Ira Berlin, “Who Freed the Slaves?

Emancipation and Its Meaning” (1997)

Abstract
Ira Berlin teaches history at the University of Maryland and has written
extensively about the history of slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. His 1999 Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery
in Mainland North America won Columbia University’s coveted Bancroft Prize
for the “best book in American History.” In this essay, Berlin explores the nature
of African American political and military participation during the Civil War as
he answers the question, “Who Freed the Slaves?”

Introduction
On January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln promulgated his Emancipation
Proclamation. A document whose grand title promised so much but whose bland
words seemed to deliver so little, the Emancipation Proclamation was an enigma
from the first. Contemporaries were unsure whether to condemn it as a failure of
idealism or applaud it as a triumph of realpolitik, and the American people have
remained similarly divided ever since.

Meeting in Washington in December 1992, the American Historical Association

convened a panel entitled “Black, White, and Lincoln.” Professor James M.
McPherson of Princeton University delivered the lead paper entitled “Who Freed
the Slaves?”1 For historians, the issues involved in McPherson’s question—and,
by implication, Lincoln’s proclamation—took on even greater significance
because they reflected a larger debate between those who look to the top of the
social order for cues in understanding the past and those who look to the bottom.

The question of who freed the slaves thus not only addressed the specific issue of
responsibility for emancipation in the American South; it also encompassed
contemporary controversies over “Great Men” in the history books. While some
celebrated history-from-the-bottom-up and condemned elitism, others called for
a recognition of the realities of power and belittled a romanticization of the
masses.

1McPherson had earlier presented his paper in October 1991 at the sixth annual
Lincoln Colloquium in Springfield, Illinois. It was published as part of the
colloquium’s proceedings. (George L. Painter, ed., Abraham Lincoln and the
Crucible of War: Papers from the Sixth Annual Lincoln Colloquium [n.p., n.d.],
59-69.) He subsequently published yet other versions in Reconstruction 2 (1994):
35-41 and another in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 139
(1995): 1-10. He added further commentary on the controversy in an essay-review
entitled “Liberating Lincoln,” New York Review of Books, Apr. 21, 1994.
The debate over the origins of Civil War emancipation in the American South can
be parsed in such a way as to divide historians into two camps: those who
understand emancipation primarily as the product of the slaves’ struggle to free
themselves, and those who see the Great Emancipator’s hand at work. James
McPherson made precisely such a division. While acknowledging the role of the
slaves in their own liberation, he came down heavily on the side of Lincoln’s
authorship of emancipation, a fact he maintained most ordinary Americans
grasped intuitively but one that eluded some scholars whose taste for the
complex, the nuanced, and the ironic had blinded them to the obvious.
McPherson characterized the critics of Lincoln’s preeminence—advocates of what
he called the “self-emancipation thesis”—as scholarly populists whose stock in
trade was a celebration of the “so-called ‘non-elite.’” Such scholars, McPherson
implied, denied the historical role of “white males,” and perhaps all regularly
constituted authority, in a misguided celebration of the masses. McPherson
singled out Vincent Harding as the high priest of the self-emancipationists, but
there were other culprits, among them Robert F. Engs and myself and my
colleagues on the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of
Maryland.2 Together, these historians were responsible for elevating the “self-
emancipation thesis” into what McPherson called “a new orthodoxy.”

Lincoln’s proclamation of January 1, 1863, as its critics have noted, freed not a
single slave who was not already entitled to freedom under legislation passed by
Congress the previous year. It applied only to the slaves in territories then beyond
the reach of Federal authority. It specifically exempted Tennessee and Union-
occupied portions of Louisiana and Virginia, and it left slavery in the loyal border
states—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri—untouched. Indeed, in a
strict sense, the Proclamation went no further than the Second Confiscation Act
of July 1862, which freed all slaves who fell under Federal control as Union
troops occupied Confederate territory. Moreover, at its fullest, the Emancipation
Proclamation rested upon the President’s wartime power as commander in chief
and was subject to constitutional challenge. Lincoln recognized the limitations of
his ill-defined wartime authority, and, as his commitment to emancipation grew

