Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 28:

"World history is not the ground of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it ..." - Hegel, Philosophy of History (German original: "Die Weltgeschichte ist nicht der Boden des Glücks. Die Perioden des Glücks sind leere Blätter in ihr ...")

I'm continuing here with the discussion of Peter Kolchin's in "Reexamining Southern Emancipation in Comparative Perspective" (Journal of Southern History 81:1 Feb 2015).

Comparing different historical events has a definite empirical aspect. Hopefully, similarities and differences will tell us something important about a particular process. Or it may not.

One comparison he makes is the role of war in ending slavery. While it is obvious in the case of the US Civil War, other cases don't present the same features:

... war frequently weakened slaveholding regimes. Tens of thousands of slaves had escaped from bondage during the American Revolution and the War of 1812, and in the northern states the War for Independence set in motion the eventual abolition of slavery, as did wars for independence in Cuba and much of the Spanish American mainland. The Napoleonic invasion was instrumental in bringing serfdom to an end in Prussia (although in the French Caribbean Napoleon appeared as a reenslaver of those freed by the French Revolution rather than as a liberator).

Usually, however, such wars led to the freedom of some slaves or paved the way for the future ending of bondage, rather than bringing about an immediate or general emancipation. Indeed, despite the enhanced opportunities for freedom provided by the American War for Independence, there were about twice as many slaves in the United States at the conclusion of the Revolutionary era (1800) as there had been at its onset (1770), and despite the massive disruption of slavery during the War of 1812, the censuses of 1810 and 1820 indicate that the enslaved population of the United States increased more than 29 percent during the intervening decade. Although the rebels in Cuba's Ten Years' War (1868-1878) increasingly championed abolition as well as independence, slavery survived in Cuba until 1886. Similarly, although Russia's defeat in the Crimean War helped convince high government officials that serfdom was keeping the country from developing its full military and economic potential and therefore needed to be abolished, the war itself freed almost no one.

He notes parenthetically, "The major exception to this pattern, of course, was the French colony of Saint Domingue, where the slaves engaged in a massive uprising the only successful slave revolution in modern history-and established the Republic of Haiti in 1804." We've looked at the Haitian Revolution several times this month and its relation to slavery and emancipation in the United States.

Kolchin argues that emancipation coming about in the process of a civil war set conditions for making the situation of the liberated slaves a more thoroughgoing formal liberation than in places where it took place by gradual emancipation: "these terms were simple and quintessentially American," he writes, "based upon the principle of republican citizenship."

The term "quintessentially American" has come to be like nails on the blackboard to me. Because it rings of American Exceptionalism. And it's often invoked to describe things that are not at all unique to America. Maybe even not intrinsically American, if even that term makes any sense.

But he explains what the means by the war situation and the terms of emancipation:

Two features of the American version are especially indicative of what would be the increasingly radical experiment that went by the name of Reconstruction. First of all, in contrast to emancipation in many other countries-Prussia, Austria, Russia, the British colonies, Cuba, Brazil, and much of the Spanish American mainland-as well as in most of the northern states after the American Revolution, emancipation in the South was immediate rather than gradually phased in over many years. Second, American emancipation was uncompensated, the only major example of uncompensated confiscation of private property in American history. In recent years, there has been debate over whether the descendants of former slaves should receive some sort of reparations for the suffering of their ancestors, but in the nineteenth century the debate was over whether the masters should receive financial compensation for the loss of their human property. In many other countries (even eventually in Haiti) they did, and as late as 1862 President Lincoln had held out the incentive of partial compensation in a futile effort to convince Confederate rebels to lay down their arms and to convince slaveholders in the loyal slaveholding states-Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri-to accept the freeing of their slaves. Military victory rendered such ideas obsolete, and the Fourteenth Amendment, among its many other provisions, explicitly invalidated both the Confederate war debt and "any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave." In short, although ending slavery in the southern United States was part of a broad historical process that produced similar features everywhere that it occurred, the specific terms of emancipation that were hammered out during Reconstruction went significantly further than those elsewhere in making citizens of former slaves.

Kolchin compares the post-emancipation situation of African-Americans mostly to that of freed Russian serfs, and shows that the immediate terms of emancipation were indeed more radical in the US.

