Revisionism and reality: Abraham Lincoln’s war against slavery

Why does it matter?

Why do we even need to think about Abraham Lincoln today? Why might ordinary citizens and activists — as opposed to academic historians — even care about a person and events more than 150 years ago?

It matters because, in the relentless woke crusade to delegitimise Western liberal democratic values and traditions, Lincoln — one of the most famous expositors and defenders of those values — is a prime target for vilification. The claim that ‘the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery’ has become a sort of received wisdom — not among actual historians of the period, obviously, but certainly among those who want to appear educated without ever putting in the work to learn the history. David Baddiel once said (I think I’m quoting correctly) that conspiracy theory is the way idiots get to feel like intellectuals. It increasingly appears that revisionist history serves the same function. This article attempts to look at the reality.

The political problem of antislavery

Suppose you’re an American, living in the first half of the nineteenth century, and loathe slavery. Yet slavery is legal and widely practiced in half the states of the Union. You feel an urge to do something about this state of affairs. What do you do? What can you do?

The first thing is to understand the political realities you’re faced with. So let’s look at some of those.

The constitution: Nothing in the constitution permitted the Federal Government to abolish slavery in existing states, and given the blocking power of the slave states, a constitutional amendment to do so was out of the question.

Furthermore, slave state power was boosted by the constitutional provision which allowed the slave states to count 3/5 of each slave towards the census total that determined their voting strength. Since the slaves themselves obviously couldn’t vote, this meant that each white Southerner’s vote counted for far more than each Northerner’s. (By the way, modern outrage that an enslaved black person could be deemed to count only 3/5ths of a white person overlooks the fact that it was the slaveowners, not their opponents, who wanted them to count fully, because this would boost white southern — and therefore pro-slavery — representation)

Politics: Political factors guaranteed the dominance of the slave states. In the period between the adoption of the constitution in 1789 and the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, only three presidents were not slaveowners, and none of them was elected for a second term. Thus, a slaveowner was president for 60 of these 72 years. In the early part of this period the southern states outmatched the northern in wealth and population, and this changed only slowly afterwards. So in George Washington’s day Virginia alone had a quarter of the nation’s population and was the richest state. (This gradually changed, so that by 1860 Virginia was outvoted by Ohio, which was still Indian territory in 1789.)

Why was this? National politics were dominated by the Jeffersonian Republicans and their successors the Jacksonian Democrats. These were an alliance between Southern planters and Western farmers, along with some dissident groups in the North East. But the Southerners were always dominant. No-one from another section who wasn’t ‘sound’ on slavery could hope to get their nomination, or any share of the spoils of office. Thus, despite the various compromises over slavery (e.g. 1820, 1850) which aimed at maintaining parity between the slave and free states, the latter frequently elected Democrats who put party first and voted with the South. For example California, a free state as a result of the 1850 compromise, was represented by two pro-slavery Democrats in the Senate right up to the civil war.

Economics: North and South, banking, manufacture and agriculture were all tied into the same economic system. New York bankers financed the plantations. New England mills bought their cotton and turned it into cheap clothing for the slaves which they sold back to the South. And northern farmers provided food for southern cities which the South itself, with its acreage dominated by plantation crops, couldn’t. The abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner denounced the alliance between the ‘Lords of the loom and the lords of the lash’. North and south were part of a single market economy in which southern slavery was an integral part, and this helps to explain why so many northern politicians (not just Democrats, but also their opponents, the Whigs) were so keen not to rock the boat.

So how were antislavery politicians to respond? Of course there was the abolitionist movement, but let’s be clear. Morally inspiring as it was, it could never have led by itself to abolition. It did have some effect, of course. As antislavery ideas spread, there was more of a political cost to Northern politicians in being seen to side with the south. Nor did the underground railroad, for all its heroism, make more than the merest dent in slavery. Escape wasn’t a practical option for any outside the northernmost slave states (e.g. Maryland, Kentucky) and even there only a tiny minority succeeded. And more violent options, such as John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid (1859), simply alienated much northern opinion that the antislavery campaigners needed to win over.

