The Civil War was a war of contradictions. The South seceded to perpetuate slavery and instead ended up destroying it. North vowed not to interfere with slavery and won sufficient support to kill it. Unlike many abolitionists, President Lincoln understood he couldn't eliminate slavery without first saving the union. And unlike many conservative Republicans and Democrats, he realized he couldn't save the union without eliminating slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation was designed to help the Union win the Civil War and thus preserve the Union. "To fight against slaveholders, without fighting against slavery, is but a half-hearted business," wrote black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. "War for the destruction of liberty must be met with war for the destruction of slavery."1

Emancipation was justified by a military necessity to preserve the Union. "If the Proclamation of Emancipation was essentially a war measure, it had the desired effect of creating confusion in the South and depriving the Confederacy of much of its valuable laboring force. If it was a diplomatic document, it succeeded in rallying to the Northern cause thousands of English and European laborers who were anxious to see workers gain their freedom throughout the world. If it was a humanitarian document, it gave hope to millions of Negroes that a better day lay ahead, and it renewed the faith of thousands of crusaders who had fought long to win freedom in America," wrote historian John Hope Franklin.2

The effect and interpretation of the Emancipation Proclamation varied by audience. "The meaning of emancipation has been profoundly shaped by Judeo-Christian concepts of deliverance and redemption," wrote David Brion Davis. "One thinks immediately of the rich symbolism associated with the Hebrews' deliverance from bondage in Egypt. The promise of God revealing himself to humanity through a chosen people was signified by an emancipation from physical slavery and a grateful acceptance of a higher form of service. Christian commentators frequently elaborated on the significance of the ancient Hebrew Jubilee, the day of atonement and of liberating slaves in the seventh month following seven sabbatical years."3 According to William Wolf, President Lincoln "told his callers many times that his concern was not to get God on his side, but to be quite sure that he and the nation were on God's side. An interview in June 1862 with a delegation from Iowa led by Congressman James Wilson threw more light on this point. It revealed again Lincoln's strong predestinarian conviction about God's will. A member was pressing Lincoln for more resolute action on emancipation, saying, 'Slavery must be stricken down wherever it exists. If we do not do right I believe God will let us go our own way to our ruin. But if we do right, I believe He will lead us safely out of this wilderness, crown our arms with victory, and restore our now dissevered union."4

President Lincoln did not believe he had the power to end slavery because it was evil, but he believed he could end it to preserve the Union. Historian T. Harry Williams wrote: "Lincoln was on the slavery question, as he was on most matters, a conservative. Unlike the ultra Radicals, he could tolerate evil, especially when he feared that to uproot it would produce greater evils. But he was not the kind of conservative who refused to move at all against evil, who let his pragmatism fade into expediency, who blindly rejected change when it could not be denied. Yet there were just such men among the ultra Conservatives of his party, and Lincoln opposed them as he did the ultra Radicals. He knew that he was not completely with them, and...he would not let the Conservatives control the slavery issue. He knew too that he was against the Radicals and also with them. Speaking of the Missouri Radicals but doubtless having the whole genre in mind, he said: 'They are utterly lawless — the unhandiest devils in the world to deal with — but after all their faces are set Zionwards.' He did work with the Radicals but he also resisted them. He used them — as he did the Conservatives — to effect a great social change with the smallest possible social dislocation. It would indeed be an error...to make too much out of the conflict in the Republican party over slavery. It would be a greater error to dismiss this unique episode and its unique issue as something normal or average and to treat it on the level of ordinary politics. There is little about the Civil War that is ordinary."5 Historian Harry Jaffa wrote:

Both in the pre-inaugural period, and in the opening stages of the conflict, the danger of disunion, now the paramount danger, did not come from the forces of slavery alone. It came as well from the abolitionists. Now the name 'abolitionist' was applied to a number of shades of opinion, although it is usually identified with the most extreme among them. However, there was a spectrum of opinions, beginning with those who insisted upon instant emancipation of all slaves, by any means, without regard to existing legality, without regard to the disruption and injury it would cause among both whites and blacks, and without regard to existing legality, without regard to the disruption and injury it would cause among both whites and blacks, and without indemnity or compensation of any kind....As the spectrum proceeded from left to right, at some point the name 'abolitionist' ceased to apply, and that of free-soiler replaced it. Lincoln was always a free-soiler, never an abolitionist, and in some respects Lincoln agreed with his Southern brethern that the abolitionists were a curse and an affliction....

In the spectrum of antislavery opinions...Lincoln himself would have to be placed at the farthest limit of the extreme right. He was the most conservative of antislavery men. He did not, in any campaign, urge any form of emancipation other than that implied in the exclusion of slavery from the territories. First privately, later publicly, he favored gradual emancipation, and in the plan he recommended to Congress in December, 1862, the state action which he envisaged might have been extended over thirty-five years, until 1900. In the plan he put forward while a Congressman, in 1848, for emancipation in the District of Columbia, three factors were crucial: it had to be gradual, voluntary (it had to be approved by a referendum in the District), and compensated. But Lincoln's task, as war came, was to preserve the Union. All the emancipation Lincoln desired, and probably a good deal more, was assured if the Union endured. If it did not endure, all the lets and hindrances exerted upon slavery by the free states in the Union would be removed. The extreme abolitionists, in the supposed purity of their principles, would have abandoned the four million slaves to their fate.6

The President followed a moderate policy between Republican Radicals and Conservatives. "In the President of the United States Providence has vouchsafed a leader whose moral perceptions are blinded neither by sophistry nor enthusiasm — who knows that permanent results must grow, and can not be prematurely seized," editorialized Harper's Weekly in June 1862.7 Historian LaWanda Cox wrote: "For Lincoln, limited policy and sweeping principle were morally compatible. During one of the debates with [Stephen] Douglas in 1858, he advanced the explanation. In defense of the men who had fought for the revolutionary principles of equality and freedom, and then established a government that recognized slavery, he argued that to the extent 'a necessity is imposed upon a man, he must submit to it.' Slavery existed, and agreement on the Constitution could not have been had without permitting slavery to remain. But the necessity did not invalidate the standard raised in the Declaration of Independence: 'So I say in relation to the principle that all men are created equal, let it be as nearly reached as we can.'"8

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