Father Abraham
Lincoln's Relentless Struggle to End Slavery
by Richard Striner
Oxford, 320 pp., $28
IN THIS ESTIMABLE VOLUME, Richard Striner effectively demolishes the fashionable myths of Lincoln the Reluctant Emancipator and Lincoln the White Supremacist. Deeply committed to the antislavery cause, the sixteenth president was, as Striner persuasively argues, "a fervent idealist" and "an artist in the Machiavellian uses of power."
Lincoln loathed and despised slavery early on. "I have always hated slavery I think as much as any abolitionist," he declared during his unsuccessful quest for a Senate seat in 1858. Six years later, as he prepared his bid for a second term in the White House, he wrote a public letter avowing "I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel."
But Lincoln also revered the Constitution and felt bound to abide by it, even the odious fugitive slave clause. To his best friend, Kentucky slaveholder Joshua Speed, he confided in 1855: "I . . . acknowledge your rights and my obligations, under the constitution, in regard to your slaves. I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down, and caught, and carried back to their stripes, and unrewarded toils; but I bite my lip and keep quiet." That sight was "a continual torment to me; and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio, or any other slave-border. It is hardly fair for you to assume, that I have no interest in a thing which has, and continually exercises, the power of making me miserable. You ought rather to appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the constitution and the Union."
As president, Lincoln would have issued the Emancipation Proclamation much earlier than he did if he had acted on his own wishes. But he felt bound by his oath of office to uphold the Constitution, which meant preserving the Union. If he moved prematurely, he rightly feared driving some or all of the loyal slave states (Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware) into the arms of the Confederacy, and thus losing the war. Only when those states were securely cemented to the Union did he announce the emancipation policy. Critics who accuse Lincoln of being soft on slavery denounce the pragmatic justification of military necessity he gave for taking that step. But as he cogently explained, the only constitutional ground for ordering emancipation was his authority under the war power. Because emancipation was legitimate as a measure for undermining the Confederacy, he restricted the scope of the proclamation to those areas still in rebellion. Exempt were the Border States and parts of the Confederacy occupied by Union forces. Greasing the skids for the proclamation, Lincoln wrote a public letter a month before its issuance that, as Striner emphasizes, has been widely misunderstood:
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to 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; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. . . . I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.
This letter was not a definitive statement of Lincoln's innermost feelings about the aims of the war but, rather, a political utterance designed to smooth the way for the proclamation, which he had already written and intended to promulgate as soon as the Union army won a major victory. He knew full well that millions of northerners and border state residents would object to transforming the war into an abolitionist crusade. They were willing to fight to preserve the Union but not to free the slaves. As president, Lincoln had to make the mighty act of emancipation palatable to them. By assuring conservatives that emancipation was simply a means to preserve the Union, Lincoln hoped to minimize the white backlash that he knew would come.
