Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [312]
Stanton “made a very emphatic speech sustaining the measure,” and Blair reiterated his concerns about the border states and the fall elections, though in the end he filed no objection. Seward alone suggested a substantive change. Wouldn’t it be stronger, he asked, if the government promised not only to recognize but to “maintain” the freedom of the former slaves, leaving “out all reference to the act being sustained during the incumbency of the present President”? Lincoln answered that he had thought about this, but “it was not my way to promise what I was not entirely sure that I could perform.” When Seward “insisted that we ought to take this ground,” Lincoln agreed, striking the limiting reference to the present administration.
The preliminary proclamation, published the following day, brought a large crowd of cheering serenaders to the White House. Though it would not take effect until Lincoln issued the final proclamation on January 1, 1863, giving the rebellious states one last chance to return to the Union, it had changed the course of the war. “I can only trust in God I have made no mistake,” Lincoln told well-wishers from an upstairs window. “It is now for the country and the world to pass judgment on it.” He then called attention to the brave soldiers in the field. While he might be “environed with difficulties” as president, these were “scarcely so great as the difficulties of those who, upon the battle field, are endeavoring to purchase with their blood and their lives the future happiness and prosperity of this country. Let us never forget them.”
The serenaders proceeded to Chase’s house at Sixth and E, where the large crowd listened “in a glorious humor” as Chase spoke. Afterward, an excited group, including Bates and “a few old fogies,” remained inside, drinking wine. “They all seemed to feel a sort of new and exhilarated life,” John Hay observed. “They gleefully and merrily called each other and themselves abolitionists, and seemed to enjoy the novel sensation of appropriating that horrible name.”
Many radicals, including Count Gurowski and William Fessenden, remained wary of Lincoln. Gurowski complained that the proclamation was written “in the meanest and the most dry routine style; not a word to evoke a generous thrill,” while Fessenden remarked that it “did not and could not affect the status of a single negro.” Nevertheless, Frederick Douglass, whose criticism of Lincoln had been implacable, understood the revolutionary impact of the proclamation. “We shout for joy that we live to record this righteous decree,” he wrote in his Monthly. Anticipating the powerful opposition it would encounter, he asked: “Will it lead the President to reconsider and retract.” “No,” he concluded, “Abraham Lincoln, will take no step backward.” Intuitively grasping Lincoln’s character, though they were not yet personally acquainted, Douglass explained that “Abraham Lincoln may be slow…but Abraham Lincoln is not the man to reconsider, retract and contradict words and purposes solemnly proclaimed over his official signature…. If he has taught us to confide in nothing else, he has taught us to confide in his word.” Lincoln confirmed this assessment when he told Massachusetts congressman George Boutwell, “My word is out to these people, and I can’t take it back.”
Opposition came from the expected sources: conservatives feared the proclamation would “render eternal the hatred between the two sections,” while Democrats predicted it would demoralize the army. Needless to say, an outcry arose in the South. The Richmond Enquirer charged Lincoln with inciting an insurrection that would inevitably lead, as with Nat Turner’s uprising, to slaves being hunted down “like wild beasts” and killed. “Cheerful