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Writer's pictureJohn O’Brien

Lincoln Defends Emancipation: The Conkling Letter, August 26, 1863

By John A. O'Brien

Denver, Colorado

August 26, 2024

 

Lincoln’s announcement of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation seriously damaged Republican election prospects. In voting conducted during the fall of 1862 through the early summer of 1863, Republicans lost several state legislature majorities, governorships, and congressional seats. Unfriendly legislatures in Indiana and Illinois were particularly problematic in hampering the Union war effort. The power of anti-war Democrats, known as Copperheads, had grown in the northwest, where subversive groups were actively planning a campaign of sabotage throughout the north. The Peace Democrats of Illinois held a mass rally on June 17, 1863, during which they approved a resolution that the country be restored under the Constitution as it was before the war, with slavery intact. 

 

Republicans planned their own, larger rally to be held in Springfield on September 3. Lincoln had hoped to attend to personally make his case for why emancipation was necessary to end the war more quickly. When he finally decided that he could not leave the capital, Lincoln wrote out a speech that he wanted his friend James C. Conkling to read on his behalf.


Lincoln sent what is now known as the Conkling Letter on August 26, 1863. This was likely the most effective of the several open letters Lincoln wrote to define his policies at critical times during the war.  Addressing the Peace Democrats and the anti-emancipation Republicans, Lincoln challenged them to prove that any negotiation could then result in a restored Union. Then he came to the heart of his message: that emancipation was the critical step necessary to winning the war and restoring the Union. "But to be plain,” Lincoln wrote, "You are dissatisfied with me about the negro. . . You dislike the emancipation proclamation and think it unconstitutional. I think differently.” Lincoln then made the case for his acting as commander in chief to deprive the rebels of a vital war resource, their slaves, and organizing them as Union soldiers. He declared that “some of the commanders of our armies in the field . . .  believe the emancipation policy and the use of the colored troops constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion, and that at least one of these important successes could not have been achieved when it was but for the aid of black soldiers.”  

 

Then Lincoln constructed the essential argument and challenge for his emancipation position. “You say you will not fight to free negroes,” he wrote, “[yet] some of them seem willing to fight for you; but no matter . . . I thought that in your struggle for the Union, to whatever extent the negroes should cease helping the enemy, to that extent it weakened the enemy in his resistance to you. Do you think differently? I thought that whatever negroes can be got to do as soldiers, leaves just so much less for white soldiers to do in saving the Union. Does it appear otherwise to you? But negroes, like other people, act upon motives. Why should they do anything for us if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive, even the promise of freedom. And the promise, being made, must be kept.”


Clement Vallandigham (Library of Congress). Vallandigham was a leader of the Peace Democrats (Copperhead) movement. Lincoln's letter helped to assure his defeat by John Brough for governor of Ohio in 1863. This prompted Lincoln to wire Brough, "Glory to God in the Highest. Ohio has saved the Nation."

Democrats objected, saying that if the proclamation could not be retracted, then Lincoln had abrogated every provision in the Constitution pertaining to slavery, and therefore “the Constitution has been murdered.” A New York paper declared that the speech meant “that the object of this struggle is to free negroes. And to do this [Lincoln] is willing to shed the blood of a quarter million of white men.” But the Chicago Tribune noted that Lincoln bolstered the Union-saving cause. “In a few plain sentences, than which none more important were ever uttered in this country, Mr. Lincoln exonerates himself from the charge urged against him, shows the untenableness of the position that his enemies occupy, and gives the world assurance that the great measure of policy and justice, which . . . guarantees freedom to three million of slaves, is to remain the law of the republic.”

  

The Conkling letter had its desired effect when the fall elections resulted in Republican governors in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maine. The electoral tide seemed to have turned in the Republicans favor. At least until the crisis of Lincoln’s reelection in September 1864. 


 

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