Abraham Lincoln had been cautious about
emancipation. Before becoming president, he had
insisted that there was no federal authority to
abolish slavery in states where it already
existed. His goal was to stop its spread into the
Western territories.
Once the Civil War began, President Lincoln
rescinded an emancipation order issued by Union
General John C. Frémont in Missouri. The
president feared that the border states (slave
states still loyal to the Union: Missouri,
Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware) might join the
Confederacy. He did make several unsuccessful
attempts to convince the border states to free
their slaves on a plan of gradual, compensated
emancipation.
In August 1862, Horace Greeley, radical editor
of the New York Tribune, chastised the
president in a widely-read editorial for dragging
his feet on emancipation. In an open letter to
Greeley, Lincoln responded that if freeing the
slaves would help win the war, he would do it, but
if not freeing the slaves would help win the war,
he would do that.
Lincoln and his cabinet knew that he planned to
issue an emancipation order following the next
major Union victory. Therefore, after Confederate
General Robert E. Lee’s invasion of the North
was repelled at the battle of Antietam in
September 1862, Lincoln issued his Preliminary
Emancipation Proclamation.
The document declared that if the Confederacy
did not cease its rebellion by the first of the
year, then all the slaves in Confederate-held
territory would be freed. It excluded slaves in
the Union border states and Southern areas
controlled by the Union military on that date. The
policy was aimed at inducing the Confederacy to
surrender rather than lose their slaves, and it
was based on what Lincoln considered to be a
president’s augmented constitutional authority
during a national emergency.
The Confederacy did not take the offer, so the
Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on
January 1, 1863. Thereafter, the federal forces
had two war aims: to restore the union and
to free the slaves. As the Union military forces
advanced across the South, thousands of slaves
were freed.
This cartoon was published after the Emancipation
Proclamation was announced, but before it took effect. It
criticizes Lincoln’s emancipation policies by poking fun at
his previous advocacy of gradual emancipation and anticipating
that he will turn the Emancipation Proclamation into a plan
for (very) gradual emancipation. The cartoon manifests the
fears of some that the president would not carry out the new
policy. The figure viewed from the back, reading the poster,
is Horace Greeley ("HG N York").
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