'He Will Issue No Proclamation'

LINCOLN WORKS ON FIRST DRAFT OF PROCLAMATION

32nd of 45 excerpts from Lincoln by David Herbert Donald:

The idea of emancipation by presidential decree was, of course, not a new one. On the day that the news of the firing on Fort Sumter reached the White House, [Massachusetts Senator Charles] Sumner had gone to the White House to remind the President that emancipation of the slaves of a military opponent fell within his war powers, and repeatedly he urged Lincoln to act. . . .

Lincoln began to think of emancipation as a question to be decided on the grounds of policy rather than of principle, and he started to formulate his ideas for a proclamation with Vice President Hamlin as early as June 18 [1863]. Later that month, in the cipher room of the War Department telegraph office, which the President frequented while anxiously awaiting dispatches from the army, he asked Major Thomas T. Eckert for some foolscap, because, he said, "he wanted to write something special." At the telegraph office, he remarked, he was able to work "more quietly and command his thoughts better than at the White House, where he was frequently interrupted." He then sat down at Eckert's desk, which faced onto Pennsylvania Avenue, and began to write. "He would look out of the window a while and then put his pen to paper," Eckert remembered, "but he did not write much at once. He would study between times and when he had made up his mind he would put down a line or two, and then sit quiet for a few minutes." That first day he filled less than a page, and as he left he asked Eckert to take charge of what he had written and not allow anyone to see it. Almost every day during the following weeks he asked for his papers and revised what he had written, adding only a few sentences at a time. Not until he had finished did he tell Eckert that he had been drafting a proclamation "giving freedom to the slaves in the South."

. . . In the following weeks, Lincoln repeatedly argued the issue of emancipation in his own mind. To help clarify his thinking, he summoned his old Illinois friend Leonard Swett to the White House and carefully reviewed with him all the arguments for and against an emancipation proclamation, reading some of the correspondence he had received on both sides of the question. "His manner did not indicate that he wished to impress his views upon his hearer," Swett later recalled, "but rather to weight and examine them for his own enlightenment in the presence of his hearer." So neutral was the President's presentation that Swett after the review wrote confidently to his wife, "He will issue no proclamation emancipating negroes."

PHOTOS (From top): Sumner and Swett