But this is not the whole explanation of his delay. It is certain that apart from this danger he would at first rather not have played the historic part which he did play as the liberator of the slaves, if he could have succeeded in the more modest part of encouraging a process of gradual emancipation. In his Annual Message to Congress in December, 1861, he laid down the general principles of his policy in this matter. He gave warning in advance to the Democrats of the North, who were against all interference with Southern institutions, that "radical and extreme measures" might become indispensable to military success, and if indispensable would be taken; but he declared his anxiety that if possible the conflict with the South should not "degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle," for he looked forward with fear to a complete overturning of the social system of the South. He feared it not only for the white people but also for the black. "Gradual and not sudden emancipation," he said, in a later Message, "is better for all." It is now probable that he was right, and yet it is difficult not to sympathise with the earnest Republicans who were impatient at his delay, who were puzzled and pained by the free and easy way in which in grave conversation he would allude to "the nigger question," and who concluded that "the President is not with us; has no sound Anti-slavery sentiment." Indeed, his sentiment did differ from theirs. Certainly, he hated slavery, for he had contended more stubbornly than any other man against any concession which seemed to him to perpetuate slavery by stamping it with approval; but his hatred of it left him quite without the passion of moral indignation against the slave owners, in whose guilt the whole country, North and South, seemed to him an accomplice. He would have classed that very natural indignation under the head of "malice"—"I shall do nothing in malice," he wrote to a citizen of Louisiana; "what I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing." But it was not, as we shall see before long, too vast for an interest, as sympathetic as it was matter of fact, in the welfare of the negroes. They were actual human beings to him, and he knew that the mere abrogation of the law of slavery was not the only thing necessary to their advancement. Looking back, with knowledge of what happened later, we cannot fail to be glad that they were emancipated somehow, but we are forced to regret that they could not have been emancipated by some more considerate process. Lincoln, perhaps alone among the Americans who were in earnest in this matter, looked at it very much in the light in which all men look at it to-day.
In the early part of 1862 the United States Government concluded a treaty with Great Britain for the more effectual suppression of the African slave trade, and it happened about the same time that the first white man ever executed as a pirate under the American law against the slave trade was hanged in New York. In those months Lincoln was privately trying to bring about the passing by the Legislature of Delaware of an Act for emancipating, with fit provisions for their welfare, the few slaves in that State, conditionally upon compensation to be paid to the owners by the United States. He hoped that if this example were set by Delaware, it would be followed in Maryland, and would spread later. The Delaware House were favourable to the scheme, but the Senate of the State rejected it. Lincoln now made a more public appeal in favour of his policy. In March, 1862, he sent a Message to Congress, which has already been quoted, and in which he urged the two Houses to pass Resolutions pledging the United States to give pecuniary help to any State which adopted gradual emancipation. It must be obvious that if the slave States of the North could have been led to adopt this policy it would have been a fitting preliminary to any action which might be taken against slavery in the South; and the policy might have been extended to those Southern States which were first recovered for the Union. The point, however, upon which Lincoln dwelt in his Message was that, if slavery were once given up by the border States, the South would abandon all hope that they would ever join the Confederacy. In private letters to an editor of a newspaper and others he pressed the consideration that the cost of compensated abolition was small in proportion to what might be gained by a quicker ending of the war. During the discussion of his proposal in Congress and again after the end of the Session he invited the Senators and Representatives of the border States to private conference with him in which he besought of them "a calm and enlarged consideration, ranging, if it may be, far above, personal and partisan politics," of the opportunity of good now open to them. The hope of the Confederacy was, as he then conceived, fixed upon the sympathy which it might arouse in the border States, two of which, Kentucky and Maryland, were in fact invaded that year with some hope of a rising among the inhabitants. The "lever" which the Confederates hoped to use in these States was the interest of the slave owners there; "Break that lever before their eyes," he urged. But the hundred and one reasons which can always be found against action presented themselves at once to the Representatives of the border States. Congress itself so far accepted the President's view that both Houses passed the Resolution which he had suggested. Indeed it gladly did something more; a Bill, such as Lincoln himself had prepared as a Congressman fourteen years before, was passed for abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia; compensation was paid to the owners; a sum was set apart to help the settlement in Liberia of any of the slaves who were willing to go; and at Lincoln's suggestion provision was added for the education of the negro children. Nothing more was done at this time.