2 Vincent Harding, There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1981). Besides myself, the editors of the
four volumes in print are Barbara Jeanne Fields, Thavolia Glymph, Steven Miller,
Joseph P. Reidy, Leslie S. Rowland, and Julie Saville. The project’s main work
has been published by Cambridge University Press under the title Freedom: A
Documentary History of Emancipation. Thus far four volumes are in print: The
Destruction of Slavery (1985); The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Upper
South (1993); The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South (1991); and
The Black Military Experience (1982). In 1992, The New Press published an
abridgment of the first four volumes entitled Free at Last: A Documentary
History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War, and Cambridge has issued a
volume entitled Slaves No More.
firmer in 1863 and 1864, he pressed for passage of a constitutional amendment to
affirm slavery’s destruction.

What then was the point of the Proclamation? It spoke in muffled tones that
heralded not the dawn of universal liberty but the compromised and piecemeal
arrival of an undefined freedom. Indeed, the Proclamation’s flat prose, ridiculed
by the late Richard Hofstadter as having “all the moral grandeur of a bill of
lading,” suggests that the true authorship of African American freedom lies
elsewhere—not at the top of American society but at its base.3

Slaves’ Role in Emancipation

From the first guns at Fort Sumter, the strongest advocates of emancipation were
the slaves themselves. Lacking political standing or a public voice, forbidden
access to the weapons of war, slaves nevertheless tossed aside the grand
pronouncements of Lincoln and other Union leaders that the sectional conflict
was only a war for national unity. Instead, they moved directly to put their own
freedom—and that of their posterity—atop the national agenda. Steadily, as
opportunities arose, slaves risked their all for freedom. By abandoning their
owners, coming uninvited into Union lines, and offering their lives and labor in
the Federal cause, slaves forced Federal soldiers at the lowest level to recognize
their importance to the Union’s success. That understanding traveled quickly up
the chain of command. In time, it became evident to even the most obtuse
Federal commanders that every slave who crossed into Union lines was a double
gain: one subtracted from the Confederacy and one added to the Union. The
slaves’ resolute determination to secure their liberty converted many white
Northern Americans—soldiers and civilians alike—to the view that the security of
the Union depended upon the destruction of slavery. Eventually, this belief
tipped the balance in favor of freedom, even among Yankees who displayed little
interest in the question of slavery and no affection for black people.

Some slaves did not even wait for the war to begin. In March 1861, before the first
shots at Fort Sumter, eight runaways presented themselves at Fort Pickens, a
federal installation in Florida, “entertaining the idea”—in the words of the fort’s
commander—that Federal forces “were placed here to protect them and grant
them their freedom.” The commander believed otherwise and delivered the slaves
to the local sheriff, who returned them to their owner.4 Although their mission
failed, these eight runaways were only the first to evince publicly a conviction that
eventually became widespread throughout the slave community.

3 Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made
It (New York: Vintage, 1948), 132.
4 U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official

Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 128 vols. (Washington, D.C.:
GPO, 188o-1901), ser. 2, vol. 1, 750 (hereafter cited as OR).
In making the connection between the war and freedom, slaves also understood
that a Union victory was imperative. They did what they could to secure it,
throwing their full weight behind the Federal cause, volunteering their services as
teamsters, stable hands, and boatmen; butchers, bakers, and cooks; nurses,
orderlies, and laundresses; blacksmiths, coopers, and carpenters; and, by the tens
of thousands, as common laborers. Slaves "tabooed" those few in their ranks who
shunned the effort.5 Hundreds of thousands of black men and women would
work for the Union army, and more than 135,ooo slave men became Union
soldiers. Even deep within the Confederacy, where escape to Federal lines was
impossible, slaves did what they could to undermine the Confederacy and
strengthen the Union—from aiding escaped Northern prisoners of war to praying
for Northern military success. With their loyalty, their labor, and their lives,
slaves provided crucial muscle and blood in support of the Federal war effort. No
one was more responsible for smashing the shackles of slavery than the slaves.