There was only one option — to fight on grounds that enabled the antislavery side to build national coalitions. The South’s determination to expand the reach of slavery to the western territories provided the challenge. The answer was the slogan of free soil. This slogan held out the possibility of breaking the agrarian alliance between the South and western settlers. The latter may not have cared about slavery as such (and indeed were often deeply racist) but the prospect of the land and politics of the new territories being dominated by slave-owning grandees rather than independent homesteaders like themselves was terrifying. The building of a new electoral coalition around free soil was the key to US politics in the 15 years or so leading up to the Civil War.

In fact, long before Lincoln’s time, slavery and opposition to it were key dividing issues. The battles, as we have seen, centred not around the abolition of slavery in the states where it already existed — that was beyond the realm of practical politics — but its extension to the new lands being opened up as the country expanded. There were three key dates in this process:

In 1787 the North-West Ordinance banned slavery in the new territories north and west of the Ohio River (ultimately bringing six new free states into the Union, including Ohio, Indiana and Lincoln’s own Illinois.

In 1820 the Missouri Compromise admitted that state with slavery, but stipulated that west of Missouri slavery should be banned north of 36⁰ 30'. This compromise kept the peace for a generation, and largely kept slavery off the national agenda until the Mexican War (1846–48) reopened the issue.

In 1850 there was a further compromise, to deal with the lands taken from Mexico. Texas was admitted as a slave state and California as a free state, with the remainder of the south-west (present-day New Mexico and Arizona) left to ‘popular sovereignty’ — i.e. a vote of the inhabitants — to decide whether they should be slave or free.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act

Unlike the Missouri Compromise, it took only a few short years for the Compromise of 1850 to blow apart. It took the Missouri Compromise with it, thus commencing the countdown to Civil War. The key figure here is the Democrat Senator from Illinois, Stephen Douglas, one of the dominant political figures of his time.

Douglas was determined that a proposed transcontinental railroad to the United States’ newly acquired port of San Francisco should start from Chicago. In order to achieve this, and make the route viable, he needed to encourage settlement of the intervening territories — most immediately Kansas and Nebraska. However — because these territories were north of the Missouri Compromise line, hence could not permit slavery — this would upset the balance of slave and free states to the detriment of the former. So, in order to conciliate the Southern Democrats whose support he would need for a future presidential bid, Douglas proposed to override the Missouri Compromise and permit the future of slavery in these territories to be determined by popular sovereignty — i.e. a vote of the inhabitants, once there were some. By splitting the territory into Nebraska to the north and Kansas to the south, it was assumed that the free/slave state balance would be maintained as Nebraska would vote ‘free’ and Kansas (immediately to the west of the slave state of Missouri) would go ‘slave’.

This proposed extension of slavery north of the Missouri Compromise line enraged anti-slavery politicians. It acted as a rallying cry which split the existing political parties and opened the way for the first major anti-slavery party, the Republicans, to emerge. Lincoln, who had been a Whig congressman, was an early joiner of the new party.

Lincoln’s attitude

Lincoln was a fierce opponent of the extension of slavery years before the Civil War. But his private opinions went beyond this. His private correspondence, to friends and political colleagues, make clear his abhorrence of slavery. So, he wrote (about the Kansas-Nebraska legislation) ‘I particularly object to the NEW position which the avowed principle of this … law gives to slavery in the body politic. I object to it because it assumes that there CAN be a MORAL RIGHT in the enslaving of one man by another… I object to it because the fathers of the republic eschewed, and rejected it.’

So was Lincoln an abolitionist? He firmly believed that slavery was an evil which besmirched the Republic. He was also a firm believer in the Republic, and the constitution, and believed that the Republic’s survival was the great hope of mankind. So he would never have deliberately provoked a Civil War in order to destroy slavery. Once the Civil War started, the priority was to rally as broad as possible a coalition to oppose it, and that meant playing down opposition to slavery. But it seems clear that he knew all along that victory would mean the end of slavery, and did all he could to hasten it.

Lincoln’s hatred of slavery, and his determination that it should eventually be eliminated are central to understanding what he was about. However, his understanding of how this could be realistically achieved went through a number of phases.

Strategy one — the defence of Free Soil, up to 1861

The phrase ‘Free Soil’ goes back to the 1840s. It denotes the policy of excluding slavery from any new territories acquired by the US. It was perfectly consistent with permitting slavery to operate in the States where it already existed, and was even consistent with virulent racism — the belief that the west should be settled by free white people, with blacks excluded. The great thing about ‘Free Soil’ is that it could embrace a broad coalition. In 1848 a Free Soil Party contested the Presidential election, with the former Democrat president Martin Van Buren as its candidate. While it had no chance of winning, it split the Democrat vote in New York and helped the Whig, Zachary Taylor, to win the election.

