The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation by David Brion Davis

PreliminaryEmancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862. While the First Confiscation Act was originally intended to apply only to those fugitives “employed in hostility to the United States,” under theWar Department’s instructions of August 8, 1861, “military necessity” meant the freeing of
all
slaves who voluntarily entered Union lines from any Confederate state. Despite some debate over “loyal” and “disloyal” masters, no freed people were to be reenslaved. While Union generals acted in different ways, they were influenced by the fact that runaway slaves often provided Northern troops with important military intelligence regarding the location of rebel forces. Within a year of passage, the law had liberated tens of thousands of slaves, and it is difficult to imagine how emancipation could have begun any sooner.
    The Second Confiscation Act, or “The Emancipation Bill” as it was frequently called, was debated for seven months and aimed at completely destroying slavery in the seceded states. Signed by Lincoln on July 17, 1862, it immediately freed thousands of slaves in parts ofLouisiana and the lowerMississippi Valley occupied by Union troops. Most surprising, a “prospective” clause called upon Lincoln to issue a proclamation freeing all rebel-owned slaves in areas not yet occupied by Union forces. Lincoln acknowledged this by quoting verbatim Section 9 of the Act in his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which he finally felt free to release following the Union victory atAntietam on September 17, and which promised to call for slave emancipation on January 1, 1863, if the South continued to rebel. One should note that Democratic and Border State congressmenwere outraged by the success of the Second Confiscation Act, and declared that Republican fanatics had destroyed all prospects of restoring the Union.
    Unfortunately,Oakes’s emphasis on the antislavery unity of the Republican Party obscures the crucial importance of Abraham Lincoln as a leader of the Union. Everything would have been different if Lincoln had not possessed the extraordinary “capacity for growth” documented inEric Foner’s Pulitzer Prize–winning
TheFiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.
Though Lincoln hated slavery from his earliest reflections and stressed in 1858 that the natural rights of theDeclaration of Independence applied to blacks and that Democrats were attempting to “dehumanize the negro,” he had no adequate reply to StevenDouglas’s persistent repetition of Jefferson’s famous question, “what shall be done with the free negro?” 25 Indeed, despite his impressive growth on other fronts, such as treating Frederick Douglass as a genuine equal, Lincoln advocated colonization and helped plan for voluntary black removal even after hisEmancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. Yet Lincoln also played a central role in helping to shape public opinion toward the radical goal of emancipation and in helping to pass theThirteenth Amendment.
    Oakes refutes the myth that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation did not free a single slave as well as the myth that it shifted the purpose of the war from the restoration of the Union to the abolition of slavery—the war to restore the Union had always been a conflict over slavery. He also highlights other aspects of the Proclamation, such as the importance of recruiting 180,000 black troops to join the Union army, which became indispensable for a Union victory. The Proclamation not only converted the Union army into a true army of liberation but helped lift the ban on the “enticement” of slaves, so that countless Union soldiers now coaxed slaves to leave, spread word of the Proclamation, or even delivered talks on plantations, reducing fears of flight and adding to the huge number of blacks who followed invading Union forces. Above all, the Proclamation gradually helped convince a large number of voters that total slave emancipation was a necessary