However, he notes that in the US as well as Russia and Brazil and other countries, there was considerable post-emancipation disappointment among the freed peoples. This is the part that reminds me of Hegel's gloomy observation with which I open this post. Kolchin's descriptions of Reconstruction are important and, like all honest history writing, departs from the neo-Confederate/Lost Cause propaganda version:

The Reconstruction experiment lasted only a few years, of course,and some have seen it as a dismal failure. The process of overthrowing the Reconstruction governments and institutionalizing racial segregation cannot be detailed here, except to note that it involved massive doses of fraud, intimidation, and violence. Reconstruction governments fell at different times in different states, lasting longest in the Deep South, where black voters formed the largest percentage of the population, but were gone everywhere by 1877. In the 1880s and early 1890s conservative Democratic state governments chipped away at Reconstruction initiatives, slashing spending on black education and discouraging black political participation, before launching a more frontal assault on African Americans' civil and political rights at the turn of the twentieth century. An explosion of white racism, marked by a sharp rise in lynching, characterized the 1890s and early years of the twentieth century, and through various quasi-legal devices such as grandfather clauses, poll taxes, and white primaries the great majority of southern African Americans were effectively disenfranchised for more than half a century, in blatant violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. After the heady days of Reconstruction, the former slaves experienced a deep sense of disappointment and disillusionment, as their early hope for the dawning of a new age faded before the reality of life in the era of Jim Crow.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 28: Emancipation in the US and abroad

Peter Kolchin in "Reexamining Southern Emancipation in Comparative Perspective" (Journal of Southern History 81:1 Feb 2015) attempts to position the significance of the emancipation of the American slaves in the context of other modern emancipations, from both serfdom and chattel slavery. As Kolchin notes in his article, such comparative approaches are in fashion at the moment in Southern history.

He argues that "in much of the Western world":

Until the second half of the eighteenth century, slavery had seemed an unremarkable feature of life, one consistent-as David Brion Davis has shown-with religion, morality, and progress. There was some sentiment that Christians should not enslave other Christians and Muslims should not enslave other Muslims-that is, in the language of the time, slavery was fit only for "infidels"-but there was little sense that slavery in general was wrong or undesirable.

But then with the progress of democratic and republican ideas and revolutionary movements both in the Old World and the New:

Then, beginning in the years leading up to the major Atlantic revolutions of the late eighteenth century, "enlightened" opinion increasingly came to see slavery as problematic. There were different versions of this sentiment: some saw slavery as morally wrong, whereas others argued that it was a backward institution, harmful to society and to economic development. But in an era that increasingly celebrated liberty and equality, slavery and its close twin serfdom, institutions that had for centuries been taken for granted, became objects of intense scrutiny; and over a period of a little more than a century they were abolished throughout the West-bthat is, Europe and European-derived societies in the Americas.

But the Enlightenment was a contradictory phenomenon, which also in some of its manifestations defined aboriginal peoples as "natural" and therefore outside of the civilized world of Reason. Even a major Enlightenment figure like Thomas Jefferson had difficulty imagining that people of African descent could be fully as intelligence and civilized as those of white European descent.

But he is right about how serfdom and slavery came apart with the flowering of capitalist modernism. And he provides this useful timetable about the emancipations in various countries:

Europeans weren't entirely wrong for criticizing or mocking the United States for the genuine contrast between the democratic principles of the government of the white majority and the reality of chattel slavery as a key institution in the American empire of freedom.

Citing the work of James Oakes, he winds up stressing the emancipatory impulse among the Republicans during the Civil War:

... many Republicans saw the war, from its very beginning, as a golden opportunity to move beyond the constitutional limitations that in normal times - that is, in peacetime-prevented the federal government from interfering with slavery in the states where it already existed. Especially important in this regard was the second Confiscation Act, which authorized the seizure and liberation of all slaves owned by rebels. Union army officers pursued varying policies toward African Americans who came under their control, but increasingly they experimented with various forms of free or, in some cases, semi-free labor, on the sea islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, in New Orleans many Republicans saw the war, from its very beginning, as a golden opportunity to move beyond the constitutional limitations that in normal times - that is, in peacetime-prevented the federal government from interfering with slavery in the states where it already existed. Especially important in this regard was the second Confiscation Act, which authorized the seizure and liberation of all slaves owned by rebels. Union army officers pursued varying policies toward African Americans who came under their control, but increasingly they experimented with various forms of free or, in some cases, semi-free labor, on the sea islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, in New Orleans and throughout the lower Mississippi Valley, in northem Virginia, and elsewhere as Confederate territory continued to shrink.

