Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation Not First

History has documented that Lincoln was not the first to write an Emancipation Proclamation. Actually he may have been the third. In May, 1861, General Benjamin F. Butler, a strong opponent of slavery, was placed in command of Fort Monroe, Virginia. Soon afterwards, runaway slaves began to appear at the fort seeking protection. The slave owners demanded that the runaways should be returned. Butler refused, issuing a statement that he considered the slaves to be "contraband of war". Butler's action was welcomed by those involved in the struggle against slavery and he immediately became a favorite with Radical Republicans.

Abraham Lincoln believed that Butler's action was unconstitutional. However, after a Cabinet meeting it was decided not to reprimand Butler. Three months later, Major General John C. Fremont, the commander of the Union Army in St. Louis proclaimed that all slaves owned by Confederates in Missouri were free. This time Lincoln decided to ask Fremont to modify his order and free only slaves owned by Missourians actively working for the South. In August 1861, Congress authorized the confiscation of slaves used to aid the rebellion in the First Confiscation Act. On the 30th of that month, Union General Fremont issued a proclamation freeing all slaves in Missouri that belonged to secessionists. In a letter dated September 11, Lincoln ordered Fremont to change his proclamation to conform to the First Confiscation Act. The letter was widely published in the newspapers, and Lincoln received many letters condemning his decision and expressing support for Fremont.

When John C. Fremont refused to back down he was sacked. Lincoln wrote to Fremont: "Can it be pretended that it is any longer the government of the U.S. - any government of Constitution and laws - wherein a General, or a President, may make permanent rules of property by proclamation." Fremont was replaced by the conservative General Henry Halleck. He immediately issued an order forbidding runaway slaves from seeking permission to be protected by the Union Army. The complete Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress consists of approximately 20,000 documents (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/malhome.html).

The situation was repeated in May, 1862, when General David Hunter began enlisting black soldiers in the occupied district under his control. Soon afterwards Hunter issued a statement that all slaves owned by Confederates in his area (Georgia, Florida and South Carolina) were free. Lincoln was furious and despite the pleas of Salmon Chase, the Secretary of the Treasury, Lincoln instructed him to disband the 1st South Carolina (African Descent) regiment and to retract his proclamation. Again, Lincoln was forced to issue a public statement revoking the proclamation. He concluded his statement, however, by urging the slave-holding border states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri to "'adopt a gradual abolishment of slavery,'" as encouraged by Congress's Joint Resolution of March 1862.

Most members of the Republican Party believed that the Constitution protected slavery in the states. However, some Radical Republicans such as Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner, argued that after the outbreak of the American Civil War the president had the power to abolish slavery in the United States. Radical Republicans were furious with Lincoln for sacking John C. Fremont. The Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, William Fessenden, described Lincoln's actions as "a weak and unjustifiable concession in the Union men of the border states. Whereas Charles Sumner wrote to Lincoln complaining about his actions and remarked how sad it was "to have the power of a god and not use it godlike".

On 19th August, 1862, Horace Greeley wrote an open letter to the Abraham Lincoln in the New York Tribune about forcing David Hunter to retract his proclamation. Greeley criticized the president for failing to make slavery the dominant issue of the war and compromising moral principles for political motives. Lincoln famously replied on 22nd August, "My paramount object 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."

William Lee Miller's "Lincoln's Virtues" is over shadowed of another study, Lerone Bennett Jr.'s "Forced Into Glory", a full-scale assault on Lincoln's reputation that paints Lincoln as a supporter of slavery and an inveterate racist. If Bennett's book is a somewhat unbalanced prosecutor's brief, Miller offers the case for the defense. Miller acknowledges that Lincoln opposed allowing blacks in Illinois to vote, hold office or interracial marriages with whites, and that he never called for repeal of the state's draconian Black Laws, which severely restricted the rights of the small black population. He points out that most of Lincoln's racist statements were defensive responses to Democrats' far more overt and insidious appeals to racism.

In the great 1858 Senate campaign, Lincoln's rival, Stephen A. Douglas, repeatedly insisted that blacks were not entitled to share in the inalienable rights cited in the Declaration of Independence. To this, Lincoln responded that blacks might not merit political equality but that the natural rights enumerated by Jefferson applied to all mankind. Miller makes clear Lincoln's deep hatred of slavery. Regarding race, however, his defense is not entirely successful. The problem with this argument was pointed out half a century ago by Richard Hofstadter in his brilliant essay on Lincoln in "The American Political Tradition." How could blacks exercise and defend their natural rights while denied the vote, the right to testify in court and access to education, as they were in Illinois?