When the Republican Party replaced both the Whigs and Free Soilers in the 1850s it went further than the latter in explicitly condemning slavery. Essentially the difference between the two was that the Republicans believed that the restriction of slavery to the existing slave states would eventually bring about the extinction of the institution as a whole. Why did they think this?

First, the growth in the slave population, without the safety valve of migration to new territories, would increase the likelihood of slave rebellions. And secondly, as the country expanded, and more free states were added, the slave states would become a minority, leaving open the possibility of a constitutional amendment that abolished slavery entirely. Secessionists were quite clear that this was precisely the Republicans’ objective. Faced with these threats, it was thought, many slaveowners would become amenable to some form of compensated emancipation.

People who argue that Lincoln and the Republicans posed no threat to slavery — and weren’t even bothered by it — need to explain why Lincoln’s victory was the trigger for the southern states to secede. Both northerners and southerners were convinced that if slavery was confined to the states where it already existed it would be doomed.

We might say that whereas for the Free Soilers, free soil was an end in itself, for the Republicans, including Lincoln, it was a strategy. And it was a strategy that the Southern slaveholders were well aware of.

Lincoln’s platform in 1860

The first few sections of the Republican platform deal with the importance of maintaining the union, and condemn violent invasion of any state. This is partly a condemnation of the John Brown raid.

It then goes on to tackle slavery. Section 8 is explicit in opposing any extension of slavery to the territories: “…the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom: That, as our Republican fathers, when they had abolished slavery in all our national territory, ordained that “no persons should be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law,” it becomes our duty, by legislation, whenever such legislation is necessary, to maintain this provision of the Constitution against all attempts to violate it; and we deny the authority of Congress, of a territorial legislature, or of any individuals, to give legal existence to slavery in any territory of the United States.”

Section 9 condemns the reopening of the slave trade.

Of course what it doesn’t do is demand the abolition of slavery in the states where it exists (‘territory’ refers to lands owned by the US which are not states, and therefore are under the direct rule of the Federal Government). Again, no-one at the time thought that this was practical politics.

Of course, as we know, Lincoln won in 1860, and this triggered the secession of the southern states.

The secession crisis

As the slave states started to secede following Lincoln’s election, there were frantic efforts at a compromise that would keep the country together. The most famous was the so-called Crittenden compromise. Senator John J Crittenden of Kentucky suggested a series of constitutional amendments to end the crisis. One would revive and extend the Missouri Compromise line: slavery could spread in all the territories “now held, or hereafter acquired” by the US below the latitude of 36⁰ 30'. Other elements were to strengthen the fugitive slave law, indemnify the owners of runaway slaves, and protect the interstate slave trade. The capstone amendment, as it became known, would forbid any future attempts by Congress to abolish slavery. These amendments would be unamendable. In short, this so-called ‘compromise’ sought to entrench slavery permanently as the price for maintaining the Union.

What was Lincoln’s reaction? Bear in mind that he wasn’t yet President. All this was happening between the election and inauguration. The answer is, he was furious. He dashed off letters to congressional Republicans to have no truck with this deal — which would of course have completely contradicted the platform on which he’s been elected. He wrote to one: “Entertain no proposition for a compromise in regard to the extension of slavery. The instant you do, they have us under again; all our labour is lost, and sooner or later must be done over… have none of it. The tug has to come & better now than later.”

Meanwhile the outgoing President Buchanan was urging Lincoln to agree to some plan that would slow the secession drive. The furthest Lincoln would go was to restate his support of the inviolate rights of the existing states, and to condemn armed attacks on a state such as the John Brown raid. But this was the limit. In response to a Southerner who pleaded for concessions: “Is it desired that I shall shift the ground on which I have been elected? I cannot do it… it would make it appear as if I repented for the crime of having been elected, and was anxious to apologise and beg forgiveness.”

