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The Emancipation Proclamation
Contributing teacher:
Bruce Baskind
Time period: 1861–65
Point
Eric Foner considers the Emancipation Proclamation—proclaimed in September 1862 but not in effect until January 1, 1863— to have been the turning point of the Civil War (1861–65), of the history of slavery, and for President Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) himself. The Emancipation Proclamation accelerated the exodus of slaves from the plantations, denying the Confederacy a certain amount of labor and undermining the institution of slavery in the loyal border states as well as in the states "then in rebellion." It also began the enlistment and use of African American soldiers, providing the North with fresh troops, who would fight courageously to abolish slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation changed the original aim of the war from simply restoring the Union to abolishing slavery.
As for the president himself, the pre-Proclamation Lincoln had subscribed to many of the racist views about African Americans that were then common, viewed the purpose of the war as a struggle to reunify the nation rather than a crusade to end slavery, supported a proposal for the colonization of African Americans in Africa, and tried unsuccessfully to move the border states toward a plan for gradual emancipation of slaves with compensation to their owners by the federal government. After the Proclamation, however, Lincoln would never again contemplate colonization or negotiate with the border states. He became the driving force behind the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, abolishing slavery throughout the United States. If he remained a racist—from our modern point of view—he still seems to have moved toward support of full citizenship rights for the freedmen, what would become the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
Explaining his decision to issue the Proclamation, Lincoln said, "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me." But what was it that controlled Lincoln and moved him toward issuing the Proclamation? Was it the radicals in his party or the fact that the war was going badly for the Union? Foner suggests that it was actually the slaves who "took actions that propelled a reluctant White America [and their President] down the road to emancipation."
Counterpoint
When W. E. B. DuBois wrote his classic Black Reconstruction (Philadelphia: Saifer, 1935), he quoted a contemporary historian who proposed that "American Negroes are the only people in the history of the world, so far as I know, that ever became free without any effort of their own. . . ." Despite Du Bois's attempts to demonstrate that blacks were "far from being the inert recipients of freedom at the hands of philanthropists," the implicit view that African Americans played no crucial role in emancipation or in shaping the events of the Civil War dominated the historiographical landscape. It is not true, however, that most historians explicitly argued this point. Rather, by and large certain that African Americans were inferior and that slavery had been a fairly benign institution, historians before the mid-1950s were frankly not very interested in what blacks had done, said, or thought. As Dudley Taylor Cornish put it in The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861–1865 (New York: Norton, 1966), "Men living in a Jim Crow society tend to write Jim Crow history"—and there was no place in that segregated country for a history of the Civil War that made African Americans important players.
With the modern civil-rights movement's powerful confrontation of Jim Crow, old assumptions fell and new questions about slavery and the Civil War needed to be asked. The publication of Kenneth Stampp's The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Knopf, 1956) began to take historians in a new direction. As Foner has written, "Stampp depicted the plantation as an arena of persistent conflict between masters concerned mainly with maximizing their income and profits and slaves in a constant state of semirebellion." Historians began to seek to learn more about these defiant slaves, their world, and their behavior.
This new focus became applied to studies of the Civil War. Primarily through the work of Ira Berlin and others in Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), historians have learned a great deal about the behavior of slaves before the war, during the early years of the war, and after the Emancipation Proclamation. What emerged from this investigation is what Foner called a new synthesis "that sees slavery as the most crucial problem of antebellum American life and the fundamental cause of the Civil War, and the myriad consequences of emancipation as the central themes of the war and Reconstruction."
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