How Lincoln Finally Made Up His Mind

After becoming president, in fact, Lincoln promised not to interfere with slavery in established Southern states. When the fighting commenced, he seemed to move with indecisive steps toward emancipation. His only war aim, he claimed well into the spring of 1862, was to save the Union. When Gen. John C. Fremont, then heading federal military operations in Missouri, declared an end to slavery in that state in August 1861, Lincoln not only rescinded the proclamation but removed Fremont from command.

Lincoln held back in resolving the emancipation question for many reasons. First, he did not want to drive slave-holding border states into the Confederacy.

Second, he worried about pervasive racism; white Northerners had willingly taken up arms to save the Union, but he wondered whether they would keep fighting to liberate the black population.

Third, if he moved too fast, he reasoned, he might lose everything - including the Union itself - should Northern peace advocates seize upon popular fears of emancipation and create an overwhelming demand to stop the fighting in favor of Southern independence.

Fourth, he had personal doubts as to whether blacks and whites could ever live together in freedom.

By the summer of 1862, Lincoln finally had made up his mind. The death toll, he reasoned, had become too great. All the maiming and killing had to have some larger purpose, transcending the primary war aim of preserving the Union. For Lincoln, the military contest had become a test to see whether the republic had the capacity to live up to the ideals of the American Revolution.

Nevertheless, Lincoln knew he was gambling with Northern morale at a time when Union victories were all but nonexistent, when enlistments were in decline, and when war weariness had set in. He was aware that racists would spread their poison. So the president waited for the right moment, such as after an important battlefield triumph, to quiet his critics who would surely say that emancipation was a desperate measure designed to cover up presidential mismanagement of the war.

As a shrewd politician, Lincoln began to prepare white Northerners for what was coming. He explained to readers of Horace Greeley's New York Tribune: "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."

A critical battlefield victory

On Sept. 22, 1862, five days after the Battle of Antietam, Lincoln announced his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which called upon Southerners to lay down their arms and return to the Union by year's end or to accept the abolition of slavery. Getting no formal response, on Jan. 1, 1863, he declared all slaves in the Confederacy "forever free." The final document called emancipation "an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution upon military necessity." Out of necessity too, slavery could continue to exist in the four Union border states - to assure a united front against the rebels.

In private, Lincoln referred to the horrible carnage at Antietam as "an indication of Divine will" that had forever "decided the question" of emancipation "in favor of the slaves."

Although Lincoln's personal position regarding slavery was always consistent, it was the unfolding events of the war and his interpretation of those events based largely on his religious faith that led to greater and wider action to eliminate what was to him a great moral evil in the life of the Republic.

* Donald E. Harpster is an associate professor of history and political science at the College of St. Joseph in Rutland, Vt.

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