Comments on: Allen Guelzo – July 22, 1862

By: edabney

edabney — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 20:17:34 +0000

There are several reasons, I think, this document, isn’t as well celebrated as others in American culture. One being the dispersed nature of emancipation and the fact that millions of people were enslaved by several thousands means there is no one place to make an American pilgrimage to or to fawn over a often seen tangible reference to America.

In that I mean, July 4th is a day that increasingly over the last approx. 60 years has been about family gatherings, swimming, and eating made better when the South got air conditioning. However, there is still a grouping of places Americans are drawn to on July 4th to: New York City (being the first capital under the U.S. Constitution); Philadelphia (specifically, Independence Hall), and for the very savvy, Yorktown (for the surrender of the British in the American Revolution).

Emancipation Proclamation…where do you go for that? You could certainly go to the President Lincoln’s Cottage but with its location on the grounds of the Armed Forces Retirement Home some people may assume they can’t go. Furthermore, the Cottage just doesn’t have the national spotlight like the other building Lincoln lived in. The White House…all but inaccessible in our post-9/11 /2001 world.

Emancipation on the ground? Hundreds of plantations sites around the country but too many shy away from honest discussions of enslavement, emancipation, and the nuances of freedom and with so many how could you tour them all?

While, there are sundry other reasons; I believe it is hard for your average American to simply think of a single place or even three or four places where not only the Emancipation Proclamation can be regularly discussed but also where enslavement, wartime emancipation, and post-war freedom struggles are *THE* focus of the site.

However, I think this is one of the exciting challenges facing folks, like myself, in the public history field. Bringing those stories to the foreground can encourage people to question if any one single place ought to be *THE* site for telling a set of stories. The field is, slowly (but more rapidly than ever), willing to include these stories to connect with people in a variety of media and personal and non-personal services.

By: Donald R. Shaffer

Donald R. Shaffer — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 15:45:32 +0000

Hi Brad. It is hard to see how slavery could have been re-imposed in reality at the end of the Civil War. The war effectively destroyed it in most places. Nonetheless, it was a good thing that the 13th Amendment was adopted to put the matter beyond doubt and well as to help mop up the remnants of slavery in places like Kentucky that were exempt from the EP but did not enact state-level emancipation like Maryland and Missouri.

By: Brad

Brad — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 10:29:31 +0000

Donald,

I agree to a certain extent as, in general, a law will not exist until the circumstances — the reality — leading to its enactment exist. Nonetheless, just because the reality exists, that doesn’t mean that what a law addresses will have legal standing without the law. Although the slaves may have been acting as if they were, in fact, free, without the legal recognition, they could have been returned to bondage at any time. That is why Lincoln pushed for the 13th Amendment. Once the circumstances mandating the EP disappeared, slaves would have been subject to remaining as such notwithstanding their de facto status.

By: Donald R. Shaffer

Donald R. Shaffer — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 01:59:43 +0000

Hi Brad. Your post presumes that the law leads and reality follows. That isn’t always the case. The Civil War is a good example of where the law played catch up with reality for most of the war. Certainly, there would have been no legal freedom without changes to the law. But to a large extent all the legal changes such as the various acts passed by Congress in regard to emancipation, the Emancipation Proclamation, and eventually the 13th Amendment confirmed what already existed and sought to keep it from being rolled back some how.

By: Brad

Brad — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 01:38:27 +0000

As an attorney, there is a big difference between de jure and de facto and to talk about them in the same sentence confuses the issue. Without the issuance of the de jure act, the issuance of the EP, there would have been no legal freedom. The de facto part indicates the acceptance of a law society gives. However, that has no affect on whether a law exists or not. When it is passed it exists. Without de jure, de facto is meaningless. You could have had all the slaves acting as if they were free but without the legal act they had no status as free individuals. That is why the de jure part is significant: no EP, no legal status for their de facto status as free individuals.

By: Allen C. Guelzo

Allen C. Guelzo — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 15:11:28 +0000

Mitch: I see that I misspelled your name. I’m afraid this shows what a terrible typist I am. After all these years I still hunt and peck. The wonder is that I didn’t misspell Lnconli’s name two.

