Did Lincoln REALLY Free The Slaves? - Excerpt

Ebony, Feb, 2000 by Lerone Bennett, Jr.

In what some critics call a hoax and others call a deliberate ploy not to free African-Americans but to keep them in slavery, Lincoln deliberately drafted the document so it wouldn't free a single Negro immediately.

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.

Despite what everybody, or almost everybody says, January 1, 1863, was not African-American Emancipation Day. Nor, as Randall and others have said, was it a Day of Jubilee for the slaves, except in certain military venues and Northern cities far removed from the hurt and humiliation of Slave Row. To tell the truth, there has never been a day in the United States of America when all the slaves could join hands and say together, "Free at last!" One of the many reasons why a national apology for slavery is an imperative necessity is that there has never been a day of closure for the slaves or the slaveholders--or the sons and daughters of the slaves and slaveholders. The real day of deliverance, December 18, 1865, the day and date nobody remembers, the day the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, was so formal and was hedged about with so many levels of technicality, that it came and went like the oxygen of the air, giving life without giving notice.

It is in the precise sense scandalous that Americans, Black and White, are so totally misinformed on this subject. Professors, museum curators, media prophets say almost without exception that slavery in America was ended by a presidential edict. And "other writers of what is claimed to be history, almost without number, speak of the President's announcement as if it caused the bulwarks of slavery to fall down very much as the walls of Jericho are said to have done, at one blast, overwhelming the whole institution and setting every bond man free." Nothing has changed in America since John Hume wrote those words in 1905. Despite computers, despite the Internet, despite the proliferation of books and pamphlets, almost all Blacks and Whites, including a not inconsiderable number of Ph.D.'s, believe that slavery in America ceased on the day and hour that Abraham Lincoln signed a document that dissolves, like a mirage, the closer one comes to it.

The confusion on this issue is monumental as we are reminded every year when schoolchildren and scholars in Memphis, New Orleans, Louisville, St. Louis, Norfolk, Baltimore and other cities celebrate a January 1 emancipation that specifically excluded Memphis, New Orleans and Norfolk and didn't even apply to the Border States of Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware. To add to the confusion, millions have created annual celebrations based on the idea that their ancestors were "freed" on January 1, 1863, but were not informed until months later by mean generals and officials.

If pressed, all or almost all scholars will concede that the Proclamation didn't free the slaves on January 1, 1863, but this information is disseminated, if it is disseminated at all, in footnotes or asides, and there is a tendency, even among the best scholars, to defend or even praise the Proclamation that didn't free anybody.