In his great Springfield speech of 1854, Lincoln asserted that he would prefer to send the slaves, if freed,"to Liberia -- to their own native land." Lincoln's support of a policy that might be called the ethnic cleansing of America was no momentary fancy. He promoted it in numerous prewar speeches, two State of the Union addresses, several cabinet meetings and a notorious exchange with black leaders at the White House in 1862. Lincoln's bias should not blind us to his many virtues, yet it cannot be denied that, like many of his contemporaries, he held prejudiced views regarding blacks even as he believed that slavery was a crime.
Despite this public dispute with Horace Greeley, Lincoln was already reconsidering his views on the power of the president to abolish slavery. He wrote that the events of the war had been "fundamental and astounding". He admitted that these events had changed his mind on emancipation. He was helped in this by William Whiting, a War Department solicitor, who told him that in his opinion, the president's war powers gave him the right to emancipate the slaves.

On July 17, 1862, Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act, declaring that slaves who crossed over Union lines were "forever free" provided that they had been held by supporters of the Confederacy. Although Lincoln had expressed concern over parts of the act and had drafted a veto message, he nevertheless signed the bill. Several days later, on July 22, 1862, Lincoln surprised members of his Cabinet with a draft of an Emancipation Proclamation. His Proclamation put him in danger of assassination.

By the time of his death, Lincoln had embraced Emancipation, abandoned colonization, enrolled black soldiers in the Union Army and favored enfranchising at least some blacks. Miller notes that only at the very end of his life did Lincoln come to deem a "biracial society" possible in the United States. How and why this happened, how Lincoln drew on principles forged before the war while responding to the pressure of military events, the actions of slaves demanding freedom and, the pressure of those moralistic abolitionists, changed Lincoln forever. The rest is history.
The complete Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress consists of approximately 20,000 documents. The Library of Congress provides access to the Abraham Lincoln Papers for educational and research purposes. The collection is a Collaborative Project Library of Congress Manuscript Division and Lincoln Studies Center, Knox College (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/malhome.html). The collection is organized into three "General Correspondence" series which include incoming and outgoing correspondence and enclosures, drafts of speeches, and notes and printed material.

Work Cited:
Abraham Lincoln to Hannibal Hamlin, November 8, 1860. Transcribed and annotated by the Lincoln Studies Center, Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois. Available at Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division (Washington, D.C.: American Memory Project, [2000-02]), http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/alhome.html, accessed February 10, 2009.

Siddali, Silvana R. (2005, May 1). Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America The Free Library. (2005). Retrieved February 12, 2009 from http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America-a0132774378

Resources:
"Abraham Lincoln, May 19, 1862 (Proclamation revoking General David Hunter's General Order No. 11 on military emancipation of slaves)," Page 4.

"The Prayer of Twenty Millions", the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, ed. Lincoln's reply (http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mal&fileName=mal2/423/4233400/malpage.db&recNum=)

Draft of an emancipation proclamation. Search on Emancipation Proclamation revisions for the suggestions that Lincoln got from his cabinet members.
From "Ulysses S. Grant to Abraham Lincoln, August 23, 1863 (Raising black regiments in the South).

http://memory.loc.gov/learn/collections/papers/history6.html

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/almintr.html

http://www.history.umd.edu/Freedmen/hunter.htm

Published in The Destruction of Slavery, pp. 123-26, and in Free at Last, pp. 46-48.

Abraham Lincoln Papers
Of general interest:
Cuomo, Mario M. and Harold Holzer. Lincoln on Democracy: His Own Words, with Essays by America's Foremost Civil War Historians. N.Y.: HarperCollins, 1990.

Donald, David Herbert. Lincoln. N.Y.: Simon & Shuster, 1995.

Neely, Mark E., Jr. The Last Great Hope on Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America. Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard University Press; San Marino, Calif.: The Huntington Library, and Springfield, Ill.: Illinois State Historical Library, 1993.

Peterson, Merrill. Lincoln in American Memory. N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1994.