As Lincoln hoped, the Proclamation swung foreign popular opinion in favor of the Union by gaining the support of European countries that had already outlawed slaver. It effectively ended the Confederacy's hopes of gaining official recognition from European heads of state. This lesson demonstrates the importance of the immediate effects that the Emancipation Proclamation had on four major American groups: the Confederate states, the Union states, the Union Army, and black Americans.
How has social disagreement and collaboration been beneficial to American society? Textual evidence, material artifacts, the built environment, and historic sites are central to understanding United States history. Conflict and cooperation among social groups, organizations, and nation-states are critical to comprehending society in the United States.
Domestic instability, ethnic and racial relations, labor relations, immigration, and wars and revolutions are examples of social disagreement and collaboration. Analyze a primary source for accuracy and bias and connect it to a time and place in United States history. Summarize how conflict and compromise in United States history impact contemporary society.
The Emancipation Proclamation at Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 1. It applied only to states that had seceded from the United States, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states.
It also expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy the Southern secessionist states that had already come under Northern control. Most important, the freedom it promised depended upon Union United States military victory. Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery in the nation, it captured the hearts and imagination of millions of Americans and fundamentally transformed the character of the war. After January 1, , every advance of federal troops expanded the domain of freedom.
Moreover, the Proclamation announced the acceptance of black men into the Union Army and Navy, enabling the liberated to become liberators.
By the end of the war, almost , black soldiers and sailors had fought for the Union and freedom. Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R.
Guelzo's book succeeds in restoring emancipation to its historical context. He has provided the best account to date of the political virtuosity and unswerving idealism that gave Lincoln his victory in the difficult battle to destroy slavery. With this volume, decades of misunderstanding about Lincoln's most controversial action now give way to exactly what Lincoln's proclamation was, for then and for all times. Tell us what you like and we'll recommend books you'll love.
Sign up and get a free ebook! Trade Paperback eBook. Table of Contents Excerpt Rave and Reviews. About The Book. Introduction The Emancipation Proclamation is surely the unhappiest of all of Abraham Lincoln's great presidential papers. Taken at face value, the Emancipation Proclamation was the most revolutionary pronouncement ever signed by an American president, striking the legal shackles from four million black slaves and setting the nation's face toward the total abolition of slavery within three more years.
Today, however, the Proclamation is probably best known for what it did not do, beginning with its apparent failure to rise to the level of eloquence Lincoln achieved in the Gettysburg Address or the Second Inaugural.
Even in the s, Karl Marx, the author of a few proclamations of his own, found that the language of the Proclamation, with its ponderous whereases and therefores, reminded him of "ordinary summonses sent by one lawyer to another on the opposing side.
A onetime member of the circle of American Marxist intellectuals around Partisan Review, Hofstadter repudiated the traditional Progressive view of American political history as a struggle between the legacies of the liberal Thomas Jefferson and the conservative Alexander Hamilton.
Instead, Hofstadter viewed American politics as a single, consistent, and deeply cynical story of how capitalism had corrupted Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians alike and turned the United States into "a democracy of cupidity rather than a democracy of fraternity. Lincoln's opposition to slavery, in Hofstadter's reckoning, was kindled only by the threat it posed to free white labor and the development of industrial capitalism.
Lincoln "was, as always, thinking primarily of the free white worker" and was "never much troubled about the Negro. Its motives were entirely other than had been advertised, and that fact explained its stylistic flaccidity. That centennial itself was a disappointing affair, capped by President John F. Kennedy's refusal to give the principal address at ceremonies at the Lincoln Memorial on September 22, , for fear of suffering deeper losses of Southern Democrats in his reelection bid the next year.
As the Proclamation's negative symbolic power has risen, efforts to interpret the text have diminished, and examination of the Proclamation's contents has subsided into offhand guesswork and angry prejudice. The Proclamation has become a document as Garry Wills once described the Declaration of Independence "dark with unexamined lights.
