On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed his name to the Emancipation Proclamation, just about a year after he ordered the largest mass execution in US history as 38 Dakota warriors were hung on his orders on behalf of northern settlers. But that’s another story.
Since that early January, ruling class acamedia has portrayed the ‘Civil War’ as one to ‘end slavery’…when in reality it was a conflict between the financial/industrial elites of the north and the agricultural slave elites of the south. In short, the last argument between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians for control of the West and leadership on the continent.
The Emancipation Proclamation provided that as of January 1, all people “held as slaves” anywhere that was still controlled by the Confederate government would be “then, thenceforward, and forever free.” (Emphasis supplied.) This excluded freeing slaves, for example, in the Border States which were northern-aligned—Lincoln’s gambit was to thread the needle between fomenting Black uprising to aid the northerners, but not alienate crucial Border areas.
Although it is said Lincoln personally opposed human enslavement, he did not believe the federal government had the power to end it in the states. The goal of the northern ruling class and, hence, that of the fledgling Republican Party, was only to keep it from spreading into the western territories where, they thought, enslaved labor would outcompete their economic model.
So, when the war broke out in 1861, the newly elected Lincoln urged southern leaders to reconsider leaving the Union, reassuring them that “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” When Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, the federal fort at the mouth of Charleston Harbor, Lincoln called not for a war on slavery, but for “all loyal citizens to favor, facilitate, and aid [an] effort to maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union.” It was only later that ‘anti-slavery’ became the ideology masking the ‘national’ preservation.
The goal of northern elites was to keep and exploit the South for themselves, much like the north would continue to dominate and exploit the global South for resources, to this very day.
From the earliest days of the war, in fact, first, in order to appease Border state residents, Union officers returned slaves to their enslavers! It was only when it became clear that enslaved people were being pressed into service for the Confederate military, Union officers refused to return them and instead hoped that welcoming them to the Union lines would make them want to work for the U.S.
In August 1861, shortly after the First Battle of Bull Run left the Union army battered and bleeding, Congress passed a law forfeiting the right of any enslaver to a person whom he had consented to be used “in aid of this rebellion, in digging ditches or intrenchments, or in any other way.” When northern Democrats charged that Republicans were subverting the Constitution and planning to emancipate all southern enslaved people, Republicans agreed that Congress had no right to “interfere with slavery in any slaveholding state,” but stood firmly on the war powers the Constitution assigned to Congress to enable it to pass laws that would help the war effort.
As Confederate armies racked up victories, Republicans increasingly emphasized the importance of Black workers to the South’s war effort. “[I]t has long been the boast of the South…that its whole white population could be made available for the war, for the reason that all its industries were carried on by the slaves,” the New York Times wrote. Northerners who before the war had complained that Black workers were inefficient found themselves redefining them. The Chicago Tribune thought Black workers were so productive that “[F]our millions of slaves off-set at least eight millions of Northern whites.”
At the same time, Republicans came to see Black workers as crucially important in the North as well, as they worked in military camps and, later, in cotton fields in areas captured by the U.S. military.
By July 1862, as Union armies continued to falter, Lincoln decided to issue a document that would free enslaved southerners who remained in areas controlled by the Confederacy. His secretary of state, William Henry Seward, urged him to wait until after a Union victory to make the announcement so it would not look as if it were prompted by desperation.
But Lincoln was desperate. The war was not completely popular—draft riots would periodically destabilize the north.
In the 1862 midterm election the Republicans got shellacked. They lost more than 25 seats in the House of Representatives and lost control of Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana. Democrats did not win control of Wisconsin and Michigan, but they made impressive gains. Voters were undoubtedly unhappy with the lackluster prosecution of the war and concerned about its mounting costs, but Democrats were not wrong to claim their victory was a repudiation of emancipation.
Lincoln threw all the crap he could on the wall, hoping something would stick. So, on September 22, he issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation under the war power of the executive, stating that in 100 days, on January 1, 1863, enslaved persons held in territories still controlled by the Confederacy would be free. He said to a visiting judge: “It is my last trump card…. If that don’t do, we must give up.” He also offered in his message to Congress on December 1, 1862, to consider amendments to the Constitution that would put off emancipation until January 1, 1900, and pay enslavers for those enslaved people who became free.
That gambit was always ludicrous—imagine northern elites actually paying off their southern counterparts. One newspaper correspondent noted that compensated emancipation would almost certainly cost more than a billion dollars, and while he seemed willing to stomach that financial hit, others were not.
So, after the traditional White House New Year’s Day reception, Lincoln played his “last trump card.” his justification for the Emancipation Proclamation was to weaken the war effort, and the areas affected by the proclamation were only those still held by the Confederacy. Lincoln welcomed Black men into the service of the U.S. Army and urged Black Americans to “labor faithfully for reasonable wages.”
That is: throw off the yoke of southern elites, fight for northern elites instead, and afterward submit to the yoke of northern wage slavery.