Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America. By Allen C. Guelzo. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.

             The Emancipation Proclamation represents perhaps the most misunderstood and most assailed aspect of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, facing a full array of charges including being cynically drafted, rhetorically lackluster, usurping too much constitutional power, and not being radical or far-reaching enough. Fortunately, we have Allen Guelzo’s Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, winner of the historian’s second (richly deserved) Lincoln Prize, to set the record straight. In providing a complete history of the historic document, Guelzo persuasively presents the Emancipation Proclamation as a product of Lincoln’s political prudence, moral conviction, and his respect for and determination to defend the Constitution.

            Guelzo casts aside opposing interpretations of the Emancipation Proclamation as the result of either Lincoln’s patience (waiting for just the right time to launch a preconceived plan of abolition) or his progress (developing a necessary level of “racial goodwill”). Instead, he frames the Proclamation as the product (doubling down on alliteration) of Lincoln’s political prudence and increasing belief in God’s providence in the Civil War (5-6). Lincoln hated slavery as long as he could remember and stood publicly opposed to it as early as 1837. Furthermore, Guelzo argues, he “understood from the first that his administration was the beginning of the end of slavery…” (5). Early in the war Lincoln discerned four possible means of emancipation: Ben Butler’s contraband policy, Congress’ two Confiscation Acts, Frémont’s and Hunter’s unilateral abolition orders in their military districts, and compensated emancipation. Lincoln, appreciating the first three options’ limits and impermanence, personally worked toward the fourth choice among the Border States.

            In summer 1862, Lincoln was frustrated on two fronts: none of the loyal slave states would accept compensated emancipation (even little Delaware, with a paltry thousand-some slaves), and the failure of McClellan’s Peninsular Campaign reversed the tide of Union victory, suggesting time was not on the side of emancipation, as he had supposed. As early as July 13, Lincoln mentioned to cabinet members plans for proclaiming emancipation in the Confederate-held South. Secretary Seward famously advised the president to wait for a battlefield victory before implementing the plan. During this stage, Lincoln also underwent a spiritual progression from belief in an impersonal deistic power to a personal God. After Lee crossed the Potomac into Maryland that September, Lincoln told several confidants that he had promised the Almighty to declare emancipation if the Rebels were repulsed, a vow he made good on in the wake of the strategic victory at Antietam. Under his war powers as Commander-in-Chief, Lincoln issued a preliminary proclamation on September 22 announcing all slaves in the Confederacy not occupied or loyal by January 1 would be freed.

            Guelzo notes the proclamation faced three main hurdles, two of which—its reception by Congress and Union soldiers—it soon surmounted, though not without a considerable hue and cry. The most daunting prospect, “the ghost at the emancipation banquet,” was the third: avoiding a ruling of unconstitutionality by the federal courts, especially the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Taney of Dred Scott infamy (190). As Guelzo demonstrates, Lincoln was clearly a principled constitutionalist and sincerely sought to shepherd through emancipation in the most legal and unassailable fashion as possible. These commitments were reflected in Lincoln’s meticulous drafting of the proclamation, from limiting its impact to parts of the South in active rebellion to removing the word “forever” in the phrase “forever free,” all to ensure it passed constitutional muster. Nor did Lincoln see the proclamation as a permanent solution; instead, he worked actively toward ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment permanently abolishing slavery, even fixing his signature to it (despite the fact the President plays no constitutional function in the amendment process).

            It would be difficult to list all the positive achievements of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Notably, Guelzo thoroughly and elegantly explicates the language of the Emancipation Proclamation and four subsequent public letters Lincoln wrote specifying its benefit to the Union cause and its constitutional justness. Guelzo also demonstrates the efficacy of the document in aiding the Union war effort, shattering Southern slavery, directly freeing thousands—if not millions—of slaves, and giving African-Americans an incalculable moral boon. In his own argumentation Guelzo provides a deft apologia for Lincoln’s document, undercutting various academic and popular critiques of the proclamation but in so artful a manner that the book never reads as a polemic. Lincoln critics across the spectrum persist, but Dr. Guelzo’s essential work scholastically stands athwart all attempts to undermine the legacy of “Father Abraham” and the Emancipation Proclamation.

Jonathan Steplyk                                                                         Texas Christian University