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By Root 1707 0

would speak again of gradualism and compensation, but these no longer formed parts of a comprehensive plan of emancipation. Embarking on a different path to ending slavery rendered that plan irrelevant. As his contract with Bernard Kock demonstrated, Lincoln still retained an interest in colonization. But he would never again publicly advocate this policy. The language of the proclamation repudiated fears that freed slaves would become a threat to public order or succumb to “idle vagabondage,” as the New York Times warned they might.85 Putting some black men into the military and asking others to labor for wages implied a very different vision of their future place in American society than plans for settling them overseas. Lincoln made no effort to define the future status of the emancipated slaves, but the proclamation unavoidably placed that question on the national agenda.

Even apart from the 800,000 persons to whom it did not apply, the Emancipation Proclamation by itself hardly guaranteed the irrevocable end of slavery; for that, Union military victory would have to follow. Slavery is a remarkably resilient institution. It had survived the dislocations of the War of Independence (including the flight of tens of thousands of slaves to British lines) only to enter a period of unprecedented growth. France decreed abolition in its West Indian colonies in 1794, Napoleon restored it in 1802, and except for independent Haiti, the institution survived until 1848.86 Were the Confederacy to gain its independence, slavery would undoubtedly continue to exist.

The proclamation’s “great characteristic,” declared Wendell Phillips, was that it did not make emancipation a punishment for individual rebels but treated slavery as “a system” that must be abolished. Legally speaking, this was not quite accurate, since, as William Whiting pointed out in his treatise on the war power, freeing slaves, even millions of them, did not abrogate the local laws that established and protected slavery. Further action beyond presidential emancipation, he noted, would be necessary to “render slavery unlawful.”87

Nonetheless, the Emancipation Proclamation, as the New York Herald commented, marked a watershed in American life, “a new epoch, which will decisively shape the future destinies of this and of every nation on the face of the globe.” Never before had so large a number of slaves been declared free. The proclamation altered the nature of the Civil War, the relationship of the federal government to slavery, and the course of American history. It liquidated without compensation the largest concentration of property in the United States. It made a negotiated settlement impossible unless the Union were willing to retract the promise of freedom. It crystallized a new identification between the ideal of liberty and a nation-state whose powers increased enormously as the war progressed. Indeed, emancipation presupposed the existence of a nation capable of enforcing such a measure, something that had not existed before 1860. Henceforth, freedom would follow the American flag. As Frederick Douglass proclaimed, “The cause of the slaves and the cause of the country” had become one. Whatever the proclamation’s limitations, by making the army an agent of emancipation and wedding the goals of Union and abolition, it ensured that northern victory would produce a social transformation in the South and a redefinition of the place of blacks in American life. In his message to Congress of December 1861, Lincoln had said that he did not wish to conduct the war as a “violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle.” The proclamation announced that this was precisely what it must become.88

“I claim not to have controlled events,” Lincoln would later write, “but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” Among the most important of the events that propelled him and the country down the road to emancipation were the actions of slaves wherever the Union army ventured; the pressure of abolitionists and Radicals; the desire to eliminate the possibility of European