It's part of the neo-Confederate canard that the Civil War was not about slavery to emphasize the limitations of Northern goals when it came to abolishing slavery.

But of course the Southern secessionists were explicit about the reason they were seceding from the Union: to preserve slavery. And while Union war aims were not explicitly directed at abolishing slavery, the North understood that it was necessary to contain slavery and the violent rebellion the slaveowners had ginned up.

When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, that meant in the common terminology of the time that the war for the North had changed from a conventional war, aimed at defeating the opponent, to a revolutionary war aimed at overthrowing the social system of the enemy. And the developments described by Kolchin show that process in its rabid development once the war was under way.

Forever Free stamps

The US Postal Service has issued a commemorative stamp on the 150th anniversary of the effective date of the Emancipation Proclamation.

It was designed by Gail Anderson and issued January 13, 2013.

Tags: emancipation proclamation

President Obama on the Emancipation Proclamation - really amazing, and not in a good way

The White House has been pushing this video of President Obama talking about he virtues of compromise, compromise, compromise. The most amazing thing about it to me is what he says about Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. This is from the White House YouTube channel. It was posted July 14 but is from a meeting of March 8. As the White House caption explains, "On March 8th 2011 President Obama surprised and took questions from a group of Boston Area College Democrats, Republicans and Independents after his speech at Tech Boston Academy in Dorchester, MA."



Obama's historical revisionism on the Emancipation Proclamation is astonishing to me. The Emancipation Proclamation in his telling was mainly about compromising with slavery! This actually is one of the neo-Confederates' big talking points: see, Lincoln didn't  free all the slaves and that shows what a big ole hypocrite he was!

And Lincoln making a strategic compromise with pro-Union border states in the middle of a Civil War is just like, say, Obama caving in to industry lobbyists on the public option before it even came to a vote in Congress? Please.

For a reality-based account of the Emancipation Proclamation, see historian John Hope Franklin's The Emancipation Proclamation: An Act of Justice Prologue 25/2 Summer 1993

Franklin addresses the reaction of Frederick Douglass, who was a great admirer of the radical-democratic, violent revolutionary John Brown and the best known African-American opponent of slavery before and during the Civil War, to the Proclamation. One has to wonder if Douglass's association with violent anti-slavery seditionists would makes Douglass just like the Huffington Post in the President's view. After all, Van Jones and Elizabeth Warren are far too leftie for Obama's taste.

Douglass called the Emancipation Proclamation "the first step on the part of the nation in its departure from the thraldom of the ages." Douglass, unlike Obama in that video, actually understood the political and military significance of the Proclamation, though he certainly continued to push for full emancipation. Lincoln before he was murdered supported for the 13th Constitutional Amendment barring slavery everywhere in the US.

Obama sneers in that video that the Huffington Post in 1863 would have been demanding to "run a third party guy" and so on. In fact, there was serious consideration among many Republicans of running Charles Frémont against Lincoln in the Republican primaries. Not only because of his perceived weaknesses on slavery but also because of the military problems the North was experiencing in suppressing the Confederate slaveholders' revolt.

Just to be clear: this does not illustrate how Obama, in caving and caving against to Republicans on core Democratic issues was just like Lincoln, waging a Civil War to destroy slavery and defend the American Constitution. The comparison is downright silly. What it illustrates is that the antislavery movement was serious and had real political clout and was willing to put major political pressure on the President of their own Party to fully eradicate slavery. And, to take up another of Obama's points in the video, with the 13th Amendment, the Abolitionists actually did get 100% of what they wanted in ending chattel slavery.
Franklin writes:

It is worth observing that there was no mention, in the final draft, of Lincoln's pet schemes of compensation and colonization, which were in the Preliminary Proclamation of September 22, 1862. Perhaps Lincoln was about to give up on such impracticable propositions. In the Preliminary Proclamation, the President had said that he would declare slaves in designated territories "thenceforward, and forever free." In the final draft of January 1, 1863, he was content to say that they "are, and henceforward shall be free." Nothing had been said in the preliminary draft about the use of blacks as soldiers. In the summer of 1862 the Confiscation Act had authorized the President to use blacks in any way he saw fit, and there had been some limited use of them in noncombat activities. In stating in the Proclamation that former slaves were to be received into the armed services, the President believed that he was using congressional authority to strike a mighty blow against the Confederacy.

