The Incomplete Emancipator

The Lincoln-Douglas Senate debates of 1858 are celebrated as a landmark of American political rhetoric. They are also a primary source document that most American students are never shown in full. At Charleston, Illinois, on September 18, 1858, Lincoln said the following in a public debate: that he was not in favor of bringing about social and political equality of the white and Black races; that he was not in favor of making Black people voters, jurors, or officeholders; and that there was a physical difference between the races that he believed would likely prevent them from living together on terms of social and political equality. He stated he was, as much as any other man, in favor of the superior position being assigned to the white race. C1

These were not private views. They were stated in a public debate, recorded, and widely reported. Lincoln was running for Senate in a state where abolitionists were politically marginal and where positioning himself as a moderate on race was a strategic necessity. LI The question this profile does not pretend to answer definitively — because it cannot be answered definitively — is how much these represented his genuine beliefs versus political positioning versus the views he held at a particular moment in an evolving life. What the profile states plainly is: he said them, publicly, in 1858.

Lincoln's views on race did evolve. By 1865 he had suggested, privately and then publicly, that some Black men — particularly those who had served in the Union army — might deserve the right to vote. C1 This evolution is real and documented. But it coexists with the full record of what came before, and the mythology that presents Lincoln as a lifelong champion of racial equality is not supported by that record.

In the summer of 1862, the Dakota people of Minnesota rose in armed conflict against the United States government. The causes were documented and specific: the federal government had failed to deliver treaty payments and food rations, and the Dakota were starving. C1 The Dakota War lasted six weeks. It ended with the capture of hundreds of Dakota men, who were tried in military tribunals — proceedings lasting as little as five minutes per case, with no legal representation, conducted in a language most defendants did not speak. C1

Three hundred and three men were sentenced to death. Lincoln, facing pressure from Minnesota's governor and population demanding mass executions, reviewed the cases. He reduced the number to 38 — those whose trials showed evidence of direct participation in murders or rapes of civilians, distinguishing them from those who had fought as combatants. C1 The historical debate among scholars concerns how meaningful that distinction was given the quality of the trials. Lincoln's own commissioner who reviewed the cases acknowledged their procedural deficiencies. C2

On December 26, 1862, 38 Dakota men were hanged simultaneously in Mankato, Minnesota, in front of a crowd estimated at 4,000 people. It remains the largest mass execution in United States history. C1 The broader consequence: 1,600 Dakota people were forcibly marched to a prison camp where approximately 300 more died of disease the following winter. The Dakota were subsequently expelled from Minnesota by congressional act. C1

Lincoln signed the execution order on December 6, 1862. He was simultaneously working on the Emancipation Proclamation, which he issued 26 days later. The American school curriculum teaches extensively about the Proclamation. It rarely mentions Mankato.

The Emancipation Proclamation is the most misunderstood document in American history. Issued January 1, 1863, it declared that enslaved people in states "in rebellion against the United States" were free. C1 The states in rebellion were: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia (except 48 designated counties), Arkansas, and North Carolina.

The states not covered — states where slavery was legal and where Lincoln's proclamation explicitly did not apply — were: Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia. These were Union slave states. Lincoln excluded them deliberately, because including them might push them into the Confederacy. C1

The Emancipation Proclamation freed no one immediately. It was a war measure, enforceable only in territory under Union control — and Union forces controlled almost none of the Confederate states on January 1, 1863. As Union armies advanced and won territory, enslaved people in those areas were freed. Slavery was not abolished in the United States until the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified December 6, 1865 — eight months after Lincoln's death. C1

Lincoln himself described the Proclamation's purpose in primarily strategic terms in correspondence — it weakened the Confederacy, encouraged enslaved people to leave plantations and join Union forces, and helped prevent European recognition of the Confederacy. These were real and important consequences. C1 The mythology, however, presents the Proclamation as a straightforward moral act. The historical document is a more complicated instrument than that.