SYMHC Classics: Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation

In 2016, Secretary of Education Dr. John B. King Jr. joined Tracy to discuss the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which gave rebelling states 100 days to return to the Union or have their enslaved population freed during the U.S. Civil War.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Recently, in our episode on Susie King Taylor,
we talked about her account of celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation
with a barbecue. Originally, that section of the episode also
had a discussion of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which basically
gave the rebelling slave states a deadline to stop fighting

(00:23):
and rejoin the Union, otherwise all enslaved people in those
states would be free. Taylor was a laundress for the
first South Carolina Volunteers, which were officially mustered in on
November seventh, eighteen sixty two, in the window between when
Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and when the Emancipation

(00:43):
Proclamation went into effect. Yeah, she did a lot of
things besides being a laundress, but that's how she was
enrolled in the volunteers. So that part of the episode
I cut that out. It wound up feeling kind of
like a digression. But we do have a whole episode
on the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and the political strategy behind
it and its impact on a civil war. This was

(01:05):
an interview with doctor John B. King, Junior, who at
the time was the Secretary of Education under President Barack Obama.
Today he is Chancellor of the State University of New York.
This originally came out on August thirty first, twenty sixteen.
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a

(01:26):
production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We have an
interview today. Yeah, that you did, I did, I did
do it. We haven't had an interview in a while,
that's correct. Today we are talking to the Secretary of Education,

(01:49):
John B. King, Junior and Secretary King joined the United
States Department of Education as a principal senior Advisor in
twenty fifteen, and before that he was the commission of
Education for the State of New York. But his career
really began as an educator. He taught social studies in
San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Boston, Massachusetts. And then earlier

(02:10):
this year, we got an email from the Department of
Education asking whether we might like to have him on
the show. I just I'm gonna go ahead and thank
the Department of Education for asking that, because this turned
out to be quite lovely, because the answer was immediately
uh huh, yes, yes, yes, so I was yes, But
then it was also okay, how would that work because
we're not really, you know, an education policy podcast, and

(02:32):
that that wouldn't really be what our listeners would be
up for. So what we did was we quickly decided
on a topic that at that point was completely new
to me and I think also to Holly. It was
the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. I had never heard of this before.
It was never mentioned in any of my history classes.
It also didn't come up in any of our many

(02:54):
previous episodes about slavery, the Civil War and reconstruction, of
which we have a lot until our recent episode on
contraband camps that Holly researched, that actually was researched after
this whole interview was scheduled, Yes, but hadn't happened yet.
It hadn't happened yet. And I think part of it
is that this particular document gets amassed into like a big,

(03:18):
kind of glossed over thing of well, there was a
lot of back and forth leading up to the Emancipation Proclamation,
and it kind of gets lumped in and it doesn't
get a moment to stand on its own and be examined. Yeah,
the Emancipation Proclamation, the final one, issued by Abraham Lincoln
on January first of eighteen sixty three, is of course
way more familiar to most people. That's the one that

(03:40):
declared that people enslaved in states that were rebelling against
the Union quote are and henceforward shall be free. That
January first Emancipation Proclamation did not immediately free everyone who
was enslaved in the United States. It only applied to
the Confederate states that were in rebellion, but it did
just set the stage for the eventual abolition of slavery

(04:03):
in the entire United States. Another date that comes up
pretty regularly is June teenth, which is June nineteenth of
eighteen sixty five, which is when the people of Galveston,
Texas finally got the news the Emancipation Proclamation had happened.
At that point, the war had also ended, so a
lot of times that comes up as like the like

(04:25):
the last holdout of chattel slavery in the United States.
Slavery was formally abolished nationwide with the adoption of the
Thirteenth Amendment on December eighteenth of eighteen sixty five. So
what we're talking about today is all stuff from way
before that. The preliminary Emancipation Proclamation was basically a one
hundred day warning of the proclamation that was to come

(04:45):
that following January. The document itself is one of Secretary
King's particular interests, and while he was Commissioner of Education
in New York, he took the document itself on a
seven city tour as part of an exhibition called First
Step to Freedom. The exhibition started out at the Schomberg
Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City

(05:06):
and from there, as we said, it toured to seven
other cities. Secretary King also co authored the text that
went along with that exhibition, and the first part of
our interview with him, we are going to talk about
why Lincoln decided to basically warn the rebelling states of
what was coming, and how that document fit into the
arc of how the Civil War progressed from originally from

