Abraham Lincoln

 

Did Lincoln issue the Emancipation Proclamation only to free slaves?

Historian Stephen B. Oates wrote: “We now know that Lincoln issued his proclamation for a combination of reasons: to clarify the status of the fugitive slaves, to solve the Union’s manpower woes, to keep Great Britain out of the conflict, to maim and cripple the Confederacy by destroying its labor force, to remove the very thing that had caused the war, and to break the chains of several million oppressed human beings and right America at last with her own ideals.”

Gabor S. Boritt, editor, The Historian’s Lincoln: Pseudohistory, Psychohistory, and History, p. 199 (Stephen B. Oates).

Did Lincoln free slaves in order to save the Union?

From Lincoln's own words he decarded his position ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.’ 20th-century historian Roy P. Basler validated that from the beginning it is clear to see that Lincoln's goal was to preserve the union. In Lincoln’s eyes abolition of slavery was the only solution to keep the union intact. Although Lincoln had always viewed slavery with disgust, he was willing to retain slavery for the time being to preserve the union. 

Did Lincoln realize his own hopes, for himself and for his country?

Abraham Lincoln deserves the title of “The Great Emancipator.” Whatever his purpose was we as a country have him to thank for turning the civil war from a union conflict to a moral war against slavery. In 1841, Lincoln told his friend Joshua Speed that, “he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived and that to connect his name with the events transpiring in his day and generation and so impress himself upon them as to link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow man was what he desired to live for.” After the Emancipation Proclamation Speed asked Lincoln if with this 

action he had realized his hopes. Lincoln's response was “I believe that in this measure my fondest hopes will be realized.” Stephen B Oates answered the second part of the question when he declared that President “Lincoln’s proclamation was not ‘of minor importance.”  On the contrary, it was the most revolutionary measure ever to come from an American president up to that time.”