By: Allen C. Guelzo

Allen C. Guelzo — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 15:09:59 +0000

OK, just once more with Patrick before we both wear out our welcome with Donald: “the actual number of slaves who fled is perhaps of less significance than their impact on Union policymaking.” I think the real impact on policy worked in exactly the other way. White Southerners’ paranoia about a second Nat Turner or Gabriel Prosser or Denmark Vesey also infected white Northerners’ assumptions that emancipation must be a trigger for race war. (This is why Howard Jones argued that the E.P. was actually more, rather than less, likely to trigger a British intervention in the fall of 1862). Slave resistance would have acted to stiffen policy reluctance to emancipate, not encourage it, and the West Indies (especially Jamaica and St. Domingue) were the most-offered exhibits. Patrick is entirely right to state that no one began the war with the assumption that the war would lead to emancipation; but many others – specifically, seven Southern states’ worth – did assume that Lincoln’s election would lead to emancipation, an expectation he himself shared (although that expectation was wrapped out plans for gradual emancipation, not immediate emancipation). Why else did the Southern states secede, if not because they read the long-term handwriting of emancipation on the wall?
Yes, Patrick is right to say that Lincoln was “adducing from events in the field that the slaves could be a source of strength for the Union”; but he was also disappointed that slave resistance was not greater than it turned out to be. The provision he wrote into the preliminary E.P. – requiring the U.S. military to assist slaves in any attempt they made to secure “actual freedom” – was read at once by his cabinet as a call for slave insurrection, which is why Seward objected to its inclusion so strenuously as the one provision in the E.P, he could not support. And he met with both Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany to suggest behind-the-lines insurrection strategies. But he was surprised to find so few takers. Lastly, there has to be some doubt about the “influence” exerted by any number of freedpeople on the political process, because next to none of them had a vote (whereas plenty of Northern Democratic white racists did). If they did have such influence, then why did Reconstruction turn into such a disappointment?
Fundamentally, what I’m asking is, if “slave behavior entered into a critical dialectic with imperial consideration of emancipation,” where, exactly, do we see this operating? In whose discourse? In what elections? In what members of Congress? In what policy treatises? Or is it possible that Lincoln did what he did, because he was convinced it was right, and because he was the only person, as the president and Commander-in-Chief, who could actually push the button. I know that it sounds too much like I’m proposing to revive the “Great Man” theory (not to mention the “Great White Man” theory), but isn’t the E.P. one moment when the hermeneutic of suspicion has to fall by the way? After all, even Charles Sumner allowed that Lincoln “put his name to Emancipation — made speeches that nobody else could have made — & early dedicated himself to the support of Human Rights as announced in the Decltn. of Indep. Therefore, we honor him, & Fame takes him by the hand.”

By: Allen C. Guelzo

Allen C. Guelzo — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 20:08:27 +0000

