While public opinion, North and South, had considerable time between late September 1862 and the end of the year to adjust to the idea that Abraham Lincoln meant to free most slaves in the United States by proclamation at the start of 1863, the reaction to Lincoln actually signing the Emancipation Proclamation was surprisingly passionate.
The nature of opinion about Lincoln’s proclamation fell along predictable lines. Richard Striner, well summarizes notable reactions in a piece in January 29 edition of Disunion in the New York Times. Striner writes:
He continues:
While individual Confederates might have changed their behavior toward Union POWs as a result of Lincoln finalizing the Emancipation Proclamation, the Confederacy’s official policy toward northern prisoners remained unchanged. While rhetoric such as Beauregard’s might have satisfied the anger of white Southerners over what they saw as Lincoln’s tyrannical action, any mistreatment of enemy POWs put Confederates in Union hands in danger of retaliation. (Their venom though would find an outlet in black Union prisoners who often would be abused or even killed when captured by the rebels, especially when the Confederates realized the Lincoln administration was reluctant to retaliate for atrocities against African-American soldiers in the federal army.)
Lawyers also disagreed about whether President Lincoln’s freeing most of the slaves in the United States as a war measure was constitutional. Abraham Lincoln himself was unsure on this point (as Spielberg’s Lincoln accurately portrays), which was why he soon began pushing for a constitutional amendment to end slavery once and for all. Lincoln did not wish risking the judiciary overruling him after the war, which was a distinct possibility in what was then the most conservative branch of the federal government. Lincoln also had to consider the fate of the slaves exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation, especially in the loyal border states. While Missouri and Maryland would move toward freeing the slaves on their own over the rest of the Civil War, Kentucky and Delaware would continue to resist emancipation and slavery would only end there with the final ratification of the 13th Amendment in December 1865.
So while the Emancipation Proclamation put the country on the road to the final end of slavery in the United States, it was far from the end of the road. And, as Jim Downs has written extensively, slaves fleeing into Union lines to gain their freedom created a horrid humanitarian crisis, with thousands dying due to the often poor conditions in hastily established federal freedmen’s camps. (Escaped slaves were a secondary priority at best for Union commanders, especially if they could not be put to work supporting federal military operations.) Downs holds Abraham Lincoln personally responsible for this humanitarian crisis. He goes as far as to assert, “Lincoln can no longer be portrayed as the hero in this story. Despite his efforts to end slavery, his emancipation policies failed to consider the human cost of liberation.” It is going too far to assert Abraham Lincoln was not a hero of emancipation in the United States, but Jim Downs is correct that this catastrophe should tarnish to some extent the Lincoln administration’s image on this point. Still, if Confederates and racist white Northerners were livid over the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, Abraham Lincoln was doing something right and heroic.
Sources: 1) http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/hurrah-for-old-abe/; 2) http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/05/dying-for-freedom/.