Throughout this matter Lincoln took counsel chiefly with himself. He could not speak his full thought to the public, and apparently he did not do so to any of his Cabinet. Supposing that the border States had yielded to his persuasion, it may still strike us as a very sanguine calculation that their action would have had much effect upon the resolution of the Confederates. But it must be noted that when Lincoln first approached the Representatives of the border States, the highest expectations were entertained of the victory that McClellan would win in Virginia, and when he made his last, rather despairing, appeal to them, the decision to withdraw the army from the Peninsula had not yet been taken. If a really heavy blow had been struck at the Confederates in Virginia, their chief hope of retrieving their military fortunes would certainly have lain in that invasion of Kentucky, which did shortly afterwards occur and which was greatly encouraged by the hope of a rising of Kentucky men who wished to join the Confederacy. This part of Lincoln's calculations was therefore quite reasonable. And it was further reasonable to suppose that, if the South had then given in and Congress had acted in the spirit of the Resolution which it had passed, the policy, of gradual emancipation, starting in the border States, would have spread steadily. The States which were disposed to hold out against the inducement that the cost of compensated emancipation, if they adopted it, would be borne by the whole Union, would have done so at a great risk; for each new free State would have been disposed before long to support a Constitutional Amendment to impose enfranchisement, possibly with no compensation, upon the States that still delayed. The force of example and the presence of this fear could not have been resisted long. Lincoln was not a man who could be accused of taking any course without a reason well thought out; we can safely conclude that in the summer of 1862 he nursed a hope, by no means visionary, of initiating a process of liberation free from certain evils in that upon which he was driven back.
Before, however, he had quite abandoned this hope he had already begun to see his way in case it failed. His last appeal to the border States was made on July 12, 1862, while McClellan's army still lay at Harrison's Landing. On the following day he privately told Seward and Bates that he had "about come to the conclusion that it was a military necessity, absolutely essential to the salvation of the nation, that we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued." On July 22 he read to his Cabinet the first draft of his Proclamation of Emancipation; telling them before he consulted them that substantially his mind was made up. Various members of the Cabinet raised points on which he had already thought and had come to a conclusion, but, as he afterwards told a friend, Seward raised a point which had never struck him before. He said that, if issued at that time of depression, just after the failure in the Peninsula, the Proclamation would seem like "a cry of distress"; and that it would have a much better effect if it were issued after some military success.
Seward was certainly right. The danger of division in the North would have been increased and the prospect of a good effect abroad would have been diminished if the Proclamation had been issued at a time of depression and manifest failure. Lincoln, who had been set on issuing it, instantly felt the force of this objection. He put aside his draft, and resolved not to issue the Proclamation till the right moment, and apparently resolved to keep the whole question open in his own mind till the time for action came.
Accordingly the two months which followed were not only full of anxiety about the war; they were full for him of a suspense painfully maintained. It troubled him perhaps comparatively little that he was driven into a position of greater aloofness from the support and sympathy of any party or school. He must now expect an opposition from the Democrats of the North, for they had declared themselves strongly against the Resolution which he had induced Congress to pass. And the strong Republicans for their part had acquiesced in it coldly, some of them contemptuously. In May of this year he had been forced for a second time publicly to repress a keen Republican general who tried to take this question of great policy into his own hands. General Hunter, commanding a small expedition which had seized Port Royal in South Carolina and some adjacent islands rich in cotton, had in a grand manner assumed to declare free all the slaves in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. This, of course, could not be let pass. Congress, too, had been occupied in the summer with a new measure for confiscating rebel property; some Republicans in the West set great store on such confiscation; other Republicans saw in it the incidental advantage that more slaves might be liberated under it. It was learnt that the President might put his veto upon it. It seemed to purport, contrary to the Constitution, to attaint the property of rebels after their death, and Lincoln was unwilling that the Constitution should be stretched in the direction of revengeful harshness. The objectionable feature in the Bill was removed, and Lincoln accepted it. But the suspicion with which many Republicans were beginning to regard him was now reinforced by a certain jealousy of Congressmen against the Executive power; they grumbled and sneered about having to "ascertain the Royal pleasure" before they could legislate. This was an able, energetic, and truly patriotic Congress, and must not be despised for its reluctance to be guided by Lincoln. But it was reluctant.
Throughout August and September he had to deal in the country with dread on the one side of any revolutionary action, and belief on the other side that he was timid and half-hearted. The precise state of his intentions could not with advantage be made public. To up-holders of slavery he wrote plainly, "It may as well be understood once for all that I shall not surrender this game leaving any available card unplayed"; to its most zealous opponents he had to speak in an entirely different strain. While the second battle of Bull Run was impending, Horace Greeley published in the New York Tribune an "open letter" of angry complaint about Lincoln's supposed bias for slavery. Lincoln at once published a reply to his letter. "If there be in it," he said, "any statements or assumptions of fact which I may know to be erroneous, I do not now and here controvert them. If there be perceptible in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend whose heart I have always supposed to be right. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union. If I could save the Union without freeing any slaves 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. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views."