Still, slaves could not free themselves. Slaves could—and they did—put the issue
of freedom on the wartime agenda; they could—and they did—make certain that
the question of their liberation did not disappear in the complex welter of the
war; they could—and they did—ensure that there was no retreat from the
commitment to emancipation once the issue was drawn. In short, they did what
was in their power to do with the weapons they had. They could not vote, pass
laws, issue field orders, or promulgate great proclamations. That was the realm of
citizens, legislators, military officers, and the president. However, the actions of
the slaves made it possible and necessary for citizens, legislators, military
officers, and the president to act. Slaves were the prime movers in the
emancipation drama, not the sole movers. Slaves set others in motion, including
many who would never have moved if left to their own devices. How they did so is
nothing less than the story of emancipation.6

Among the slaves' first students were Union soldiers of the lowest rank. Union
soldiers soon found their camps inundated with slaves, often breathless, tattered,
and bearing marks of abuse who were seeking sanctuary and offering to assist
them in any way possible. In so doing, slaves took a considerable risk. They not
only faced sure punishment if captured, but Union soldiers often turned upon
them violently. Still, some gained entry into Federal lines, where they found work
aplenty. Sometimes the slaves' labor cut to the heart of the soldiers' military
mission, as slaves understood that the enemy of their enemy was their friend and
were pleased to impart information about Confederate troop movements, assist
in the construction of Federal fortifications, and guide Union troops through a
strange countryside.

5 See, for example, Former Superintendent of the Poor in the Department of

North Carolina to the Chairman of the American Freedmen’s Inquiry
Commission, May 25, 1863, in The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Upper
South, doc. 7.
6 The argument is fully explicated in The Destruction of Slavery.
Northern soldiers did not have to be Free-Soilers, abolitionists, or even radical
egalitarians to appreciate these valuable services. Thus, soldiers were dismayed
to discover that they had violated orders by harboring the fugitives. They were
more upset when the men and women who cleaned their camps and cooked their
food were dragged off to certain punishment by angry masters or mistresses.
Indeed, even those soldiers who stoutly maintained that they fought only for
Union bitterly resented being implicated in the punishment of men and women
who had done nothing more than do them a good turn in exchange for a blanket
and a few morsels of food. "I don't care a damn for the darkies," declared one
midwestern volunteer in March 1862, "but I couldn't help to send a run away
nigger back. I'm blamed if I could."7 The "blame'' many Union soldiers felt at
being implicated in slavery was compounded by their outrage when they
discovered that the very same men and women they had returned to bondage
were being mobilized by the Confederate enemy against them.

These same lessons were also learned by Federal officers. Slaveholders, many of
them brandishing Unionist credentials, demanded that Northern troops return
fugitives who had taken refuge within their encampments. They objected
particularly to being compelled to do the slave master's dirty work, and they
intensely disliked being demeaned before their men. The high-handed demands
of slave owners turned many Federal officers into the slaves' champion. When
Federal policy toward fugitive slaves finally changed in the summer of 1862, one
could hear an almost-audible sigh of relief from the Union officer corps. "This
thing of guarding rebels property has about 'played out'.... We have guarded their
homes and property long enough.... The only way to put down this rebellion is to
hurt the instigators and abettors of it. Slavery must be cleaned out."8

Time and time again, slaves forced Federal soldiers and officers to make the
choice, a choice that became easier as the Union army's need for labor grew.
Change did not come at once, but it came. The lessons slaves taught soldiers and
soldiers taught officers slowly ascended the Union chain of command and in
November 1861 reached Lincoln's cabinet for the first time.9 The slaves' lesson,
moreover, did not travel merely within the military chain of command. As news
of the war filtered northward, it moved outside of military lines entirely. In their
letters home, citizen-soldiers not only informed the Northern public; they formed
Northern opinion. Thus, the lesson slaves had taught soldiers reverberated in

7 Charles Wills to his family, April 16, 1862, Wills to his brother, February 25,
1862, quoted in James M. McPherson, What They Fought For, 1861-1865 (Baton
Rouge, Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1994), 59.
8 William P. Lyon to his wife, July 9, 1862, quoted in James M. McPherson, What

