The Revolution of 1861 by Andre M. Fleche

Author:Andre M. Fleche
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2012-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

5

The Last Best Hope of Earth

ON JANUARY 1, 1863, IN A MUCH-ANTICIPATED NEW YEAR’S DAY CEREMONY, Abraham Lincoln signed his Emancipation Proclamation. The order, in its final form, granted freedom to all slaves still held in bondage in Confederate territory. The president’s directive recast the U.S. military as an army of liberation. It instructed members of the armed forces to act on their new duty to “recognize and maintain” the freedom of the slaves they encountered as Union armies marched deeper into the South. The new federal policy also authorized African Americans to strike a blow for their own emancipation. For the first time since the war began, black Americans could officially enlist and serve in the Union army.1

Numerous observers remarked on the revolutionary nature of the act. For some, it called to mind the most momentous events of the past half-century. Frederick Douglass compared the promise of emancipation to the promise that the revolutions of 1848 had held for “the death of kingcraft in Europe and throughout the world.” Lest the supporters of abolition prematurely give up the struggle, he recalled with foreboding that in Europe “the latent forces of despotism rallied.” Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the New England abolitionist and man of letters, also worried that the lessons of the past spoke to the transience of progressive change. As he waited to lead into battle one of the first African American regiments to take the field, he confessed to fears that the president’s promise might not be kept. “After the experience of Hungary, one sees that revolutions may go backward,” he remembered. In New York City, the Irishman and Democratic politician James T. Brady spoke to a large gathering of citizens designed to build support for the new policy. Brady, as did many of his countrymen, admitted to having once bitterly opposed all abolitionists. He now considered emancipation necessary to save the U.S. government, a government that he believed provided “a home and a refuge from the persecution and oppression” of the Old Country. “I have within me,” he wrote, “the hope of the poor serf in Russia, the enthusiasm of the young Hungarian, who, by the little flicking flame of freedom, even though it be in a dungeon, finds himself stimulated with . . . hope.”2

As the reactions of Douglass, Higginson, and Brady attest, emancipation held more than domestic relevance. It also responded to recent history and held implications for the world. For contemporaries in Europe and America, Lincoln’s decision to free Confederate slaves represented nothing less than an act of revolution. It gave the Union a common cause and a shared history with the thousands of revolutionaries in Europe who had taken up arms for liberty, equality, economic justice, and liberal nationalism in the years since 1789. But it did more than that. Emancipation forced northern intellectuals, politicians, and policymakers to rethink the meaning of American nationalism. They had heretofore avoided associating the Union cause with revolutionary values out of fear that such comparisons might hurt the United States’ standing as a credible world power.

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