A Catholic Looks At Abraham Lincoln

By Gary Topping

On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln set the slaves free by signing the Emancipation Proclamation, right?

Uh, wrong.  The date is right, but in fact the Proclamation did not free a single slave.  And that was not even President Lincoln’s intention.

What the Proclamation said was that all the slaves in areas in rebellion against the United States were declared to be free.  Well, that wouldn’t free any slaves: no slaveholder in Mississippi was going to let his slaves go just because a President whose authority he didn’t recognize told him to.  And the fact that Mississippi was in rebellion against the United States government meant that Lincoln had no power to enforce the Proclamation.

It gets even worse.  There were four slave states that remained loyal:  Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware.  Their slaves did not go free because they weren’t in rebellion against the United States.  So the Proclamation freed the slaves in areas where it couldn’t be enforced and left slavery alone in areas where it could.  Lincoln knew that if he tried to free the slaves in those border states, they would immediately leave the Union.  He himself had been born in Kentucky, and he famously said on one occasion, “I hope I have God on my side, but I have to have Kentucky.”  As one historian has observed, “The Emancipation Proclamation was more proclamation than emancipation.”

So what was Lincoln thinking?  Lincoln found himself squeezed between two intransigent positions: slavery and abolition.  He hated slavery, but he recognized that outright abolition, even if it were possible, would cause so much social and economic trauma that the cure might be worse than the disease.  So if neither of those positions was politically tenable, what was?  Preservation of the Union.  Lincoln thought that if those rebellious states could be kept in the Union, slavery could be kept in the arena of political discussion, and there was a possibility that some kind of gradual emancipation program could be negotiated (even though such negotiation before the outbreak of the war had produced no such program).

So how did the Emancipation Proclamation fit into this strategy?  Lincoln had been forthright that his goal was preservation of the Union and that he would use slavery as a negotiating tool toward that end.  In August, 1862, he had written to newspaper publisher Horace Greeley that “My paramount goal in this struggle is to save the Union; it is not to save or to destroy slavery.  If I can save the Union by freeing all the slaves, I will do it; if I can save the Union by leaving slavery alone, I will do that; if I can save the union by freeing some of the slaves and leaving others alone, I will also do that.  But my paramount goal is to save the Union.”  Even as late as August, 1864, when the war was all but won, Lincoln could write to one Charles D. Peterson, a “Copperhead,” or a southern sympathizer in the North, “If Jefferson Davis [President of the Confederate States] wishes to know what I would do if he were to offer peace and reunion, saying nothing about slavery, let him try me.”  [Italics added]

What the Emancipation Proclamation said, then, was that if you Southerners will lay down your arms and get back into the Union, you can keep your slaves.  How did they know that was true?  Look at Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware.  On the other hand, if you make us fight this war to a military conclusion so that Federal authority once again returns to the rebellious states, you’re going to lose your slaves.  Of course the latter possibility is what eventually occurred.

So if it wasn’t the Emancipation Proclamation, what actually freed the slaves?  Well, here’s one that will make you the hit of the next cocktail party: slavery has never been abolished in this country!  The 13^th Amendment says that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime for which the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States . . . .”  [Italics added]  We actually should be celebrating slavery in that light, so that all those murderers and other miscreants can be taken out of circulation and placed where they can’t do any more damage.

So what’s the Catholic angle on all this?  I suggest that we Catholics, like the pro- and anti-slavery people before the Civil War, are inclined to dig in our heels and totally reject any political discussion or compromise where issues of Catholic moral and social teaching are concerned.  Compromise often seems to us to be capitulation.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  The last thing I’m suggesting is that all or even most Catholic positions on moral or social issues ought to be open to negotiation.  The Ten Commandments aren’t up for discussion!  But what if we, like Abraham Lincoln, looked for ways to keep less essential matters on the table as political issues and to be willing to accept compromise if that is all we can get?  That would mean that we often would get only a piece of the pie instead of the whole thing.  But at least we would get that piece.  Ultimately, as I suggest above, Lincoln failed in his attempt to effect a political solution to those divisive Civil War issues.  The parties on both sides continued to be as intransigent as both sides in our Congress these days are.  But I don’t think that means we should give up on the political process, either as Catholics or as Americans in general.