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8

“A New Birth of Freedom”: Securing Emancipation

ON JANUARY 9, 1863, a little over a week after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, General Richard J. Oglesby, a former member of the Illinois legislature and a future governor of the state, spoke at a war rally in Springfield. The proclamation, he said, “is a great thing, perhaps the greatest thing that has occurred in this century. It is too big for us to realize.”1 Despite his awkward language, Oglesby understood that if emancipation opened a new chapter in American history, its long-term consequences were impossible to predict or even, in some ways, to comprehend.

When Oglesby spoke, emancipation was neither complete nor secure. The Confederate government vowed not to recognize the liberty of the slaves Lincoln had declared free. Indeed, as the fortunes of war ebbed and flowed, blacks who had tasted freedom behind Union lines sometimes found themselves reenslaved by advancing Confederate forces. In the North, Democrats denounced the edict as a violation of the Constitution and an unwarranted redefinition of the war’s purposes. When it assembled on January 8, 1863, the Democratic-controlled legislature of Indiana demanded that the proclamation be revoked. Even some Republicans refused to accept emancipation as a fait accompli. In the days after it was issued, representatives of the party’s conservative wing, including Orville H. Browning, David Davis, James R. Doolittle, and Thomas Ewing, implored Lincoln to withdraw the proclamation, arguing that it had strengthened Confederate resolve and divided the North. Lincoln refused; it was a “fixed thing,” he told them. “The proclamation,” he assured one group of visitors to the White House, “has knocked the bottom out of slavery.”2

“All the logic of the struggle,” wrote the New York Times in 1863, “leads us more and more toward universal freedom.” Lincoln embraced that logic. In his message to Congress of the previous December, Lincoln had called on Americans to rethink their basic assumptions. And between January 1863 and his death, Lincoln would abandon or modify many of his previous beliefs. Even as the military situation remained uppermost in his mind, Lincoln began to address questions the proclamation had left unresolved. These included the fate of slavery in the border states and the exempted parts of the Confederacy, the conditions for “rebel” states to return to the Union, and the system of labor that would replace slavery. As the disintegration of slavery continued and Union victory grew more likely, these questions became increasingly urgent. To secure complete emancipation, Lincoln again encouraged the border states to take action against slavery and made abolition a requirement for the readmission of Confederate states. In public letters and his messages to Congress he sought to persuade the American people of the wisdom of emancipation (he even encouraged Bayard Taylor, a noted poet, dramatist, and former diplomat in Russia, to give public lectures on the liberation of the serfs).3 Lincoln’s racial views began to change, and for the first time in his life, he began to think seriously about the role of blacks in a post-slavery America.

I

AMONG THE MOST RADICAL PROVISIONS of the Emancipation Proclamation was Lincoln’s invitation to African-American men to enlist in the Union army. The recruitment of blacks, remarked Congressman William P. Cutler of Ohio, “is a recognition of the Negro’s manhood such as has never before been made by this nation.” For this very reason, the arming of black soldiers inspired as much controversy as emancipation itself. On January 12, 1863, Thaddeus Stevens introduced a bill in the House authorizing Lincoln to raise 150,000 black soldiers. Slaves who enlisted would become free, as would their families, with the government paying monetary compensation to loyal owners.

Only “partisan demagogues,” Stevens declared, failed to realize that “if we are to continue this war, we must call in the aid of Africans.