(05:28):
the Union point of view being more about retaining the Union,
to eventually from the Union point of view being about
abolishing slavery. So joining us today is Secretary of Education
John B. King Junior. Thank you so much for being
on the show today. Happy to do it. So I

(05:53):
have heard from so many folks on your staff that
one of your passions is the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. And
so on September twenty second, eighteen sixty two, which was
one hundred days before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, President
Abraham Lincoln issued this preliminary Proclamation that said, among other things,

(06:14):
that if the rebelling States did not return to the Union,
their enslaved populations would be forever freed. So what led
to President Lincoln basically warning the rebelling states that this
was going to happen. Well, so you know, in many
ways it was for Lincoln a manner of political strategy

(06:36):
right to build public will around the Emancipation Proclamation. He
wanted to both convey that the South had had an
opportunity to return to the Union and also build public
understanding that this was essential step in order to successfully

(07:00):
prosecute the Civil War. And interestingly, he sort of timed
issuing the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation for a moment when the
North was doing better in the Civil War. So the
date that it was issued is actually bound up with
the Battle at Antietam, and it was the success there

(07:22):
that allowed him to issue it because he had been
warned by Secretary Seward back in July that if he
issued the preliminary emancipation Proclamation at a low moment in
the conflict, it would seem like desperation, but if he
did it after a victory, it would seem like a
more confident maneuver done to give it South a chance

(07:45):
to return to the Union on the right terms, or
to move forward to finish the war. Was there any
chance at all that the rebelling states were going to
rejoin the Union after this essentially threat. No. I think
this really was Lincoln, as master politician, figuring out what

(08:07):
it would take to build public will. He also wanted
realized the historical importance of the Emancipation Proclamation, that in
many ways it was fulfillment of the promise of the
Declaration of Independence, critical defining moment for the country, And

(08:28):
I think wanted to have the Emancipation Proclamation have the
strongest possible foundation because he recognized its importance. So part
of this was, as you said, laying this legal groundwork
for future emancipation. So what would have happened if these

(08:53):
states had rejoined the Union in an effort to not
have their slaves emancipated well. Interestingly, in the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation,
there's language around the possibility that there would be some
sort of financial renumeration for the owners of slaves if

(09:13):
the slave states returned. That language does not appear in
the in the January eighteen sixty three Amancipatient Proclamation. And
so Lincoln had a vision that least in theory, that
the institution of slavery could have been on a kind

(09:34):
of a path to disappearance, eliminated in the territories, sort
of phased out in the states that had slavery in place.
But I think ultimately Lincoln understood that this was a
step that would ultimately change the nature of the war

(09:54):
and make the war fundamentally not just about protecting the Union,
but about ending the institution of slavery. Oh and that
really leads really well into my next question, which is,
at the start of the war, several slave states had
basically promised that they would secede if Lincoln was elected,
And so then he was elected and they did secede.

(10:17):
But from Lincoln's point of view, the war at the
beginning was not really so much about slavery as it
was about preserving the Union, and it was like the
focus gradually became it came around to the abolition of
slavery as the war progressed. So where does the preliminary
Emancipation Proclamation fit into this arc of moving from it

(10:43):
being about preserving the Union to also being about ending
the institution of slavery. You know, it's an interesting question,
I'm one that really the scholars of Lincoln have debated.
So there's one view that is that Lincoln all ways
intended to make progress towards the eventual abolition of slavery,

(11:07):
but was a savvy and thoughtful politician understood that the
first step was to not have slavery expand into the
into the territories. As the war began, saw the opportunity
to move towards emancipation, and pursued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation

(11:29):
and the Emancipation Proclamation as as a tactic to satisfy
his ultimate goal of the elimination of slavery. So that's
one view. Another view is that Lincoln was most focused
always on preservation of the Union and would have chosen

(11:51):
that above all else. And you know, there's of course
the you know, the famous language from Lincoln where he
tries to make that make the point that he would
preserve the Union above all else, whether that was with
or without the institution of slavery. So one view is
that that was a genuine articulation of his view, and

(12:13):
another view would be that it was a political strategy
and that he realized he had to build public will
over time. And you know, and some of Lincoln's writing,
you hear him talking about the idea that public will
is essential to accomplishing things that are hard, and that
you need to bring the public along with you. So

(12:38):
I love his idea of the president needing to bring
the public along with him as he and the nation
were gradually moving toward abolishing slavery. That idea has been
present and so so many social changes we have talked
about on the show before, Like we've talked about some
really difficult times in the United States where a change
needed to be made and it took a while to

