384 Chapter 14 The War to Save the Union
not because he personally disapproved. Indeed, he
frequently cited Radical pressure as an excuse for
doing what he wished to do on his own.
Lincoln would have preferred to see slavery
done away with by state law, with compensation for
slave owners and federal aid for former slaves willing
to leave the United States. He tried repeatedly to
persuade the loyal slave states to adopt this policy,
but without success. By the summer of 1862 he was
convinced that for military reasons and to win the
support of liberal opinion in Europe, the govern-
ment should make abolition a war aim. “We must
free the slaves or be ourselves subdued,” he
explained to a member of his Cabinet. He delayed
temporarily, fearing that a statement in the face of
military reverses would be taken as a sign of weak-
ness. The “victory” at Antietam Creek gave him his
opportunity, and on September 22 he made public
theEmancipation Proclamation. After January 1,
1863, it said, all slaves in areas in rebellion against
the United States “shall be then, thenceforward, and
forever free.”
No single slave was freed directly by Lincoln’s
announcement, which did not apply to the border
states or to those sections of the Confederacy, like
New Orleans and Norfolk, Virginia, already con-
trolled by federal troops. The proclamation differed
in philosophy, however, from the Confiscation Act in
striking at the institution, not at the property of
rebels. Henceforth every Union victory would speed
the destruction of slavery without regard for the atti-
tudes of individual masters.
Some of the president’s advisers thought the
proclamation inexpedient, and others considered it
illegal. Lincoln justified it as a way to weaken the
enemy. The proclamation is full of phrases like “as a
fit and necessary war measure” and “warranted by the
Constitution upon military necessity.”
Southerners considered the Emancipation
Proclamation an incitement to slave rebellion—as one
of them put it, an “infamous attempt to... convert
the quiet, ignorant, and dependent black son of toil
into a savage incendiary and brutal murderer.” Most
antislavery groups thought it did not go far enough.
Lincoln “is only stopping on the edge of Niagara, to
pick up a few chips,” one abolitionist declared. “He
and they will go over together.” Foreign opinion was
mixed: Liberals tended to applaud, conservatives to
react with alarm or contempt.
As Lincoln anticipated, the proclamation had a
subtle but continuing impact in the North. Its imme-
diate effect was to aggravate racial prejudices. Millions
of whites disapproved of slavery yet abhorred the idea
of equality for blacks. David Wilmot, for example,
insisted that his famous proviso was designed to pre-
serve the territories for whites rather than to weaken
slavery, and as late as 1857 the people of Iowa had
rejected black suffrage by a vote of 49,000 to 8,000.
The Democrats spared no effort to make political
capital of these fears and prejudices even before
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and they made
large gains in the 1862 election, especially in the
Northwest. So strong was antiblack feeling that most
of the Republican politicians who defended emanci-
pation did so with racist arguments. Far from encour-
aging southern blacks to move north, they claimed,
the ending of slavery would lead to a mass migration
of northern blacks to the South.
When the Emancipation Proclamation began actu-
ally to free slaves, the government pursued a policy of
“containment,” that is, of keeping the former slaves in
the South. Panicky fears of an inundation of blacks
subsided in the North. Nevertheless, emancipation
remained a cause of social discontent. In March 1863,
volunteering having fallen off, Congress passed the
Conscription Act. The law applied to all men between
ages twenty and forty-five, but it allowed draftees to
hire substitutes and even to buy exemption for $300,
provisions that were patently unfair to the poor.
During the remainder of the war 46,000 men were
actually drafted, whereas 118,000 hired substitutes,
and another 161,000 “failed to report.” Conscription
represented an enormous expansion of national
authority, since in effect it gave the government the
power of life and death over individual citizens.
The Emancipation Proclamationat
http://www.myhistorylab.comThe Draft Riots
After the passage of the Conscription Act, draft riots
erupted in a number of cities. By far the most seri-
ous disturbance occurred in New York City in July- Many workers resented conscription in princi-
ple and were embittered by the $300 exemption fee
(which represented a year’s wages). The idea of
being forced to risk their lives to free slaves who
would then, they believed, compete with them for
jobs infuriated them. On July 13 a mob attacked the
office where the names of conscripts were being
drawn. Most of the rioters were poor Irish Catholic
laborers who resented both the blacks and the mid-
dle-class Protestant whites who seemed to them
responsible for the special attention blacks were sud-
denly receiving. For four days the city was an
inferno. Public buildings, shops, and private resi-
dences were put to the torch. What began as a
protest against the draft became an assault on blacks
and the well-to-do. It took federal troops and the
temporary suspension of the draft in the city to put
an end to the rioting. By the time order was restored
more than a hundred people had lost their lives.
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