They Fought For, 1861-1865 (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1994),
6o.
9 Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States of America

during the Great Rebellion, 186o-1865, 2d ed. (Washington, D.C.: Philip &
Solomons, 1865), 249, 416.
general-store gossip, newspaper editorials, and sermons throughout the North. It
seemed particularly compelling to wives who wanted their husbands home and to
parents who were fearful for their sons. It appealed to Northerners who were
tired of the war and fearful of the Federal government's seemingly insatiable
appetite for young men.10

Lincoln and Emancipation

The lesson that slaves taught common soldiers, that common soldiers taught
officers, that officers taught field commanders, that field commanders taught
their desk-bound superiors in Washington, and that resonated in the North was
not wasted on Abraham Lincoln. In many ways, Lincoln was a slow learner, but
he learned.

Lincoln was no friend of slavery. He believed, as he said many times, that "if
slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong." But, as president, Lincoln also believed
he had a constitutional obligation not to interfere with slavery where it existed.
Shortly before his inauguration, he offered to support a proposed constitutional
amendment that would have prohibited any subsequent amendment authorizing
Congress "to abolish or interfere ... with the domestic institutions" of any state,
including slavery."11 As wartime leader, he feared the disaffection of the loyal
slave states, which he understood to be critical to the success of the Union. He
crafted much of his wartime policy respecting slavery to avoid alienating loyal
slaveholders, especially in Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland.12 Throughout the
war, Lincoln [also] held tight to the notion that slaveholders retained a residual
loyalty to the Union and could be weaned away from the Confederacy.13

Lincoln also doubted whether white and black could live as equals in American
society and thought it best for black people to remove themselves physically from
the United States.14 At his insistence, the congressional legislation providing for

10 Black Military Experience, 85-86.

11 For the proposed amendment, see McPherson, Political History of the United
States, 59; Abraham Lincoln, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P.
Basler, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1953-55), 4:421-41.
12 Lincoln, Collected Works, 4:531-33, quotation on p. 532.
13 Louis S. Gerteis, From Contraband to Freedman: Federal Policy toward

Southern Blacks, 1861-1865 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1973), chap. 4; C.

Peter Ripley, Slaves and Freedmen in Civil War Louisiana (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1976); and especially Peyton McCrary, Abraham
Lincoln and Reconstruction: The Louisiana Experiment (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1978).
14 On the matter of Lincoln's lifelong connection to the idea of colonization and

his principled commitment to the idea and his strategic use of it, see Michael
Vorenberg, “Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Black Colonization," Journal of
the Abraham Lincoln Association 14 (1993): 23-45; Jason H. Silverman, "'In Isles
the emancipation of slaves in the District of Columbia in April 1862 included a
$10o,ooo appropriation to aid the removal of liberated slaves who wished to leave
the United States. Through the end of 1862, Lincoln continually connected
emancipation in the border states to the idea of colonizing slaves somewhere
beyond the boundaries of the United States. Lincoln clung to the policy of
expatriating black people long after most had abandoned it as a reasonable
strategy to gain acceptance for emancipation or as a practical policy to address
the consequences of emancipation.15

Where others led on emancipation, Lincoln followed. Lincoln responded slowly

to demands for emancipation as they rose through the military chain of
command and as they echoed on the Northern home front. Even as pressure for
emancipation grew in the spring of 1862, Lincoln continued to urge gradual,
compensated emancipation. The compensation would be to slaveholders for
property lost, not to slaves for labor stolen. In late September 1862, even while
announcing that he would proclaim emancipation on January 1 if the rebellious
states did not return to the Union, he again called for gradual, compensated
emancipation in the border states and compensation for loyal slaveholders
elsewhere. The preliminary emancipation proclamation also reiterated his
support for colonizing freed slaves "upon this continent or elsewhere."16 While
some pressed for the enlistment of black soldiers, Lincoln doubted the capacity of
black men for military service, fearing that former slaves would simply turn their
guns over to their old masters.

