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intervention; the failure of efforts to fight the war without targeting the economic foundation of southern society; the need for additional manpower; the rejection of his gradual emancipation plan by the border states; and the antislavery measures of what one newspaper called “the Congress of the Revolution.” But Lincoln was hardly a passive observer of the actions of others. In October 1862, a black writer had shrewdly observed that although Lincoln’s actions seemed “rather equivocal,” in fact “by close observation, there could be seen a constant under-current in favor of freedom.”89

Lincoln’s course in the first two years of the war was not without miscalculations. He succumbed to wishful thinking about the extent of southern Unionism, the willingness of border slaveholders to accept any plan of emancipation, and the receptivity of black Americans to the fantastic scheme of colonization. But early in the war, he had made public a plan for emancipation that, while unsuccessful, committed the federal government to seeking an end to slavery. He made clear numerous times his wish that “all men everywhere could be free,” and signed every piece of antislavery legislation enacted by Congress, including highly controversial measures like the Militia and Second Confiscation Acts. Lincoln lagged behind the abolitionists and Radicals in recognizing the necessity of general emancipation. While celebrating the proclamation, the Christian Recorder urged its black readers to give thanks to Sumner, Stevens, Lovejoy, Chase, and other “apostles of liberty” for their role in changing public opinion and government policy. But popular sentiment does not exist independently of political leadership. “Your personal influence upon public opinion,” Carl Schurz had written to Lincoln in May 1862, “is immense; you are perhaps not aware of the whole extent of your moral power.” In his own way, Lincoln helped to create the public sentiment that made emancipation possible.90

Despite its palpable limitations, the proclamation set off scenes of jubilation among free blacks in the North and contrabands and slaves in the South. At Beaufort on the Sea Islands, over 5,000 African-Americans celebrated their freedom by singing what a white observer called “the Marseillaise of the slaves”: “In that New Jerusalem, I am not afraid to die; We must fight for liberty, in that New Jerusalem.” In the North, blacks gathered in their churches. “I have never witnessed,” the abolitionist Benjamin R. Plumly wrote to Lincoln from Philadelphia, “such intense, intelligent and devout ‘Thanksgiving.’” The mention of Lincoln’s name “evoked a spontaneous benediction from the whole Congregation” and the singing of “The Year of Jubilee.” “The Black people all trust you,” Plumly reported. “They believe you desire to do them justice.” When one person suggested that Lincoln might pursue “some form of colonization,” a woman shouted, “‘God won’t let him,’…and the response of the congregation was emphatic.” The process of deifying Lincoln as the Great Emancipator had begun.91

During the Civil War, Europeans carefully observed events in the United States. The announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation produced expressions of gratitude from across the continent. In ornate-ness of rhetoric, none surpassed the message from the Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi and his two sons:

Heir of the thought of Christ and [John] Brown, you will pass down to posterity under the name of the Emancipator! More enviable than any crown and any human treasure! An entire race of mankind yoked by selfishness to the collar of Slavery is, by you, at the price of the noblest blood of America, restored to the dignity of Manhood, to Civilization, and to Love.

No American in the debates of 1861 and 1862 had linked emancipation with the restoration of Love—it took an Italian to do so. More down to earth was the comment of Karl Marx in one of his occasional dispatches from London for the New York Tribune: “Up to now, we have witnessed only the first act of the Civil War—the constitutional waging of war. The