THE GENIUS OF THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION

 In May 1861 three escaped slaves from Virginia made their way to Fortress Monroe in Norfolk which was still under Union control. The Federal commander, General Benjamin Butler refused to return these slaves to their owners because they had had been building artillery positions for the Confederate Army along the James River. Butler coined a new term. He declared them "contraband of war". Under the Fugitive Slave Law passed in 1850 he was required by law to return these slaves to their masters. Virginia had recently seceded from the Union and he considered the state a hostile foreign country. Under the rules of war Federal law did not apply in this case. This decision by Ben Butler was at odds with Lincoln's view of the war. Lincoln didn't consider Virginia to be a foreign country. In his view Virginia was still in the Union and they had no legal right to secede. Butler's action, however; was the first step in the direction of the future Emancipation Proclamation. The First Confiscation Act came on the heels of Butler's action. It was passed by Congress and signed by President Lincoln on August 6, 1861. The law was formally titled An Act to Confiscate Property Used for Insurrectionary Purposes. It was designed to target property that aided the rebellion and slaves who were forced to work for the Confederate military. 

Abraham Lincoln, like John Kennedy 100 years later was a gradualist on slavery. Kennedy was a gradualist on segregation. They knew that they had to walk a political tightrope in order to bring about change. Lincoln had abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and a host of others pushing for immediate abolition. Kennedy faced Martin Luther King and many others pushing for a immediate end to segregation. Both presidents wanted to proceed at their own pace so as not to isolate their political support but events forced their hands. Lincoln had many of the race prejudices of most white men of his era but he hated slavery. Yet he was pragmatic enough to know that he could not be elected president in 1860 or accomplish anything politically by taking an abolitionist stance in 1861 at the start of the war. So he adapted as conditions changed to advance the anti-slavery cause. 

Lincoln realized early on that slaves were a military asset for the Democrat South. They made it possible for white men to fight in the army while the slaves built fortifications and maintained the agrarian economy of the Democrat South planting and harvesting cotton and other crops. The genius of the Emancipation Proclamation was that it freed only those slaves still under Confederate control. It did not apply to parts of Tennessee and Louisiana that were already under Federal control along with the four loyal slave states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri. The Emancipation Proclamation did not alienate loyal slave owners from supporting the Union cause. It robbed disloyal Southern Democrats of their labor. As the Union Army drove deeper into Confederate territory the slaves left their Democrat masters and flocked to the protection of the Union Army. The Northern armies then benefitted from their labor when building their own fortifications. In 1863 when white enlistments were falling off the slaves enlisted in the Union Army. By the end of the war nearly 200,000 blacks had served in the Union Army and 40,000 died.

Last but not least the antislavery movement was very strong in Western Europe. England had ended slavery in 1834 and France in 1848. American abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and others had been treated like rock stars as the spoke at numerous anti-slavery rallies across Europe before the Civil War. In the early days of our Civil War when war Union war aims were focused mainly on the preservation of the Union the aristocracy of England and France were sympathetic to the Democrat South because of their reliance on cotton for their textile mills. If the Confederates had been successful during the Antietam and Kentucky campaigns in the Fall of 1862 there is a good possibility that Britain and possibly France might have signed a military alliance with the South. These defeats combined with the announcement just after Antietam of Lincoln's proposed Emancipation Proclamation ended any chance of a military alliance. The war was not only about preserving the Union but it became a war for human freedom. This tied the hands of the European cotton interests because the cause of emancipation was popular with the masses. Besides the European textile industry was now relying on Egyptian cotton rather than Southern cotton. As the war neared it's end Lincoln and the Republicans were able to put an end to slavery once and for all by the passage of the 13th Amendment. Many criticize Lincoln because the Emancipation Proclamation didn't go far enough. In my view it was political genius.