A Multitude of Emancipation Proclamations

In the video above, a clueless Barney Fife attempts to elucidate what the Emancipation Proclamation is with no success. At one point he shouts exasperatedly at Andy Griffith that the Emancipation Proclamation was “about emancipation, what do you think it was about!?” The proclamation in question, the one of January 1, 1863, did not bring “the end of slavery in America” as Allen Guelzo’s subtitle of his Lincoln Prize winning book states, nor was it the only proclamation of emancipation.

Journalist Douglas A. Blackmon found that slavery, “by another name,” continued in the South for more than seventy years after the passage of 13^th amendment. It was only after the horrors of the National Socialist regime in Germany were witnessed that, according to Blackmon, “the final delivery of African Americans from overt slavery and from the quiet complicity of the federal government in their servitude” (p. 382).  Slavery on a much smaller scale still exists in the US with the slave holders getting what amounts to a slap on the wrist in the way of punishment. Lincoln himself had to deal with the sympathetic friends and relatives of Captain Nathaniel Gordon, who was convicted of violating the Piracy Law of 1820 by being “engaged in the slave trade.” The penalty was death and Lincoln refused to grant Gordon a pardon. Gordon became the only person in US history to be executed for being a slave trader on February 21, 1862. Lincoln signed a treaty with the British in July of 1862 “for the suppression of the slave trade.” Meanwhile, we should remember that a “conservative estimate” maintains that 27 million people are enslaved worldwide today.

On the subject of proclamations, Lincoln issued two (he also signed two separate 1862 bills which abolished slavery 1) in Washington, D.C. through compensated emancipation—an idea he tried without success as a Congressman in 1849 and 2) in the territories—a law directly challenging the Dred Scott decision). The first was a preliminary proclamation on September 22, 1862. Technically States or parts of States “in rebellion against the United States” in September could have read this document as a warning and discontinued their support of the Confederacy and joined the Border States in keeping their slaves when the final Emancipation Proclamation  was issued on January 1, 1863. Predictably, the Civil War raged on. Lincoln had also revoked two proclamations by the time he issued his preliminary proclamation, those of General John C. Frémont in Missouri and General David Hunter for Georgia, Florida and South Carolina. By the time of the final Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln had also already asked Congress for a resolution supporting compensated emancipation, drafted a bill for compensated emancipation in Delaware, appealed to Border States to get their representatives to favor emancipation, and worked out the figures in his December 1862 Annual Message on the cost of compensated emancipation were it to be dragged out over 37 years.

It took a long time for Lincoln to come to the position that he had the authority as Commander-in-Chief “in time of actual armed rebellion against authority and government of the United States” to abolish slavery. He had for most of his adult life favored gradual emancipation and voluntary colonization of freed blacks as his hero Henry Clay advocated. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed very few slaves, but this did not matter much in the imagination of the country at the time nor does it now. The Sunday before the issuing of the proclamation, Frederick Douglass said: “It is difficult for us who have toiled so long and hard, to believe that this event, so stupendous, so far reaching and glorious is even now at the door. It surpasses our most enthusiastic hopes that we live at such a time and are likely to witness the downfall, at least the legal downfall of slavery in America. It is a moment for joy, thanksgiving and praise.”

It would take two more years of bloody war and the passage of the 13^th Amendment to ensure that Lincoln’s efforts at legally ending slavery were not rolled back.