594 Emancipation adopted in West Virginia [1862 also succeeded in electing a governor in the great State of New York, whose stubborn partisanship gave the administration much annoyance when enforcing the Draft Law in the following year. Nevertheless, the elections once over, moderate men who had opposed military emancipation began gradually to accept it as one of the inevitable events of war, to be submitted to along with its other calamities. In the House of Representatives the Republicans promptly took measures to defeat a resolution declaring the proclamation to be an unconstitutional and dangerous war-measure, and, by a test vote of 78 to 51, passed a resolution sustaining it in strong affirmative terms. In his annual message of December 1, 1862, the President once more elaborately discussed and urgently recommended his policy of compensated emancipation, proposing a constitutional amendment containing provisions that all slaves who should have enjoyed actual freedom by the chances of war at any time before the end of the rebellion should remain for ever free; but that all loyal owners, and all States which should abolish the institution before 1900, should receive compensation from the United States. While this recommendation did not take effect in legislation, the strong logic of the President's argument and the fervency of his exhortation in favour of shortening the war, and dividing its necessary sacrifices between the people of both sections, made a powerful impression upon the public mind, preparing the country for the final military decree of which the September proclamation was the preliminary announcement. Meanwhile as a joint result of war, Congressional legislation, and executive action, the first step in actual emancipation took place. Loyal West Virginia, having by the spontaneous movement of her people repudiated secession, formed a new State and adopted a constitution, and applied for admission to the Union. Congress accepted all the provisions of the new constitution which she presented, except that relating to slaves, which was a simple prohibition against their being brought into the State for permanent residence. By way of insisting on a more radical reform, Congress embodied in its Act to admit the new State a condition precedent requiring it to adopt a system of gradual emancipation to begin on July 4, 1863; slave children born thereafter to be free, slaves under ten years of age to become free at twenty-one, and slaves under twenty-one to become free at twenty-five. The Senate passed the Act on July 14, 1862, and the House at the next session, on December 10, 1862. The constitutionality of this Act of Admission was thoroughly discussed by President Lincoln's Cabinet in written opinions, during the last week of December; and the President signed it on the 31st. In due time West Virginia accepted the system of gradual emancipation imposed by Congress; and the State was admitted on June 20, 1863. Finally, under the impulse of the growing spirit of progress, the system of 1863] Final decree of emancipation 595 gradual emancipation prescribed by Congress was terminated by the immediate abolition of "the institution" under an Act of the West Virginia legislature passed three days after the adoption of the XIIIth Amendment by Congress. The year 1862 had drawn to its close; the period fixed by the President's September proclamation, warning the country that an emancipation decree would follow unless rebellion ceased, had expired; but the Confederate States gave no sign of repentance, and offered no diminution of hostility; nor was there any indication of willingness to give up slavery and receive the money equivalent tendered. President Lincoln was not, however, the man to recede from his public announcement, and on January 1, 1863, he signed the final Edict of Freedom, the details of which he had carefully discussed with his Cabinet on the preceding day. The essential paragraphs of the proclamation read as follows: "Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war-measure for suppressing said rebellion, do, on this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and in accordance with my purpose so to do, publicly proclaimed for the full period of 100 days from the day first above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof, respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States, the following, to wit: 66 Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana (except the parishes of St Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson, St John, St Charles, St James, Ascension, Assumption, Terre Bonne, La Fourche, St Mary, St Martin, and Orleans, including the city of New Orleans), Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkeley, Accomac, Northampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Ann, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth), and which excepted parts are for the present left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued. "And by virtue of the power and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States and parts of States are, and henceforward shall be, free; and that the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognise and maintain the freedom of said persons. The proclamation also contained one other feature of immense importance not before publicly announced. It was contained in the following paragraph: "And I further declare and make known that 596 Negro soldiers in the Northern armies [1862-3 such persons of suitable condition will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service." While Lincoln had hitherto discouraged the formation of negro regiments for use in active campaigns, and while two or three tentative experiments to put arms into their hands to strengthen the local defence of the Port Royal cotton fields and the sugar plantations adjacent to New Orleans had proved unsuccessful, the purpose of eventually making the negroes a military resource had long been entertained by him, and was indeed one of the principal reasons for adopting the policy of military emancipation. So far back as July, 1862, when the collapse of McClellan's Richmond campaign had forced the President to make an anxious forecast of the future military struggle, he had indicated in a conversation his determination to use the great and decisive element of military strength which lay as yet untouched and unappropriated in the slave population of the South. The reasons which then existed against it—prejudice on the part of the whites, and the want of a motive on the part of the blacks—were removed, the first by the stress of war, the second by the two proclamations of freedom. Thereafter the government urgently pushed the formation of negro regiments among the Southern blacks; and before the end of the war 150,000 of their number carried bayonets in the Unionist armies, and worthily vindicated their right to freedom by bravery in battle. The fondness of Southern politicians and statesmen for redundant and florid rhetoric was aggravated by the passions of the Civil War into a hot and vindictive intemperance of language with which, in their official correspondence and State papers, they ascribed the meanest motives and most shocking excesses to their antagonists. The Confederate