Editing Emancipation Proclamation (section)

===Public opinion of emancipation===
[[File:Gordon, scourged back, NPG, 1863.jpg|thumb|upright|''[[Carte de visite]]'' image of [[Peter (enslaved man)|Peter]], taken in [[Baton Rouge, Louisiana|Baton Rouge]] spring 1863; widely distributed by abolitionists to expose the brutality of slavery]]

[[Abolitionism in the United States|Abolitionists]] had long been urging Lincoln to free all slaves. In the summer of 1862, Republican editor [[Horace Greeley]] of the highly influential ''[[New-York Tribune]]'' wrote a famous editorial entitled "The Prayer of Twenty Millions" demanding a more aggressive attack on the Confederacy and faster emancipation of the slaves: "On the face of this wide earth, Mr. President, there is not one ... intelligent champion of the Union cause who does not feel ... that the rebellion, if crushed tomorrow, would be renewed if slavery were left in full vigor and that every hour of deference to slavery is an hour of added and deepened peril to the Union."<ref>{{cite book |first=Harold |last=Holzer |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=05ggngEACAAJ |title=Dear Mr. Lincoln: Letters to the President |publisher=Southern Illinois University Press |date=2006 |pages=160–161 |edition=second |isbn=978-0-8093-2686-0}}</ref> Lincoln responded in his open [[q:Abraham Lincoln#Letter to Horace Greeley (1862)|letter to Horace Greeley]] of August 22, 1862:

{{Blockquote|If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time ''save'' slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time ''destroy'' slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle ''is'' to save the Union, and is ''not'' either to save or to destroy slavery. 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. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do ''not'' believe it would help to save the Union.... I have here stated my purpose according to my view of ''official'' duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed ''personal'' wish that all men everywhere could be free.<ref>{{cite book |title=The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln |editor-first=Roy P. |editor-last=Basler |volume=V: 1861–1862 |pages=[https://books.google.com/books?id=Q4ysBXMyg8UC&pg=PA388 388]–[https://books.google.com/books?id=Q4ysBXMyg8UC&pg=PA389 389] |publisher=Rutgers University Press |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Q4ysBXMyg8UC&pg=PA388 |location=New Brunswick |date=1953|isbn=9781434477071 }}</ref>}}

Lincoln scholar [[Harold Holzer]] wrote about Lincoln's letter: "Unknown to Greeley, Lincoln composed this after he had already drafted a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which he had determined to issue after the next Union military victory. Therefore, this letter, was in truth, an attempt to position the impending announcement in terms of saving the Union, not freeing slaves as a humanitarian gesture. It was one of Lincoln's most skillful public relations efforts, even if it has cast longstanding doubt on his sincerity as a liberator."<ref name=Dear>{{cite book |first=Harold |last=Holzer |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=05ggngEACAAJ |title=Dear Mr. Lincoln: Letters to the President |publisher=Southern Illinois University Press |date=2006 |page=162 |edition=2nd |isbn=978-0-8093-2686-0}}</ref> Historian [[Richard Striner]] argues that "for years" Lincoln's letter has been misread as "Lincoln only wanted to save the Union."<ref name="Striner">{{cite book |last=Striner |first=Richard |title=Father Abraham: Lincoln's Relentless Struggle to End Slavery |year=2006 |publisher=Oxford University Press |page=[https://archive.org/details/fatherabrahamlin0000stri/page/176 176] |isbn=978-0-19-518306-1 |url=https://archive.org/details/fatherabrahamlin0000stri/page/176}}</ref> However, within the context of Lincoln's entire career and pronouncements on slavery this interpretation is wrong, according to Striner. Rather, Lincoln was softening the strong Northern white supremacist opposition to his imminent emancipation by tying it to the cause of the Union. This opposition would fight for the Union but not to end slavery, so Lincoln gave them the means and motivation to do both, at the same time.<ref name="Striner"/> In effect, then, Lincoln may have already chosen the third option he mentioned to Greeley: "freeing some and leaving others alone"; that is, freeing slaves in the states still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, but leaving enslaved those in the [[Border states (American Civil War)|border states]] and Union-occupied areas.