To present the Proclamation, as Obama does in that video, as mainly about compromising with slaveowners, is just nuts. Or, more specifically, grotesquely ahistorical.

Franklin continues:

The trenchant observation by Douglass that the Emancipation Proclamation was but the first step could not have been more accurate. Although the Presidential decree would not free slaves in areas where the United States could not enforce the Proclamation, it sent a mighty signal both to the slaves and to the Confederacy that enslavement would no longer be tolerated. An important part of that signal was the invitation to the slaves to take up arms and participate in the fight for their own freedom. That more than 185,000 slaves as well as free blacks accepted the invitation indicates that those who had been the victims of thraldom were now among the most enthusiastic freedom fighters.

Meanwhile, no one appreciated better than Lincoln the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation had a quite limited effect in freeing the slaves directly. It should be remembered, however, that in the Proclamation he called emancipation "an act of justice," and in later weeks and months he did everything he could to confirm his view that it was An Act of Justice. And no one was more anxious than Lincoln to take the necessary additional steps to bring about actual freedom. Thus, he proposed that the Republican Party include in its 1864 platform a plank calling for the abolition of slavery by constitutional amendment. When he was "notified" of his renomination, as was the custom in those days, he singled out that plank in the platform calling for constitutional emancipation and pronounced it "a fitting and necessary conclusion to the final success of the Union cause." Early in 1865, when Congress sent the amendment to Lincoln for his signature, he is reported to have said, "This amendment is a King's cure for all the evils. It winds the whole thing up."

Despite the fact that the Proclamation did not emancipate the slaves and surely did not do what the Thirteenth Amendment did in winding things up, it is the Proclamation and not the Thirteenth Amendment that has been remembered and celebrated over the past 130 years. That should not be surprising. Americans seem not to take to celebrating legal documents. The language of such documents is not particularly inspiring, and they are the product of the deliberations of large numbers of people. We celebrate the Declaration of Independence, but not the ratification of the Constitution. Jefferson's words in the Declaration moved the emerging Americans in a way that Madison's committee of style failed to do in the Constitution. [my emphasis in bold]

This is the first thing I've heard Obama say that sounds like something that could have come from Shrub Bush's mouth. Up until now, he has been awfully frustrating and disappointing for progressives. In this video, he's starting to sound downright pitiful.

See also Emancipation Proclamation Mr. Lincoln and Freedom website (Lincoln Institute/Lehrman Institute; not dated, accessed 07/18/2011)

Tags: abraham lincoln, barack obama, emancipation proclamation, neo-confederate, slavery

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 7: Lincoln, slavery and race

A recent article provides a good analysis of Abraham Lincoln's position on slavery and race: What Did He Really Think About Race? by James McPherson New York Review of Books 03/29/07 issue. (The New York Review puts its articles behind subscription after a few weeks, but this one is accessible at the time of this writing.)

McPherson is reviewing The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics, a new work by James Oakes, one of the leading Civil War historians. He opens with this illustration of why this is a challenging subject:

Abraham Lincoln was "emphatically, the black man's President," wrote the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass in 1865, "the first to show any respect for their rights as men." A decade later, however, in a speech at the unveiling of an emancipation monument in Washington, Douglass described Lincoln as "preeminently the white man's President." To his largely white audience on this occasion, Douglass declared that "you are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children." Later in the same speech, Douglass brought together his Hegelian thesis and antithesis in a final synthesis. Whatever Lincoln's flaws may have been in the eyes of racial egalitarians, he said "in his heart of hearts he loathed and hated slavery." His firm wartime leadership saved the nation and freed it "from the great crime of slavery.... The hour and the man of our redemption had met in the person of Abraham Lincoln."

