AS CHASE AND Seward had guessed, critics saw Emancipation as a plan not to save the Union but to destroy the South in a wave of indiscriminate violence. The United States, fumed Jefferson Davis, hoped to “inflict on the non-combatant population of the Confederate States all the horrors of a servile war.” As Davis saw it, Lincoln had made clear “not only his approval of the effort to excite servile war within the Confederacy, but his intention to give aid and encouragement thereto.” Southern state legislatures condemned Lincoln for “seeking to bring upon us a servile war by arming our slaves.” In New Orleans, a young society woman named Julia Ellen LeGrand excoriated northern abolitionists for urging “that our homes should be burned and that Southern women and children should be startled at midnight by the wild beasts which Africans become after having scented blood.” Thomas Jenkins Semmes, a member of the Confederate Senate, called Emancipation “an invitation to servile war.” The Richmond Enquireropined that Lincoln had issued a proclamation “ordaining servile insurrection” and employing means that “the most callous highwayman should shudder to employ.”
The Confederate Congress took up a blizzard of retaliatory resolutions. One bill resolved that “all rules of civilized warfare should be discarded in the future defense of our country.” Another proposed that “every person pretending to be a soldier or officer of the United States” captured after January 1 should be presumed to intend “to incite insurrection and abet murder” and therefore “suffer death” as a criminal. The Confederate Congress’s final joint resolutions described the Emancipation Proclamation as an effort to encourage slaves to take up a servile war that would be “inconsistent with the spirit of those usages which in modern warfare prevail among civilized nations.”
Many observers in the North and in the border states were almost as critical as the rebels. Two days after the Proclamation was made public, McClellan wrote privately to his wife, Ellen, that he would not “fight for such an accursed doctrine as that of a servile insurrection—it is too infamous.” The Louisville Journal observed angrily that Emancipation freed enemy slaves and incited “servile insurrection,” both of which were “condemned by the laws of civilized warfare.” Further west, in Dubuque, Iowa, critics of Emancipation saw it as tending toward “a servile war, instigated by the President’s proclamation.” In Lincoln’s old haunts of Springfield, Democrats accused him of unloosing “the lusts of freed negroes who will overrun our country.” Former Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Curtis conjured up “scenes of bloodshed, and worse than bloodshed.” The governor of New Jersey, Joel Parker (no relation to the Harvard professor of the same name), predicted a slave uprising that would lead to the genocidal massacre of all the South’s blacks. Similar nightmarish stories raced through the salons of Britain and France in the winter 1862–63, creating speculation that the threatened terrors of Emancipation might lead the two European states to recognize the South and impose a mediated peace.
Detractors focused in particular on one aspect of the September 22 preliminary Emancipation Proclamation: Lincoln’s promise that the armed forces would “recognize and maintain” freedom and not “repress” the efforts of former slaves to turn the Proclamation into “actual freedom.” Outraged newspaper editors spluttered that Lincoln was practically “inviting the negroes to the commission of any atrocity which their brutal passions may suggest.” With Lincoln’s active assistance, Emancipation would lead “a barbarous and servile race” to wreak violence on the white women and children of the South.
FOR EMANCIPATION’S CRITICS, the Proclamation seemed to signal the end of restraint. But in this they were badly mistaken.
Like Butler at the outset of the war, Lincoln and his cabinet remained gravely concerned about the risk that slave uprisings would give rise to an indiscriminate bloodbath. Secretary of War Stanton thought enough of the concern to assure the Congress in his December 1862 annual report that “under no circumstances has any disposition to servile insurrection been exhibited by the colored population in any Southern State.” And when Lincoln issued the final Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, he aimed to allay precisely these worries. All persons held as slaves in the rebellious states, the Proclamation reaffirmed, “are, and henceforward shall be free.” But where the preliminary Proclamation in September had promised Union aid to slaves’ own efforts to achieve “actual freedom,” now Lincoln substituted a stern warning against self-help: “I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free,” he wrote, “to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence.” Indeed, Lincoln went further, urging the newly freed blacks of the South to refrain from any attempt to challenge the allocation of power and wealth in the southern states. “I recommend to them,” he continued, “that, in all cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.” A year later, in his 1863 message to Congress, Lincoln proudly reported on the status of the Emancipation Proclamation and on the Union’s military successes since its implementation: “No servile insurrection, or tendency to violence or cruelty,” the president said, “has marked the measures of emancipation and arming the blacks.”
Emancipation did not entail the elimination of restraints. But it did mean a different way of talking about them. As Francis Lieber told his students a year before, jurists in Europe and America had sought for a century and more to maintain a sharp separation between rules for combat, on the one hand, and the justice of the cause, on the other. Jurists like Vattel had done this by articulating hard-and-fast prohibitions that could be followed without reference to the cause of the underlying conflict. Lieber’s lectures aimed to dismantle the partition between means and ends, and most of Vattel’s rules had come tumbling down in the process. Now Lincoln experimented with the same move. Like Lieber’s lectures, Emancipation pressed humanitarian limits and justice back together by measuring the limits on conduct by reference to the justice of its ends. Lincoln had announced the Emancipation Proclamation “as a fit and necessary war measure,” one that was “warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity.” The military necessity test tethered the means allowed to the justice of the end in view. Justice—God’s justice—was precisely what Lincoln had in mind. “Upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice,” the president wrote in the final Emancipation Proclamation, “I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.”
ODDLY, the grave reasoning of the Emancipation Proclamation has been missed by most of its readers. For a century and a half, even sympathetic observers have criticized the Proclamation’s text as morally impoverished. The abolitionist Lydia Maria Child—who had sympathized openly with John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry just four years before—complained that the Emancipation Proclamation was “merely a war measure.” Child said it made “no recognition” of the “principles of justice or humanity” that had prompted it. The influential twentieth-century historian Richard Hofstadter dismissed the document as having “all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.” It was, Hofstadter protested, based on nothing more than “military necessity.”
What Child and Hofstadter missed is that military necessity was morally momentous. As a war measure based in military necessity, the Emancipation Proclamation condensed a millennium of moral and legal reasoning into its short text. It contained an entire world of moral considerations about the relationship between means and ends. In cutting against the grain of the hard-and-fast rules that had populated the laws of war since the Enlightenment, Lincoln moved the war to a dangerous new footing—one that not only undid one of war’s limits but also threatened to undermine the very moral structure of just wars in the modern tradition. Yet it was hardly a lawless vision of war that Lincoln offered. Even the flat affect of the Proclamation itself was exquisitely attuned to moral restraint in warfare and to what men like Seward were telling the president might be the “vast and momentous” consequences of his act. Lincoln knew precisely the risks posed by bringing justice back into the conduct of war. He thus did so quietly, omitting rhetoric calculated to stir the passions of the conflict. Lincoln announced Emancipation with the modesty of a man who knew that he could never understand for certain how God willed him to act, but who knew that he had to act nonetheless.
If uncertainty was man’s fate, if there were to be no miracles, then the Lincoln administration would have to attend very carefully to the risks that Emancipation occasioned. Recruiting the newly free men into the Union Army would turn those risks into one of the most pressing problems of the entire war.