The great emancipator

LINCOLN’S EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION: THE END OF SLAVERY IN AMERICA

By Allen C. Guelzo

Simon & Schuster, $26, 352 pages

REVIEWED BY MICHAEL P. RICCARDS

It is hard to believe there is anything more that one can say about Abraham Lincoln — the most researched figure in American history. Allen Guelzo of Eastern University in Pennsylvania has already given us an award-winning study of the great executive in his “Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President.” Now he follows up that volume with an analysis of the Emancipation Proclamation, a book that is really an erudite vehicle for a major study of the slavery issue during the Civil War. Clearly Lincoln is the author’s hero, and his analysis of the president’s decisions is almost always through Lincoln’s eyes, and not those of his critics.

Since the 1960s, the Proclamation has been the subject of a variety of random assaults by revisionist historians, both white and black, who view the measure as a tepid, uninspiring statement that reflected simply the political expediency and the racist attitudes of both the president and his society.

Writing earlier, one famous historian, Richard Hofstadter of Columbia University, set the tone by saying that it had “the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.” He maintained that the document was the work of a politician who was more concerned with the ambitions of free white workers, the class from whence he came, than the immorality of black bondage.

Why was it that the author of the majestic Gettysburg Address and the stirring inaugural speeches could not reach similar rhetorical heights in the writing of the Proclamation? It was too bland and too lawyerlike to stir history, we are told — usually by our contemporaries.

Yet Mr. Guelzo reminds us of some important historical background. Unlike almost all of his predecessors in the presidential office, Lincoln honestly detested and consistently opposed slavery all of his adult life, and had proposed its termination in the District of Columbia when he was a one-term congressman. There could be no doubt that he hated slavery and wished that it would shrivel up and simply go away.

When in the 1850s, however, slavery seemed to be perched to expand into the new western territories, Lincoln stood firm in his opposition. And in the interregnum period between James Buchanan’s term and Lincoln’s inauguration, it was Lincoln who made the shaky Republican Party stand tall and not compromise on the issue of allowing the expansion of slavery into those territories, thus risking secession.

When the war came, the radicals in Congress along with Gens. John C. Fremont and David Hunter wished to treat the slaves as contraband, targets for confiscation by the army. Lincoln, desperately trying to mollify the loyal border states, refused to concur. He noted that any such steps were in his realm alone as commander in chief.

Mr. Guelzo labors long and hard in telling the tales of Lincoln’s attempts at getting the border states to accept federal compensation for emancipation, and in getting blacks to accept colonization to South America. He was consistently unsuccessful in both cases. In the midst of conflict, he wanted a solution that was gradual and voluntary for both, but his patience never paid off.

So faced with those failures and with the increasingly harsh realities of a prolonged war, he played his last card. The president resorted to emancipation by executive proclamation, despite the intense legal arguments raised. He faced two major challenges — a possible revolt by Gen. George B. McClellan’s army against his decision and a court challenge to the uncertain “war powers” doctrine that he came to embrace.

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