Enough with half measures; enough with a Union achieved by kinder, gentler means; enough of compromises over slavery.
When he made a Northern Democrat commanding general the man wouldn't fight.
When he made a last attempt to get border state leaders to voluntarily agree to accept Federal compensation for their "property" he was stiffed.
When he tried to sell Black leaders on emigration they weren't interested.
Now, "The South is to be destroyed."(1)
So on July 22, 1862 the president called his cabinet together and gave them a document, telling them beforehand that he wanted no input on substance. He had had it with input, too. The document was a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln took one piece of advice, on timing, from Secretary of State Seward. Mightn't it bee better to wait for some, like, military success? For in the summer of 1862, and in the spring, Robert E. Lee had been making life hell for Abraham Lincoln. Lee and Stonewall were running circles around an inert McClellan and the entire Army of the Potomac. It was embarrassing. The United States was also having difficulty holding onto what it took in the west, the Mississippi and New Orleans the signal examples, and foreign powers such as Great Britain and France were taking note. The cotton works in and around Manchester ("Cottonopolis") and Liverpool were on their knees, half of the labor force in the industry was out of work, and the island empire's populace needed clothes. To foreigners the Civil War was a goddamned labor dispute and they wanted it solved one way or the other, they didn't care much which way, but if Lord Palmerston's government recognized the Confederacy it was all up for the U.S.A. Lincoln took Seward's advice and the Emancipation Proclamation, "an act of justice, upon military necessity," would issue on January 1, 1863 after the requisite, hoped for, prayed for victory on the battlefield.
The effect was transformative: of the war, to which it gave meaning; in the government and peoples of the United States, to whom it gave purpose; in the Confederate government and people, to whom it gave the green shits; among the slaves, to whom it gave first light on a dark continent; and in the leadership and populace overseas, to whom it gave great pause:
To the workers and businessmen of England that was all the war amounted to--unless the people who were actually fighting it should manage to make it mean something transcendent, more important even than the struggle for daily bread and annual profits. Bruce Catton, Terrible Swift Sword, "The Pressures of War," 397.
1. Catton, quoting T.J. Barnett, Terrible Swift Sword. Thenceforward and Forever, "Taking the Initiative," 467.
