CH. XIX.] LINCOLN AND SEWARD 211 was waning, he was stronger with the country than with the men at Washington. The people did not come in personal contact with him, and estimated him by his formal state papers and his acts. Posterity, that has seen his ultimate success, bends to the same judgment and looks with open admiration on the patience and determination with which he bore his burden during this gloomy winter. The hand that draws the grotesque trait of Lincoln may disappoint the heroworshipper, but the truth of the story requires this touch which helps to explain the words of disparagement that showered upon him, and serves as a justification for those who could not in the winter of 1862-63 see with the eyes of to-day. Had his other qualities been enhanced by Washington's dignity of manner, not so many had been deceived; but as it was we cannot wonder that his contemporaries failed to appreciate his greatness. Since his early environment in fostering his essential capabilities had not bestowed on him the external characteristics usually attributed to transcendent leaders of men, it was not suspected that in him had developed a germ of extraordinary mental power. Seward, with his amiable and genial manners, was, I believe, a most agreeable man in council. Fertile in suggestion, he must, in spite of his personal failings, have been especially acceptable to Lincoln, whose slow-working mind was undoubtedly often assisted to a decision by the various expedients which his Secretary of State put before him. It is frequently easier for an executive to choose one out of several courses than to invent a policy. The members of the cabinet who filled the public eye were Seward, Chase, and Stanton, and they exact a like attention from the historian. It was either on Seward or on Stanton that the President leaned the most; and the weight of evidence, confirmed by the cir Western jury lawyer. But he is an unutterable calamity to us where he is. Only the army can save us. Congress is not a council of state. It is a mere district representation of men of district reputations. It has passed some good laws to enable the President to do the work, but the nation does not look up to it for counsel or lead." - Adams's Dana, vol. ii. p. 264. cumstance of his urbanity, points to the Secretary of State as the favorite counsellor.1 It will be remembered that the President's proclamation of emancipation of September 22, 1862, was in the form of a warning; it was a declaration that the slaves in States or parts of States whose people were still in rebellion, January 1, 1863, against the federal government should be free. The new year had come, and his purpose had been proclaimed one hundred days before. It remained for him to carry out the design that he had gravely announced. While the form and the words of the preliminary proclamation seemed to expect that the Confederates or some of them might lay down their arms to avoid incurring the threatened penalty, no such illusion was really entertained. It had become well understood that the States of the Southern Confederacy were earnest in their desire to secure their independence, and that their people were united in this aim. If therefore the proclamation had any effect at all on the Southern people, it made them more determined in their resistance by giving force to the argument that the war of the North was a crusade against their social institutions. The President regarded the proclamation "as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing [the] rebellion," and notwithstanding the defeat of his party at the ballot-box and the defeat of his principal army in the field in the interim of the hundred days, he fulfilled his promise and promulgated, January 1, 1863, the complement of his preliminary edict. "I do order and declare," it ran, "that all persons held as slaves within said designated States and parts of States [a list of these is given in the preceding paragraph] are, and henceforward shall be, free; and that the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons." To obviate an objection that had been made by the Demo 1 See F. Bancroft, Polit. Sci. Quar., vol. vi. p. 722. THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION 213 CH. XIX.] crats and to allay the not unreasonable dread that the blacks, incited by the proclamation, would rise against their masters and perpetrate the horrors of a servile revolt, this paragraph was added: "And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence; and I recommend to them that in all cases, when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages." In the next paragraph the President declared that the liberated slaves would be accepted as soldiers to garrison forts, positions, stations, and concluded with an invocation suggested by Chase: "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." 1 There was, as every one knows, no authority for the proclamation in the letter of the Constitution, nor was there any statute which warranted it. It imports much to see how Lincoln, who had the American reverence for the Constitution and the Anglo-Saxon veneration for law, justified this departure from the letter of the organic act and from sacred precedent. "I am naturally anti-slavery," he wrote. "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think and feel, and yet I have never understood that the presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling. I did under stand, however, that my oath to preserve the Constitution to the best of my ability imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every indispensable means, that government — that nation of which that Constitution was the organic law. Was it possible to lose the nation and yet preserve the Constitution? By general law, life and limb must be protected, yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I felt that measures 1 The three words in brackets are Lincoln's, the rest Chase's. See Warden's Chase, p. 513; on the making of the proclamation, see Nicolay and Hay, vol. vi. pp. 405-430. otherwise unconstitutional might become lawful by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution through the preservation of the nation. Right or wrong, I assumed this ground. . . . I could not feel that, to the best of my ability, I had even tried to preserve the Constitution, if, to save slavery or any minor matter, I should permit the wreck of government, country, and Constitution all together. When in March and May and July, 1862, I made earnest and successive appeals to the Border States to favor compensated emancipation, I believed the indispensable necessity for military emancipation and arming the blacks would come unless averted by that measure. They declined the proposition, and I was, in my best judgment, driven to the alternative of either surrendering the Union, and with it the Constitution, or of laying strong hand upon the colored element. I chose the latter." 1 With opponents who maintained that the emancipation proclamation was unconstitutional, he argued: "I think differently. I think the Constitution invests its commander-in-chief with the law of war in time of war. The most that can be said if so much—is that slaves are property. Is there — has there ever been any question that by the law of war, property, both of enemies and friends, may be taken when needed? And is it not needed whenever taking it helps us, or hurts the enemy? Armies, the world over, destroy enemies' property when they cannot use it; and even destroy their own to keep it from the enemy. Civilized belligerents do all in their power to help themselves or hurt the enemy, except a few things regarded as barbarous or cruel."2 The event manifested the wisdom of Lincoln's policy. The proclamation did not incite servile insurrection, although it completed the process, which the war had commenced, of making every slave in the South the friend of the North. 1 Letter of April 4, 1864, Lincoln, Complete Works, vol. ii. p. 508; Nicolay and Hay, vol. vi. p. 430. 2 Letter of Aug. 26, 1863, Lincoln, Complete Works, vol. ii. p. 397. CH. XIX.] THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION 215 Every negro knew that if he got within the lines of the Federal armies, the aspiration of his life would be realized; he would become a free man. Before the close of the year there were in the United States military service 100,000 former slaves, "about one-half of which number actually [bore] arms in the ranks."1 Without the policy of emancipation, these negroes would probably have remained at the South raising food for the able-bodied white men, all of whom were forced into the Confederate army by the rigorous conscription. The proclamation, making clear as it did the real issue of the war, was of incontestable value in turning English sentiment into the right channel. It already had the approval of the House of Representatives,2 and, when enforced by victories in the field, received the support of the majority of the Northern people. It does not appear that the preliminary proclamation could have been better timed. The trend of public sentiment makes it evident that it was issued soon enough, and that the President showed discretion in annulling the acts of Frémont, Cameron, and Hunter; and since it was conceded that the edict ought not to be promulgated except after a victory, there would have been danger in delay beyond September, 1862, for no military success as important in its results as Antietam was obtained until July 3, 1863, when Meade defeated Lee at Gettysburg. In addition to military emancipation, the policy of the President comprised the giving of freedom to the slaves gradually in a way strictly legal, the compensation of the owners by the federal government and the colonization of the liberated negroes. In his annual message to Congress of December 1, 1862, taking as his text, "Without slavery the rebellion could never have existed; without slavery it could not continue," he made an argument in advocacy of his policy, which, in his grasp of the subject, as tested by suc 1 Lincoln, Annual Message, Dec. 8, 1863 |