This parallel legacy was influenced by two of the nation’s unique Civil War social movements: the mostly political Union Leagues, dedicated to Republican politics and black enlistment, and the U.S. Of the document itself-as a talisman and piece of archival history. How then to explain the proclamation’s concurrent, and disparate, reputations as both a rhetorical failure and an icon of freedom? Perhaps nothing better illustrates these oddly conflicting historical currents than the strange history “We shout for joy that we live to record this righteous decree,” he wrote in Douglass’ Monthly, quoting the prosaic text with biblical fervor. “It was not a proclamation of ‘liberty throughout the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof,’ such as we had hoped it would be,” Douglass lamented, but “one marked by discriminations and reservations.” Even so, Douglass fully understood its immediate impact. Marx found it astonishing that what he called “the most significant document in American history since the founding of the Union and one which tears up the old American Constitution, bears the same character,” although its literary shortcomings did not alter its “historic content.”įrederick Douglass concurred, even after campaigning mightily for the document to be issued. A 19th-century European Lincoln admirer named Karl Marx similarly complained Lincoln’s freedom orders called to mind “the trite summonses that one lawyer sends to an opposing lawyer, the legal chicaneries and pettifogging stipulations of an actiones juris”-a court case. Historian Richard Hofstadter offered the most devastating criticism of all, famously deriding the Emancipation Proclamation as boasting “all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.” Hofstadter was hardly the first to make such a derisive comment.
No wonder the document’s style-or lack of it-has been criticized ever since. Its one stylistically redeeming sentence-“upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice…I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God”-was written not by Lincoln, but by Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. The word “free,” by contrast, appeared in the text only three times, first merely quoting the preliminary proclamation that had been issued a hundred days earlier and later to admonish liberated people to “abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence.” Most of the text was given not to discussing the promise of liberty, but to listing exemptions and exceptions. While the first Declaration of Independence began with the unforgettable phrase, “When in the course of human events,” the so-called second Declaration started with: “Whereas, on the twenty-second day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty two, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing among other things the following, to wit.” The remainder cited not “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but offered insipid phrases like “attention is hereby called” and “I do hereby enjoin.” The document groans under the burden of two “therefores,” one “thereto,” two “to wits” and two “aforesaids.”
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Yet he hardly offered the endeavor his full supply of literary skill.
As he told witnesses on New Year’s Day 1863-pausing before affixing his name to it because his right arm was “almost paralyzed” from three hours of holiday handshaking-“If my name ever goes into history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.” One thing is certain: Lincoln never doubted himself or his document. Why, observers have wondered, at a moment of such awesome historic importance, did the great writer fail to use all the powers at his command? When autographed reprints were offered for sale at a Philadelphia charity fair just a year and a half later, several copies went unsold at the price of $10.Ībraham Lincoln himself believed the document represented a “grand consummation” capable of inspiring a “great revolution in public sentiment.” But word for word, it struck many observers as not only less than “grand” and “great,” but remarkably short on sentiment itself. When it was first issued, even Northerners who recognized it as a second Declaration of Independence lamented its uninspiring prose. Lincoln’s famous flair for words couldn’t compete with the gravity of emancipation America's second declaration of independence Close
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