Page 34 - Harvard Business Review, Sep/Oct 2018

Lincoln and his cabinet with the Emancipation Proclamation
Lithograph by Currier & Ives, 1876

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FRANCIS BICKNELL CARPENTER/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS laborious; but once he had finally determined to act, it was no he unexpectedly and wholeheartedly concurred—albeit with

the condition that emancipated slaves be deported someplace
longer a question of what—only when.
Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and Attorney General
in Central America or Africa.
Edward Bates—the most radical and the most conservative
Welles kept silent, later admitting that the proclamation’s
of Lincoln’s team—were the only two who expressed strong
“magnitude and its uncertain results,” its “solemnity and
support for the proclamation. That Stanton recommended
weight,” mightily oppressed him. Not only did he worry
about “an extreme exercise of War powers,” but he feared that
its “immediate promulgation” was understandable. More
“desperation on the part of the slave-owners” would most
intimately aware than any of his colleagues of the condition
likely lengthen the war and raise the struggle to new heights of
of the hard-pressed army, he instantly grasped the massive
ferocity. Interior Secretary Caleb Smith, a conservative Whig
military boost emancipation would confer: Slave labor kept
farms and plantations in operation; the toil of slaves liberated
from Indiana, remained silent as well, though he later confided
Confederate soldiers to fight. As for the constitutionalist Bates,
to his assistant secretary that should Lincoln actually issue the
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