As black laborers became essential to the Union war effort and as demands to
enlist black men in the Federal army mounted, the pressure for emancipation
became inexorable. By the summer of 1862, Lincoln understood the importance
of the sable arm as well as any. Lincoln had decided to act. On July 22, [1862,] he
informed the cabinet of his intention to issue a proclamation of general
emancipation. The slaves' determination had indeed made every policy short of
emancipation untenable.17 On January 1, 1863, Lincoln fulfilled his promise to
free all slaves in the states still in rebellion. Had another Republican been in
Lincoln's place, that person doubtless would have done the same. Without
question, some would have acted more expeditiously and with greater bravado.
Without question, some would have acted more cautiously and with lesser
resolve. In the end, Lincoln did what needed to be done. Others might be left
behind: Lincoln would not. It does no disservice to Lincoln—or to anyone else—to

Beyond the Main': Abraham Lincoln's Philosophy on Black Colonization,"

Lincoln Herald 80 (1978): 115-22.
15 Lincoln, Collected Works, 5:29-31, 317-19.
16 U.S. Statutes at Large, 12 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1863): 1267-68.
17 As Lincoln later put it, "No human power can subdue this rebellion without

using the Emancipation lever as I have done." Lincoln, Collected Works, 7:499-
502, 506-8, quotation on p. 507.
say that his claim to greatness rests upon his willingness to act when the moment
was right.

When Lincoln finally acted, he moved with confidence and determination. He

stripped the final Emancipation Proclamation of any reference to compensation
for former slaveholders or colonization for former slaves.18 He added provisions
that allowed for the service of black men in the Union army and navy. The
Proclamation opened the door to the eventual enlistment of more than 179,000
black men, most of them former slaves.

More than anything else, the enlistment of black men, slave as well as free,
transformed the Federal army into an army of liberation. At war's end, the
number of black men in Federal uniform was larger than the number of soldiers
in Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Military enlistment became the surest solvent
of slavery, extending to places the Emancipation Proclamation did not reach,
especially the loyal slave states. Once slave men entered the Union army, they
were free and they made it clear that they expected their families to be free as
well. Lincoln's actions, however tardy, gave force to all that the slaves had risked.
The Emancipation Proclamation transformed the war in ways only the president
could. After January 1, 1863, the Union army marched for freedom, and Lincoln
was its commander.

Lincoln understood the importance of his role, both politically and morally—just
as the slaves had understood theirs. Having determined to free the slaves, Lincoln
declared he would not take back the Emancipation Proclamation even when
military failure and political reversals threatened that policy. He repudiated his
misgivings about the military abilities of black soldiers and became one of their
great supporters. Lincoln praised the role of black soldiers in preserving the
Union and ending chattel bondage and vowed not to "betray" them. "There have
been men who proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors of Port
Hudson & Olustee to ... conciliate the South," Lincoln reflected in August 1864, "I
should be damned in time & in eternity for doing so.''19 To secure the freedom
that his proclamation had promised, Lincoln pressed for the final liquidation of
slavery in the Union's own slave states where diehards obstructed and delayed.
To that end and to write freedom into the nation's highest charter, Lincoln
promoted passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, although he did not live to see
its ratification.

18 Lincoln, who had declared in his second annual message to Congress," I cannot
make it better known than it already is, that I strongly favor colonization," never
made another public appeal for the scheme. Fehrenbacher, "Only His
Stepchildren," 308.
19 Lincoln, Collected Works, 7:499-502, 506-8, quotation on p. 507.
 Conclusion
The Emancipation Proclamation's place in the drama of emancipation is thus
secure—as is Lincoln's. To deny it is to ignore the intense struggle by which
freedom arrived. It is to ignore the Union soldiers who sheltered slaves, the
abolitionists who stumped for emancipation, and the thousands of men and
women who, like Lincoln, changed their minds as slaves made the case for
universal liberty. Reducing the Emancipation Proclamation to a nullity and
Lincoln to a cipher denies human agency just as personifying emancipation in a
larger-than-life Great Emancipator denies the agency of the slaves and many
others, and trivializes the process by which the slaves were freed. And, as in many
other cases, process is critical.

