The Meaning of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation
On this date in 1862, Abraham Lincoln issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation announcing that if the states of the Confederacy did not return to the Union within 100 days, he would issue a final proclamation freeing the slaves in areas of rebellion. One hundred days later, with the Civil War still raging, Lincoln did just that. On January 1, 1863, he signed the Emancipation Proclamation with a tired but steady hand (he had been shaking hands all morning at a New Year’s reception at the White House). “If my name ever goes into history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it,” he said in that moment. Later, he called the proclamation “the central act of my administration, and the greatest event of the nineteenth century.”
Issuing a presidential edict ending slavery was a remarkable step. Less than two years earlier, Lincoln had said in his First Inaugural Address that he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” Now he was doing precisely what he’d said he would not and could not do. How could he justify such a drastic change in policy?
The simple answer is that the war necessitated a change. By mid-1862, Lincoln had become convinced that freeing the slaves was the best way to defeat the Confederacy. “This government cannot much longer play a game in which it stakes all, and its enemies stake nothing,” he told a New York Democrat. “Those enemies must understand that they cannot experiment for ten years trying to destroy the government, and if they fail still come back into the Union unhurt.” Freeing the slaves, in short, would weaken the Confederate war effort and simultaneously punish the rebels for their treason.
In his final proclamation of January 1, 1863, Lincoln defended emancipation as a constitutional war measure – an action that would help him fulfill his oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He took this action, he said, as “President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief, … 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.” In short, something he had seen as unconstitutional in 1861 became constitutional, as he later explained, “by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the constitution, through the preservation of the nation.”
Over the years, many have doubted that Lincoln truly cared about black freedom. Critics have alleged that he only freed the slaves to win the war. And if saving the Union was his “paramount object,” as he said in August 1862, then perhaps he should not be seen as a “Great Emancipator.”
Yet the evidence is clear that Lincoln pursued emancipation not only to win the war, but also to fulfill his “oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.” This moral motivation for black freedom is evident in many ways, but perhaps most clearly in a meeting he had with Frederick Douglass in August 1864.
The summer of 1864 was an awful time for the Union war effort. In Virginia, Ulysses S. Grant was unable to capture Richmond, and in the Western theater, William T. Sherman was stalled outside of Atlanta. So low was Northern morale throughout that hot, dismal summer that Lincoln believed he would lose the upcoming presidential election. Nevertheless, at this critical juncture, Lincoln prioritized the fate of more than three million enslaved people in the Confederacy.
On August 19, 1864, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln met at the White House – at the president’s invitation – to formulate a plan to free as many slaves as possible before the next presidential inauguration, in March 1865. “Douglass, I hate slavery as much as you do, and I want to see it abolished altogether,” Lincoln told his famous guest. Lincoln then explained that the “slaves are not coming [into Union lines] so rapidly and so numerously” as he “hoped” they would after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. So he asked Douglass to devise “some means” of getting slaves to run away from their masters before the next president took the oath of office, because a Democratic president would most certainly rescind the proclamation. Shortly after this meeting, Douglass suggested dispatching “bands of scouts” into the Confederacy to persuade the slaves to run away while they still had the opportunity with Lincoln as president.
Fortunately, nothing came of this plan. After Sherman captured Atlanta in early September, Northern morale skyrocketed, and Lincoln sailed into reelection in November. But the meeting between Lincoln and Douglass is crucial for understanding how much Lincoln cared about black freedom – that his “whole soul” really was “in it.” Freeing the slaves in this way had nothing to do with “military necessity” or “saving the Union.” Lincoln’s sole desire was to bring freedom to as many people as he could before he was out of power. Frederick Douglass recognized this. “What he said on this day showed a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had ever seen before in anything spoken or written by him,” he later wrote.
In our polarized times, Lincoln’s statesmanship on behalf of black equality is something all Americans should be able to admire.
Jonathan W. White is professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University and author of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize-winning “A House Built By Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House” (2022).
