He issued his Emancipation Proclamation.
As far as freeing any slaves was concerned, he knew it amounted to
very little, if anything. He said so. Less than two weeks before the
preliminary section of the proclamation appeared, Mr. Lincoln was
waited on by a delegation of over one hundred Chicago clergymen, who
urged him to issue a proclamation of freedom for the slaves. "What
good would a proclamation from me do, especially as we are now
situated?" asked Mr. Lincoln by way of reply. "I do not want to issue
a document that the whole world would see must necessarily be
inoperative, like the Pope's bull against the comet. Would my word
free the slaves, when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the
rebel States?"
In contemplating a proclamation applicable to the rebel States, it is
hardly to be supposed that Mr. Lincoln did not understand the
situation two weeks earlier quite as well as when the document
appeared.
If Mr. Lincoln had been told, when he entered on the Presidency, that
before his term of office would expire he would be hailed as "The
Great Emancipator," he would have treated the statement as equal to
one of his own best jokes.
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