Nevertheless, in the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation itself, Lincoln said that he would recommend to Congress that it compensate states that "adopt, immediate, or gradual abolishment of slavery". In addition, during the hundred days between September 22, 1862, when he issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, and January 1, 1863, when he issued the Final Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln took actions that suggest that he continued to consider the first option he mentioned to Greeley — saving the Union without freeing any slave — a possibility. Historian [[William W. Freehling]] wrote, "From mid-October to mid-November 1862, he sent personal envoys to Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas".<ref>Freehling, William W. (2001). ''The South vs. The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War'', New York: Oxford University Press, p. 111.</ref><ref> Cohen, Henry, [https://static1.squarespace.com/static/61e83d709f319913599d9eff/t/65654294056d981e17a815ec/1701135003723/2023+%2354+LF+Fall+Bulletin++%E2%80%93+WEB.pdf "Was Lincoln Disingenuous in His Greeley Letter?"], ''The Lincoln Forum Bulletin'', Issue 54, Fall 2023, pp. 8-9.</ref> Each of these envoys carried with him a letter from Lincoln stating that if the people of their state desired "to avoid the unsatisfactory" terms of the Final Emancipation Proclamation "and to have peace again upon the old terms" (''i.e.'', with slavery intact), they should rally "the largest number of the people possible" to vote in "elections of members to the Congress of the United States ... friendly to their object".<ref>[https://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln5/1:1126.1?rgn=div2;view=fulltext ''Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln'', Vol. 5, pp. 462-463, 470, 500.]</ref> Later, in his [[State of the Union|Annual Message to Congress]] of December 1, 1862, Lincoln proposed an amendment to the [[Constitution of the United States|U.S. Constitution]] providing that any state that abolished slavery before January 1, 1900, would receive compensation from the United States in the form of interest-bearing U.S. bonds. Adoption of this amendment, in theory, could have ended the war without ever permanently ending slavery, because the amendment provided, "Any State having received bonds ... and afterwards reintroducing or tolerating slavery therein, shall refund to the United States the bonds so received, or the value thereof, and all interest paid thereon".<ref>[https://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln5/1:1126.1?rgn=div2;view=fulltext ''Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln'', Vol. 5, p. 530.]</ref>

In his 2014 book, ''[[Lincoln's Gamble]]'', journalist and historian [[Todd Brewster]] asserted that Lincoln's desire to reassert the saving of the Union as his sole war goal was, in fact, crucial to his claim of legal authority for emancipation. Since slavery was protected by the Constitution, the only way that he could free the slaves was as a tactic of war—not as the mission itself.<ref name="Brewster">{{cite book| last=Brewster| first=Todd| title=Lincoln's Gamble: The Tumultuous Six Months that Gave America the Emancipation Proclamation and Changed the Course of the Civil War|year=2014|publisher=Scribner|page=59|isbn=978-1451693867}}</ref> But that carried the risk that when the war ended, so would the justification for freeing the slaves. Late in 1862, Lincoln asked his Attorney General, [[Edward Bates]], for an opinion as to whether slaves freed through a war-related proclamation of emancipation could be re-enslaved once the war was over. Bates had to work through the language of the ''Dred Scott'' decision to arrive at an answer, but he finally concluded that they could indeed remain free. Still, a complete end to slavery would require a constitutional amendment.<ref>{{cite book |last=Brewster |first=Todd |title=Lincoln's Gamble: The Tumultuous Six Months that Gave America the Emancipation Proclamation and Changed the Course of the Civil War |year=2014 |publisher=Scribner |page=236 |isbn=978-1451693867}}</ref>

Conflicting advice as to whether to free the slaves was presented to Lincoln in public and private. [[Thomas Nast]], a cartoon artist during the Civil War and the late 1800s considered "Father of the American Cartoon", composed many works, including a two-sided spread that showed the transition from slavery into civilization after President Lincoln signed the Proclamation. Nast believed in equal opportunity and equality for all people, including enslaved Africans or free blacks. A mass rally in Chicago on September 7, 1862, demanded immediate and universal emancipation of slaves. A delegation headed by [[William W. Patton]] met the president at the [[White House]] on September 13. Lincoln had declared in peacetime that he had no constitutional authority to free the slaves. Even used as a war power, emancipation was a risky political act. Public opinion as a whole was against it.<ref>{{harvnb|Guelzo|2006|p=[https://books.google.com/books?id=MOFHPTQYqzgC&pg=PA18 18]}}</ref> There would be strong opposition among [[Copperhead (politics)|Copperhead]] Democrats and an uncertain reaction from loyal border states. Delaware and Maryland already had a high percentage of free blacks: 91.2% and 49.7%, respectively, in 1860.<ref>{{cite book |first=Peter |last=Kolchin |title=American Slavery: 1619–1877 |location=New York |publisher=Hill and Wang |date=1994 |page=82 |isbn=978-0-8090-1554-2}}</ref>