Recapturing at least some of those assumptions will begin, I think, with recognizing in Abraham Lincoln our last Enlightenment politician. The contours of Lincoln's mind -- his allegiance to "reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason"; his aversion to the politics of passion; the distance he maintained from organized religion; his affection for Shakespeare, Paine, and Robert Burns; and his unquestioning belief in universal natural rights -- were all shaped by the hand of the Enlightenment.
But the most important among the Enlightenment's political virtues for Lincoln, and for his Proclamation, was prudence.
Prudence carries with it today the connotation of "prude" -- a person of exaggerated caution, bland temperance, hesitation, a lack of imagination and will, fearfulness, and a bad case of mincing steps. This view would have surprised the classical philosophers, who thought of prudence as one of the four cardinal virtues and who linked it to shrewdness, exceptionally good judgment, and the gift of coup d'oeil -- the "coup of the eye" -- which could take in the whole of a situation at once and know almost automatically how to proceed.
Among political scientists, it has more specific meanings, but those meanings are usually just as repellent -- of cunning, and in some quarters, an unhealthy preoccupation with the neo-classicism of Leo Strauss.
So let me say, for the benefit of the hunters of subtexts, that I can cheerfully confess to never having read Leo Strauss, nor, for that matter, to possessing much aptitude for the peculiar dialect spoken by my political science friends. It is an ironic rather than a tragic attitude, in which the calculus of costs is critical rather than crucial or incidental.
It prefers incremental progress to categorical solutions and fosters that progress through the offering of motives rather than expecting to change dispositions. Yet, unlike mere moderation, it has a sense of purposeful motion and declines to be paralyzed by a preoccupation with process, even while it remains aware that there is no goal so easily attained or so fully attained that it rationalizes dispensing with process altogether.
Montesquieu found the origins of political greatness in "prudence, wisdom, perseverance," since prudence would "guard the passions of individuals for the sake of order and guard the guardians for the sake of freedom.
The most salient feature to emerge from the sixteen months between his inauguration and the first presentation of the Proclamation to his cabinet on July 22, , is the consistency with which Lincoln's face was set toward the goal of emancipation from the day he first took the presidential oath.
Lincoln was not exaggerating when he claimed in that he "hated" slavery: I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world -- enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites -- causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty -- criticising the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.
But in Lincoln's case, prudence demanded that he balance the integrity of ends the elimination of slavery with the integrity of means his oath to uphold the Constitution and his near-religious reverence for the rule of law.
Lincoln understood emancipation not as the satisfaction of a "spirit" overriding the law, nor as the moment of fusion between the Constitution and absolute moral theory, but as a goal to be achieved through prudential means, so that worthwhile consequences might result. He could not be persuaded that emancipation required the headlong abandonment of everything save the single absolute of abolition, or that purity of intention was all that mattered, or that the exercise of the will rather than the reason was the best ethical foot forward.
Far too often, Lincoln's apologists hope to give the lie to Hofstadter's scalding attack by pulling apart means and ends, either apologizing for the former or explaining away the latter, a sure sign that they have no better grasp on the politics of prudence than Hofstadter. Most often, this pulling apart happens whenever we are tempted to plead that Lincoln was either a man in progress or a man of patience.
That is, Lincoln was as Horace Greeley put it "a growing man," growing in this case from a stance of moral indifference and ignorance about emancipation at the time of his election in , toward deep conviction about African-American freedom by the time of the Emancipation Proclamation less than two years later.
Or else that Lincoln already had all the racial goodwill necessary for emancipation but had to wait until the right moment in the war or the right moment in the growth of Northern acceptance of the idea of emancipation. These are both generous sentiments, but I am not sure that generosity is quite what is needed for understanding Lincoln's proclamation.
Rather than needing to develop progress, I believe that Abraham Lincoln understood from the first that his administration was the beginning of the end of slavery and that he would not leave office without some form of legislative emancipation policy in place.
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