I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. Let me express my great appreciation to the chairman and to the ranking member of this committee. Today we have come to this temple of democracy on this…
I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. Let me express my great appreciation to the chairman and to the ranking member of this committee.
Today we have come to this temple of democracy on this momentous occasion to write a new chapter in the unfolding story of human freedom. The event of emancipation marks one of the most if not the most significant event in American history.
Emancipation was more than an act; it was a process. Emancipation was not a date but a period. Emancipation was not an event but the fulfillment of providence that the arc of history may be long but it bends towards justice and human freedom.
When the American city war erupted, both North and South defended their causes as morally just, legally right, and constitutionally sound. Northerners and southerners saw themselves as the true Americans following in the tradition and the footsteps of the Founding Fathers. North and South used the Constitution as their source of moral and legal authority for conducting a war against each other. Both sides saw themselves as standing in the tradition of the American Revolution.
Each side contended that it was fighting for freedom and liberty, though certain facts contradicted the beliefs of both. The South said it was fighting to preserve the freedom, while owning slaves. The North said it was fighting for liberty, while not initially fighting to grant liberty to the slaves. President Abraham Lincoln's address to the Sanitary Fair in Baltimore on April 18, 1864, summed up the quandary.
He said, ``We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word, we do not mean the same thing. With some the word `liberty' may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men and the product of other men's labor. Here are two not only different but incompatible things called by the same name: liberty. And it follows that each of these things is, by their respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names: liberty and tyranny.''
Today women, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgendered Americans, African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and students see in the word ``liberty'' one thing. Today for the Titans of Industry, it still means quite another. For the disposed, it means for each person to do with himself as they please. For the Titans, it means for them to do as they please with other men and the product of other men's labor anywhere in the world. As Lincoln said, ``And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names: liberty and tyranny.''
That is why the efforts to name the great hall Liberty Hall will settle for some but still not settle for others the fundamental question of human freedom. For millions of Americans to pass through Emancipation Hall and not Liberty Hall is an important acknowledgment about the process for attaining human freedom in the American historical context.
Mr. Speaker, it is most appropriate that the distinguished gentleman from Tennessee, Mr. Zach Wamp, offered this amendment, in conjunction with the gentleman from Illinois, to help establish a marker in the Capitol of the United States about the significant role that these Americans, these Africans, played in the process not only in constructing the temple of our democracy but in strengthening America.
Madam Chair, it is probably most appropriate that the Emancipation Hall designation be established during this Thanksgiving period, as the first Thanksgiving established by proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln was during the American Civil War when President Lincoln, on October 3, 1863, looked out over a Nation torn by war, ravaged by internecine, intrafamily and interfamily struggles, and concluded that because of the extraordinary efforts of the North and the South, men and women who thought their causes were just, that we needed a national day of thanks. And so on October 3, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln affixed to a national proclamation a national day of thanks to say thank you for now until eternity for all of the blessings that have been bestowed upon our Nation.
Thanksgiving has a lot less to do, Mr. Speaker, with Pilgrims in 1620 and much more to do with the emancipation of human freedom.
I thank the gentlewoman for the time.
Lincoln understood for his time and ours that we must not be confused about the language and process of human freedom.
Much has been said about Lincoln and his ambivalence about emancipation. I believe when placed in context greater clarity emerges in Lincoln's calculation of emancipation.
In 1862, Lincoln's announced support of colonization, along with his lack of public support for emancipation, was generating sometimes vicious attacks from militant abolitionists, including a ``Prayer for Twenty Millions'' editorial urging emancipation that appeared in Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. On August 22, a month after the private announcement to his cabinet on July 22 that he intended to issue an Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln replied to Greeley's editorial with a masterfully written open letter:
If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they
could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with
them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless
they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree
with them. My paramount objective in this struggle is to save
the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.
If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would
do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I
would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and
leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about
slavery, and colored race, I do because I believe it helps to
save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do
not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less
whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and
I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help
the cause.
Lincoln was reiterating his central thesis, that the purpose of the war was preservation of the Union, but in light of the intransigence of the border States, he was publicly hinting that he might have to do something more, including emancipation, to save the Union. In this open letter, Lincoln was saying ``if,'' but he had already concluded in his own mind ``that'' the only way to save the Union was to free the slaves.
