Most Americans are under the impression that Abraham Lincoln personally
abolished slavery. It seems
almost self-evident that “Lincoln freed the slaves.” For generations,
many blacks voted Republican out of
gratitude to Lincoln.
But the statement that “Lincoln freed the slaves” is a gross oversimplification.
Its widespread acceptance
shows not only ignorance of history, but a deep incomprehension of
the U.S. Constitution.
No president, as Lincoln well knew, could simply pick up a pen and do
away with slavery. To think that
he could is remarkably naive — yet that is what most people do think.
Legally, slaves were the property of other men; that is what slavery
means. And under the Constitution,
nobody could be deprived of his property without “due process of law”
— that is, a court proceeding had
to prove to a jury that a slaveowner had somehow forfeited his property.
“Due process of law” didn’t mean a legislative act. Congress had no
power to pass a law outlawing
slavery. Lincoln acknowledged this in his first inaugural address and
even said he could support an
amendment to the Constitution protecting slavery where it already existed.
If the Constitution meant what today’s liberals say it means, Congress
could have simply passed a law
banning slavery by invoking its “Power ... to regulate Commerce ...
among the several States.” But in the
1860s, nobody thought that this power was so broad as to nullify property
rights. They understood that
the Constitution would have to be amended to give Congress authority
over slavery, which at the time
seemed less likely than an amendment for the opposite purpose.
Lincoln knew that emancipation would be a risky business. Convinced
that whites and blacks could never
live together as equals, he contemplated resettling freed blacks in
Africa and Latin America.
During the Civil War, Lincoln decided, after much agonizing, to declare
that slaves in the seceding states
were free. The Emancipation Proclamation didn’t apply to slaves in
the states that remained within the
Union. So it didn’t really “free the slaves.” It had little immediate
effect on slaves in the Confederacy, of
course, since they were beyond Lincoln’s reach. Wags quipped that Lincoln
had freed the slaves he
couldn’t help, while doing nothing for the slaves he could have helped.
The question everyone asked was by what authority Lincoln could help
any slave. Lincoln admitted that
Congress had no constitutional power to touch slavery by legislation;
but he argued that he, in his capacity
as commander in chief of the armed forces putting down what he defined
as an insurrection, could punish
“rebels” by stripping them of their property, even if that property
happened to be slaves. In a civil war, he
contended, this could be done without the peacetime niceties of “due
process of law.”
So the Emancipation Proclamation was a limited, complex, and constitutionally
dubious measure. Still, it
was a brilliant propaganda coup that won foreign sympathy for the Union
cause. It redefined the Civil War
as a contest over slavery rather than secession, distracting attention
from the basic question of whether a
state could declare its independence of the Union.
That question was brutally answered anyway by the outcome of the war.
Since 1865 it has been assumed
that no state may secede for any reason, no matter how tyrannical the
federal government may become,
no matter how wildly it exceeds its constitutional powers. People still
illogically associate secession with
slavery; and even if the federal government is wrong in its claim of
absolute sovereignty, the states and the
people are helpless against it. The federal government can now change
the meaning of the Constitution that
is supposed to restrain it, and there is no practical remedy for its
abuses.
Lincoln was in some ways a short-sighted man, who neither foresaw nor
intended the ultimate results of
the Civil War. But “preserving the Union” turned out to mean inverting
its federal structure and creating a
central government so strong that no countervailing forces can stop
it from monopolizing power. The
worst of it is that most people in the United States of Amnesia can’t
even see this as a problem.