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Lincoln's hesitation to emancipate slaves at the onset of the war stemmed from his belief that American self-government itself was in danger: "We already have an important principle to rally and unite the people in the fact that constitutional government is at stake. This is a fundamental idea, going down about as deep as any thing." He was at pains to figure out how to preserve a constitutional regime from the physical force of rebellious southerners as well as the rhetorical force of rebellious abolitionists. The former were unwilling to obey a duly elected Republican administration, while the latter were unwilling to support a constitutional union of freemen and slaveholders.

In short, Lincoln sought to rid the nation of slavery, but not at the price of free government. To act simply according to an abstract truth about the natural equality of human beings without respecting the coeval truth that a government should act only by the consent of the governed would be to undermine the rule of law that emancipated slaves would need for their protection. "Without the legal freedom conferred first by the Emancipation Proclamation," Guelzo argues, "no runaway could have remained 'self-emancipated' for very long." Freeing the slaves was always only half the battle. Providing "security for freedom," as Guelzo notes, was the main difficulty in devising any emancipation policy.

An important contention of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation is that Lincoln feared a federal court might revoke a wartime emancipation of slaves as an unconstitutional taking of private property under the prohibition of bills of attainder. With his "unrelenting judicial nemesis" Chief Justice Roger Taney on the Supreme Court, this was no idle threat. Guelzo argues that this was the main reason Lincoln repeatedly called upon states to initiate the "abolishment" of slavery instead of applying federal power unilaterally to the "peculiar institution."

This also supports Guelzo's defense of Lincoln's Proclamation against the charge that its lack of eloquence reflected a lack of conviction about freeing slaves—a criticism lodged most recently by Ebony magazine's executive editor Lerone Bennett in Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream (2000).1 Bennett writes, "What Lincoln did—and it was so clever that we ought to stop calling him honest Abe—was to 'free' slaves in Confederate-held territory where he couldn't free them and to leave them in slavery in Union-held territory where he could have freed them." Bennett's argument implies that what Lincoln should have done regarding slavery in Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware concerned only the military might of the president, and not the constitutional rights of loyal citizens. But this still leaves the claim that Lincoln waxed prosaic, not poetic, in his world-historic proclamation.

Guelzo responds that "the Proclamation is a legal document, and legal documents cannot afford very much in the way of flourishes. They have work to do." The occasion demanded not a full-throated rejection of slavery—for no one doubted Lincoln's view on this point—but a sober declaration of the president's authority. We are reminded that Lincoln's declaration of freedom to slaves in the rebellious states was not a speech per se, but an executive order intended to have legal and practical effect. As Lincoln's Gettysburg Address confirms with its call for a "new birth of freedom," there would be time enough for speeches on the subject.

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