Ironically, William Seward, the Secretary of State designate (and Lincoln’s former rival for the nomination), who had previously taken more radical stands than Lincoln, and whom the South regarded as a war-crazed abolitionist, was the one who wavered. He urged Lincoln to indulge the compromise attempts. However, Lincoln whipped Seward into line. He repeated: “I am inflexible. I am for no compromise which assists or permits the extension of the institution [i.e. slavery] on soil owned by the nation. I take it that to effect some such result as this, and to put us again on the high road to a slave empire is the object of all these compromises. I am against it.”

Interestingly, Seward’s own wife was outraged at his wavering. She wrote to her husband in January 1862: “No-one can dread war more than I do. For 16 years I have prayed earnestly that our son might be spared the misfortune of raising his hand against his fellow man — yet I could not today assent to the extension or perpetuation of slavery in order to prevent war.” It seems people at the time were perfectly aware of the issues at stake, even if some modern commentators appear confused.

The leaders of upper south states such as Virginia and Maryland called for a peace convention of all the states to meet in Washington DC on 4th February. The convention was held, but the seven already seceded deep south states ignored it. The conference generated compromise proposals similar to the Crittenden ones. Lincoln told another Republican leader that all this was blackmail. “We have just fairly carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten, before we take the offices. In this way they are either attempting to play upon us, or they are in deadly earnest. Either way, it is the end of us, and of the government. They will repeat the experiment… A year will not pass, till we have to take Cuba as a condition on which they will stay in the Union.”

Lincoln travelled to Washington for his inauguration by a roundabout route — partly because he’d received a number of speaking invitations and partly to avoid the very real risk of assassination. In one of his speeches, in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, he expressed his devotion to the Declaration of Independence. Its purpose, he said, “was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the mother land… [it was]something in that Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time… a promise that the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.” He then said (my emphasis): “If this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I would rather be assassinated on the spot than surrender it.”

On arrival in Washington, Seward again urged Lincoln to back down, and accept the convention measures. Lincoln stuck to his refusal.

Of course, nothing came of these proposals. So the war started, and this opened up new possibilities for tackling the slavery issue. However, he had to move carefully. Northern Democrats were ready to pounce, and to accuse him of needlessly prolonging the conflict in furtherance of his — as they saw it — mad crusade against slavery.

On 4th July, Lincoln sent a special message to Congress requesting retrospective approval of all the measures he had taken to suppress the rebellion. There was only an elliptical reference to the slavery issue. “No popular government can long survive a marked precedent, that those who carry an election, can only save the government from immediate destruction, by giving up the main point, upon which the people gave the election. The people themselves, and not their servants, can safely reverse their own deliberate decisions.” Of course, the ‘main point’ was precisely his adamant opposition to the extension of slavery.

In the early days of the war, Lincoln moved carefully, keen to maintain the bipartisan alliance in support of the war; keen also to maintain the loyalty of pro-Union slave states such as Maryland and Kentucky, whose loss would have dealt a devastating strategic blow to the Union.

Some Union men wanted to go further than Lincoln. John C Fremont was the Western commander with his HQ at St Louis. He’d been the Republican Presidential candidate in 1856. On 30th August 1861 he issued a proclamation that the slaves of rebels in his military region were henceforth free. Lincoln sent him a message advising him not to go further than the existing Confiscation Act, of which he sent Fremont a copy. However, he closed his message by saying ‘This letter is written in a spirit of caution and not of censure.’

Many were critical of Lincoln’s response to Fremont, including an Illinois senator, Orville Browning, a friend of Lincoln’s. In reply Lincoln pointed out that when news of Fremont’s action reached Kentucky, “a whole company of our volunteers threw down their arms and disbanded”. And to lose Kentucky “is nearly the same as to lose the whole game”. He urged Browning and his friends to back him, and then “we shall go through triumphantly”.

Strategy 2 — the border state strategy 1861–1862

In late 1861 Lincoln came to a decision. He would use the Civil War as an occasion to launch the second phase of his antislavery strategy. At this stage Free Soil — the prevention of slavery expansion to the Territories — was assured as long as they remained under the military control of the Union. Now he could turn his attention to the phaseout of slavery within the Union. The target here was the border states — i.e. the slave states that had remained loyal to the Union. These were Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Missouri (later joined by West Virginia, comprising the western counties of Virginia which had remained loyal to the Union). Of course, Lincoln had no legal power to abolish slavery in these states — but he thought he could bring pressure on the states themselves to support abolition.

