Radical Republicans and abolitionists, however, tried to convince the president that slavery would only be outlawed with an amendment to the U.S. Lincoln preferred to see abolition codified on the state level, and by early 1864 several states had in fact enacted laws prohibiting slavery. Since it was executed by a president exercising greatly expanded wartime powers, the president and his supporters were concerned that courts might rule the Emancipation Proclamation a temporary emergency measure invalid once the war concluded. After the hard-fought Union victory at the Battle of Antietam, Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that all slaves in areas still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” Since it did not apply to border states or slave-holding territory already seized by the North, the Emancipation Proclamation had a much greater symbolic than practical effect. By the fall of 1862, he had begun to believe that freeing the slaves could aid in his ultimate goal of reuniting the states as he saw the military benefit provided by the thousands of slaves who had fled their owners and joined the Union forces fighting behind enemy lines.
Lincoln’s position would pivot, however, as the war progressed. “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.” “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery,” he wrote in a famous letter to Horace Greeley in August 1862. Granting freedom from bondage to the nearly 4 million slaves in America was a secondary concern. The president’s stated goal in the early years of the war was strictly the preservation of the Union. Although he believed slavery to be immoral, Abraham Lincoln was not an abolitionist when the Civil War broke out in 1861.
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