PAPER TWO

Paper Two

Paper Two

Introduction

Emancipation was the central issue of the Civil War. African Americans came to that conclusion at the outset of the war. The Union government took somewhat longer to reach the conclusion. The timing and the steps taken to achieve emancipation raise some interesting questions, which historians still grapple with. First, was emancipation a matter of expediency or conviction? Second, were the origins of emancipation top down or bottom up? To put it another way, was the government the catalyst or were African Americans and abolitionists the means of emancipation? The following is an examination of how some historians have treated the issue of emancipation. While they do not answer the above questions directly, they do point in the general direction of an answer to both of them. Through the examination, it will be seen that emancipation was a matter of conviction for some, and expediency for others. Additionally, the government in Washington, African Americans, and abolitionists alike, catalyzed emancipation.( Berlin, 1985)

Any examination of emancipation must begin with Abraham Lincoln. His words and deeds at the beginning of the Civil War have led some historians to conclude that he viewed emancipation as a political and military necessity, nothing more. This view is supported in The Destruction of Slavery. From the beginning of the war, Lincoln struggled with the emancipation issue. Harry Jarvis, a Virginia slave, escaped to Fortress Monroe occupied by Union forces under General Benjamin Butler. Jarvis asked Butler to let him enlist in the Union Army. Butler responded, It wasn't a black man's war.” Jarvis replied, “It would be a black man's war before they got through. African Americans as well as abolitionists understood from the beginning that slavery was the chief cause of the war, and as a Georgia slave put it, “Liberty must take the day.”( Foner, 2005:43)

However, other historians conclude that Lincoln was in an extremely delicate position. He had to maintain the support of the Border States, the slave states that stayed loyal to the Union, war Democrats, and his own party. According to LaWanda Cox, it was unclear until the election of 1864 that slavery would be destroyed. In her book, Lincoln and Black Freedom Cox argued, “Lincoln held a deeply felt conviction that slavery was morally wrong and should be placed on the road to extinction.” Additionally, James McPherson, in Who Freed the Slaves, argued, “The common denominator in all the steps that opened the door to freedom was the active agency of Lincoln as antislavery political leader, president-elect, president, and commander in chief.( McPherson,2005)

Discussion

Lincoln preferred a program of gradual compensated emancipation. That is, to offer slave states compensation to persuade them to abolish slavery themselves by acts of their own legislatures. The Confiscation Act of August 1861 and contrabands imperiled such a program. Slaves made their way into Union-occupied areas of the South months before there was a Confiscation Act. Harry Jarvis and others like him, some with families, who made it to the Union lines, came to ...