One historian has written: Lincoln truly believed “from the first… that he should not leave office without some form of legislative emancipation in place. By his design, the burden would have to rest on the state legislatures, largely because Lincoln mistrusted the federal judiciary and expected that any emancipation initiatives that came directly from his hand would be struck down by the courts.” (Allen C Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The end of slavery in America, 2004)

In late November 1861 Lincoln secretly drafted plans for a bill to be passed by the Delaware legislature which would ask for congressional financial assistance to get rid of slavery.

On 20th January 1862 two antislavery leaders paid a visit to the White House, intending to push Lincoln towards a bolder approach. They suggested a programme of compensated emancipation. Lincoln responded that he had always been in favour of this. They batted around various approaches, with Lincoln pointing out the political realities of public opinion. Then, right at the end, he said: “We shall need all the anti-slavery feeling in the country, and more. You can go home and try to bring the people to your views; and you may say anything you like about me, if that will help. Don’t spare me!” This was said with a laugh. Then he said very gravely, “When the hour comes for dealing with slavery I trust I will be willing to do my duty though it cost my life. And, gentlemen, lives will be lost.”

It’s clear from this that Lincoln was following a dual strategy. To be Union only as far as public opinion was concerned, but to do what he could behind the scenes to work against slavery. However, by March 1862 his strategy was faltering. Delaware was failing to respond to his initiative. He started to think a direct approach by Congress would have more effect. He sent a direct presidential message to Congress recommending a joint resolution which would formally offer Federal funds to any state that wished to go down the abolition route. In his message he stressed that the plan should be “a matter of perfectly free choice.” However, he warned that if rebel resistance should continue, “the war must also continue; and it is impossible to foresee all the incidents which may attend and the ruin which may follow it.” In other words, accept this offer or you could lose everything.

The resolutions passed Congress on a straight party line vote. Many Democrats denounced the idea of “taxes to buy Negroes”. The Republicans passed another measure, to forbid Union military men from returning Negroes who had crossed into Union lines. Meanwhile a new slogan was circulating among the Democrats: The Union as it was, the constitution as it is.

Reactions to these initiatives among border state leaders remained sullen and defiant.

General David Hunter was the Union commander in Georgia, Florida and South Carolina. On 9th May he issued a proclamation declaring the slaves in his region free. Lincoln countermanded this order, saying “The question of whether it is competent for me, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, to declare the slaves of any state or states free, and whether in any case it shall have become a necessity… are questions which… I reserve to myself.” However, in the same proclamation he added an appeal to the leaders of the border states. “I beseech you to consider Congress’s offer. You cannot if you would be blind to the signs of the times… Will you not embrace it? May the vast future not have to lament that you have neglected it.” But they did neglect it!

At this time Lincoln seemed to be becoming more religious. He had always been a sceptic, but now the pressures started to change him. There was of course the awful responsibility of conducting a bloody war. Also at this time his young son Willy died. He started turning more and more to scripture. While he had since the 1850s dedicated his life to the elimination of slavery, he possibly began to see this more in terms of a religious mission. What else could begin to justify all the suffering?

He was being urged on by radicals such as Senator Charles Sumner to strike at the root of the rebellion, slavery. The radicals developed a different view of the legal position. Lincoln had always insisted that the rebel states remained states of the Union, but which had been taken over by rebels. The radicals started to take a different approach — that by their rebellion, these states had committed a sort of state suicide, and had therefore reverted to the status of territories — with which the government could do as it pleased. Many of the radicals grew contemptuous of Lincoln. However, Sumner continued to believe that Lincoln was on their side, and should be supported.

Strategy 3 — Emancipation

By the summer of 1862 Lincoln had despaired of the border states’ response and was casting round for a different approach. In July he met with over two dozen border state leaders and implored them to take up the offer of compensated emancipation. He told them: let the states which are in rebellion see that in no event will the states you represent ever join their proposed Confederacy. “Break that lever before their faces, and they can shake you no more forever.” If not, the war might destroy slavery anyway, and their investment would be lost. Once again, they turned him down. It was at that point that he made the great decision to emancipate the slaves. He presented his secret decree to the cabinet on 22nd July. In the meantime he signed a new confiscation act into law, provoking a Democrat backlash. A New York headline was typical: Can N*****s conquer Americans? Racial violence against free blacks broke out in northern cities.