Both Lincoln and the slaves played their parts in the drama of emancipation.
Denying their complementary roles limits understanding of the complex
interaction of human agency and events that resulted in slavery's demise. The
editors of Freedom, who have sought to make the slaves central to the study of
emancipation, have tried to expand the terrain of historical understanding,
documenting the process by which freedom arrived. They have maintained that
the slaves were the prime movers of emancipation; they do not believe they were
the only movers, and nowhere do they deny Lincoln's importance to the events
that culminated in universal freedom. In fact, rather than single out slaves or
exclude Lincoln, the editors argue for the significance of others as well: white
Union soldiers—few of them racial egalitarians—who saw firsthand how slavery
weakened the Union cause; their families and friends in the North, eager for
Federal victory, who learned from these soldiers the strength the Confederate
regime drew from bonded labor; the Northern men and women, most of whom
had no connection with the abolition movement, who acted upon such news to
petition Congress; and the congressmen and senators who eventually moved in
favor of freedom. Taken as a whole, however, the new understanding of
emancipation does suggest something of the complexity of the process by which
freedom arrived and the limitation of seeing slavery's end as the product of any
one individual—or element—in the social order.

Emphasizing that emancipation was not the work of one hand underscores the
force of contingency, the crooked course by which universal freedom arrived. It
captures the ebb and flow of events which, at times, placed Lincoln among the
opponents of emancipation and then propelled him to the forefront of freedom's
friends. It emphasizes the clash of wills that is the essence of politics, whether it
involves enfranchised legislators or voteless slaves. Politics, perforce, necessitates
an on-the-ground struggle among different interests, not the unfolding of a single
idea or perspective, whether that of an individual or an age. Lincoln, no less than
the meanest slave, acted upon changing possibilities as he understood them. To
think that Lincoln could have anticipated these changes—or, more strangely still,
somehow embodied them—imbues him with a power over the course of events
that no human being has ever enjoyed. Lincoln was part of history, not above it.
Whatever he believed about slavery in 1861, Lincoln did not see the war as an
instrument of emancipation.20 The slaves did. Lincoln's commitment to
emancipation changed with time because it had to. The slaves' commitment to
universal freedom never wavered because it could not.

Complexity—contrary to McPherson—is not ambivalence or ambiguity. To tell the

whole story, to follow that crooked course, does not diminish the clarity of an
argument or mystify it into a maze of "nuance, paradox, or irony." Telling the
entire tale is not a form of obfuscation. If done right, it clarifies precisely because
it consolidates the mass of competing claims under a single head. Elegance or
simplicity of argument is useful only when it encompasses all of the evidence, not
when it excludes or narrows it. In the perennial tests in which constituted
authority searches for the voice of the people and when the people are testing the
measure of their leaders, it is well to recall the relationship of both to securing
freedom's greatest victory.21 Real change derives both from the actions of the
people and from the imprimatur of constituted authority.

Source
Excerpted from Ira Berlin, “Who Freed the Slaves? Emancipation and Its
Meaning,” in Union and Emancipation: Essays on Politics and Race in the Civil
War Era, ed. David W. Blight and Brooks D. Simpson (Kent, OH: Kent State
University Press, 1997), 105–21.

20 If there is a tendency in one brand of social history to emphasize the agency of

the disfranchised, there is a similar tendency in one brand of political history to
emphasize the omnipotence and clairvoyance of the great leader. The hero sees
farthest, first. While combating the former fallacy, McPherson succumbs to the
latter. From the beginning of the war, McPherson maintains, "Lincoln demurred
from turning the war for Union into a war for slavery because the war for Union
united Northern people while premature emancipation would divide them and
lose the war." Lincoln, in other words, understood the Civil War as a struggle for
emancipation from the beginning. He waited, however, for the right moment to
spring the news on those not quite as farseeing. "With an acute sense of timing,"
McPherson continues,'' Lincoln first proclaimed emancipation only as a means to
win the war (to gain moderate and conservative support) and ultimately as an
end—to give America 'a new birth of freedom,' as Lincoln said at Gettysburg."
21 USA Today, Dec. 30, 1992.