President, followed by some of the leading generals, could hardly find phrases sufficiently strong to express their feelings. They accused the North of conducting the war in a "cruel," "barbarous," "merciless," "inhuman" manner. This violence of language came to a climax whenever it touched the subject of negro soldiers. Forgetting their own wholesale use of slaves in various military labours, they affected to feel surprise and horror when Unionist commanders began to organise them for local defence. "The best authenticated newspapers received from the United States," wrote General Lee, "announce as a fact that Major-General Hunter has armed slaves for the murder of their masters, and has thus done all in his power to inaugurate a servile war, which is worse than that of the savage, inasmuch as it superadds other horrors to the indiscriminate slaughter of ages, sexes, and conditions." The Confederate War Department issued a general order that officers organising negro soldiers should be subject, if captured, to execution as felons. General Butler's earliest effort to repeat what the Confederates themselves had done in New Orleans to organise a regiment, not of slaves, 1861-3] Progress of the Abolition movement 597 but of free mulattos, was thus set forth in a proclamation of outlawry by the Confederate President: "African slaves have not only been incited to insurrection by every licence and encouragement, but numbers of them have actually been armed for a servile war a war in its nature far exceeding the horrors and most merciless atrocities of savages." In a similar temper Jefferson Davis, in his annual message, commented upon President Lincoln's final proclamation of emancipation. "Our own detestation of those who have attempted the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man is tempered by profound contempt for the impotent rage which it discloses "; and he threatened with dire punishment officers executing the decree. It is worthy of historical record that in the tremendous change which transferred four millions of Africans from bondage to freedom, none of these dreadful consequences happened. The Southern people had for half a century groaned and trembled under the nightmare of a general slave insurrection; and it was not unnatural that the Civil War should double this dread. But the suffering and destruction inseparable from war were not aggravated by any inhuman excesses on the part of the freed people, armed or unarmed. The only serious violation of the laws of war was committed by white Confederate soldiers at the massacre of Fort Pillow. This caused President Lincoln to issue an order of retaliation, but his humane and forgiving spirit permitted it to lapse. The action of Lincoln in freeing the United States from the institution of African slavery falls naturally into two periods. The first extends from the re-affirmation, in his inaugural address, of the doctrines of the Chicago platform to the final emancipation proclamation; the second from that military decree, which annulled the proprietary rights of rebellious masters, to the XIIIth Amendment obliterating slavery from the national jurisdiction. The edict of freedom left the "institution" untouched in a few territorial fragments of Louisiana and Virginia, and in the loyal States of Delaware, West Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. But an aggressive public spirit of reform had been generated during the first period, which now added its impulse to the stern decree of the final proclamation. The war had everywhere rudely disturbed the relation of master and slave, wakening the nation from the old life to fresher aspirations. The advantages of the Free States in intellectual energy and material prosperity were strongly brought into light by the trying struggle. The discussion of emancipation merged gradually into an acceptance of the idea, and a hope of its fulfilment. Considerable portions of the Secessionist States of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee came and remained under control of the Unionist armies; and the loyal element of the population, repressed under the terrorism of Secession, saw its best hope for ascendancy and domination, and the firm adherence of 598 Reconstruction and Emancipation [1863-4 the State to the Union, in the complete local destruction of the old order of things. To foster this political regeneration, President Lincoln, acting through his military governors and local commanders appointed to restore and supplement the civil administration subverted by secession, suggested, aided, and promoted the movements to reorganise loyal State governments and adopt new State constitutions by which slavery should be prohibited. Since these three States differed greatly in respect to existing military conditions and local political sentiment, the President, on December 8, 1863, issued a general proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction, granting to all except certain specified classes, on taking a prescribed oath of allegiance, pardon and restoration of rights of property, except as to slaves, and authorising one-tenth of the legal voters of any seceding State to re-establish a loyal State government, which would be recognised by the executive. In his accompanying annual message, he remarked further that "By the proclamation the plan is presented which may be accepted by them as a rallying point, and which they are assured in advance will not be rejected here.. Saying that reconstruction will be accepted if presented in a specified way, it is not said it will never be accepted in any other way." Under the terms of this proclamation, Arkansas and Louisiana organised State governments and adopted new constitutions prohibiting slavery, mainly during the year 1864; Tennessee, where more serious military obstacles prevailed, reached the same result early in 1865; while in the loyal border Slave States of Maryland and Missouri the regular political action of their people worked out the same constitutional reform at about the same dates. Congress, however, displayed considerable reluctance to recognise these "ten per cent. States" reorganised under the plan of the President, and to approve the admission of their senators and representatives to seats. Discussion of various theories engendered some factional heat among Republican senators and representatives; but the President carefully avoided the formation of any practical legislative issue on the subject. It was only in the succeeding administration of President Johnson that the divergence developed into bitter antagonism and led to a long constitutional struggle between the executive powers of the Administration and the legislative powers of Congress. Meanwhile, however, a yet more radical and far-reaching movement for the complete extinction of slavery was in progress. With the year 1864 came again the quadrennial election of a President of the United States. While the failures of campaigns, the rivalries of generals, and the fierce criticisms of the opposition minority in Congress had created a certain disaffection among a few Republican politicians towards Lincoln's administration, the people at large recognised and appreciated the unselfish devotion, sagacity, and tact which he had displayed in |