(12:59):
bring the people along to be more on board with
the change. So it's really interesting to talk about this
document as one piece of a more gradual attempt to
change the public view to the idea that abolishing slavery
was really something that needed to happen entirely it is. It's, uh,
you know, we often think about this period, I think,

(13:22):
particularly in history in a way where it gets taught
in a very black and white way. And I don't
mean that to be punny, but it's like this happened,
and then everybody got it, and then this happened and
everybody and it's like no, no, no, no no, no. It
was a slope for like, none of these steps were immediate.
They were not you know, like a door opening or closing.

(13:43):
It was all like gradual. You really had to like
coax it through its processes. So then continue the coaxing
for more than a century afterwards. So we were going
to take a brief break for a word from a
sponsor before we get back to talking to Secretary King.

(14:11):
So next up in Tracy's talk with Secretary King, they're
going to talk about the language of the document, which
is a lot more formal and legal than the Lincoln
era documents that a lot of US school kids wind
up memorizing four class It does not at all sound
like four score and seven years ago, not remotely. So

(14:35):
one of the things that I think a lot of
people remember most about Lincoln from their just regular history
classes is the get the Gettysburg address, And that is
an address that you would probably describe as being beautifully written.
It has this almost poetic, flowing language, and this document

(14:55):
does not really have that. It is a lot more
formal and egal in its tone. Can you talk about
that difference a little bit? Sure? Well, you know, Lincoln
was a lawyer, and he thought about this as a
as a legal action that would need to be legally defensible,
and view the emancipation Proclamation as exercise of the sort

(15:21):
of presidential war powers. And so the document is in
very legalistic prose and intentionally so. And he took great
care and personally authoring the document and the version of
the primary Emancipation Proclamation that the New York State Library has,

(15:46):
the original in Lincoln's own hand, even has cut and
pasted sections from the confiscation Acts where you can see
that he literally cut them out and pasted them. And
there's even that spot where you can see Lincoln's thumb
print in glue um on the document as he cut

(16:08):
and pasted into it. So this was this was for
Lincoln a very careful step, and it's it's you know,
I think one of the powerful things as a teacher
UM as you're teaching these documents is to see the
complexity of the role of historic figures. You know that
Lincoln was president making political judgments, thinking about um his legacy,

(16:34):
thinking about the importance of these events in the grand
sweep of history, their significance for the country. He wanted
to make sure that that emancipation succeeded. He wanted to
make sure he built public support, that he had a
strong legal position, and that he could navigate to emancipation

(16:59):
while preserving the role of the border states that were
members of the Union. So this is all very very
carefully executed by Lincoln. The first time that I actually
read this, it was a transcript of the document because
I have a very hard time with historical handwriting, and
I didn't realize until much later that those sections of

(17:20):
the previous acts were literally cut out and pasted to
the document. And that quickly became one of my favorite
things about it, was that he cut it out and
pasted it on there so it would be exactly the
word for word, and then also not have to rewrite
the whole thing yeah, yeah, old fashioned before before long
before the cutting and pasting of Microsoft word. Yea, So

(17:46):
there is there's one copy of this document that's in
the president's own handwriting. What happened to that physical copy
once he signed it? Well, so you know. Later the
document was donated to a commission that was set up
for the care of soldiers, of medical care of soldiers,

(18:09):
and that commission then held a auction and an abolitionist
won the documented an auction. He bought a lot of
tickets in the auction or raffle, and then the New
York State Legislature allocated funding to buy the document from him,

(18:30):
and that's how it came to be in the possession
of New York State. And New York State has periodically
shared the document with the public. And when I was
State Commissioner in New York, I was privileged to be
a part of an effort where we developed an exhibit
with the Pulmonary Mancipation Proclamation and also a speech that
doctor King gave on the hundredth anniversary of the Pulmonary

(18:53):
Mancipation Proclamation, And we built an exhibit for kids with
the two documents and took it all around the state
and it was during the time that the Lincoln movie
was coming out, and there was a lot of interest
when we had thousands of people and thousands of students

(19:13):
from schools all over the state come to see this
exhibit and come to see the document, and you can
really see people's appreciation for Lincoln in their enthusiasm just
to stand in the same space as this document. So,
I don't know if this is the case now. And
when I was studying, you know, k through twelve American history,

