EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION

EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION

EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORK HERALD SEPT. 23, 1862

[LINCOLN, Abraham.] EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. New York Herald, Sept. 23, 1862. Issue no. 9506, eight pages, broadsheet folio, six-column format, damp staining along top right corners, small closed tear at center fold.

"ON THE FIRST DAY OF JANUARY, IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD ONE THOUSAND EIGHT-HUNDRED AND SIXTY-THREE, ALL PERSONS HELD AS SLAVES WITHIN ANY STATE...SHALL BE THEN THENCEFORWARD AND FOREVER FREE"

The publication of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in James Gordon Bennett’s pro-Democratic New York Herald. Lincoln waited until he had the political cover of a military victory before issuing the proclamation. The massive Battle at Antietam—a bare tactical victory for the North—gave Lincoln what he needed. The president understood the act as a war measure, intended to undercut the aid supplied to the Confederate war effort by slave labor. More ardent abolitionists like his Secretary of State William Seward complained that this was too limiting, since it freed slaves only where Confederate forces were in control, and left enslaved those blacks who lived in Union controlled areas. But Seward and the other critics were wrong. Lincoln knew better that he had irrevocably committed the United States to abolition. The war that Lincoln had begun to restore the Union—with or without slavery, as he famously told Bennett’s rival, Horace Greeley—was now a war to destroy the “peculiar institution.”