After the emancipation proposal became public, Lincoln was sometimes ridiculed in political oratory and newspaper editorials about
his Emancipation Proclamation, which would free the slaves only where the president had no power to do so--in the rebel southern States--but preserve the institution everywhere else. But Lincoln's enemies either misunderstood the president, lacked his understanding of the Constitution, or ignored his politics. On saving the Union, Lincoln had additional flexibility under the Constitution. Politically, he could sometimes get away with violating it by engaging in arbitrary arrests and suspending the writ of habeas corpus. On the question of ending slavery, however, Lincoln saw no such flexibility. His understanding of the Constitution committed him to acting within both it and the law, for neither had yet been changed. Under the Constitution, slavery was still legal in the United States.
On the first question, Lincoln and all Republicans agreed that a Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery must be added to the Constitution. The Senate quickly passed such an amendment, but the House--which had gained thirty-four Democrats in the 1862 midterm elections--was opposed.
Lincoln understood, if others didn't, that issuing the Emancipation Proclamation would convert a struggling Union army, trying to hold a Nation together, into a liberation army to free the slaves. The newly freed slaves could help win the struggle by fighting alongside the Union soldiers. Of course, the liberation of slaves would happen only if the North won the war. Militant abolitionists still thought the proclamation weak, southerners thought it an outrage, but most antislavery advocates, both black and white, understood its revolutionary implications. It was the one act that changed the entire character of the war. It gave the war a moral purpose--human freedom-- to bolster the political goal of saving the Union. And a purpose with such deep emotional power condemned the Confederacy to sure defeat.
The question now was, having transformed the conflict into a war of liberation, would the northern Union soldiers still fight? Some said no. ``An Ohio Democrat amended the party's slogan to proclaim, `the Constitution as it is, the Union as it was, the Niggers where they are.' '' But most said yes! ``A Democratic private in the Army of the Potomac whose previous letters had railed against abolitionists and blacks now expressed support for `putting away any institution if by so doing it will put down the rebellion, for I hold that nothing should stand in the way of the Union--niggers, nor anything else.' ''
With the July 4, 1863 victory at Gettysburg and Vicksburg northern hopes rose and southern spirits sank.
The burial of the Gettysburg dead was originally planned for October 23 but rescheduled to November 19 because the principal orator, Edward Everett of Massachusetts, could not be ready before then. Lincoln, by comparison, was casually invited to attend and make a few remarks. ``No insult was intended. Federal responsibility or participation was not assumed, then, in state activities. And Lincoln took no offense. Though specifically invited to deliver only `a few appropriate remarks' to open the cemetery, he meant to use this opportunity. The partly mythical victory of Gettysburg was important to his administration's war propaganda.''
There are mythical accounts that Lincoln wrote his Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope. Even though the 272-word speech probably took less than three minutes to deliver--interrupted with applause five times by the twenty thousand in attendance--such cavalier preparation would have been totally uncharacteristic of Lincoln, who took such opportunities very seriously.
Lincoln intended to use this occasion and speech to lift the Nation's eyes above the death and carnage of Gettysburg ``to a level of abstraction that purges it of grosser matter . . . Lincoln did for the whole Civil War what he accomplished for the single battlefield.'' He transformed its meaning and in so doing transformed what it meant to be an American.
Lincoln mentioned neither slavery nor Gettysburg. He drained his speech of all particulars in order to lift up an ideal. Lincoln intended to create something good and new out of this tragic and bloody episode. Both North and South strove to interpret Gettysburg to further their own war interests. Lincoln was after an even bigger victory-- winning the ideological as well as the military war. And he succeeded. ``The Civil War is, to most Americans, what Lincoln wanted it to mean. Words had to complete the word of the guns.''
When we wave the flag and celebrate on July 4, Independence Day, we are not so much celebrating our American-ness in terms of our independence from England. We are celebrating the meaning of the flag and America as Lincoln interpreted them in his Gettysburg Address. At Gettysburg, Lincoln reinterpreted the Constitution. Looking past slavery in the Constitution, he appealed to the Declaration of Independence and its claim that ``all men are created equal.'' Conservative political ``heirs to his outrage still attack Lincoln for subverting the Constitution at Gettysburg.''
Lincoln is here not only to sweeten the air at Gettysburg,
but to clear the infected atmosphere of American history
itself, tainted with official sins and inherited guilt. He
would cleanse the Constitution--not, as William Lloyd
Garrison had, by burning an instrument that countenanced
slavery. He altered the document from within, by appeal from
its letter to the spirit, subtly changing the recalcitrant
stuff that legal compromise, bringing it to its own
indictment. By implicitly doing this, he performed one of the
most daring acts of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed
by the unsuspecting. Everyone in that vast throng of
thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked.
