Use Lincoln’s model to harness the federal government to beat back COVID-19

On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued an executive order which freed all the slaves in the areas in the United States in rebellion against the government. Even though Lincoln’s proclamation did not physically free one slave in the country, psychologically it freed them all, not only in regions behind Confederate lines, but everywhere.

For four decades slavery had increasingly divided the country. Before he became president, Lincoln warned that a country half-slave and half free could not stand. But the issue seemed insoluble since historically it had fallen to the individual states to decide whether or not to sanction slavery as an institution. Lincoln himself, in his inaugural address, had declared that he had no intention of interfering with slavery in the states in which it existed. But, once the war came, Lincoln’s thinking began to change, particularly when military campaigns to put down the rebellion failed spectacularly, not least because of the slave labor that Confederate armies were able to utilize in resisting their Union counterparts.

By July of 1862, Lincoln had determined that, if his government was going to win the war, it had to make emancipation a war goal. But he needed success on the battle field to make any such proclamation seem more than a desperate measure. In mid-September, 1862, Lincoln got that modest victory at Antietam Creek in western Maryland, where, in a day of unprecedented blood-letting, Robert E. Lee’s invasion of the North was stopped.

Five days later Lincoln announced that, if the states in rebellion did not return to the Union by the beginning of the next year, he would free their slaves. When January 1 came with the war still raging (a major battle was occurring in Tennessee that very day), Lincoln made good on his threat. The Emancipation Proclamation radically changed the war’s course, greatly accelerating the tide of runaways from Southern plantations, enabling the enlistment of more than 150,000 slaves in Union armies, and eliminating the prospect of any European intervention on the side of the Confederacy. In brief, Lincoln’s executive order established national policy that played a huge role in winning the war.

Now, we are engaged in another kind of war, one in which, as President Donald Trump has stated, we are battling an invisible enemy, but a highly deadly one whose potency we are continuing to discover. If we are to win this war, by keeping fatalities of the coronavirus to a minimum, we can do so only by effective presidential leadership that sets the rules for the nation’s behavior and marshals the nation’s resources to combat this dreaded disease in the most equitable manner.

That means establishing a national stay-at-home policy to best mitigate the spread of a virus that respects no borders, whether county, state, or international. That means bringing to bear the full federal apparatus to oversee and co-ordinate the acquisition and distribution of the Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and the ventilators desperately needed by healthcare workers across the country. That means establishing price controls, as the country has done before during wartime, to eliminate the price gouging that too many suppliers seem to be engaging in, to exploit the crisis. That means determining the temporary hospital facilities that various sections of the country will require, and ensuring their construction, in order to avoid being overwhelmed by the virus. That means harnessing the incomparable research capabilities of this nation in a new Manhattan Project to produce, not a death-dealing bomb, but a life-saving vaccine. That means having the discipline, the magnanimity to put politics and personal feelings aside in these extraordinary times that call for extraordinary leadership.

Only by the federal government taking the lead by bringing to bear its full resources, in concert with state governments, can we hope to achieve an outcome that is worthy of this great republic. If Donald Trump wants to be regarded as a war president, let him, as Lincoln did, act like one. The lives of hundreds of thousands of us depend on it.

Robert Emmett Curran is Professor of History Emeritus from Georgetown University. He lives in Richmond.