We'll let McPherson slide for confusing Kantian dialectics with Hegelian. But this contradictory image has given rise to various interpretations of Lincoln's positions over the decades, not all of them sound or honestly offered. Neo-Confederates have tried to argue that Lincoln was as much a racist as anyone else, as part of the Lost Cause mythology that slavery had nothing to do with the war. The idea being that a racist President would never have fought a war to abolish the Peculiar Institution.

The fundamental reality in a republic for whites that also maintained large-scale chattel slavery for most blacks, virtually no politician in the 1850s could have come to power with a straight-out abolitionist and equal rights program and hoped to be elected to Congressional office, much less the Presidency.

In any case, "sincerity" is a greatly overrated virtue in politics. Sure, I would prefer to have a Congress full of saints - who agree with me on the important issues, of course! But especially in our present-day situation, if we can't get politicians who are law-abiding and effective in getting constructive things done, I'm willing to have sainthood and sincerity take lower priorities until some Golden Age when settling for merely human government is no longer necessary. I expect it to be a long wait.

A main point of McPherson's in this essay is, in fact, the differing roles of reformers, in this case the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, and of politicians:

James Oakes believes that Lincoln possessed as much "anti-slavery conviction" as Douglass himself. "I have always hated slavery," said Lincoln in 1858, "as much as any Abolitionist." The difference between the two men was one of position and tactics, not conviction. Douglass was a radical reformer whose mission was to proclaim principles and to demand that the people and their leaders live up to them. Lincoln was a politician, a practitioner of the art of the possible, a pragmatist who subscribed to the same principles but recognized that they could only be achieved in gradual, step-by-step fashion through compromise and negotiation, in pace with progressive changes in public opinion and political realities. Oakes describes a symbiosis between the radical Douglass and the Republican Lincoln: "It is important to democracy that reformers like Frederick Douglass could say what needed to be said, but it is indispensable to democracy that politicians like Abraham Lincoln could do only what the law and the people allowed them to do." (my emphasis)

To state the obvious, pleading "the art of the possible" is far more often an excuse for not doing something that a real reason for tactical maneuvering. But it makes a good excuse because it is a reality.

But what is true of a democracy is not always true of less participative forms of government. And in the 1850s, the United States had a democracy for white men, not for women or blacks or Native Americans. Not even close. Some women had been able to vote around 1800, but that enlightened practice had largely faded by the 1850s.

That's why, even in these days where the extra-legal violence of terrorism is deeply suspect for good reasons, from today's perspective we can't dismiss the goals of old John Brown out of hand and write him off as a simple fanatic. John Brown did stand for something very much like the concept of equal rights for all people in the sense that we know it today. In actual practice, we only got to some like Brown's understanding for freedom and equality by going through the process that made Lincoln, not Brown, the Great Emancipator. But Brown also is a reminder that it's not entirely an "anachronism" (reading present standards into the past) to evaluate politics of the 1850s from the standpoint of racial and gender equality, however low either of them were on the nation's list of priorities then. The 13th and 14th Amendments did establish racial equality for men in the Constitution in a basic sense, though that reality has yet to be fulfilled today. There's an argument to be made that the 14th Amendment establishes legal equality for women, as well, though the Supreme Court has never accepted that interpretation (although I believe they came within one vote of doing so on one occasion.)

And Douglass, who was a great admirer and partial co-conspirator of Brown's who also shared his general view of human freedom, was not willing at critical moments to be pure rather than effective:

But in Douglass's view, Lincoln backslid after issuing the proclamation. Just as the President had seemed too slow in 1862 to embrace emancipation, he seemed similarly tardy in 1864 to embrace equal rights for freed slaves. For a time Douglass even supported efforts to replace Lincoln with a more radical Republican candidate for president in the election of 1864. In the end, however, when the only alternative to Lincoln was the Democratic nominee George B. McClellan, whose election might jeopardize the antislavery gains of the previous two years, Douglass came out for Lincoln. "When there was any shadow of a hope that a man of more anti-slavery conviction and policy could be elected," he wrote, "I was not for Mr. Lincoln." But with the prospect of the (miscalled) Democratic party ... clearly before us, all hesitation ought to cease, and every man who wishes well to the slave and to the country should at once rally with all the warmth and earnestness of his nature to the support of Abraham Lincoln.

