that because of recent Northern military defeats the proclamation might be looked on as a desperate measure, a "last shriek on the retreat." Lincoln agreed and put the document aside to await a victory.

       In the Battle of Antietam, on September 17, 1862, Union General George B. McClellan stopped Confederate General Robert E. Lee's invasion of the North. Antietam was not a clear-cut victory, but it was good enough for Lincoln's purpose. Five days later, on September 22, Lincoln called the Cabinet together again. He told the members that some time ago he had decided to issue a proclamation of emancipation when the Confederate army was driven from Maryland. "I said nothing to anyone," he admitted to the Cabinet, "but I made the promise to myself, and to my Maker. The rebel army is now driven out, and I am going to fulfill that promise."

       That same day a preliminary proclamation of emancipation was given to the country.

Effects of the Proclamation

       The response to the proclamation was mixed. Abolitionists, who had long worked for the end of slavery, cheered the President's action. Many Northerners who had not objected to slavery in the beginning had come to see it as an evil. They too applauded. As news of the proclamation seeped into the South the slaves were beside themselves with joy. Yet thousands of men in the Union armies threatened to desert because they had enlisted to save the Union but not to free the slaves. Few did desert, however. In the South many saw the proclamation as an invitation to a slave uprising. Southerners became more determined than ever to win the war.

       In the months following September 22, some people urged the President not to issue the final proclamation he had promised. Many abolitionists, fearing that he would weaken, pushed him in the other direction. There is no evidence that Lincoln ever considered backing down. The final proclamation was issued on January 1, 1863.

       The Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery in the United States. In the first place, it did not apply to the four slaveholding border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware, which had not seceded. Secondly, much of the territory to which the proclamation did apply was beyond the power of the Federal government, and therefore, at the time it was issued, it could not be enforced. Finally, even Lincoln doubted that it would be held legal in peacetime.

       Yet the Emancipation Proclamation was a turning point in the Civil War and a turning point in American history. As the Union armies cut deeper into the South in the last 2 years of the war Negroes by the thousands left their masters forever. Some 300,000 joined the Union armies. In England, France, and other European countries, talk of important aid to the Confederacy ended.

       After the proclamation was issued, it was only a question of time until an amendment to the Constitution (the 13th, ratified December 18, 1865) ended slavery in the United States.

       Because of his proclamation Abraham Lincoln is known as the Great Emancipator.

Paul M. Angle

Author, The Lincoln Reader

Director, Chicago Historical Society
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BOOKER TALIAFERRO WASHINGTON
(1856 - 1915), American educator. The mulatto son of a slave mother, he was born near Hale's Ford, Va. He was one of three children clinging to the skirts of the plantation cook as the Emancipation Proclamation was read aloud by a government man from the steps of the big house. He spent years as a child laborer in the salt furnaces and coal mines of West Virginia, where the family migrated after obtaining its freedom.

       At the age of 17 Washington made his way on foot to the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, a distance of some 500 mi. There he and the other Negro students supported themselves while pursuing their studies. After graduating in 1875 he began a teaching career. In 1881 he arrived in Tuskegee, Ala., with good references from his teachers at Hampton and at the invitation of "commissioners" authorized by the legislature to start a similar school in Macon County, Ala. He became the founder and head of Tuskegee Institute, and for the next 34 years he labored in the cause of Negro education.

       In 1884 Washington made an address before the National Education Association which drew favorable attention in parts of the South as well as in the North. He advocated a policy of accommodation whereby the Negro would, in effect, exchange civil rights for economic opportunity. In a speech in 1893 he used the metaphor "separate as the fingers yet one as the hand" to illustrate the "separate but equal" doctrine, soon to be recognized in Southern law and custom as the formula for dealing with the Negro question. Washington was widely applauded for his creative statesmanship, but it was not long before some of his more reluctant followers began to express apprehension. Was it the purpose of the South to keep the separate but renege on the equal part of the bargain?

       Washington's place in American life came to resemble that of a king of a subject nation. He was the chief consultant where the Negro was concerned, and a Cabinet post for him was vaguely considered. Meanwhile the withdrawal of the franchise from the Southern Negro was hastened, lynchings occurred more frequently, and segregation became the accepted way of life in the South. There was increasing doubt as to whether it was possible for Negroes to progress within the limits set by Washington. His educational theory, which called for vocational training before "higher," or liberal, education, also began to be questioned. Although the aspirations of the Negro changed radically in the years following his death, he epitomized during his lifetime the "gradualist" approach to the race question. His views, which appeared to be acceptable to the majority of the country in his time, were criticized as being overly conciliatory by W. E. B. Du Bois and other civil rights leaders of both his own and later generations.

Arna Bontemps, Fisk University

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William Edward Burghardt, Du Bois,
American Negro sociologist and educator, born in Great Barrington, Mass., Feb. 23, 1868. He was educated at Harvard University. He was professor of economics and history at Atlanta University from 1897 to 1910 and edited Crisis, the publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. His works include The Negro (1915), Black Reconstruction (1935), and In Battle for Peace (1952).



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