While keeping his proclamation under wraps for the moment, he pounced on an abolitionist editorial by the famous editor Horace Greeley in the New York Tribune which accused him of weakness on the slavery issue. In response, Lincoln made one of his most famous — and notorious — statements.

“I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be “the Union as it was.” If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.”

This of course is Exhibit A for the Lincoln debunkers and Twitter warriors. But let’s look at the context. First, his message to Greeley was a lie. He had already rejected a chance to save the Union without doing anything about slavery. Had he accepted the Crittenden Compromise the previous year secession might well have been prevented. (Not to mention that it was Lincoln’s position on slavery that triggered secession in the first place.) And second, at the very moment he wrote this reply to Greeley, he had already decided on the Emancipation proclamation! He was doing two things here: first, launching a trial balloon — giving a ‘heads up’ that saving the Union might require freeing the slaves. And second, by giving advance cover for when he issued the proclamation — that it was merely a stratagem to save the Union — and so hopefully head off the expected white racist backlash.

The proclamation was issued on 22 September 1862. So, what did the proclamation actually say?

On 1st January 1863 “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.”

Reading this section in isolation, the proclamation seemed to be saying: we grant freedom to the slaves in areas where the government has no power to enforce it, but we decline to do so in those areas which are actually under our control — namely the pro-Union slave states and those areas of the rebel states that we already occupy. It’s easy to see why there were accusations of hypocrisy. The accusations came both from abolitionists in the north, and from Confederate sympathisers. It suited the latter to claim that the war wasn’t about slavery at all, but the right to independence — the same right that the Americans had championed in 1776. And modern critics have echoed this line. For example, the historian Richard Hofstadter (1948) said: “The proclamation did not free any slaves… It simply declared free all slaves in the ‘States and parts of States’ where the people were in rebellion — that is to say, precisely where its effects could not reach”. Hofstadter’s quip was in part drawn from a sardonic remark attributed to Seward. In our day, this interpretation has become the common currency of both far-right Confederate apologists and far-left enemies of the liberal tradition.

However, this interpretation neglects the following section.

Further, [the President on that day] “will by proclamation designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United States”. It then goes on to detail the criteria by which this will be decided.

So this section is saying: Surrender before the end of this year and you can keep your slaves. But if you’re still in rebellion after that, then we will free your slaves as soon as we conquer your area.

Why wasn’t it issued sooner? The war had been going on for almost one and a half years. Part of the answer is of course the ultimately unsuccessful ‘border state’ strategy that we have already discussed, which took up the first year of the war. However, that strategy was, as we have seen, dead in the water by the spring of 1862. So why the delay, from the cabinet agreeing in July, to its eventual issuing in October?

There is evidence that Lincoln wanted to issue it much sooner, but was persuaded that to do so while the Union was losing battles would look like an act of desperation, and be counterproductive in terms of foreign support. However, on 17 September 1862 the Union had a major victory at the Battle of Antietam, which ended the Confederates’ first attempted invasion of the North. In fact, it was something of a stalemate, as the Union commander failed to follow up and allowed the Confederate army to escape (as also happened after Gettysburg the following year). Nevertheless, it was good enough, and had a powerful effect on foreign powers. Lincoln seized the opportunity to issue his proclamation.

Why was it so limited and conditional?

In other words, why didn’t it simply declare all the slaves free? Let’s start by looking at what a presidential proclamation actually means? When is it possible to make one?

The president isn’t a dictator. He can’t make law by proclamation. Only Congress can make laws. But the problem goes beyond this. As we have seen, nothing in the constitution allowed Congress to ban slavery in any State. So it was understood by everyone that the banning of slavery would require a constitutional amendment. That of course is what eventually happened, but not until the Confederacy was effectively defeated. In fact, the 13th Amendment which did just this came in that tiny window of opportunity when the war was almost won, but the rebel states either hadn’t yet resumed their places in Congress, or else were represented by a Unionist minority supported by an occupying army. This point bears restating. In 1862 Lincoln had no constitutional power to ban slavery. So what could he do?

