Via John Fea, I read Allen Guelzo’s National Review piece on “Emancipation: The Un-Holiday.”
The Emancipation Proclamation did more, and for more Americans, than any other presidential document before or since. It declared that over 3 million black slaves (representing some $3 billion in capital investment) would “thenceforward, and forever, be free” (thus transforming that $3 billion into a net zero, overnight) and turned the Civil War from being a police action against the breakaway southern Confederacy into a crusade for freedom. It was, as Lincoln himself said, “the central act of my administration and the great event of the nineteenth century.”
Still, there will be no federal holiday, no emancipation parades, no proclamation fireworks.
Guelzo drifts about a bit after that, dickishly imagining that this is due in part to black Americans’ unwillingness to celebrate the act of a white president or some such. It’s a National Review article, after all, and in the pages of the National Review, apparently, one cannot praise emancipation without sniffing about the supposed ingratitude of the formerly enslaved. Parsing all the ironies of that would take more time than we have here, so let’s just commend Guelzo for those first two paragraphs quoted above and be done with that.
But let me also take his essay as an excuse to link back to an earlier post providing an eyewitness view from the eve of emancipation.
Nathaniel Brown was a Baptist missionary who returned home in the 1850s to run The American Baptist and Freeman, an abolitionist newspaper. Along with other abolitionist Baptist clergymen, he prepared a “memorial” urging President Lincoln to declare universal emancipation as a matter of justice.
Brown and two of his colleagues me with the president and presented their “memorial” on New Year’s Eve, 1862. Brown recorded an account of that conversation in his diary.
I posted the whole account five years ago, noting:
It’s a fascinating glimpse of history — the accessibility and informality of the White House, the behind-the-scenes look at Lincoln, the idealistic zeal of the abolitionists. I particularly enjoyed seeing the contrast between the clergymen’s earnest certainty and the president’s irony and his sense of responsibility for consequences. Reading this, I can’t help but think that they don’t make presidents — or political preachers — like they used to.
If you’re at all interested in Lincoln, history or abolitionists, you’ll want to read the whole thing.
Here’s a brief taste:
“You come to me as God’s ministers, and you are positive that you know exactly what God’s will is. You tell me that slavery is a sin; but other’s of God’s ministers say the opposite – which am I to believe? You assume that you only have the knowledge of God’s will.”
“No, Mr. President,” said Dr. Cheever, “we only refer to God’s word, which speaks plainly on this point. The Golden Rule is sufficient.”
The President said to Dr. Cheever, that he presumed he was the writer of the memorial. Mr. Goodell said that the other members of the Committee had a part in it.
“Well, Dr. Cheever, I must say that you are a very illogical reasoner, at least, that is my opinion – ha! ha! ha!” The President seemed to have a habit, whenever he said anything sharp or sarcastic, of finishing it up with a sort of forced, mechanical laugh – a pretty good imitation, too, of a right hearty, spontaneous laugh – to show that he was in good humor. This made his sarcasm appear not at all offensive, but rather as good natured pleasantry, and Dr. Cheever could not but thank him for his frankness. Several times his laugh was so earnest, that, mingled with his wit, it succeeded in bringing the whole Committee into a tolerably sympathetic he-haw.
The President said all his convictions and feelings were against slavery. “But,” said he, “I am not so certain that God’s views and feelings in respect to it are the same as mine. If his feelings were like mine, how could he have permitted it to remain so long? I am obliged to believe that God may not, after all, look upon it in the same light as I do.”
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