The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological
luggage, that new Constitution Lincoln has substituted for
the one they brought there with them. They walked off, from
those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky,
into a different America. Lincoln has revolutionized the
Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would
change their future indefinitely.
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was transforming the United States from a plural to a singular noun--from the United States are into the United States is a free government.
According to Garry Wills, Lincoln, by his words and action, converted the Union from a mystical hope into a constitutional reality.
July 4, 1776--only white men could vote; July 4, 1863--Gettysburg; July 4, 2007: Barack Obama, an African American, Hillary Clinton, a woman, Mitt Romney, a Mormon, All are candidates for President; America and what it means to be an American today will not be the same definition of what it means to be an American tomorrow. We are all part of the Emancipation process.
A bit of trivia, when was the first Thanksgiving? 1620. Why? Landing of Plymouth Rock. Interesting, because the first slaves arrived in Jamestown in 1619.
In November 1863, Abraham Lincoln looked out over a Nation ravaged by war, internecine warfare, intra and inter family feuding, and saw light at the end of the tunnel for Northern victory and proclaimed the 3rd Thursday in November as a national day of thanks. Proclamation of Thanksgiving:
Washington, DC,
October 3, 1863.
This is the proclamation which set the precedent for
America's national day of Thanksgiving. During his
administration, President Lincoln issued many orders like
this. For example, on November 28, 1861, he ordered
government departments closed for a local day of
thanksgiving.
Sarah Josepha Hale, a prominent magazine editor, wrote a
letter to Lincoln on November 28, 1863, urging him to have
the ``day of our annual Thanksgiving made a National and
fixed Union Festival. `` She wrote, ``You may have observed
that, for some years past, there has been an increasing
interest felt in our land to have the Thanksgiving held on
the same day, in all the States; it now needs National
recognition and authoritive fixation, only, to become
permanently, an American custom and institution. `` The
document below sets apart the last Thursday of November ``as
a day of Thanksgiving and Praise. ``
According to an April 1, 1864, letter from John Nicolay,
one of President Lincoln's secretaries, this document was
written by Secretary of State William Seward, and the
original was in his handwriting. On October 3, 1863, fellow
Cabinet member Gideon Welles recorded in his diary that he
complimented Seward on his work. A year later the manuscript
was sold to benefit Union troops.
By the President of the United States of America.
A Proclamation
The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled
with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To
these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are
prone to forget the source from which they come, others have
been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they
cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is
habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of
Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequaled
magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign
States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has
been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained,
the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has
prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military
conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by
the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful
diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of
peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested
the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the
borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron
and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more
abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily
increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in
the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country,
rejoicing in the consiousness of augmented strength and
vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large
increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath
any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the
gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with
us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.
It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be
solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one
heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do
therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the
United States, and also those who are at sea and those who
are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the
last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and
Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.
And I recommend to them that while offering up the
ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances
and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our
national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender
care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or
sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are
unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition
of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to
restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine
purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony,
tranquillity and Union.
In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and
caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.
Done at the city of Washington, this third day of October,
in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-
three, and of the Independence of the United States the
Eighty-eighth.
By the President: Abraham Lincoln.
William H. Seward,
Secretary of State.
The question for contemporary American memory is why would we appropriate the memory for Thanksgiving as ``Plymouth Rock'' an event that has its formation in quite a different story.
The same can be said for the story of our capitol. From the moment a visitor enters this building the unfolding process of emancipation, the players in this drama, the actors, the people, the heroes and the sheroes have been hidden, denied a fair and accurate account of these unfolding events.
Rotunda: Story of America from pilgrims to the Wright Brothers. Not a story of America; Statuary Hall: Emancipation is ignored in Statuary Hall as we count among our honored dead Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Confederate Vice President Alexander Hamilton Stephens, Confederate General Robert E. Lee, and Confederate Commander Joseph Wheeler--still in uniform; Rather than discuss this history we reduce the story of this Nation to acoustics; Old Senate Chamber: Charles Sumner, Preston Brooks, Plessy v. Ferguson; Old Supreme Court Chamber: Dred Scott, Amistad Africa.
It is the emancipation process that led to the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. And as descendants of Slaves we believe that as Americans are better educated on this history that process will lead to our twenty-eighth amendment, our twenty-ninth and thirtieth: Health care for all; Education of equal and high quality for all; Cleaner environment; Fix our Nation's voting system; Provide equality for women.
It is our Nation's historical process and only that process can provide emancipation for all.
