Emancipation Proclamation

The Emancipation Proclamation is a legal document not generally known for its literary qualities. In fact, several prominent persons have quipped about this. Karl Marx, a contemporary of Lincoln who closely followed the Civil War, wrote that the proclamation was the most important American document since the Constitution; however, Marx added about Lincoln: “He always presents the most important act in the most insignificant form possible” (Gambino, Megan. “Document Deep Dive: Emancipation Proclamation.” Smithsonian, 19 Dec. 2012). A century later, historian Richard Hofstadter stated the majority opinion when he wrote, “The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, had all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading” (Hofstadter, Richard. The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It. Knopf Doubleday, 1948, p. 158). This may seem surprising coming from Lincoln, some of whose orations, like the Gettysburg Address, are among the greatest in American history. Lincoln, however, chose to work in “prose” not “poetry” in this case, deliberately producing, some have argued, a “leaden” or “dry” document by design, in order to step gingerly between those who were prepared to celebrate the act and those prepared to be enraged by it. (For more on this, an excellent resource is Harold Holzer’s 2012 book Emancipating Lincoln: The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory).

Others, however, have pointed to phrases such as “then, thenceforward, and forever free” and the paragraph beginning, “And upon this act, believed to be an act of justice” (Paragraph 9), to demonstrate that the proclamation is not devoid of language that resounds.