Abraham Lincoln’s primary objective in the Civil War was to at all costs, preserve the Union. This meant that the Confederacy needed to be destroyed. A tactic employed by Lincoln to weaken the southern cause and give the northerners a huge advantage was the installment of the Emancipation Proclamation in September of 1862 after the Battle of Antietam. This battle was significant in precipitating emancipation because of the amount of casualties it recorded. Over twenty thousand soldiers died in a single day. Lincoln saw this and being the pragmatic unionist he was, he sought to rid the root cause of the Civil War in order to ensure a disaster like this never repeated itself. He found that slavery was the fundamental reason why the war started
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In other words, he was not a true abolitionist at heart. Rather, he was a limited abolitionist motivated by pragmatic unionist beliefs. Yes, he chose to emancipate the slaves, but that doesn’t automatically make him an abolitionist. First of all, the Emancipation Proclamation was a side effect of achieving his primary objective in the war, which was to preserve the Union. If he could’ve saved the Union without the emancipation, he would’ve done it. But because of the disadvantages the Union was facing at the time, he need to go through with the emancipation to guarantee the northern victory and ensure that the Union as a whole was kept intact. Also, the emancipation didn’t remove slavery from all the states. It only had an effect in Confederate areas still under rebellion. For the border states and all the areas conquered by the Union throughout the war, slavery was legal. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was much more of a proclamation than that of an emancipation. Still, Abraham Lincoln was very brave by deciding to end slavery in most of south. He knew the proclamation was going to receive a lot of criticism, but not only did it win the war for the Union, but it brought recognition to blacks and their rights. That is why many consider him as good a president as George
In other words, he was not a true abolitionist at heart. Rather, he was a limited abolitionist motivated by pragmatic unionist beliefs. Yes, he chose to emancipate the slaves, but that doesn’t automatically make him an abolitionist. First of all, the Emancipation Proclamation was a side effect of achieving his primary objective in the war, which was to preserve the Union. If he could’ve saved the Union without the emancipation, he would’ve done it. But because of the disadvantages the Union was facing at the time, he need to go through with the emancipation to guarantee the northern victory and ensure that the Union as a whole was kept intact. Also, the emancipation didn’t remove slavery from all the states. It only had an effect in Confederate areas still under rebellion. For the border states and all the areas conquered by the Union throughout the war, slavery was legal. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was much more of a proclamation than that of an emancipation. Still, Abraham Lincoln was very brave by deciding to end slavery in most of south. He knew the proclamation was going to receive a lot of criticism, but not only did it win the war for the Union, but it brought recognition to blacks and their rights. That is why many consider him as good a president as George