Abraham Lincoln and Emancipation
This page will explore sources where Abraham Lincoln addresses his role in the Emancipation of slaves, a power not specificcally vested in the Constitution. As you read each document, think about how the document reveals Lincoln's persective on this executive role. Pay attention to tone and audience for each source in our analysis.
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To provide backgroud/context on this topic, check out the resources below:
"10 Facts about the Emancipation Proclamation", The Civil War Trust,. http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/emancipation-150/10-facts.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/
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Presidential Proclamation
(May 19, 1862)
“I, Abraham Lincoln, president of the United States, proclaim and declare, that the government of the United States, had no knowledge, information, or belief, of an intention on the part of General Hunter to issue such a proclamation;”
Lincoln Log:
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Historiography:
“Lincoln’s apparent conservatism on the slavery issue drew strong criticism from radicals as early as the fall of 1861. His revocation of Fremont’s edict proclaiming emancipation in Missouri provoked a storm of recrimination that was renewed in May 1862 when he revoked a similar order issued by General David Hunter for South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. In a letter to another senator, Wade sneered that nothing better could be expected from a man of Southern antecedents and ‘poor white trash’ at that. Frederick Douglass, the leading black abolitionist, declared in his monthly magazine that Lincoln had become the ‘miserable tool of traitors and rebels,’ and had shown himself to be ‘a genuine representative of American prejudice and negro hatred.’”
— Don E. Fehrenbacher, “The Anti-Lincoln Tradition,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 4, no. 1 (1982): 6-28.
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Close Reading:
Deborah Tyminski, "A Place For Everything and Everything In Its Place: An Exanimation of Power in Lincoln’s Proclamation on May 19th, 1862"
Emancipation Proclamation
(January 1, 1863)
"And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.”
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Daily Report:
HD Daily Report, January 1, 1863
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Historiography:
“But Lincoln was under increasing pressure to act. His call for additional volunteers had met a slow response, and several of the Northern governors bluntly declared that they could not meet their quotas unless the President moved against slavery. The approaching conference of Northern war governors would almost certainly demand an emancipation proclamation. He also had to take seriously the insistent reports that European powers were close to recognizing the Confederacy and would surely act unless the United States government took a stand against slavery.”
—David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), pp. 374
Close Reading:
Matthew Pinsker: Lincoln and the Emancipaiton Proclamation from The Gilder Lehrman Institute on Vimeo.
Letter to Salmon Chase (September 2, 1863)
"Knowing your great anxiety that the emancipation proclamation shall now be applied to certain parts of Virginia and Louisiana which were exempted from it last January, I state briefly what appear to me to be difficulties in the way of such a step.”
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Lincoln Log:
The Lincoln Log, September 2, 1863
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Historiography:
“Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase argued against such exceptions and kept after the President thereafter to extend the Emancipation Proclamation to all of Virginia and Louisiana. Lincoln replied to him on September 2, 1863… Notice the words ‘Could this pass unnoticed?’ ‘Could it fail to be perceived…?’ It is important for constitutional government what the people of the Country understand their officer to be doing and on what authority. It is also important that the people be trained to expect the basis of governmental authority to be evident, even when extraordinary measures have to be resorted to.”
— George Anastplo, Abraham Lincoln: A Constitutional Biography (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999), 218.
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Close Reading:
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Deborah Tyminski, "Deep in Thought: Close Reading of Letter to Salmon Chase Sept. 2, 1863"
Gettysburg Address (November 19, 1863)
"that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
Close Readings:
Close Reading by Students in Sarah Turpin’s first grade class, Clemson, SC (Posted atYouTube, November 15, 2013)
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Lincoln Log:
The Lincoln Log, November 19, 1863
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Historiography:
“Lincoln read his draft to no one before he reached Gettysburg, and he explained to no one why he had accepted the invitation to attend the dedication ceremonies or what he hoped to accomplish in his address. Yet his text suggested his purpose. When he drafted his Gettysburg speech, he did not know for certain what Edward Everett would say, but he could safely predict that this conservative former Whig would stress the ties of common origin, language, belief, and law shared by Southerners and Northerners and appeal for a speedy restoration of the Union under the Constitution. Everett’s oration could give another push to the movement for a negotiated peace and strengthen the conservative call for a return to ‘the Union as it was,’ with all the constitutional guarantees of state sovereignty, state rights, and even state control over domestic institutions, such as slavery. Lincoln thought it important to anticipate this appeal by building on and extending the argument he had advanced in his letter to Conkling against the possibility of a negotiated peace with the Confederates. In the Gettysburg address he drove home his belief that the United States was not just a political union, but a nation—a word he used five times. Its origins antedated the 1789 Constitution, with its restrictions on the powers of the national government; it stemmed from 1776 . . . In invoking the Declaration now, Lincoln was reminding his listeners—and, beyond them, the thousands who would read his words—that theirs was a nation pledged not merely to constitutional liberty but to human equality. He did not have to mention slavery in his brief address to make the point that the Confederacy did not share these values. Instead, in language that evoked images of generation and birth . . . he stressed the role of the Declaration in the origins of the nation, which had been ‘conceived in Liberty’ and ‘brought forth’ by the attending Founding Fathers. Now the sacrifices of ‘the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here’ on the battlefield at Gettysburg had renewed the power of the Declaration.”
—David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), pp. 461-462