THE DEVELOPMENT AND PURSUIT OF ANTISLAVERY POLICY IN THE UNITED STATES

James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 (New York & London: Norton, 2013) (From the bookjacket: "[Freedom National] shatters the widespread conviction that the Civil War was first and foremost a war to restore the Union and only gradually, when it became a military necessity, a war to end slavery. These two aims--'Liberty and Union, one and insepaable'--were intertwined in Republican policy from the very start of the war." "By the summer of 1861 the federal government invoked military authority to begin freeing slaves, immediately and without slaveholder compensation, as they fled to Union lines in the disloyal South. In the loyal Border States the Republicans tried coaxing officials into gradual abolition with promises of compensation and the colonization abroad of freed blacks. James Oakes shows that Lincoln's landmark 1863 proclamation marked neither the beginning nor the end of emancipation: it triggered a more aggressive phase of military emancipation, sending Union soldiers onto plantations to entice slaves away and enlist the men in the army. But slavery proved deeply entrenched, with slaveholders determined to re-enslave freedmen left behind the shifting Union lines. Lincoln feared that the war could end in Union victory with slavery still intact. The Thirteenth Amendment that so succinctly abolished slavery was no formality: it was the final act in a saga of immense war, social upheaval, and determined political leadership." From the text: "What-if history is always a tricky business, but in this case Lincoln and the Republicans laid the alternative scenario for us. They believed that if George B. McClellan, the Democratic candidate, were elected president in 1864, the Confederacy would still be defeated but slavery would survive the war. The mass emancipations of 1865 would not have happened. A President McClellan would not have required the defeated Confederate states to abolish slavery as a condition for readmission to the Union. There would have been no Thirteenth Amendment, and without it control over slavery would have reverted to the states where the slaveholders made it clear that even in defeat they would hold on to slavery forever if they could. If that happened there's no telling when, if ever, slavery would have ended in the United States. Who knows what would have happened to slavery in Cuba and Brazil? If the Republicans had not succeeded in making freedom national, we might not even be talking about the Age of Emancipation." Id. at xxiv.).