A Documentary History of the American Civil War Era: Volume 2, Political Arguments

Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, September 22, 1862

President Abraham Lincoln Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, September 22, 1862 Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 5:433–36. On September 17, 1862, Union and Confederate forces clashed in Maryland at the Battle of Antietam; it remains the bloodiest day in United States military history with 5,200 dead, 18,000 wounded (2,000 mortally). Though military historians consider the battle a tactical draw, it was also a strategic defeat for General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and the Confederacy, which, after the battle, retreated back into Virginia. But for President Abraham Lincoln, Antietam constituted just enough of a military victory that he could press ahead with adding a second war goal to the Union cause, a goal he had decided upon back in July 1862. At that time, his cabinet urged him to wait for an adequate military victory to announce such a step, or else emancipation might appear to be an act of a desperate administration. Grudgingly, Lincoln agreed, and awaited a significant Union military. Although the preservation of the nation always constituted the first war goal for the Lincoln administration, the president believed that emancipation constituted a second war goal, as well as a means to achieve the primary goal. Lincoln also understood the gravity of such a momentous and controversial step as uncompensated military emancipation; thus, he delayed implementation for one hundred days, to January 1, 1863, to provide the states in insurrection time to lay down their arms and, potentially, keep their slaves. Lincoln decided upon this go-slow, conservative approach to the radical step of immediate emancipation as necessary because many in the North and Midwest feared emancipation and its potential consequences as much as white southerners. Lincoln himself did not believe that the southern states would cease the war, but this gesture was politically necessary to maintain his support in Congress and in the nation, and it included the carrot of compensation to loyal slave owners. Although promised in this executive order, such compensation never occurred. Documentary History of the American Civil War Era 326 By The President of The United States of America: A Proclamation. I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America, and commander -in-chief of the army and navy thereof, do hereby proclaim and declare that hereafter, as heretofore, the war will be prosecuted for the object of practically restoring the constitutional relation between the United States, and each of the states and the people thereof, in which states that relation is or may be suspended or disturbed. That it is my purpose, upon the next meeting of Congress, to again recommend the adoption of a practical measure tendering pecuniary aid to the free acceptance or rejection of all slave states, so called, the people whereof may not then be in rebellion against the United States, and which states may then have voluntarily adopted, or thereafter may voluntarily adopt, immediate or gradual abolishment of slavery within their respective limits; and that the effort to colonize persons of African descent with their consent upon this continent or elsewhere , with the previously obtained consent of the governments existing there, will be continued. That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any state or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom. That the executive will, on the first day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the states and parts of states, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively , shall then be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any state, or the people thereof, shall on that day be, in good faith, represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such state shall have participated, shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such state, and the people thereof, are not then in rebellion against the United States. That...