Download Presidential Leadership: Principles Amidst Politics Absurd, fanatical

Presidential Leadership: Principles Amidst Politics
Absurd, fanatical, unconstitutional, trash, likely to do more harm than good, issued by an
incompetent and unprincipled president, out to incite the murder of women and children, and
exterminate a race! You might guess that this is from one of the over-the-top, anti-Obama
Super-PAC commercials targeting the Affordable Care Act. But the language comes from the
Democrats and their supporters in 1862, attacking Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation
Proclamation and stoking the popular passions against emancipation in hope of political gain. In
this presidential campaign season, as we lament the negative ads and personal attacks, we may
find comfort in the sesquicentennial commemoration of the Emancipation Proclamation, a story
of principle surviving particularly ugly partisan politics.
For many Americans in the late eighteenth century the logic of their revolution – the
founding of a nation upon the principles of human equality and liberty – signaled the inevitable
end of slavery. What has been called “the ideological contagion of the American Revolution”
led seven of the original thirteen states to either abolish slavery or adopt gradual emancipation,
New Jersey being the last in 1804. But, as Joseph Ellis has written, “the further one got from
1776, the lower the revolutionary fires burned and the less imperative the logic of the
revolutionary ideology seemed.” By 1860 – with popular sovereignty in the territories, the
stringent federal Fugitive Slave Act, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and the Supreme
Court’s Dred Scott decision – slavery was an expanding rather than a dying institution.
With the Civil War, abolitionists saw the opportunity to take the slavery issue out of the
established political process and Lincoln soon found some of his generals, a cabinet secretary
and even Congress racing ahead of him on emancipation. Almost immediately, Generals Butler
and Fremont began emancipating slaves in the field and in May, 1862 General Hunter issued a
proclamation emancipating all slaves within his area of command – the entire Department of the
South! Meanwhile, in a report to the President, Secretary of War Cameron recommended the
emancipation and arming of blacks. The report was widely disseminated by Cameron without
waiting for direction from Lincoln. And Congress, unencumbered by Southern Democrats,
abolished slavery in the District of Columbia and the Territories in the spring of 1862. When
slaves from Maryland came streaming into the District, the U.S. Marshall jailed them pursuant to
the Fugitive Slave Act. Union General Wadsworth, in command of Washington, D.C., in turn
arrested the Marshall. Lincoln had his hands full.
In his book The Emancipation Proclamation, John Hope Franklin describes how Lincoln,
personally opposed to slavery on principle, as President was committed “to forge a document of
freedom for the slaves within the existing constitutional system and in a manner that would give
even greater support to that constitutional system.” Others have described him as “a ‘process
based’ egalitarian.” He certainly was intent on controlling the controversial subject of the war’s
relationship to emancipation. He immediately saw to the repeal of General Hunter’s
proclamation. He had all copies of Secretary Cameron’s reports recalled and sent Cameron off
to Russia as Ambassador. He signed the bill abolishing slavery in D.C. only after negotiating
from Congress provisions for compensation of owners and colonization of freed blacks. And he
sent General Wadsworth into Virginia with the Army of the Potomac where his zeal for freedom
might be better directed.
In late spring, 1862 Lincoln privately decided to issue a proclamation of emancipation
utilizing his presidential war powers, thereby carrying revolutionary principles forward through a
constitutional act. Lincoln informed his Cabinet in July and agreed a public announcement
should await a military victory rather than risk tarnishing the principles. The battle of Antietam
presented that victory. By then, however, the fall midterm elections were just weeks away and
he was again advised to wait rather than give the Democrats political fodder. Not willing to play
politics with principle, Lincoln said no and on September 22nd announced to the world his
intention to emancipate.
The Democratic Party seized the opportunity, framing and exploiting the division over
emancipation as white versus black, not North versus South, and as economic self-interest.
Democratic newspapers in New Jersey appealed to “those who love the Union more than the
negro” called the proclamation “as absurd as it is fanatical,” comparing the likelihood of
emancipation to the chances of successfully ordering “Mormons to cast off their superfluous
wives.” In New York, Democrats called it a proposal “for the butchery of women and children,
for scenes of lust and rapine, and of arson and murder.” Business journals in New York
opposed the destruction of the very labor system upon which the profits of northern business
relied and warned white immigrants of the negro threat to their jobs. Economic self-interest
trumped principle in the English government as well. Addiction to cheap cotton led the Prime
Minister to call the proclamation “trash” and Lincoln’s government “contemptible”. The
London Spectator brazenly accused Lincoln of being the one without principle, twisting his
words to mean that ownership of a person is wrong only if by an individual not loyal to the
United States government. As an exercise of war powers, the President could not touch slavery
in the Union states. Even in New Jersey persons continued to be legally owned by another. The
editor of the Times of London opined that slave insurrections were inevitable and when the
“blood begins to flow and shrieks come piercing through the darkness, Mr. Lincoln will . . . rub
his hands and think that revenge is sweet.”
How successful was this use of the “race card” is hard to say but the American people
expressed their dissatisfaction with the Republicans in the fall elections. The Democrats enjoyed
significant gains in Congress and state governments including New Jersey where the Democratic
Governor-elect stated that Lincoln had turned the war into the “extermination of a superior race
to abolish the enslavement of another inferior to it.”
Given the election defeats, escalating criticisms, and the Union’s defeat at Fredericksburg
in mid-December, many hoped and many worried that President Lincoln would change course
before January. Congress supported the anticipated Emancipation Proclamation by resolution
but forty-percent voted against. Democrats introduced a resolution to make the Emancipation
Proclamation an impeachable offense. But Lincoln did not waiver. He told one Senator that he
would not stop the Proclamation if he could, and he could not if he would. And he declared, as
he signed the final document on New Year’s Day, “I never, in my life, felt more certain that I
was doing right than I do in signing this paper.”
Once signed, the criticisms continued but the forecasted insurrections never materialized.
Lincoln exposed a fear older than the nation to be just fear itself. Thomas Jefferson had once
written that he could not imagine that the “ten thousand recollections by the blacks of the injuries
they have sustained” would not result in the taking of revenge. On this point, Lincoln departed
ways with Jefferson. He was undoubtedly sympathetic to the views expressed in the Princeton
Standard in April 1861: “Of all the forms of slavery the American is the most difficult to dispose
of, because it is not only a question of domestic institutions and political economy, but of race.
The Negro question lies far deeper than the slavery question. Emancipation is no solution.” But
Lincoln refused to succumb to the fears and demagoguery that had held the nation he loved in its
grips for four score and seven years – and breathed new life into the principles of equality and
liberty.
Unfortunately, as with the revolution of 1776, so too with that of 1863: the ideological
contagion proved to have a shelf life of just a few decades. By the 1890s Jim Crow was firmly
established and principled action would again be stonewalled by ugly political realities.
Fittingly, the watershed moment of the Civil Rights Movement took place on the steps of the
Lincoln memorial in 1963. In his book published for the centennial, Professor Franklin
expressed the hope that in the Emancipation Proclamation’s “second century it would give real
meaning and purpose to the Declaration of Independence.” We are now half-way through that
second century which began auspiciously with the Civil Rights Act, the end of Jim Crow, and
has now given us our first black President. Today, as we are bombarded with apocalyptic
political ads, we should remember that American principles have survived the dregs of political
discourse in the past, but not without struggle and, as we examine our candidates, not without
leadership.