While Lincoln was willing to sign what he regarded as an imperfect emancipation measure for the District, he would not condone formal emancipation by military commanders in the field. Just as he had overruled Frémont’s proclamation in September 1861, so, too, he struck down General David Hunter’s similar decree in the spring of 1862. On May 9, Hunter, in charge of the Department of the South (consisting primarily of the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina), cited military necessity as a justification for liberating slaves there. Two days later, he pressed hundreds of them into military service and gave them weapons, prompting Border State delegations to demand that Lincoln repudiate Hunter’s action. From the North, Lincoln received heated protests, including one from a New Yorker who warned that if “General Hunter’s proclamation declairing the slaves of his department forever free, is not disowned by the administration and himself disgraced, I will place my whole property to the value of three millions, in the hands of the rebels for the use of the traitor Jeff Davis and his base ends[.] This act has done us more harm than a loss of two battles and has made Kentucky & Maryland almost against us, if not wholly.” Reverdy Johnson of Maryland pleaded with Lincoln to overrule Hunter and recall the general: “Unless promptly corrected, it will serve the rebels, more than a dozen victories.” Though he insisted that he was devoted to the Union cause, Johnson said he regarded “the policy thus inaugurated, if to be followed, as fatal to all our hopes.” Another Marylander, the former congressman and future Radical bête noire of the Lincoln administration, Henry Winter Davis, called Hunter’s proclamation “an outrage,” “unmilitary, unrepublican & insubordinate & wholly incapable of giving liberty in fact to a single slave who could not himself take it. A proclamation of emancipation over three States by a commander who hangs on by his fingernails to the coast under cover of … gun boats is a little ludicrous!!” A Philadelphian recommended that Lincoln should turn the tables on proclamation-prone generals by forbidding the issuance of any such documents contradicting administration policy. The president may well have been tempted to do so, for he exclaimed in frustration: “No matter what I do—I am troubled every day with the rash and unexpected acts of my officers!”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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