Digital Extra: The Journal's 175th Anniversary

07.21.2004

1862. Emancipation to abolition: a bloody path

President Lincoln's September 1862 announcement of his Emancipation Proclamation seemed to catch The Journal by surprise. The text of the proclamation -- stating that Lincoln intended to declare the slaves free in the rebel states -- came by telegraph on Sept. 22 from Washington, D.C., and was published without comment in the next day's paper.

On Sept. 24, a careful editorial analysis supported the proclamation as a potentially effective tool of war; The Journal argued that any discord among southern slaves could undercut the South's war effort. "They have sent nearly all their males capable of bearing arms to the war, leaving the negroes to do the agriculture work under the direction of the women and the boys," the paper wrote. If the slaves were free, the South would have to recall soldiers to grow their crops.

But The Journal did not immediately back the proclamation on moral grounds.

"It is superfluous to say that the President adopts this measure strictly as a war measure, that he frees the slaves as he takes the horses or houses which it is necessary to take from the enemy . . .

"We are free to confess that we have never been so sanguine as many in expecting that very great military advantages would immediately result from a proclamation of emancipation," The Journal wrote. A week later, the paper acknowledged: "We have not been among those who urged a proclamation of emancipation. We desired to see the question of emancipation kept in entire subordination to that of the war."

The paper's positions on slavery evolved over the next three years of hard war, until The Journal's editors had become abolitionists.

In praising Lincoln in March 1865, The Journal concluded: "Nothing else which he has done, nothing which he possibly can do, will contribute so much to insure him the admiration and regard of all future generations as his emancipation proclamation."

The paper also wrote about the reaction and evolution of the Republican Party, but it could have been speaking of The Providence Journal:

"A large portion of the party which elected [Lincoln] at first, gave his proclamation a qualified and cautious approval, and were in truth a little taken by surprise. But public opinion soon came to the President's support . . . They look forward with pleasure to the day when he can officially announce that the last slave has really come into possession of that freedom, to which he declared all slaves entitled by virtue of his great proclamation."

In December 1865, The Journal marked the final adoption of the 13th Amendment banning slavery as the day "the historian will pause to survey the long and bloody path by which the nation has come up to that sublime height of achievement."