According to Catton, Lincoln was prepared to pay $400 a head for each slave; expensive, but cheaper than going on with the war for the few months longer would cost, and, besides, it would not kill any young men.
Lincoln made up his mind to issue the Emancipation Proclamation in the summer of 1982, when the War was going very badly for the Yankees. He had written to a correspondent that he never had a wish to touch the foundations of southern society, or the rights of any southern man, yet there was a necessity on him to send armies into the South, and “it may as well be understood, once for all, that I shall not surrender this game leaving any available card unplayed.” To another correspondent, he wrote the only remedy was to remove the cause for the war. Come what might, he would free the slaves, as far as the stroke of a pen on a sheet of paper could accomplish that.
A victory was needed for another reason: The British Government seemed to be on the verge of recognizing the Confederacy as an independent nation.
Incomplete and imperfect as it was, thanks to McClellan’s habitual timidity, Antietam in Sep 62 was a decisive Union victory. It broke the great southern counteroffensive and gave Lincoln the opening he needed, and
Read my first post again. I said, paraphrasing, that Lincoln was a politician, a lawyer, and a party loyalist. Because of his political sense, he knew that acting against slavery would make it impossible for him to pursue his primary goal, preserving the Union. Is this not what you are saying also?
If it was not clear from the context, when I said that Lincoln delayed acting against slavery unitl it couldn’t have made anything worse, I meant from the standpoint of preserving the Union. By the time he acted, total war was a done deal. He could have appeared in public wearing the Stars and Bars as thong underwear and the South wouldn’t have acted any differently.
The problem with this comment is that it implictly suggests that Mr. Lincoln was deficient in his opposition to slavery and should have done more than the Emancipation Proclamation, which only applied to territory in rebellion.
But what more could Mr. Lincoln have done, under the authority of the U.S. Constitution? He was very limited in his options. After the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scot, it was clear that the right to own another human being was a constitutionally protected right. Since slaves were property, the federal government could only expropriate them by complying with the “takings” clause of the Fifth Amendment. Nor could Mr. Lincoln unilaterally end slavery in states that were not in rebellion, such as Maryland - nothing in the federal constitution gave him the power to abolish a system of property holding authorised by a state’s law.
Mr. Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation under his powers as Commander-in-Chief. Just as he could order Sherman’s army to destroy the industry of the south as a war measure, so too could he order the federal armies to free slaves in areas that were in rebellion. The limitation of the Proclamation to areas in rebellion wasn’t a hypocritical measure, as I’ve seen some people suggest from time to time - rather, as a matter of constitutional law, that was the sole basis for the Proclamation’s legality. And, some scholars and lawyers at the time and since have argued that the Proclamation would cease to have effect if a rebellious state re-joined the Union, ending the application of Mr. Lincoln’s war powers to the state. By this argument, the Proclamation at best was only a temporary measure.
Nor did Congress have the power to abolish slavery in the slave states that were not in rebellion. Dred Scot and the Fifth Amendment applied equally to congressional measures, and nothing in Article I, § 8 gave the Congress the power to legislate with respect to slavery in Union states like Maryland.
That’s why a constitutional amendment was needed - and the President doesn’t have any authority in relation to constitutional amendments, only the House and the Senate do. All that Mr. Lincoln could do was to try to persuade the waverers in the House to vote for the measure - and that is exactly what he did do, as summarised in this article: Passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. Once it was passed, he even signed it, something that was not constitutionally required, but emphasised to the states that Mr. Lincoln was putting his political capital behind the measure.
When Lincoln ran for Senator and later President, he made it clear that he was opposed to slavery, but that there was nothing he could do about it in the states in which it already existed. The federal government had no authority in those states to ban slavery without a constitutional amendment, as mentioned above. However, he did note that the federal government had authority to restrict slavery in the territories, and he supported doing that. Thus, Lincoln supported using the full power of the federal government to restrict slavery. To say that he was being wishy-washy on the subject misunderstands the federal system that existed at the time. If you read the Lincoln-Douglas debates, you will see that he is clearly against slavery and wishes its extinction.