I believe there was an interesting discussion about Mr. Coates fascinatingly good editorial in the New York Times today, entitled "Obama and His Discontents." All this was started when President Obama said this:
“Now think about that,” Obama said. “The Great Emancipator was making a compromise in the Emancipation Proclamation because he thought it was necessary in terms of advancing the goals of preserving the Union and winning the war.”
“So, you know what? If Abraham Lincoln could make some compromises as part of governance, then surely we can make some compromises when it comes handling our budget,” Obama said.
In that piece, Mr. Coates took the president to task over his comparing his tendency towards compromise to that of Lincoln issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. Coates made the point that while Lincoln did compromise, the abolitionists of the era supported Lincoln in making the Proclamation, even though they continued to push very aggressively for more. But I've offered a counterpoint that the President was all wrong in his comparison, that in fact the Emancipation Proclamation was not a compromise between abolitionists and slave-owners, but was the furthest possible pushing of the abolitionist position legally available to the President. Kossack mallyroyal and I had a discussion about it here.
Well, boy...you should go read Mr. Coates in his new piece in The Atlantic, his regular perch. It's a doozy:
When I read this I was basically of Obama's view--that the Proclamation was a necessary compromise, the sort of thing that is essential to American democracy. But I also thought it was important to always remember that compromise, whatever its virtue, isn't an abstract concept. It's the compromising of the lives of actual people. But in the course of researching the column I came to a somewhat different opinion--that the Proclamation actually went further than I thought.
Better people here will know this, but my understanding is that there really was no constitutional mechanism by which Lincoln could--with a wave of his pen--emancipate the slaves of loyal owners. Thus there never really a choice between, say, ending slavery everywhere and ending just in disloyal states. The compromise was whether the Proclamation would cover all formerly rebel areas that had fallen under union control--occupied areas of Tennessee, Virginia, South Carolina and Louisiana for instance. And the Proclamation did actually exempt some of those areas.
But on the other side of the ledger there's the fact that Lincoln immediately affected the largest act of manumission in American history with a stroke of the pen. I haven't come across a precise number, in terms of who was immediately freed by the Proclamation. But it was in the thousands, and Foner estimates that it may well have ranged into the tens of thousands. Other states had emancipated slaves--but almost always gradually. Nothing like this--an immediate grant of freedom to thousands of slaves--had happened before.
That's exactly right. As I've pointed out, Obama just has the wrong analogy here. Lincoln didn't sit down with the rebels and the abolitionists to broker a deal. He freed every slave he could by fiat because he already declared martial law in areas where there was rebellion. Lincoln's reasoning is simple: Slavery was legal in the United States. The South rebelled against the United States. Therefore, they had no legal right to keep slaves. In fact, the South had no legal rights at all because Lincoln declared martial law. The Emancipation Proclamation was not a negotiated settlement but a military edict imposed by the sole authority of the Commander in Chief.
He simply did not have the authority to free slaves in states that didn't rebel against the union. But with the authority he did have, he used to the fullest possible extent under the justification of national security.
The Emancipation Proclamation differed dramatically from Lincoln's previous policies regarding slavery and emancipation, some of which dated back to his days in the Illinois legislature and Congress. It abandoned the idea of seeking the cooperation of slaveholders in emancipation, and of distinguishing between loyal and disloyal owners. It was immediate, not gradual; contained no mention of monetary compensation for slaveowners, did not depend on action by the states, and mad no reference to colonization (in part, perhaps, because gradualism, compensation, and colonization had no bearing on the "military necessity" that justified the document.) Lincoln had long resisted the enlistment of black soldiers; now he welcomed them into the Union Army. The Proclamation addressed slaves directly, not as the property of the country's enemies but as persons with wills of their own whose action might help win the Civil War.
Coates is so spot on, there's nothing to add here. Go read the whole thing.