(19:37):
this was in the late nineteen eighties, early nineteen nineties,
and this whole idea that there was a preliminary Emancipation
Proclamation and that there was a process of setting legal
foundations in order to abolish the institution of slavery, that
was skipped completely over and it seemed more like the

(19:58):
Emancipation Proclamation and just kind of appeared out of whole cloth,
and then the slaves were free, and that's it's that's
not at all what happened. Why do you think so
much of that process is omitted from so many history
lessons about the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. Well,

(20:19):
you know, I thinks as a country, you know, we
so celebrate Lincoln's legacy and the notion of Lincoln as
the emancipator, which is true and right, but there's also
nuance behind that. And you know, one of the things
I tried to do when I taught in high school

(20:41):
history and also high school Civics was to China have
students get a sense of the complexity of politics throughout
our history. You know, It's one of the great things
about the Hamilton Musical is I think it's given a
generation of Americans a better under standing that these figures

(21:03):
in history aren't just two dimensional characters that a pr
and our currency. That they're complicated people operating in complicated times,
making political judgments, making very strategic decisions. And you know,
from my perspective, it makes Abraham Lincoln even more heroic

(21:27):
because you understand that that that he had to have
carefully plotted legal strategy, a carefully plotted political strategy to
accomplish emancipatient and ultimately to win the Civil War. It's
one of the nice things about some of the recent

(21:50):
books and study on Lyndon Johnson and the path to
the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Yeah,
these important achievements are the product not of a sudden inspiration,
but rather careful execution by very capable politicians. And sometimes

(22:17):
the word politician is put in a negative light, but
Abraham Lincoln was a very very capable politician. So before
we get to the end of our interview, we're going
to stop for one more brief word from a sponsor,
and after we hear from that sponsor, we are going

(22:39):
to talk about why this particular document is so personally
important to Secretary King. Okay, so let's get to the
end of the interview. Secretary King is going to talk

(22:59):
about the documents personal importance to him and as also
how it fits into the greater arc of progress toward
racial equality in the United States. So every person I
spoke with while arranging this interview with you talked about

(23:19):
this document being really important to you. So what does
this document specifically mean to you? And why why is
it the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in particular that has so
captivated you. You know, I think for me, it's a
reflection of um both the ways in which United States

(23:42):
has fallen short of the founding values. You know that
that we have to acknowledge that the United States began
very much with the institution of slavery as fundamental to
how the country works. And there was a real tension

(24:03):
between the institution of slavery and the promise of the
Declaration of Independence and then and the notion, the notion
that all men aren't created equal, and so there was
this gap, and we all as Americans need to appreciate
that complexity of our history around issues of race. At

(24:26):
the same time, the document also illustrates and something the
President often talks about, that the trajectory of America is
towards greater equality, greater opportunity over time. And so this period,
the Civil War and reconstruction are really a second birth

(24:49):
of the United States. You know, when you look at
the thirteenth fourteen, fifteenth Amendments, which were really products of
the Civil War and reconstruction, they expanded the definition of
American equality and American democracy, and this document was very
much a part of that journey. And then the last

(25:11):
pieces this document is also about the complexity of government,
the importance of leaders figuring out how to bring the
public along on things that are hard, the importance of
leaders having a good political strategy, a good legal strategy,

(25:35):
as well as moral higher purpose, and Lincoln really combined
all of those things, and you see that very much
in this document and the eventual January Emancipation Proclamation January
eighteen sixty three. So is there anything else about this
document or its history that you really think that listeners

(25:58):
to our show should know? You know, the one thing
I would say is, just speaking as a teacher, I
just think there's so much power in students engaging with
primary source documents. And it's one thing to read, you know,
a textbook and what the textbook might say, but it's
another to delve into a historical document and really appreciate

(26:26):
what the author was trying to accomplish, the choices the
author made. You can imagine a powerful unit comprised of
this preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, the Mancipation Proclamation of January eighteen
sixty three, the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural Address, the thirteenth, fourteen,

(26:49):
fifteenth Amendments. You know, just study through those powerful historical texts,
and it can be a way to inspire students both
about literacy and about social studies. It also can be
a way to help students see the nuances in our history.

(27:14):
Thank you so much for taking the time to speak
with us today. Was a pleasure to have you on
the show. Thanks, it's fun to talk with you, and
thanks for what you do making sure folks are learning
about our history. Thanks so much for joining us on
this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,

(27:36):
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(27:57):
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