It was probably easy to him now to write these masterful generalities, but a week or two later, after Pope's defeat, he had to engage in a controversy which tried his feelings much more sorely. It had really grieved him that clergymen in Illinois had opposed him as unorthodox, when he was fighting against the extension of slavery. Now, a week or two after his correspondence with Greeley, a deputation from a number of Churches in Chicago waited upon him, and some of their members spoke to him with assumed authority from on high, commanding him in God's name to emancipate the slaves. He said, "I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious men who are equally certain that they represent the divine will. I am sure that either the one or the other class is mistaken in that belief, and perhaps in some respects both. I hope it will not be irreverent for me to say that, if it is probable that God would reveal His will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed He would reveal it directly to me. What good would a proclamation of emancipation from me do especially as we are now situated? I do not want to issue a document that the whole world will see must necessarily be inoperative like the Pope's Bull against the comet. Do not misunderstand me, because I have mentioned these objections. They indicate the difficulties that have thus far prevented my acting in some such way as you desire. I have not decided against a proclamation of liberty to the slaves, but hold the matter under advisement. And I can assure you that the subject is on my mind, by day and night, more than any other. Whatever shall appear to be God's will, I will do." The language of this speech, especially when the touch is humorous, seems that of a strained and slightly irritated man, but the solemnity blended in it showed Lincoln's true mind.
In this month, September, 1862, he composed for his own reading alone a sad and inconclusive fragment of meditation which was found after his death. "The will of God prevails," he wrote. "In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be and one must be wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party, and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true, that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By His mere great power on the minds of the contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began, and, having begun, He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds." For Lincoln's own part it seemed his plain duty to do what in the circumstances he thought safest for the Union, and yet he was almost of a mind with the deputation which had preached to him, that he must be doing God's will in taking a great step towards emancipation. The solution, that the great step must be taken at the first opportune moment, was doubtless clear enough in principle, but it must always remain arguable whether any particular moment was opportune. He told soon afterwards how his mind was finally made up.
On the day that he received the news of the battle of Antietam, the draft Proclamation was taken from its drawer and studied afresh; his visit to McClellan on the battlefield intervened; but on the fifth day after the battle the Cabinet was suddenly called together. When the Ministers had assembled Lincoln first entertained them by reading the short chapter of Artemus Ward entitled "High-handed Outrage at Utica." It is less amusing than most of Artemus Ward; but it had just appeared; it pleased all the Ministers except Stanton, to whom the frivolous reading he sometimes had to hear from Lincoln was a standing vexation; and it was precisely that sort of relief to which Lincoln's mind when overwrought could always turn. Having thus composed himself for business, he reminded his Cabinet that he had, as they were aware, thought a great deal about the relation of the war to slavery, and had a few weeks before read them a draft Proclamation on this subject. Ever since then, he said, his mind had been occupied on the matter, and, though he wished it were a better time, he thought the time had come now. "When the rebel army was at Frederick," he is related to have continued, "I determined, as soon as it should be driven out of Maryland, to issue a Proclamation of Emancipation such as I thought likely to be most useful. I said nothing to any one, but I made the promise to myself and"—here he hesitated a little—"to my Maker. The rebel army is now driven out, and I am going to fulfil that promise. I have got you together to hear what I have written down. I do not wish your advice about the main matter, for that I have determined for myself. This I say without intending anything but respect for any one of you." He then invited their suggestions upon the expressions used in his draft and other minor matters, and concluded: "One other observation I will make. I know very well that many others might in this matter, as in others, do better than I can; and if I was satisfied that the public confidence was more fully possessed by any one of them than by me, and knew of any constitutional way in which he could be put in my place, he should have it. I would gladly yield it to him. But though I believe I have not so much of the confidence of the people as I had some time since, I do not know that, all things considered, any other person has more; and, however this may be, there is no way in which I can have any other man put where I am. I am here; I must do the best I can, and bear the responsibility of taking the course which I feel I ought to take." Then he read his draft, and in the long discussion which followed, and owing to which a few slight changes were made in it, he told them further, without any false reserve, just how he came to his decision. In his great perplexity he had gone on his knees, before the battle of Antietam, and, like a child, he had promised that if a victory was given which drove the enemy out of Maryland he would consider it as an indication that it was his duty to move forward. "It might be thought strange," he said, "that he had in this way submitted the disposal of matters, when the way was not clear to his mind what he should do. God had decided this question in favour of the slaves."