As Commander in Chief, Lincoln had the power (indeed the responsibility) to take all steps to suppress internal insurrection, including of course the confiscation of rebel property. Consequently, the proclamation had to be presented as a war measure, and was carefully drafted to that end. Even as it stood there was a strong likelihood that the Supreme Court would declare it unconstitutional, or else would say that even if it was a legitimate measure while the war lasted, it couldn’t prevent slaves being returned to their masters after resistance had ceased. Lincoln’s argument was that the Proclamation embodied a promise to the slaves, and that the promise once made had to be kept. But of course there’s no such constitutional principle!

So Lincoln was operating on the margins of constitutional propriety, and he knew it. The gamble was that once the war was won, emancipation could be regularised and made permanent.

From the start of 1863 slavery began to crumble. Not only did Union armies under the terms of the proclamation free the slaves everywhere they conquered from then on, but frequently the slaves took matters into their own hands and simply left the plantations. At this point Lincoln started to take action to support the newly free blacks. He pushed the recruitment of freedmen into the Union army more aggressively, and also supported economic measures such as providing employment for them on plantations confiscated from their rebel owners. Congress also created the Freedmen’s Bureau, arguably the world’s first ever social welfare agency.

Strategy 4 — Abolition

By the end of 1864 the window of opportunity had arrived. With the Confederacy almost destroyed, Lincoln worked to secure the passage of the 13th Amendment to fully and finally abolish slavery. He pulled out all the stops to ensure that the outgoing Congress passed the Amendment before it adjourned. A historian Michael Vorenberg has written: “No piece of legislation during Lincoln’s presidency received more of his attention than the Thirteenth Amendment.” He bullied, threatened and cajoled, and even threatened to call the Congress into a special session in March. It worked. On 31st January 1865 the Amendment was passed. Ratification by the states was made possible by the fact that some of the rebel states now had Unionist governments kept in power by the Union army. In his Second Inaugural Address— the one that’s always quoted for the conciliatory parts — he actually suggests that the war may be God’s punishment for the sin of slavery!

Of course, things ended badly with the re-imposition of white supremacy in a new guise. Could the reaction have been avoided?

The historian Richard Striner argues that it was Lincoln’s assassination that made the re-imposition of white rule possible. In April 1865 the Confederacy was beaten and demoralised, and had Lincoln been around to push through his programme there would have been little resistance. But Lincoln was murdered by a white supremacist, and his successor Andrew Johnson adopted a very different position. Of course, Johnson was replaced by Grant in the 1868 election, and the radicals then took control of Congress. By then, though, the South had recovered its self-confidence and its ability to resist. Ultimately this led to the Compromise of 1877 and the imposition of racist regimes across the South by around 1890.

Lincoln’s legacy

Lincoln’s untimely death obviously makes it impossible to blame him for the century of racist oppression that was only brought to an end by the Civil Rights movement and legislation of the 1960s, and the might-have-beens had Lincoln survived are hard to contemplate. The important thing is what he did accomplish.

My own belief is that there are no inevitabilities in history. Without Lincoln slavery might never have been destroyed. A more timid leader might not have pushed for its end as forcefully as Lincoln was to do. A more radical one might never have held together the political coalition required to win the war. In either case, the result might have been that the country was pushed — in Lincoln’s own words — on the high road to a slave empire. In short, only someone with Lincoln’s distinctive combination of cunning and principled determination could have achieved what he did.

So why the need among so many to belittle his achievements today? I believe this this tendency says more about our own day than it does about Lincoln. Far left ideology aims to destroy the liberal democratic tradition. To do this it has to debunk that tradition’s heroes, of which Lincoln is one of the most illustrious. The recovery of the history and traditions of the democratic west is our most important mission, and a fitting tribute to Lincoln himself.

References and disclaimer

This article makes no claim to being an original work of historical scholarship. It is deeply indebted to many genuine historians, whose work I have liberally drawn on here. Of these, the works detailed below have been my main sources.

Needless to say, any errors are completely my own.

Richard Striner, Father Abraham: Lincoln’s Relentless Struggle to End Slavery (Oxford University Press, 2006)

Carl Wieck, Lincoln’s Quest for Equality: The Road to Gettysburg (Cornell University Press, 2002)

Leonard L Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination 1780–1860 (Louisiana State University Press, 2000)

Allen C Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The end of slavery in America, Simon and Schuster, 2004)