Kenneth J. Winkle, Allen C. Guelzo . Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America. New York: Simon and Schuster. 2004. Pp. xiii, 332. $26.00, The American Historical Review, Volume 110, Issue 4, October 2005, Pages 1186–1187, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.110.4.1186
Navbar Search Filter Mobile Enter search term Search Navbar Search Filter Enter search term SearchAllen C. Guelzo's meticulous and imaginative analysis of the origins and impact of the Emancipation Proclamation resurrects that beleaguered document as the cornerstone of freedom for America's four million slaves. Abraham Lincoln's personal commitment to emancipation has suffered egregiously at the hands of critics, both scholarly and popular, who discount his proclamation's centrality to emancipation while pointing to his zest for compensated emancipation and colonization as an indication of his true feelings—lukewarm, vacillating, and even racist—toward African‐American freedom. Guelzo's masterful reconstruction of Lincoln's motives and methods, rendered within the political and military context in which they played out, challenges the notion that the Emancipation Proclamation “accomplished nothing” (p. 2) and reinforces Lincoln's genuine personal commitment to end slavery.
The crux of Guelzo's argument is his portrayal of Lincoln as an “Enlightenment president” who was steadfast in his pursuit of freedom but equally “prudent” in his efforts to attain and secure it. “Emancipation, for Lincoln, was never a question of the end,” Guelzo reasons, “but of how to construct the means in such a way that the end was not put into jeopardy” (p. 25). Guelzo surveys several possible routes to freedom: self‐emancipation, military decree, congressional legislation, executive proclamation, and state legislative action. Weighing these options, Lincoln distrusted the federal judiciary to uphold either a presidential proclamation or congressional legislation freeing slaves and considered state legislative action the only way of permanently guaranteeing emancipation. Throughout his presidency, therefore, Lincoln worked tenaciously to wring emancipation from the states, beginning with the four loyal border states. Depending on state action, however, meant that emancipation must be gradual, compensated, and voluntary and include the prospect of colonization to make it workable within a racist society. Simply put, as a pragmatist Lincoln was determined to work patiently for freedom, state by state, recognizing realistically that the means must be as legal and constitutional as the end was necessary and moral. Hence, Lincoln clung tenaciously to his dream of “state by state” emancipation—what an abolitionist critic labeled “shooting a gun a little at a time” (p. 95)—from the beginning of his presidency to the end.