Interpreting Lincoln's life and work is extremely important. Recently there have been questions raised as to whether Lincoln should be credited with freeing the slaves. The argument goes: Given some of Lincoln's history, his racial attitudes and stalemates, his moderate views on the subject, his noninterference with slavery where it already existed, his one proposed solution of colonization, his gradualist approach to ending the institution, his hesitancy with respect to issuing the Emancipation Proclamation and using colored troops in the war, his late conversion to limited voting rights for blacks, and more, why should he be given credit with freeing the slaves? Some have even argued that it was various actions taken by the slaves--including the power given to the Union cause as a result of the moral case for overturning slavery, plus the actual military role of working and fighting in Union campaigns--that actually freed them. By forcing the emancipation issue onto the agenda, first of military officers, then of Congress, and finally of Lincoln, it was their actions that led to freedom.
Clearly, just as the Congress and Lyndon Johnson would not have been able to pass and sign the civil rights and social legislation of the 1960s apart from a modern civil and human rights movement, so too the military commanders, the Congress, and Lincoln would not have been able to achieve what they did without the agitation and movement of the slaves and their allies. On the other hand, the slaves would not have become freedmen apart from what these leaders did. Because historical interpretation has played up the role of white male leaders while playing down the role of mass movements and leaders of color and women, our understanding of history has been skewed. Some of the current ``putdown'' of traditional historical interpretation is legitimate rejection and reaction to his past limited and distorted understanding and interpretation of our history. The search now, it seems to me, should be for a more balanced interpretation, which includes striving to put many forces and multiple players in proper balance and perspective. That, I think, is what is at issue with regard to the question: Did Lincoln free the slaves?
To answer this question James M. McPherson says in Drawn With the Sword that we must first ask: What was ``the essential condition, the one thing without which it would not have happened? The clear answer is the war.'' Slavery had existed for nearly two and a half centuries, it was more deeply entrenched in the South than ever, and every effort at self-emancipation--and there were plenty--had failed. ``Without the Civil War there would have been no confiscation act, no Emancipation Proclamation, no Thirteenth Amendment (not to mention the Fourteenth and Fifteenth) . . . and almost certainly no end of slavery for several more decades at least.''
As to the first question, what brought on the war, there are two interrelated answers. What brought on the war was slavery. What triggered the war was disunion over the issue of slavery. Disunion resulted because initially seven and ultimately eleven southern States saw Lincoln as an antislavery advocate and candidate, running in an antislavery party on an antislavery platform, who would be an antislavery president. Rather than abide such a ``Black President'' and ``Black Republican Party,'' southern States led by the Democratic Party severed their ties to the Union. Through secession, which Lincoln and the Union refused to accept, they went to war over preserving the Union. While Lincoln was willing to allow slavery to stand where it stood from 1854 when he reentered politics onward, Lincoln never wavered or compromised on one central issue--extension of slavery into the territories. And while gradualist in approach, Lincoln (and the slave states of the South) knew this would eventually mean the end of slavery. It was Lincoln who brought out and sustained all of these factors.
Thus, while Lincoln's primary emphasis throughout was on saving the Union, the result of saving the Union was emancipation for the slaves. If the Union has not been preserved, slavery would not have been ended and may even have been strengthened. Strategically, Lincoln understood that the Union was a common-ground issue around which he could rally the American people, while slavery and antislavery were divisive. And looked at in perspective, by holding his coalition together around the issue of the Union, enough Unionists eventually saw the connection between the two issues that he could ease into emancipation in the middle of the war--when it gave the North a huge boost.
Even when Lincoln believed he was going to lose the presidency in August 1864, he said, ``There have been men who proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors'' who had fought for the Union. `I should be damned in time and eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends and enemies, come what will . . . In effect, he was saying that he would rather be right than president . . . As matters turned out . . . he was both right and president.
Clearly, many slaves did self-emancipate through the Underground Railroad before the war, and through flight during the war. Even so, that is not the same as bringing an end to the peculiar institution of slavery, which only the Civil War and Lincoln's leadership did. By pronouncing slavery a moral evil that must come to an end and then winning the presidency in 1860, provoking the South to secede, by refusing to compromise on the issue of slavery's expansion or no Fort Sumter, by careful leadership and timing that kept a fragile Union.
Toby--Kunta Kinte.
Toby--Kunta Kinte.
Toby--Kunta Kinte.
Boy your name is Toby!
Today we begin the process of educating America on who Mr. Kinte was! Today we acknowledge in a small way Mr. Kinte's contribution to the Union making it more perfect.
