Peegee

President Abraham Lincoln, known as the “Great Emancipator,” is widely regarded as a defender of black freedom who supported social equality of the races and led us into the American Civil War to free the slaves. According to Lincoln, “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Lincoln did,in fact, view slavery as an evil institution, but did not seek to abolish slavery because it was morally despicable. Rather, he only supported an end to slavery when he felt it became necessary to win the war.

Lincoln’s first action as President was to persuade the States to ratify a constitutional amendment that would have legalized and preserved the institution of slavery. The proposed amendment, “The Corwin Amendment,” stated the following: “No Amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of the State.” Slavery, to Lincoln, was a “domestic institution” under this Amendment. The Amendment,of course, was never formally adopted, as Southern legislatures were already prepared to secede from the Union to express their discontent with federal dominion over their interests.Lincoln opposed slavery’s expansion into America’s new territories not based on any moral duty to uphold the Natural Law, or the need to right inherent wrongs. Instead, Lincoln simply wanted to keep African-Americans out of the West and keep the white and black races separate. In 1857,prior to becoming President, Lincoln expressed his opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would have admitted Kansas into the Union as a slave state: “There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people to the idea of indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races . . .

A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation, but as an immediate separation is impossible, the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together”. Lincoln went on to state that “if white and black people never get together in Kansas, they will never mix blood in Kansas.” Moreover, to alleviate racial tension in the United States, Lincoln favored the deportation of the African-American population to settlements in either Africa or Central America. According to Lincoln:

"Racial separation must be effected by colonization of the country’s blacks to foreign land. The enterprise is a difficult one, but where there is a will there is a way . . . Let us be brought to believe it is morally right and, at the same time, favorable to, or, at least, not against, our interests, to transfer the African to his native clime, and we shall find a way to do it, however great the task may be.

When the South began seceding from the Union, Lincoln met with leaders from Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware, using slavery as a bargaining device. Lincoln promised that the federal government would not interfere with slavery in those states as long as they remained in the Union. Some border states, albeit temporarily, agreed to remain in the Union. Therefore, it is quite clear that Lincoln was willing to support the existence of slavery so long as his federal government stayed intact.

Lincoln was reluctant to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. He feared that it would conflict with his goal of “saving the Union,” or rather,expanding the size of the federal government. In fact, Lincoln actually issued a “Preliminary Proclamation” to the Confederacy on September 22nd 1862, warning the Confederate States that if they continued in rebellion, he would end slavery in the South on January 1st 1863 (the date on which the Emancipation Proclamation was issued). Therefore, if the slave states had rejoined the Union, Lincoln would have permitted them to keep their slaves. After issuing the Proclamation, Lincoln declared:

"My paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union."

Furthermore, Lincoln saw the Proclamation as a wartime measure to weaken the South, not as a step toward the abolition of involuntary servitude. If the slaves were freed, Lincoln believed that they would revolt against their masters and bolster the Union Army. Lincoln publicly announced that the Emancipation Proclamation was “sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution upon military necessity”.

Moreover, the Emancipation Proclamation was rather limited in its scope, and had very little effect by itself. The Proclamation applied only in the Confederacy, and had no legal justification, as the Confederate states had already seceded. Even after the Proclamation, eight hundred thousand African-Americans were still enslaved in the border states of Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia, as well as in the North,with the blessings of the Great Emancipator. In essence, the Proclamation supported slavery after its issuance.

The Union Army forced emancipated African-Americans to enter into yearly labor contracts with their masters to avoid “vagrancy” and “idleness.”Once they were under contract, the blacks were not allowed to leave their respective plantations without permission. This system of forced free labor spread throughout the parts of the South that were dominated by the American Army, and lasted until the end of the Civil War.

Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, therefore, achieved little in terms of African-American freedom. The federal government did not officially recognize emancipation until Congress enacted the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution on December 6th 1865. By that time,slavery had been abolished in Missouri, Maryland, Louisiana, and Arkansas; and Tennessee and Kentucky were both in the process of ending slavery.

- Judge Andrew Napolitano