I hate to get metaphysical here, much less Aristotelian, but we’re not taking fully into account the meaning of “cause,” either. Because someone happens to be in the same room as an event, does not mean they caused it. Fugitive slaves, sympathetic army officers, and abolition activists do not “cause” emancipation except in the sense of providing the material casuality; they certainly do not provide a sufficient cause, since all three existed prior to the E.P. We can certainly have material causation, proximate causation, sufficient causation, and final causation, and I will leave it to others to assign which cause belongs to whom concerning the E.P. But I think things are in order:
1. The end of slavery required a legal act. Lincoln originally hoped to cajole the border states into beginning that process when he drew up the Delaware plan in 1861, because he recognized that a legislative solution to slavery was the only one which could eliminate slavery as both practice and legal existent. And the 13th Amendment is Lincoln’s final statement about the need for a legislative solution. But so long as Congress refused, the state legislatures refused, and the Army refused to move in that direction, the one path which remained open was unilateral executive action, through a “war powers” proclamation. In this circumstance, I believe that the proximate cause was McClellan and the threat of a McClellanite coup in the summer and fall of 1862 (Richard Slotkin’s new book on Antietam has a similar judgment to make about McClellan, and William Styple’s forthcoming book on McClellan and Thomas Key will go a long way toward establishing how close McClellan was to some kind of military intervention). The idea of using the government’s “war powers” was not a new one: J.Q. Adams articulated this back in the 1830s, and both Sumner and C.F. Adams urged the use of “war powers” on Lincoln to abolish slavery. But they weren’t the people to issue the document; that pointed in one direction only, and that was Lincoln.
2. The difficulty in talking about a “massive spate of slave flight and resistance” is tghe softness of the evidence. Despite the labors of Herbert Aptheker and WEB DuBois to promote the idea of the CW as a “general strike,” and more recently Steven Hahn to argue for the CW as a slave revolt, this is the wish giving fatherhood to the thought. Even Ira Berlin’s Emancipation Project notes that there are no readily-available statistics on fugitives and contrabands during the war. William Seward’s guess-timate in 1865 that there may have been as many as 200,000 contrabands would amount to less than 5% of the slave population. It seems to me that one of the great, unexplored topics for CW research is precisely the numbers and extent of the contrabands; we have some isolated studies of contraband camps (like Roanoke Island) but a comprehensive study is still waiting to be written. Until then, speculation about “massive” slave flight is empty-handed. I do not say this because I subscribe to the delusion that the slaves were all happy, contented Sambos who just loved ol’ marster too much to leave him; to the contrary, the slaves were smarter than either side, and saw no sense in risking their necks for the promises of any white men, in blue or in gray.
3. I don’t know which K-12 teachers Patrick Rael has been interacting with, but the ones I meet year after year are always quick to tell me that (a) Lincoln didn’t free the slaves, (b) Lincoln only freed slaves where he had no power, and left slaves in bondage where he could have, (c) the E.P. had the moral grandeur of a bill of lading (thank you, Richard Hofstadter). What I hear from black students is that Lincoln was a racist and the E.P. was only a political sideshow to restore the Union or distract the British. And what I heard most recently from a professor in an academic audience I spoke to was this: “It just doesn’t feel right to me to say that one man did this for other people.” If Patrick Rael has heard from a different constituency, I say bless him, and let him be grateful for that. But I have had to cope with different circumstances; hence, my concern that that the E.P. not be forgotten.
4. Donald: toothpaste cannot be put back into the tube, but fugitives are not toothpaste. They can be returned to slavery. I agree that any attempt to implement slave rendition as part of some ignoble negotiated settlement with the Confederacy would have been difficult, messy, and inadequate. But should we really suppose that the Confederates wouldn’t have tried? And that, given prevailing white Northern racial insanities, Northern whites wouldn’t have co-operated? If so, you have a better opinion of slaveholders and white racists than I do. They fought to tear fugitives from the grasp of the British in 1783 and 1815, and more damnably successful than we like to admit; why wouldn’t they have done so again? Again, the document that stood in the way of this rendition was the E.P., which Lincoln insisted that he would resign the presidency rather than retract it.
One last word for Mitch Katun, who has done such very fine work on emancipation observances: I don’t take anything in your comment as snarky. To the contrary, I mourn the absence of an official national observance of emancipation. Your essay in Remixing illustrated a number of the efforts which have been made in this direction, and perhaps we will both live to see something of them come to fruition on a national scale. “I am an aboliitonist/I glory in the name/Though now by Slavery’s minions hiss’d. And covered o’er with shame….”

By: Margaret D. Blough

Margaret D. Blough — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 03:32:32 +0000

I don’t think giving Lincoln the credit that he is due takes away from anyone. It was a gutsy act of leadership. He presented the draft to his Cabinet as a fait accompli-the only thing genuinely on the table was timing. The preliminary EP was released as the critical 1862 congressional and gubernatorial elections were beginning and was blamed by many Republicans for the losses suffered in those elections. It was written as a legal document because it WAS a legal document, unlike the soaring Inaugural and Gettysburg Addresses, and Lincoln was doing all in his power as a lawyer drafting a legal document to ensure that it withstood attack in the courts (anyone who doubts how genuine this fear was should read how the postwar SCOTUS gutted the 14th Amendment for generations in the Slaughterhouse Cases). Aside from selling it to the public, it HAD to be tied to military purposed since the War Powers (a very controversial and untested doctrine) was the ONLY constitutional basis for the EP. He first started pushing for the 13th Amendment before the 1864 presidential election because he feared as to what would happen to formerly enslaved persons who’d been freed once the war ended (at the latest) or when each of the areas covered by the EP came under Union control. Grudgingly, many Unionists who had no interest in abolition came to support emancipation because they came to realize the importance of slave labor to the Confederate war effort and also came to accept that, so long as slavery continued to exist, the Union could never be safe.

By: Donald R. Shaffer

Donald R. Shaffer — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 02:01:54 +0000

Hi Mitch. Thanks for weighing in. You are the best advocate for your own work. Plus, I’m embarrassed to confess although I’ve read your book, I don’t own a copy.

Best,

Don