EMANCIPATION
When the news of a second battle of Bull Run reached
England it seemed at first to Lord John Russell that
the failure of the North was certain, and he asked
Palmerston and his colleagues to consider whether
they must not soon recognise the Confederacy, and whether
mediation in the interest of peace and humanity might
not perhaps follow. But within two months all
thoughts of recognising the Confederacy had been so
completely put aside that even Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville
caused no renewal of the suggestion, and an invitation
from Louis Napoleon to joint action of this kind between
England and France had once for all been rejected.
The battle of Antietam had been fought in the meantime.
This made men think that the South could no more win
a speedy and decisive success than the North, and
that victory must rest in the end with the side that
could last. But that was not all; the battle
of Antietam was followed within five days by an event
which made it impossible for any Government of this
country to take action unfriendly to the North.
On September 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln set his hand
to a Proclamation of which the principal words were
these: “That, on the first day of January
in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred
and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within
any State, or designated part of a State, the people
whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United
States, shall be then, thenceforward and forever free.”
The policy and the true effect of this act cannot
be understood without some examination. Still
less so can the course of the man who will always
be remembered as its author. First, in regard
to the legal effect of the Proclamation; in normal
times the President would of course not have had the
power, which even the Legislature did not possess,
to set free a single slave; the Proclamation was an
act of war on his part, as Commander-in-Chief of the
forces, by which slaves were to be taken from people
at war with the United States, just as horses or carts
might be taken, to subtract from their resources and
add to those of the United States. In a curiously
prophetic manner, ex-President John Quincy Adams had
argued in Congress many years before that, if rebellion
ever arose, this very thing might be done. Adams
would probably have claimed that the command of the
President became law in the States which took part
in the rebellion. Lincoln only claimed legal
force for his Proclamation in so far as it was an act
of war based on sufficient necessity and plainly tending
to help the Northern arms. If the legal question
had ever been tried out, the Courts would no doubt
have had to hold that at least those slaves who obtained
actual freedom under the Proclamation became free in
law; for it was certainly in good faith an act of
war, and the military result justified it. A
