Lincoln’s September 22, 1862, Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery. It only announced that slavery would end in the Confederacy if the rebellion in the South did not cease by January 1, 1863. The Proclamation could be dismissed as nothing more than a press release, but it put the Federal government squarely in opposition to a future for American slavery. This reversed eight decades of the Federal government standing as the most powerful guardian of the slave owners’ control of blacks.1
Support for making emancipation a principal war aim had been weak in much of the country at the start of the war. Northerners might personally oppose slavery, but they understood that the Founding Fathers had sanctioned its existence. Many believed that only states had the power to end slavery and that Federal emancipation was unconstitutional.2
Lincoln showing his cabinet the Emancipation Proclamation for the first time.
Abraham Lincoln was a lawyer and a lifelong opponent of slavery. He understood that in normal times it was beyond his power to unilaterally free the slaves. The Constitution would have to change to accomplish that. When the Confederates attacked Fort Sumter, “normal times” ended. Lincoln told his advisers that he now had extraordinary power to take action to win the war.3
Within months of the outbreak of fighting, Lincoln authorized the “confiscation” of slaves being used by the Confederates to build fortifications. This essentially freed those slaves although it did not define what their new status was. A year later, the President expanded the “confiscation” to the slaves of rebels, but many in Congress opposed him. Immigrant-rich New York City’s own congressional delegation split on the issue. It voted two for freeing the slaves of Confederate soldiers, four against, and two abstaining.4
The heart of opposition to emancipation was the Democratic Party. Before the war, that party linked the interests of Northern workers, immigrants, and Southern slave owners. Party members lived inside a Democratic ideological bubble. They read Democratic newspapers and socialized at Democratic gatherings. The Democratic press was notoriously racist in a country where racism was the common intellectual currency.5
Immigrants driven into the Democratic Party by the Know Nothing surge of the 1850s read that slavery was the only institution preventing slaves from rising up and murdering thousands of whites in a “servile insurrection”, or slave uprising. They were warned by the Democratic newspapers that freed slaves would stream north to crowd immigrants out of the miserable slums that were the only piece of America allowed to many of the foreign-born.6
The Irish were particularly susceptible to this message of fear. They sat at the very bottom of the North’s hierarchy. Sometimes depicted as a gorilla-like “race” inferior to the dominant Anglo-Saxons, the Irish clung to a precarious position as white men in a country defined by race. Irish immigrants expressed fears that emancipation could be used by anti-immigrant nativists to replace them with the cheap labor of freed blacks. Irish workingmen in cities like New York feared that their labor unions, which had carved out living wages for some low-skilled workers, would be undermined by a flood of black refugees from the South who were already being used as strikebreakers by big business.7
Cartoons like this one routinely depicted the Irish as subhuman gorillas. This cartoon shows both the Irish and the freed slave as “equals” in subordination. This was drawn by Thomas Nast for Harper’s Weekly.
Racist views were hardly confined to the immigrant poor. They were also common among the well-educated native-born. For example, as emancipation loomed on the horizon, a select committee of the House of Representatives issued a report calling for the removal of freed slaves from the United States. According to the Congressmen “the highest interests of the white race, whether Anglo-Saxon, Celt, or Scandinavian, require that the whole country should be held and occupied by those [white] races alone…” The committee said of the relations between whites and blacks that; “There are irreconcilable differences between the two races that separate them as with a wall of fire.” Because of the unbridgeable divide “The home of the African must not be within the limits of the present territory of the Union. The Anglo-American looks upon every acre of our present domain as intended for him and not the negro.” This report, advocating mass deportation of freedmen from a House committee with a majority from the party of Lincoln, expressed an attitude of racial supremacy with which millions of white Americans concurred. 8
The progress towards emancipation in the last days of 1862 would cause many Irish immigrants to reconsider their support for what they were increasingly referring to as “Lincoln’s War”. In this, they were not very different from millions of the disaffected native-born. But when this racial fear was coupled with a history of anti-Irish discrimination and a growing alienation based on battlefront developments, conditions for a violent spasm converged.
Videos:
Here is a short discussion by historian Bruce Levine about the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation:
Sources
1. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America by Allen C. Guelzo published by Simon & Schuster (2006); Emancipating Lincoln: The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory (Nathan I Huggins Lectures) by Harold Holzer published by Harvard University Press (February 2012)
2. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America by Allen C. Guelzo published by Simon & Schuster (2006); Emancipating Lincoln: The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory (Nathan I Huggins Lectures) by Harold Holzer published by Harvard University Press (February 2012)
3. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America by Allen C. Guelzo published by Simon & Schuster (2006); Emancipating Lincoln: The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory (Nathan I Huggins Lectures) by Harold Holzer published by Harvard University Press (February 2012)
4. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America by Allen C. Guelzo published by Simon & Schuster (2006); Emancipating Lincoln: The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory (Nathan I Huggins Lectures) by Harold Holzer published by Harvard University Press (February 2012)
5. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America by Allen C. Guelzo published by Simon & Schuster (2006); Emancipating Lincoln: The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory (Nathan I Huggins Lectures) by Harold Holzer published by Harvard University Press (February 2012)
6. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America by Allen C. Guelzo published by Simon & Schuster (2006); Emancipating Lincoln: The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory (Nathan I Huggins Lectures) by Harold Holzer published by Harvard University Press (February 2012)
7. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America by Allen C. Guelzo published by Simon & Schuster (2006); Emancipating Lincoln: The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory (Nathan I Huggins Lectures) by Harold Holzer published by Harvard University Press (February 2012)
8. Lincoln’s Hundred Days by Luis P. Masur published by Belknap/Harvard (2012) p. 50; Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America by Allen C. Guelzo published by Simon & Schuster (2006); Emancipating Lincoln: The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory (Nathan I Huggins Lectures) by Harold Holzer published by Harvard University Press (February 2012)