And as a contemporary of Lincoln's who long survived him, Douglass' placing of Lincoln in the context of his times - "context" also being a favorite excuse of the reactionary and the complacent - is hard to ignore:

Looking back in 1876, Douglass acknowledged that while from the standpoint of the abolitionists "Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent," he was considerably to the left of the political center on the slavery issue. "Measure him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult," and Lincoln "was swift, zealous, radical, and determined." Oakes carries this point a step further. Lincoln the politician was a master of misdirection, of appearing to appease conservatives while manipulating them toward acceptance of radical policies. Douglass and many other contemporaries failed to appreciate or even to understand Lincoln's political legerdemain. Many historians have similarly failed. But Oakes both understands and appreciates it, and he analyzes with more clarity and precision than anyone else the "typically backhanded way" in which Lincoln handled slavery, which "obscured the radicalism of his move." (my emphasis)

Douglass was the leading African-American abolitionist of his time. The fact that he regarded Lincoln as compared to most whites as "swift, zealous, radical, and determined" to abolish slavery says a lot.

McPherson, citing Oakes, brings up a wrinkle that I've never seen mentioned before. When Lincoln reversed the local emancipation action by the flamboyant and mercurial John Charles Fremont in Missouri early in the war, he also used that action to established the practice and principle that the "confiscation" of slave property by the Union Army meant that the human being so confiscated were thereby liberated from slavery.

This doesn't get at the question of whether Lincoln's motivation in that case, fear that the border slave states would go over to the Confederacy, was well-founded. But it does give an important perspective on Lincoln's view of slavery.

McPherson provides other examples that give similar glimpses into Lincoln's thinking on this issue.

While it doesn't resolve all the questions around it, Lincoln did use white racism as a way to, as McPherson puts it, "separate the issue of bondage from that of race." That is, to reassure white voters that they could hate both slavery and black people. He gives this as one example:

Lincoln's racial attitudes were also a target of Douglass's criticisms until 1864. On this subject, Oakes offers some original and incisive insights. The main charge of racism against Lincoln focuses on his statements during the debates with Stephen A. Douglas in 1858. Lincoln rejected Douglas's accusation that he favored racial equality — a volatile issue in Illinois that threatened Lincoln's political career if the charge stuck. Goaded by Douglas's repeated playing of the race card, Lincoln declared in one of the debates that "I am not, nor have ever been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races." It would be easy, comments Oakes, "to string such quotations together and show up Lincoln as a run-of-the-mill white supremacist." But in private, Lincoln was much less racist than most whites of his time. He was "disgusted by the race-baiting of the Douglas Democrats" and he "made the humanity of blacks central to his antislavery argument." In a speech at Chicago in 1858, Lincoln pleaded: "Let us discard all this quibbling about...this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position," and instead "once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal."

Whether that approach of partially using white racism to oppose slavery - for many and probably most whites, absence of slavery meant the absence of blacks or at least no more than a small presence - was the best political strategy is a meaningful argument. But it's also important to recognize that there was more to Lincoln's public pronouncements on race to an all-white electorate than simple racism or bigotry.

McPherson puts Lincoln's public support of colonizing American blacks to Africa, a scheme which was always a crackpot idea though it had wide support among white abolitionists, in a similar light:

After issuing the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, Lincoln never again mentioned colonization. He also stopped using racism as a strategic diversion. By March 1863 he strongly endorsed the recruitment of black soldiers to fight for the Union, and in response to prodding by Douglass and other abolitionists he supported passage of legislation to equalize the pay of black and white soldiers. In the last year of the war, the President also endorsed giving the right to vote to two overlapping groups: literate African-Americans and all black veterans of the Union army.

When Lincoln came under enormous pressure in the summer of 1864 to waive his insistence on Southern acceptance of the abolition of slavery as a precondition for peace negotiations, he eloquently refused to do so. "No human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done," he insisted. By that time more than one hundred thousand black soldiers and sailors were fighting for the Union. "If they stake their lives for us they must be prompted by the strongest motive," the promise of freedom. "And the promise being made, must be kept." To jettison emancipation would ruin the Union cause itself.... Why should they give their lives for us, with full notice of our purpose to betray them?... I should be damned in time & in eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends & enemies, come what will. (my emphasis)

Tags: abraham lincoln, civil war, emancipation proclamation, frederick douglass, james mcpherson, slavery, stephen oakes, us civil war